Positions
The 2014 board listed graduate assistantships (RA/TA/GA), postdocs, faculty and staff openings and campus jobs, side by side. The board is closed, but the categories still describe how graduate work gets paid. Here is what each one means and where its openings are posted now.
| Category | What it is | Where to look in 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Research Assistantship (RA) | Paid from a professor’s grant to do research, often your own thesis work. Usually includes a tuition waiver. | Faculty pages, lab websites, direct email, department admissions |
| Teaching Assistantship (TA) | Paid by the department to grade, run labs or sections. The standard funding for first-year PhD students in many fields. | Department graduate office, the admission offer itself |
| Graduate Assistantship (GA) | Paid by a university office (housing, advising, a research center) for administrative or project work. | University HR job board, student employment pages |
| Scholarship or Fellowship (SF) | Money with no work obligation, from the university, a foundation or a government program. | Graduate school fellowship page, national programs such as NSF GRFP |
| Postdoc | A paid research position after the PhD, usually one to three years, on a grant or a fellowship. | Society job boards, Science Careers, lab websites, field mailing lists |
| Part-time campus job | Hourly work in libraries, labs, dining or IT. No tuition benefit, but flexible. | University student employment portal |
Most assistantships are never posted
This surprises people every year. A professor with a new grant rarely writes a job ad for a PhD student. They admit one through the normal application, or they pick from students who wrote to them in the fall. The postings you see on boards skew toward master’s RAs, staff researchers, postdocs and a few fields (agriculture, natural resources, engineering) where advertised assistantships are a tradition.
So the board is the second place to look, not the first. The first is the list of professors with fresh funding, followed by a short, specific email.
Where the advertised ones live
Department and lab pages
Look for a “prospective students” or “join us” page. Labs that actively recruit say so, often with the number of openings and the start term. A page last updated three years ago tells you something too.
Field mailing lists and society boards
Ecology, geosciences, soil science, wildlife and fisheries have long-running job boards where professors post funded MS and PhD positions with stipend figures. Physics, chemistry and the life sciences rely more on society career sites and on journals’ job sections. Ask a current grad student in your field which list everyone reads; there is always one.
University HR portals
Graduate assistantships in student affairs, housing and research centers usually run through the university’s student employment or HR site. They often open in spring for the next academic year and fill fast.
Europe and elsewhere
Outside the US, PhD places are frequently advertised as salaried jobs with a fixed project. EURAXESS lists research positions across Europe, and many universities post doctoral positions on their own vacancy pages with closing dates.
A posting from the 2014 board
The archive kept one listing in full enough to quote. It is typical of what an advertised assistantship looked like then, and still does:
University of South Carolina: immediate opening of 5 TA assistantships for PhD study in Computer Science, covering all expenses and tuition. Admitted students can work with any faculty in data mining, bioinformatics, security, computer vision and related areas. Deadline: June 30, 2014.
Notice what it promises (tuition plus a stipend) and what it does not (a specific advisor). A TA line gets you in the door and paid; finding a research home is still your job once you arrive. Our explainer on TA, RA and GA covers hours, benefits and the trade-offs between them.
Before you apply to a posting
- Check the start term and whether admission to the graduate program is a separate application with its own deadline.
- Ask whether the position includes a tuition waiver, health insurance and summer pay, or only a stipend.
- Find out how many years are guaranteed and what happens if the grant ends early.
- Email the contact person with a CV and two paragraphs on why the project fits; the sample emails work here as well.
If two offers arrive at once, the offer comparison page will help you weigh them.
Questions about positions
- I found an advertised RA position. Do I still need to apply to the graduate program?
- Almost always. The professor can choose you, but the graduate school admits you, so you usually submit a full application with its own deadline and fee. Ask the contact person which deadline applies and whether they will flag your file to the committee.
- Why do ecology and soil science boards list so many funded master’s positions when computer science boards list almost none?
- Field traditions. In natural resources and agriculture, grants often name a specific thesis project and professors recruit openly for it. In computer science and most of biology, students are admitted to a program first and matched to labs later, so few positions are advertised.
- Is a campus job like library work a graduate assistantship?
- No. Hourly campus jobs pay wages but normally come without a tuition waiver or health insurance. A graduate assistantship is tied to your enrollment and usually includes a tuition benefit, which is worth far more than the hourly pay difference.
- Do postdoc postings work the same way as student positions?
- Not quite. A postdoc is employment after the PhD, usually on a fixed grant-funded project, and it is hired like a job: posting, interview, offer. Personal contact still helps, but there is no admission committee in between.