Federal Work Study Student Employment Authorization Form: Fill & Download for Free

F-1 Options (On Campus, CPT, OPT)“Employment” is work performed in exchange for compensation. Compensation can include money, room and board, or other significant benefits. Before accepting any kind of employment, be sure it is allowed by the F-1 regulations. Note that the off-campus employment opportunities generally require you to have completed one academic year (three quarters) to be eligible to apply for authorization. Consult an ISS adviser with any questions related to F-1 status and employment.F-1 status allows the following five categories of employment:On-campus EmploymentCurricular Practical Training (CPT)Optional Practical Training (OPT)Severe Economic HardshipInternational OrganizationsOn-Campus EmploymentYour F-1 student status permits you to work on campus at the university that issued your I-20 while you are enrolled in a full course of study. Your UW I-20 is your proof of work eligibility for on-campus employment at UW only. You must maintain F-1 status to be eligible for this employment benefit; maintaining status means that you are a full-time registered student (except for approved exceptions) in good academic standing with a valid I-20.Definition of “On-Campus” EmploymentOn-campus employment includes:Employment for the UWExamples: teaching assistant, research assistant, library student worker, etc.Work performed in a campus location for a commercial firm providing direct services to studentsExample: University Bookstore branch in the HUB (but not on the Ave)Employment at an off-campus location which is educationally affiliated with the UW. The educational affiliation must be associated with your academic department's established curriculum or related to contractually funded projects at the post-graduate level, and be an integral part of your educational program. If you are not sure whether the employment opportunity would meet the definition of “on-campus” employment, please complete and submit the On Campus Employment Assessment Form to ISS to determine eligibility.ISS interprets this to mean that the employment itself must be an integral part of your established curriculum. If the work is related to a contractually funded project, it should be under the guidance of a UW professor affiliated with the off-campus location. This particular definition of on-campus employment is very rarely applied. Given the size of UW and its various connections with many local and national organizations, it can be challenging to determine if this definition is applicable. Please note that ISS advisers do not authorize on-campus employment. While ISS advisers can provide guidance/opinions, the final hiring decision is made by the employer.Time LimitsYou are allowed to work:part-time (20 hours per week or less) during your regular full-time quarters (quarter dates are set by the UW academic calendar and include finals week).full-time (more than 20 hours per week) between quarters.full-time (more than 20 hours per week) during your annual vacation quarter.Graduate students: if you have a teaching or research assistantship, this reaches the 20-hour-per-week limit to on-campus employment. If you have an opportunity for additional employment on campus, you must consult your primary ISS adviser about additional work authorization.Expiration of On-campus Employment EligibilityYour on-campus employment eligibility ends:When you graduate. It expires the last day of your final quarter (per UW calendar), even if your I-20 expiration date is in the future.If you transfer to another university; your work authorization expires on the day of your SEVIS record release date.If you violate your F-1 status.Work StudySome campus jobs are designated as “work study” positions. The job description might include a statement such as: “position open only to UW students who qualify for work study awards.” Work study awards are part of federal financial aid packages and are only available to U.S. citizens and permanent residents. As an F-1 student, generally you are not eligible for a work study position and should not apply.However, there are some cases where the term “work study” might be used in a more general sense and not necessarily refer to a financial aid award. You can contact the office that posted the job opening to confirm whether or not you must have a work study award to be eligible for the job.Finding a Campus JobSet up an account in the UW Career Center’s Husky Jobs. This database advertises both on-campus and off-campus jobs. Filter your search to only look for on-campus jobs. On-campus jobs are also advertised on flyers posted around campus—in elevators, office bulletin boards, etc.Your Responsibility: Know the RulesIt is your responsibility to research and understand your on-campus work eligibility. It is generally not the job of UW staff outside of ISS to thoroughly know the immigration regulations. It is possible you will be offered employment that you are not eligible to accept or for your employment eligibility to expire without your payroll coordinator notifying you. Be sure to review all information provided by ISS and consult ISS if you have any concerns or questionsSevere Economic HardshipOverview:If you are suffering a severe economic hardship due to unforeseen changes in your financial circumstances, you may apply to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) for authorization to work off-campus.Examples of unforeseen circumstances:Loss of financial support or on-campus