FYI: Note on recent Graduate Student program document releases

Fri Aug 23 09:54:23 PDT 2024

The latest versions of the Graduate Student Program (V4, Document-169622) and the  Hiring and Remuneration Procedures (V5, Document-171510) have been released on Docushare.

This note is to highlight some changes from the previous releases, as well as to clarify their intent  and the reasoning behind them, and to address a few “frequently asked questions”.

Warning: this is rather long. Sorry.

Stipends for GSRAs  (students who have an employment agreement with TRIUMF)

NSERC rules prohibit reimbursing students for things like tuition and student fees, so the procedures had to be reformulated to maintain the bedrock principle (articulated in Document-169622) that students should receive an adequate amount of take-home stipend to be able to live on.

  *   The INTENT of the remuneration policy is for Masters/PhD students to take home at least  25K$/30K$ from all sources after paying for mandatory schooling costs.

     *   This was laid out explicitly in the previous version of the policy, with support for tuition and various fees  treated separately.  Since these cannot be explicitly reimbursed per NSERC rules, we needed another way to ensure the take-home minimums.

  *   Note the policy specifies a MINIMUM.  A supervisor can offer more, if they so wish

  *   “from all sources” means amounts from TRIUMF, teaching assistance-ships, and provisions for awards/scholarships/fellowships (more on these below).

     *   It no longer includes loans the students may choose to get.

  *   So …  Step 1:   the new policy now specifies stipend minima  of 27K$/32K$, which are 2K$ more than before

     *   That additional 2K$ is allocated to pay for student fees (incl. bus passes, health) that EVERY student must pay from their stipends. These vary by  2K +/- few hundred dollars across the country.  Consequently, some students may get a little more/less than the actual cost, which we saw as an acceptable variance, given the constraints.

  *   Step 2:  About half of students must pay tuition out of their stipends, while the others get a “tuition award” from their university to pay for the tuition.  Tuitions are around 6 +/- 2K nationwide.  Consequently, we were not able to address this expense by just increasing the base amount (like we did for fees above) as this would introduce gross inequities.

     *   So, students may submit in writing to their supervisor and HR in a “Request for Extraordinary Financial Conditions” each year that those conditions arise.
IN PARTICULAR, those students that do NOT get a department or other such tuition award can ask for support for this ‘extraordinary’ circumstance.

        *   The request must be made annually

        *   Note that this is not just for tuition – one can imagine other scenarios (e.g. child support) for which such a request could be made.

     *    For students that DO get a tuition award, see below …

So that is how we addressed the schooling costs issue.  Otherwise, things are the same as the previous version.

Awards that student receive

e.g. from NSERC, or entrance awards, are treated slightly differently now:

  *   Main principle is that treatment of the award is “subject to the intentions and requirements of the funder”.  i.e., what did the funder intend to achieve/accomplish/support with the award?
  *   So, “major” awards clearly intended to provide living support (e.g. NSERC awards) over more than one year will have 75% of the award amount counted toward the total support (“from all sources”), with 25% retained by the student as a ‘top up’.

     *   This 25% reflects what many of the top universities in Canada do, UBC being a notable (stingier!) exception.

  *   One-time awards, such as entrance awards,  intended as merit-based top ups for the students are NOT to be counted towards the minimum.  Those are for the students to keep in full.
  *   However, TUITION AWARDS, which many (but not all) departments provide, are also not considered towards their stipend minima,  since these awards are clearly intended to pay for the student’s tuition.   They solve the tuition issue for us, with the input/output from/to the university neatly summing to zero.  So, its functionally equivalent to these students not having any tuition at all to worry about.

Support for GSVs (long-term graduate student visitors)

This part hasn’t changed, but bears repeating:  Graduate Student Visitors (GSVs) are NOT subject to the GSRA remuneration precepts.   They are  a type of visitor called “visitor appointees”. As such they are eligible for financial support, just like sabbatical visitors, but that does NOT mean ‘obligated to get’.

This is a touchy subject – local departments have complained about inequities amongst their student body if TRIUMF were to top up their GSVs with additional financial support.  One such department threatened  to pull their students from TRIUMF altogether if we were to insist on it.

So the recommendation is to speak to the student’s home university supervisor about it.  Presumably those from outside the Lower Mainland would be amenable to some level of assistance to support their GSVs cost of living here – it’s the local universities one has to worry about.

Implementation Procedures

The above outlined the ‘what’, there is also the ‘how” :  both GSRAs and GSVs will be onboarded and processed within Workday, including issuing job requisitions, uploading pertinent documentation, and managing requests for financial assistance. GSRAs will be entered as a class of TRIUMF Employee (Graduate Student), while GSVs will be entered as a class of Contingent Worker (Graduate Visitor Appointee).   There will also be  a yearly (anonymous) audit of the our students’ overall financial condition, likely conducted through Sharepoint forms.

Work has begun with HR about implementation.  In the interim, we will use a semi-automagic process to collect student financial information and requests for financial assistance, as well as  requests for support from supervisors whose current grants are insufficient to support the minimum stipends.   Stay tuned for further details on that.  In the meantime, if you are wondering, feel free to send me a message.

Note on “Host” vs “Research Supervisor”

When discussing GSVs, questions arose about the difference between a Host and a Research Supervisor.   They are NOT the same thing!   A Host is “accountable and responsible” for their visitor vis a vis adherence to TRIUMF policies, training, and workplace safety.  Hosts must be TRIUMF staff.  This role is separate from that of the GSV’s research supervisor, who (obviously)  oversees the student’s research activities.   Often Hosts and Research Supervisors are the same person (especially for GSRAs), but sometimes they are not.   So Affiliates, Joint Appointments, Emeriti certainly CAN continue to be Research Supervisors for both GSVs and GSRAs – this privilege is written into their appointments – even if they can’t be their Hosts. So despite the changes in the Grad Student and Visitor policies, nothing really changes for Affiliates, etc with regards to the research supervision of their students.

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n.b.  The policy attempts to be comprehensive while not being overly prescriptive – we did not intend to remove common sense from the calculus.  The one bedrock principle is that students get a minimum of 25K/30K take home to live on after paying for their mandatory schooling costs.

Very likely there will be atypical, heretofore unforeseen, scenarios  that arise that are not cleanly addressed in the documents– when they do, contact us and let’s talk about how to deal with them.

As always, if/when you have any questions or concerns, feel free to email or message me at your earliest convenience. I’ll get back to you as soon as I am able.

Best wishes,
Marcello

Marcello Pavan, Ph.D.
Head, Academic and User Programs
TRIUMF
4004 Wesbrook Mall
Vancouver, B.C. V6T 2A3
Canada

www.triumf.ca<http://www.triumf.ca/>
@TRIUMFLab

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