Students working in a slew of different jobs may be affecting everyone differently, a PhD student says.  

Emily Hammond, a PhD in sociology student at University of Toronto, is exploring how various kinds of jobs affect working students.  

The research is aimed at understanding the impacts of the various jobs that students do, and to provide awareness to both students and institutions to help navigate and support.  

“I have worked a lot of different jobs throughout my life, in high school and my undergrad, my masters… I worked as a camp counselor, an after-school childcare facilitator, I worked in a halfway house, I worked at a retirement home. I’ve worked in so many different positions, which brought [me] awareness of the various jobs that students are doing,” said Hammond. 

Hammond completed her master’s degree in women’s and gender studies from Carleton University.  

For her master’s thesis, she studied about students using sex work to pay for their post-secondary education in Canada. Her PhD research idea stemmed from that study. 

“Having done this research, specifically on student sex workers, I realized that while this was a really interesting subset of this working student population, it only captures such a small number of the experiences of student workers as a whole,” Hammond said. 

During the course of her study, Hammond found that many students were opting for sex-work for its economic benefits. This, however, did not mean that the job came without its challenges and risks. 

“I am hypothesizing and guessing that [this] will be reflected in the experiences of the working student population at large, the struggles of student workers as a whole.” 

Hammond values the opportunity she has had for education over the years and finds that security, including financial and job security, are important to her.  

This, she shared, is another factor for taking up this study. 

“I think security and having a sense of security in one’s life and balance are so important. I think that it’s not sustainable for students to be in school long term, if they’re not able to achieve some kind of balance, and it becomes harder when students are working jobs.” 

Students in post-secondary institutions in Toronto work in various jobs ranging from factory-work to working in restaurants.  

Most students work part-time and at jobs offering minimum wage. With the increase in living costs and high tuition fees, it has almost become a necessity to work while studying. 

Hammond mentioned that there are obvious gaps present in student support services within institutions that are relevant to her study.  

“[It] is an important and relevant factor that is influencing and perhaps pushing more students into the job force, perhaps forcing students to work more hours and I don’t think that the impacts of these, policy decisions are necessarily always understood to the degree of individual impacts on working students,” she said. 

Hammond hopes that the findings from this exploratory study will help institutions understand how to better support their students, as well as help guide policy discussions at the provincial and national levels.  

“I’m hoping that all of these findings will become relevant and will be important to those people who are kind of in charge of setting the boundaries or the constraints within which student workers like operate, because as it stands, there’s just so little research on this topic,” she said.  

The study will be focused on undergraduate students and the data will be collected from focus groups. 

The groups will consist of four to five participants who will converse about their work experiences. Hammond will provide broad questions to guide the group discussions. Interested individuals can then proceed to individual interviews, but this is not mandatory.  

Participants will receive a $10 gift card as a thank you for their time. 

Students who are engaged in any type of paid work and are interested to be a part of this study can contact Hammond at e.hammond@utoronto.ca.