Resident assistants at colleges and universities, including Boston University, Swarthmore College, and Smith College, are increasingly unionizing to advocate for better pay and working conditions. These undergraduates, known as R.A.s, perform various responsibilities such as assisting crime victims, enforcing health protocols, and handling mental health crises. This year alone, around 20,000 undergraduates, many from California State University, have participated in union elections or secured the opportunity to vote. Contract negotiations have begun for the resident assistants at Boston University, marking a growing trend of unionization among college students.
Adam Patterson, a PhD student in philosophy at Syracuse University, is seeking help in identifying and making explicit the assumptions and expectations teachers have about their undergraduate students. By doing so, he aims to improve communication and mitigate tension between students and teachers. Examples of assumptions include students knowing how to ask for extensions, being professional in email communications, and accessing university services beyond health services. The goal is to create a handout of "implicit student do's-and-don'ts" to provide clarity and support to all students.
A team of physicists recruited around 1,000 undergraduate students at the University of Colorado Boulder to help answer one of the most enduring questions about the sun: How does the star's outermost atmosphere, or "corona," get so hot? The students' results cast doubt on the theory that especially tiny flares, or "nanoflares," may be responsible for superheating the sun's corona, as a popular theory in astrophysics suggests. The study's actual findings aren't its only important results. The students were able to learn first-hand about the collaborative and often-messy way that scientific research works in the real world.