employmentSubstantial fluctuations in the value of currency or exchange rateInordinate increases in tuition and/or living costsUnexpected changes in the financial condition of your source of support, such a loss of a family businessExcessive medical billsThe employment authorization is granted by USCIS in increments of one year at a time.The authorization allows you to work for any employer up to 20 hours per week while you are registered full-time.It also allows you to work more than 20 hours per week during quarter breaks and your annual vacation quarter.This employment does not affect your eligibility for Optional Practical Training (OPT).Employment authorization is automatically terminated if you graduate, fail to maintain status, or transfer to another school.Eligibility:You must have been in F-1 status for one academic yearYou must be in good academic standingYou must document that on-campus employment opportunities are unavailable or insufficient to meet your financial needs.How to apply:Contact your adviser in International Student Services (ISS) to discuss your situation before you complete the required documentation. Your adviser will determine your eligibility and assist you in completing the application and submitting it to USCIS. Required documentation includes:Form I-765 (write (c)(3)(iii) in item 16)$410 fee (make your check or money order payable to U.S. Department of Homeland Security)Photocopy of Form I-20, with your ISS adviser’s recommendation for economic hardship employmentTwo passport style photosPhotocopy of I-94 card (front and back)A letter describing your financial difficulties and why on-campus employment opportunities are unavailable or insufficient; include supporting evidencePhotocopy of passport identification pagePhotocopy of visa pagePhotocopies of any previously-issued EAD cardsApplication processing times vary between two to four months. Do not begin working until you receive the Employment Authorization Document (EAD).

Farming? No. Gardening? Maybe, but probably not.A farm is a commercial business venture in which one plants and then harvests crops for sale for profit. A person who works on a farm is engaged in productive labor. Someone in H-1B can only perform productive labor for their H-1B petitioner, and someone in F-1 can only perform productive labor under the restrictive rules that apply to F-1 students. Since farming is, in most cases, not a “specialty occupation” (there may be exceptions to this) it’s probably not possible to be an H-1B farmer, and the only situation where a F-1 student could be a farmer is as a student employee at a farm run by, or in affiliation with, the institution at which the student studies. Thus, if you’re a student at Illinois State University, you could indeed potentially work as a student employee at University Farm, which is run by the school as a research and teaching farm for students studying agriculture. But that’s not “your backyard”; the farm will have to be owned by someone else and the purpose of your employment would have be consistent with the (fairly complex) rules for student employment.Gardening, on the other hand, is planting and then harvesting crops for your own personal use; that is, to feed yourself and your family, to give as gifts, or for some other purpose other than to sell them for profit. It is not a status violation for a person in F-1 or H-1B to engage in gardening in their own back yard (or anywhere else, such as at a community garden). However, the activity must not be engaged in for the purpose of making a profit. It might be permissible for you to occasionally conduct a sale of excess produce generated by your personal garden, but you cannot do so on a regular basis or with the intent to produce a profit. Your purpose in conducting the sale must be solely to efficiently dispose of personal property for which you no longer have a need. It’s probably better for you to simply donate any garden produce in excess of your personal needs to a food bank or other charity; this avoids even the appearance of attempting to run an unauthorized business.In addition, be aware that many communities have zoning or land use regulations that will restrict the establishment of agricultural operations on land designated for residential purposes. Most communities allow household gardening to some degree, but trying to set up a full-blown farm on a residential lot is likely to be a violation of local land use laws.Furthermore, nearly all states have some form of regulatory supervision of food producers, for public health reasons, and so you may need a license or permit of some sort from a state or local authority in order to run a food-producing business in that state or locality. Some types of agricultural activity are also subject to federal regulation by one or more of the United States Department of Agriculture, the United States Food and Drug Administration, or the Environmental Protection Agency.Finally, note that if you do not own your own home, you need permission of the landowner to operate a farm on the land surrounding your home. While some people in H-1B do own their own home, virtually everyone in F-1 rents. Most residential leases do not include what are called severance rights, which means that any crops grown on the land belong to the landlord, not to the tenant, and thus the landlord, not the tenant, is entitled to the fruits of the harvest. Your landlord will probably not approve of you running a farm on his or her land, at least not unless you agree to give him or her a cut of the take.

