Grad Student Groups Bounce Back After Pandemic Slump

Though the number of graduate student groups at Princeton dropped during the pandemic, many have rebounded, thanks in part to a funding incentive led by the Graduate Student Government (GSG) events board. There are now more clubs and activities than before the lockdown.

During the 2019-20 school year, there were 70 graduate groups, according to Lily Secora, associate dean for student affairs at the graduate school, and the following year, during the height of the pandemic, that number dipped to 62.

Anna Jacobson, GSG president and a fifth-year quantitative and computational biology student, said even post-pandemic, some returning groups had “very minimal activity.”

“Every year, we have some clubs that go under and some clubs that are revived, but I think overall before [the pandemic] we had a relatively stable number of student groups,” said Jacobson.

“These graduate student groups fulfill a very important function in terms of providing social venues for people to get to know others outside their departments and pursue hobbies in Princeton.”

— Jan Ertl
Graduate Student Government treasurer

A November 2023 story in The Chronicle of Higher Education makes clear the problem wasn’t unique to Princeton: “More than a dozen administrators and experts told The Chronicle that student organizations have been slow to recover.”

According to economics graduate student Jan Ertl, who is GSG treasurer, a role that includes leading the GSG events board, the number of event applications dipped from around 40 per year leading up to the pandemic to just 10 during 2020-21, but that resulted in one unanticipated benefit: unused funds.

In December 2022, the GSG events board, which is funded by GSG, the graduate school, and the Office of the Vice President for Campus Life, agreed to publicize a special incentive: At least $500 would be reimbursed in both spring and fall 2023 to the first 10 new and newly revived groups that applied for events funding, so long as the events met the board’s funding guidelines, mainly that they must be open to all graduate students.

And it worked. Since fall 2022, “we have around 15 or more new organizations,” said Ertl. “So yeah, we were quite excited about that.”

In January, Ertl said they had already received almost as many funding requests this academic year as was typical for the entirety of prepandemic years.

According to Secora, there were 79 graduate student groups in 2022-23 and 82 this academic year. Revived groups include the Graduate Muslim Student Association and Tigers with Cubs, for those with kids, and new clubs include the Princeton Science Fiction Society, the Princeton Graduate Pet Owner Club, and the Graduate Muay Thai Club.

“At a place like Princeton that’s maybe a bit more remote from the city, I think these graduate student groups fulfill a very important function in terms of providing social venues for people to get to know others outside their departments and pursue hobbies in Princeton,” said Ertl.