Campus Connection

Starting July 1, 2008, all graduate students in the University of Maryland, Baltimore, School of Medicine will receive an annual increase of $2,000 in their stipends, amounting to $25,000 per year for students who have not yet taken their qualifying exams and $26,000 for those who have, and they have Assistant Dean for Graduate Studies and Professor Dr. Margaret McCarthy to thank.

Traditionally, UMB evaluates and adjusts the graduate student stipend every three years. Considering that three years has passed since the last stipend increase, Dr. McCarthy and her associates reviewed data from graduate programs all over the country to determine where UMB’s stipend stood relative to those offered at other graduate schools.

“It had become clear that we had fallen behind,” said Dr. McCarthy, “and we wanted to make sure that we maintained our competitive edge.” The stipend increase will do just that by putting UMB’s graduate school stipend “in the middle of what range is in the mid-Atlantic region,” she said.

Dr. McCarthy first set out to increase the graduate student stipend early in the fall semester of 2007 by enlisting the support of Drs. Malinda Orlin and E. Albert Reece, deans of the graduate and medical schools, respectively. Each of these schools provides half of the funding for the graduate research assistantships (GRAs), she said, so gaining their support was crucial. However, neither of these schools could finance the increase alone. Therefore, the Graduate Program in Life Sciences (GPILS) used their own resources to supplement the student stipends by consolidating some of their GRAs, thereby reducing the number of GRAs in order to increase the stipends for the ones they already had.

Dr. McCarthy then had to work with the directors of every program to gain approval from the faculty members for the proposed increase and to ensure that they had the financial resources necessary to provide their students with this raise.

In addition, she had to work with the training grant directors because training grant stipends are “substantially below” the graduate school stipend, especially after the proposed increase. Therefore, strategies were instituted to supplement these stipends so that students on training grants receive the same stipend as all other graduate students.

“We have an absolute hard and fast rule that all students in all programs receive the same stipend. Our goal is to keep our students on this campus all equitable.”

The whole process, from proposing the stipend increase to finalizing the plans to increase the stipend, took only between four to six months, said Dr. McCarthy, because of the widespread support from the graduate school. “In the end, everybody agreed it was a good idea … [although] there are some people who are less happy about it,” she added. 

Article Tools