“I had already heard stories of my co-workers being berated to the point of tears in front of their colleagues because, as international students, their English fluency wasn’t up to their advisors’ standards. But for whatever reason, all of that just seemed normal — like difficult working conditions were the tax I had to pay to have this job.
And perhaps that is the most insidious thing about how the University of California treats its nearly 17,000 student researchers. It’s not just that we’re treated as expendable cogs in the machine of an R1 research institution — it’s that we’re made to feel like our exploitation is normal. Or, even worse, that we ought to feel lucky to work in these conditions because we’re given the opportunity to work at UC Berkeley or UCSF.”