Graduate students live in a diverse world, inhabiting a wide variety of off-campus and student housing. They bring wives, husbands and children with them and leave behind extremely varied work and life experiences. All of this creates unique challenges and opportunities for the Community Associate (CA) program, which attempts to instill a sense of community in University-owned graduate housing.

CAs are responsible for providing opportunities for students and their families to meet each other and provide information about campus resources. Chris Griffith, associate dean of graduate student life, described the breadth of the community that the CA program in Escondido Village (EV) serves, including couples, domestic partners and families with children.

“Some graduate students arrive here directly out of their undergraduate experience and other students have worked in professional positions before returning to graduate school,” Griffith wrote in an email to The Daily. “So the needs within our community are very diverse.”

Terry Walker, a CA in EV whose husband is a graduate student, works in an area filled with families.

“With families, the biggest concern is working around children,” Walker wrote in an email to The Daily. “Not only would three year olds not enjoy certain events, like late night loud rowdy keg parties, but a lot of single grad events would not be safe for children. All of our EV-wide events are a focus on our EV kids, and most of our individual courtyard events are also focused on children.”

Walker described how CAs timed their events to meet the needs of families.

“Typically our events run on kid time and do not run late into the night, and we try to avoid naptime,” she said. “The events are fun, vibrant and full of laughing, playing children. I don’t know of any other place where we could have this kind of a family community.”

But there are also many communities composed of single grad students. Andrew Lookingbill, a fourth-year doctoral candidate in electrical engineering and CA in the Rains Houses, described the atmosphere that they were trying to create.

“The bottom line is getting people to meet each other,” Lookingbill said. “Grad school can be a very insular environment, so we foster a sense of community through these events.”

Julie Litzenburger, a fourth-year graduate student in bioengineering and CA in Rains, tries to put on a variety of events.

“We have Rains divided into a bunch of different neighborhoods,” she said. “Every week we try to do an event with just our neighborhood and every few weeks we try to do a Rains-wide event. The neighborhood events can be anything from subsidized lunches, where we pay to take residents to lunch, to horseback riding on the beach or trips to San Francisco.”

CAs receive a stipend of $300 a quarter, which is less than most undergraduate student staff receive. Some international graduate students also are not able to receive the money if it endangers their student visa status. However, the job does have some non-monetary perks. Graduate students normally have only one year of guaranteed housing. But a CA is ensured a place in university housing.

The CA program is organized by the Graduate Life Office (GLO), which was established roughly seven years ago to unite graduate community programs. Griffith, Ken Hsu and Andrew Hernandez serve as the three GLO deans and are available around the clock for emergency purposes.

The GLO also works closely with the Graduate Student Programming Board and Graduate Student Council to co-sponsor events and advocate for the graduate community.