Entomology graduate student life

See also:

• Admissions & Info
• How to Apply
• Student Life
• Graduate students website
• Graduate students contact list
• M.S. degree
• Ph.D. degree
• Graduate courses
• Travel grants

Prospective students who come to interview get the unexpurgated student view of our graduate program from our current students. Here are some of the descriptive details that will help give you a flavor of life as an entomology student in Tucson.

Current Entomology Graduate Students

The grad student web site has individual pages for each graduate student in the Department of Entomology. The graduate students have diverse backgrounds, and equally diverse research interests. Nonetheless, the insect-studying student community, composed of students from Entomology, Insect Science* and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, is a very interactive group. Students get to know each other through hosting seminar speakers for beer and dinner, in the PCRA (Pizza City Research Association) a student-only group that meets more or less regularly to discuss research results, and in many other informal venues. The breakdown of current students (2006-2007) is as follows:

*The Graduate Interdisciplinary program in Insect Science (GIDP-IS) is a separate PhD program at the University of Arizona, and is administered separately. In practice, students of both programs form a fairly cohesive social and intellectual community.

Graduate Student Financial Support

Almost all students making substantial progress toward their degrees are funded for the entirety of their graduate careers. The nature of this support varies. Students may be admitted on a one-year research assistantship (Research Assistantships pdf announcement) from the department. For students who are not quite sure what research direction to pursue, this experience allows them a period in which to decide on an advisor and laboratory. Following this, students may receive research assistantships associated with research in a particular laboratory, they may have teaching assistantships, they may receive funding from in-house training grants, or they may apply for and receive fellowships from national programs such as a NSF Pre-doctoral Fellowship, NSF CATTS Award (for K-12 curriculum development and teaching), EPA Star Award, ARCS (Achievement Awards for College Scientists) Fellowship, or Graduate Fellowships for minority applicants. Currently, students with an interest in genomics may be supported by the interdisciplinary IGERT Training Grant in Genomics, and students in insect neurobiology may be supported by an NIH Predoctoral training grant in Neuroscience. Exceptionally, students will be admitted without funding. This is usually because there is not a great fit of the student interests with any particular faculty member, but the student is highly motivated to follow a line of independent research. Students in this situation may have funding that they have developed or may be employed elsewhere. Students admitted without funding may be awarded funding for one or more semesters of their program if funding becomes available.

Assistantships awarded from outside the department (e.g. Teaching Assistantships, NSF Fellowships) vary in the amount awarded to students, but research and teaching assistantships within the department are set depending on your qualifications (three levels: post-Bachelors, post-Masters (or Masters equivalent credits), and post-qualifying exam Doctoral). In 2006-2007, the stipends range from $16,922 to $19,776 (0.5 FTE, meaning payment for 20 hours per week) with out-of-state tuition waived and health insurance premium paid in full. The rate is for 12 months, and teaching assistantships and recruiting research assistantships may be for 9 months, so the total earned is proportionately less. Students often receive summer stipends from their advisors or from the Department. Students on assistantships are required to pay registration fees and miscellaneous fees. These fees change frequently. This year, registration fees are $528 per semester, and registration scholarships from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences enabled the department to pay those fees for all of our students. In most years, we are able to award at least a few of these scholarships, so most students get relief from registration fees for one or more years of their program. The miscellaneous fees (Recreational Center fee, Technology fee, etc.) are about $150 per semester, $220 if you are an international student.

In the miscellaneous funding category are funds for student travel to conferences from the Department of Entomology, the Center for Insect Science, the Graduate School, the Under-represented Graduate Student Travel Fund, and of course from individual advisors. In addition, there are annual competitive awards for graduate student excellence, The Carruth Award, and The Chapman Award, both generally about $1000.

Which program? How long do graduate programs take?

Entomology accepts students into both Masters and Doctoral programs. While we encourage students without an M.S. degree to complete one before embarking on a Ph.D., we do accept some students into a doctoral program directly after a Bachelor's degree if they have extraordinary focus and/or research experience. The M.S. degree generally takes two to three years to complete. Doctoral programs tend to be more variable in length, from about four to about six or seven years. Generally, students that have a master's degree will have completed some of the required course work of a doctoral program, and so the Ph.D. component of a M.S./Ph.D. program may be on the shorter end of the range.

Cost of living in Tucson

Our current graduate students have chosen a range of housing options. Some of them own their houses, others rent single apartments, or share group houses. Tucson is still a relatively affordable city, with the recent speculative real estate boom causing many investors to have places for student rental. It is also possible to live close to campus, making car ownership optional. Tucson is a spread-out western city, however, and most students have cars.

Housing (approximate costs)
1 bedroom apartment – about $500-$600/month
2 bedroom apartment – about $650-750/month
2 bedroom house – about $750- $1000
Utilities $50- $120/month depending on season

Living in Tucson, living in the Sonoran Desert

There are few places in the United States that are as unusual and beautiful as the Sonoran Desert, nor as good a place to study biology. For example, fourteen species of hummingbirds have been recorded in Southern Arizona, and bee diversity is the highest of any place in the country. The desert is never completely absent, even in town, where it is not uncommon to see a coyote, a roadrunner (although rarely a coyote chasing a roadrunner), Gambel’s quail crossing the road with a long train of pursuing offspring, or Gila woodpeckers excavating a saguaro for a nest. When the summer rains start, ants swarm over Gould-Simpson (the Neurobiology building) and the giant palo verde beetle and mesquite bug come to lights.

Tucson, at 2000 ft. is ringed by mountain ranges with peaks of 9,000 ft. Even in the dog days of summer, you can escape the heat, and in an hour and a half drive, find yourself in a habitat reminiscent of the northern U.S. As you climb from the desert lowlands, with giant saguaro cacti, prickly pear, mesquite and palo verde trees, you move into oak savannah, with red-barked manzanitas, and then eventually pine forest, with a leafy understory of wildflowers.

With only eleven inches of rain a year, Tucson boasts more sunshine than any other US city—about 350 days annually. Tucsonans celebrate rain like Seattleites celebrate sunshine, and people who leave the desert are likely to remember the mountains turning all possible shades of pink and purple in the evening, and the smell of creosote after a rain.

Performances of the Tucson Symphony Orchestra are of high quality at affordable prices. Recent performances of the Arizona Opera include: Macbeth, The Marriage of Figaro, Madam Butterfly, and Beauty and the Beast. There are a number of opportunities to view theatrical performances in venues both large and small. Tucson has nine movie houses, several of them offering less commercial productions. The collections at the Tucson Museum of Art and the Center for Creative Photography are renowned and extremely interesting. The Old West is evident in the two-day Fiesta de los Vaqueros (Tucson Rodeo), an event for which all local schools are cancelled. In addition, Tucson has a thriving counterculture centered a few blocks from campus that produces lively art, a multitude of ethnic, vegetarian and vegan restaurants, many vintage clothing shops, and an annual event near November 1, the Day of the Dead Parade, that is not to be missed.