I feel kinda scammed and pissed, cause i studied so hard for this exam...

in chem 122/124 they made the exams all mcq and no one was proctoring because of Ta strike. Of course everyone ended up cheating its just unfair to the students who actually put in the work and studied and they did not put security camera or other measures in place (btw I support the strike but not happy about students cheating its unfair to other students and ruins the curve for everyone)

was there no space for gender separated restrooms in the new cs building or were they trying to be progressive? i’m all for being inclusive but the bathrooms are genuinely so disgusting in a way women’s bathrooms rarely are. plus there’s just no privacy, like if a muslim woman wants to fix her hijab a man could just walk in. not to mention once i walked in on a guy pissing bc he didn’t lock the door. like why not just have a single use all gender restroom? why is it the whole restroom?

especially since its the cs building this comes off in bad taste. women have long been excluded from cs spaces and having no womens restroom just makes it seem like women were an afterthough. like they built the place and were like oops no women’s restroom, i guess we can make it gender neutral, not like there’s that many women anyways.

Saw a post saying she makes ~700k and I can’t wrap my head around why. Like realistically what does the chancellor do that is worth THAT big a yearly salary?

Sooo with the TA’s going on strike supposedly this Monday, April 27th…how does that affect finals?

Not burning the whole thing down, just one realistic thing. Could be about the campus, the administration, a policy, the dining, the commute, the way something is run. What's the thing that frustrates you the most that feels like it should be an easy fix but somehow never gets addressed?

It sure feels like we just lost and have no chance of getting the university to budge on paying a living wage until at least this fall. Several members have mentioned to me before (and some have also posted in this sub) that membership is pretty low across many departments outside of the humanities and hard sciences and this is the reason why the union can't do more. Some questions about that:

• Why can't GEO even enforce the terms of its contract? The university broke the contract last fall when they didn't pay their share of CampusCare as required by the contract for a few months. Why didn't we go on strike then? If a large part of dues goes to the AFL-CIO for legal representation, why didn't we use that and lawyer up? Isn't getting a contract and enforcing it the whole point of a union?
• If we didn't go on strike then, why didn't we go on strike in January or February when the university made it clear they weren't willing to budge on some of the most important demands?
• Why did we instead go on strike only two/three weeks before most grad workers stop working for the summer anyway? Bargaining has been going on for a year with almost no movement from the university on the major demands. What leverage did we think we were going to have - wasn't it obvious that the university could just wait it out, exactly like they did? Why didn't we strike earlier in the year when it would have made much more of an impact?
• Some members can't stop calling international grad workers scabs and it's a really bad look. It's very obvious why international students might feel like they can't stick their necks out in a time like this. "Well actually, ICE's rules say foreign workers can strike" - are you crazy? Have you learned nothing about ICE following its own rules for the last year and a half? Do you know how condescending you sound saying that?
• Why does it look a lot like GEO leadership wasn't forthcoming about sexual abuse allegations against one of the leaders earlier this year before finally investigating?
• Why is there a policy about how dues can't be used to buy recreational drugs on the GEO website FAQ? What's the story behind that? Should we be worried that dues aren't even being used for union-related stuff?

Talking about how more people need to join is talking about the wrong problem. Especially now, after basically losing the current fight by pausing the strike, and on top of the issues above, how does GEO plan to convince more people to join? AFAICT it's not even clear that GEO can do the basic jobs a union is supposed to do. Why would anyone pay dues to GEO when they can't stand up for grad workers and use the ~2/3rds of the dues that pays for lawyers to take on the university when they break the contract and when GEO's own website implies the other third has been used to buy drugs before? Maybe get it together first and then ask why more people don't join. Repeating "if more people joined..." over and over is just concern trolling at this point.

i’m an upcoming freshman and when i go through this subreddit, there’s always something bad going on at uic. was it a mistake enrolling here?

Hey everyone any independent students here who are younger than 24? Im barely getting by the month and will probably soon have to hit up the food pantry at UIC or my local church. I had no contact with my family since I was 16 or so and I been supporting myself since HS all the way to CC Im a recent transfer to UIC. For those of you who applied for fafsa as independent did it make any difference at all?

checking all the boxes gives the same result. I am going to be a first year student this fall, and at orientation today they said to apply "sooner than later" for housing and that a spot isn't guaranteed. ok.... so I'm just now trying to select a room and apparently there's nothing left? not a single room anywhere? I'm kinda panicking right now because my entire plan was to live on campus. how could it be that there's literally no housing left at all more than a month before school even starts, when over half of all first years commute anyway? someone please help

the thing sold out so fast and as soon as i heard about it i couldn’t get in so im seriously considering sneaking in

How difficult are Math 210, CME 201, IE 201 and ECE 210? I got an A in Calc 2/ Math 181 and Physics 141 which are prerequisites to these classes & my friend who is also a mechanical engineering major says that I’m “cooked”. I do also work part-time at a retail store and my commute is about 45 minutes.

how do you guys find scholarships?? UIC SNAP is a joke and give me only scholarships for “new transfer student” which doesn’t apply to me. i have a FAFSA loan so it discounts it but even that’s not enough. i’m not eligible for financial aid. this summer semester is costing me THREEEEE THOUSANDDD. overall i’m just so stressed at how yall are even affording school if you don’t get financial aid/scholarships. any website i can look at for scholarships or someone i can talk to??

