UC Irvine doctoral student Tia Chung-Swanson didn't miss the reminder of how her life changed a year ago. … One photo shows her on the first day of the UC graduate student strike on Nov. 14, 2022. She’s holding a megaphone. She was one of nearly 50,000 graduate students across 10 University of California campuses whose United Auto Workers-affiliated locals went on strike for higher pay and better working conditions. “[In science] you're asking hard questions that people don't know the answer to, you have to constantly devise experiments to try to prove yourself wrong, and [it] just involves so much and back and forth between the mentor and the mentee … counting hours is something that's never been on our radar," said Elliot Botvinick, a UC Irvine professor in the departments of surgery and biomedical engineering. … “Now I feel like an employer, which is an absolute catastrophe from the point of view of doing science,” he said. The contract and its rules, he said, are affecting his lab’s productivity. But the previous arrangement of low pay for full time-plus work had to change, he added. Read More