Graduate studies are isolating by nature: The time it takes to conduct independent research, mixed with high standards and stringent deadlines, leads to long hours and irregular routines. Adding to the claustrophobic, often competitive tenor of graduate student scholarship, there are challenges to collaboration and socializing that come from studying abroad.
I do not want my unrest to overtake the genuine sorrow felt across our community following the tragic death Tuesday of Hyoun Ju Sohn GS. No one can know for certain what leads a person with so much promise, joy and passion to take his or her life. But I am particularly concerned by the fact that the ensuing conversations surrounding this tragedy — in President Christina Paxson’s P’19 moving letters to the Brown community, in the pages of The Herald, in our hallways and in our classrooms — have failed to address a real and sensitive truth: Sohn was an international graduate student.
It should be clear that international students have a difficult time transitioning to life as a student in the United States. But beyond the obstacles that arise for anyone entering a new climate — cultural differences, language barriers or matters purely of adjustment to a demanding environment — international students face additional challenges transitioning to graduate student life.
International graduate students at Brown have a particularly difficult time. There are already only a few designated spaces for graduate students across disciplines to collaborate or even cross paths on campus. For international students, the issue of space is only exacerbated by a glaring lack of support structures specific to the needs of an increasingly diverse community of young international scholars facing different pressures. From year to year, international graduate students have articulated an acute need for more and better resources and support, as voiced by past iterations of the Graduate Student Council’s executive board. These calls have varied over time, but there are consistent issues pertaining to mentorship, training for teaching assistants and community-building activities.
While I recognize the work that the deans of the Graduate School, the Office of Student Life and the Office of International Student and Scholar Services conducted last summer to reorganize International Graduate Student Orientation — certainly a step in the right direction — this all-too-brief moment of connection for incoming international graduate students is simply not enough.
Brown is severely in want of a specific support system for international students and, more specifically, for international graduate students, exemplified both by the lack of an in-house dean of international students at the Grad School and the absence of a real community center for international graduate students. As it stands, the OISSS, which is understaffed and already stretched quite thin, is required to focus on legal compliance issues since it is housed within the Office of the Vice Presidence and General Counsel and is therefore not regarded as a division of the University focused on student life. To put this into perspective: There are currently 2,094 graduate students enrolled at the University. Roughly a third of us are international graduate students — an estimated 681. Surely this number alone draws attention to a disparity between existing support structures and the growing needs of graduate students.
I acknowledge the immense privilege we have as Brown students and want to honor the tremendous role that members of the Brown community — including Assistant Dean of the College and Director for International Students and Visitor Experience Shontay Delalue, Vice President for Campus Life and Student Services Margaret Klawunn and the graduate student activists who devote each day to advocacy for a better Brown — have had in improving life for international graduate students here. But I am shaken by our institutional inattention to such an important part of the graduate student community, especially in the wake of our recent loss.
In drawing attention to these concerns, as others before me have done, I want to stress that a call for increased graduate student support in areas of community space, outreach and mental health does not come at the expense of our undergraduates. Indeed, there has been a vocal debate over attenuated resources that seems to assume this is a zero-sum game and anything given to graduate students will be taken from undergraduates — or that graduate students see themselves in a place of competition for additional support services.
Yet this is far from the reality of the matter. Most importantly, such a belief fails to account for the very real, very exhausting work that graduate student advocates and leaders across disciplines perform on campus every day to improve life for all Brown students.
It is my continuing hope that the administration, The Herald and other student publications reach out to international graduate students and expand this conversation, keeping in mind graduate student readership and constituencies. It is unfortunate that the loss of a life should catalyze this discussion, but if we are to take away anything from this tragic event, it is that time is of the essence.
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