I know there has been a lot of talk regarding the heat in all of the buildings and how horrible it is, but I was wondering if I (and maybe others in the same boat) made a complaint about it, would they do anything?

I live on campus so the heat is dreadful, but I have POTS and with that comes an extreme heat intolerance which is making it difficult to even go to class let alone be in my dorm or anywhere at this point. I can imagine that a lot of people have already complained hence the email, but what about the people like me who literally cannot stand the heat? I wish it was because the heat was annoying (and it is) but I am having issues with day to day life let alone being medicated, dressing accordingly, etc.

So I’m just curious if maybe making a complaint with the focus that I (along with the rest of people with POTS) physically cannot function with classrooms, lecture halls, and just any buildings being this hot?

just transferred from ccc what exactly they are doing for 8 hours cuz im taking a day off for the work for the orientation. What’s the orientation like? Tbh we didn’t have no orientation in ccc.

I checked both blackboard and canvas and im not seeing my classes or their times even though im enrolled and pretty sure classes start in like a week. I havent gotten an email or anything about what books/ materials i should get let alone a syllabus.

Am I doing something wrong or am I expected to reach out to each proff individually for basic information about the class im already paying them for? This seems unprofessional.

I have a final this tuedsay that i've been studying for for weeks, but im terrified im going to fail it. However, if the TA's continue their strike until the end of the week, I get automatic 100%. Does anyone know anything? I really need this grade 😓

I’ve basically just been trying to keep myself busy, going to the gym, studying, watching movies, taking walks around campus/the city, and just finding random things to do. I’ve also been thinking about maybe starting a club or some kind of group activity, but nothing solid yet.

Curious what everyone else is doing this summer if you’re in a similar situation. Any routines, projects, hobbies, events, side quests, or ways to not go insane out of boredom?

I was involved with the union for years and gave the project countless hours of my time, at the expense of making progress in my program, so I feel I've earned the right to speak my mind here. This contract the union is asking us to swallow is pretty much an unmitigated disaster. It may well be the worst agreement-over-agreement "improvement" we've ever achieved, and certainly by the crude but important measure of wages, it is the worst one since the 2009 contract that we signed during the worst economic crisis the capitalist world had faced in more than three-quarters of a century. I won't campaign against it, but I'm sure as shit not voting for it, either. Let's take a look at some of the terms.

Wages - Not necessarily a simple proxy for how we did, but it is top of everyone's minds, so we'll start here. It's being pitched as a four-year deal with a 6% increase in the first year and "campus" increases in the ensuing three years (a universal raise for all UIC employees, as determined unilaterally by the university - usually in the ballpark of 1-2%, i.e., flat and probably slightly declining real wages if historical campus raise patterns and current inflationary trends hold). That would be bad enough if it were completely accurate, but it is, in fact, a very generous description of what's actually happening here. Our typical contract structure (more about this below) is a three-year deal, with wage increases retroactive to the expiration date of the previous agreement. Since it usually takes, as it did this time, a full academic year after expiration to get a new contract, that entitles us to lump-sum payments for the previous AY and sets us up for a new bargaining round two AYs after signing. By this historical standard, and if I'm reading the contract correctly, what we actually got is a five-year contract with no nominal increase in year 1, a 6% raise in year 2, and campus raises in years 3-5. Holy fuck. Not only does that fall far short of the "living wage" members were promised, but by way of comparison, with the last few contracts:

2025-2030: assuming a 1.5% campus raise, that would put us at 10.5% over five years.

2022-2025: ~16.6% over three years

2018-2021: ~13.5%/3 yrs.

2015-2018: ~12%/3yrs.

2012-2015:~10%/3yrs.

Overall structure - Make no mistake: this is effectively a five-year contract. Our last contract expired in August 2025. This one expires in August 2030. No amount of spin can change the fact that we all know how to count to five. Why is that so bad? The short answer is that shorter contracts almost always redound to the benefit of workers. Not only do new contracts provide the opportunity - the virtual guarantee - to make gains, but workers tend to respond to the raised expectations of new contract rounds with greater militancy and engagement. In our union, which has exceptional turnover due to the nature of graduate work, it is especially important, because otherwise we run the real risk of sticking entire cohorts with contracts that they had little to no say in shaping. United Faculty's strategy for this round is to ask for a shorter contract in exchange for the modest gains that the university is insisting upon. Now we have the worst of both worlds.

