Exploiting undergraduate labor https://twitter.com/opwall/status/1359135707617452033

For those of you who haven’t heard of Operation Wallacea, the central purpose of this organization is to sign up undergraduates to become unpaid field technicians. It’s designed to strengthen the CVs of students who can afford to pay for access to fieldwork.

For those of us who see how unpaid research is undermining efforts at equitable graduate student recruitment, especially in fieldwork-oriented disciplines, check out how OW works. It’s kind of horrific and infuriating to see how wealth transparently translates into access.

(My long list of ‘blog posts I’ll write someday includes a detailed explanation of everything wrong with what Operation Wallacea is doing to my discipline and our junior scientists. And the fact that AR Wallace is one of my faves gets at me too.)

Field experience is important for professional advancement. In a lot of fields, low income students lose out to those who can buy that experience. If you’re running your research program using unpaid undergraduate labor, _you_ are part of the DEIJ problem in your field.