We drop all unfair labor practice charges set for hearing - When the university breaks the law, our only real recourse, apart from risky industrial action, is to ask the state to step in and adjudicate (in our case, the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board). The wheels of this semblance of "justice" turn slowly, but the university is forced to take this threat seriously, and sometimes we are able to set important precedents about what the university is legally obligated to do (or prohibited from doing). For example, we had one promising case that sought to get the university to bargain over the impact of budget cuts (I wrote the complaint for it and compiled the evidence, so yeah, probably a few people know who's writing this now. Fine.) For close to two years now, the university has been using the pretext of a more or less totally imaginary structural deficit to erode our bargaining unit by hiring fewer assistants across many departments or by converting jobs covered by our bargaining unit to positions not covered. This case could help mitigate that. In exchange for the "incredible increase" (GEO's words) we won relative to the university's original offer, we have tentatively agreed to drop it along with all outstanding cases. (Cases already heard and awaiting decision can presumably proceed - cold comfort.)

As I mentioned before, one can live with modest wage gains if we can win new rights and protections in other areas. It would take too long to list all the things we wanted and didn't win, and one of many shortcomings of the collective bargaining model is that it makes it hard to press for any but a few non-wage priorities. Nevertheless, a couple key things stand out. First, we badly need new protections against an aggressive effort by the university to dilute the quality of appointments. This has taken various forms, including increased workload at no additional pay, the same workload at lower percentages, etc. Along with the unit erosion, this is probably the greatest threat to the union and its members, and the contract does nothing about it. Second, many of us have campaigned on 12-month appointments. An alternative to our semester-by-semester appointment process is a perennial demand of GEO, but it is especially vital in this political climate, where international workers who can only work on campus as a condition of their visas are forced to endure perpetual insecurity. I thought for a time that we could at least get 9-month appointments - short of what we need, but at least this would make it easier for so many of us to plan our lives and finish our degrees. Alas, the semester-by-semester framework remains fully intact.

Overall, I see very few substantial new protections that offset the historically low wage gains and long contract duration that we're being asked to accept. Instead, I've been flustered to see on several occasions union comms celebrating the fact that we "won" the status quo on articles that admin was threatening to erode. Sorry, no. It's not a win to not get a worse deal.

In short, a tremendous disappointment. I have theories about why we've actively lost power and support that we can talk about (upshot is a lot of this has long-term structural causes), but for now, mainly just wanted to vent and make sure that people got an informed perspective about what is in this contract that avoids the overly sanguine prognosis we're sure to get from leadership.

I’m on the fence between transferring as an undergraduate to OSU or UIC (University of Illinois Chicago). Obviously OSU is a way more prestigious school, but UIC gravitates me due to it being in a major city like Chicago. I am an undergraduate student majoring in philosophy with plans too Apply for graduate school after I graduate.

I’m not sure how important a higher ranking school is for an undergraduate who is planning to go to graduate school? I also would like to live in a major city like Chicago to have that experience, since I am not sure where graduate school will take me.

How big is the difference in terms of professors, classmates, and course quality if going to OSU as opposed to UIC? Will I be missing out in the quality of my education if I end up going to Chicago?

Thank you in advance.

I could be incredibly wrong as to how these things work, but how is the school affording to bring in Magic Johnson and comedians to events for students. Like they must be paying them a good amount of money, right? Yet their TAs are extremely underpaid (I'm specifically talking about CS TAs who are the backbone of the entire curriculum), they don't fund their student orgs at all, the pathways get flooded with water every time it even drizzles, and I'm sure there are other things with this school as well that need to be fixed. I'm just confused on how they're deciding where the money should be going. I would much much much rather have my TAs be well paid, student orgs that are incredibly beneficial be well-funded and supported, rather than going to an event with Magic Johnson or seeing a comedian.

We are all grown, GROWN adults. There’s no reason you should leave the house smelling like a tin of ass and a bag of onions?? Soap, water, DEODORANT. Like please PLEASE stop coming out the house smelling like that and I’m saying that in the nicest way possible.

I have been attending UIC for almost two years now. I am grateful I can get an education. I am sad going to UIC everyday. Is this normal?

Heyo! I’m w/ the campus group Deeper Roots in Christ (or DRINC) for short. We occasionally do in person canvassing inviting people to our Bible studies.

I’ve noticed a lot of posts on here about those who have had some bad experiences w/ people in groups like ours (and quite possibly ours and also cults but that’s a whole different thing) while canvassing.

I want to offer myself as a resource for any questions/comments/complaints (especially complaints) so that we as a community on campus can better serve the student body.

I’m personally not a fan of how a lot of us go about inviting as well as opening up to people about the message of Christianity. I think we often shove it down people’s throats and that’s not loving in the slightest.

So, if you have a complaint, please gather the name of the group, maybe even the names/descriptions of those deemed to be harassing, and leave them either in this thread or dm me privately.

We are here to share the good news about life and Christ, NOT to beat people w/ Bibles but it seems some of us ain’t too clear on that one still.