Asking a professor whether they think graduate students are exploited as cheap labor in the lab is akin to expecting a potential suspect to voluntarily confess, not because any given professor is necessarily in the wrong but because whether they like it or not or acknowledge it or not, they operate within an entrenched hierarchy designed for their benefit, one where in the decades since WWII, universities and the scientific enterprise they support evolved to indeed subject graduate students and later post-docs as well to work conditions rather akin to indentured labor.Rather than asking professors, examining independent analyses of the scientific enterprise and of graduate student efforts to unionize provides better understanding, and this US- and biomedical research-specific answer draws on such material.A tenured professor (or principal investigator) typically operates with unquestioning authority as the head of a lab or lab section. Though it's a work environment with quite the extreme power asymmetry, academia runs on the principle that tenured professors self-regulate but we know from Wall Street and Silicon Valley that self-regulation simply doesn't work.In recent decades, some changes and trends in academia further exacerbated this power asymmetry in the US.Research by tenured professors yields manifold economic and other benefits to the university that employs them,Grant money.Prestige.Fees from increased student enrollment using names of star academics as recruiting tools.Potential revenue from patents, licensing fees, biotech and other commercial spin-offs, partnerships and the like.The passage of the Bayh–Dole Act - Wikipedia in 1980 codified and spurred the expansion of such commercial aspects of federally funded university research. Thus motivated, universities expanded their research activities and, generously subsidized by federal monies, tenured professors eagerly and successfully recruited more students to their labs. Research labs thus expanded and even more so during the late Clinton-early Bush II years when the NIH budget ~doubled over a mere handful of years.Problem is while faculty were thus incentivized to churn out more and more Masters and PhDs, faculty positions remained largely stagnant even as mandatory faculty retirement got abolished in 1994. This intensified academic competition, exacerbated the supply-demand gap between eligible candidates and available faculty positions, and increased the pressure to publish research papers within shorter time frames.Too Many Graduate Students, Backbone of Academic Labor; Too Few Faculty PositionsUS universities evolved to staff labs not with a full-time workforce on the university payroll with the benefits and protections that accompany such a designation but with a constantly churning temporary labor force in the form of graduate students and post-docs funded through fellowships, grants, scholarships, teaching or research assistantships (1, 2).Notice how the position of the post-doc barely existed pre-WW II and has ballooned since the 1980s. The post-doc is a purely made-up temporary position whose very existence exemplifies an artificially created supply-demand problem between a glut of PhDs and lack of faculty positions that can absorb them into academia, even as it conveniently offers a steady pipeline of well-trained, cheap labor.Paternalistically labeling graduate students' work products euphemisms such as 'labor of love' or 'intellectual pursuit' cannot mask the ugly reality that an inherently asymmetric relationship leaves them little or no recourse against discrimination, exploitation or harassment, all of which are pervasive and massively under-reported across academia (3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10).Meantime, universities and graduate student advisors have consistently fallen short in managing student expectations, woefully failing to train and prepare them for alternate career choices. Some of this may stem from a classic frog-in-the-well mindset. After all, a typical academic best knows how to be an academic and can likely offer little or no guidance about other career options.In the meantime, since the 1980s, an immigrant student population, *cough* workforce, began swelling the ranks of undergraduate and graduate (Masters, PhD) students as well as post-docs (11). Coming in on temporary student visas with little parity or bargaining power with respect to the professors who sponsor their higher studies, such students are the very definition of a captive workforce.The abrupt squeeze on federal research funds in the wake of the Great Recession was a tremendous shock wave to this gussied up system, akin to a pin abruptly and sharply pushed into a tightly inflated balloon. Its aftermath only further exacerbated an already obscene gap between a supply glut and an even further cratering demand.The terms of the exchange are a graduate student's labor in the lab and increasingly, in the classroom as well, in exchange for a degree. Problem is this phony paternalistic mindset deliberately devalues academic labor (1, see below from 2, emphasis mine).'The troubles plaguing academic science -- including fierce competition for funding, dismal career opportunities for young scientists, overdependence on soft money, excessive time spent applying for grants, and many more -- do not arise, Stephan suggests, from a shortage of funds. In 2009, she notes, the United States spent nearly $55 billion on university- and medical school–based research and development, far more than any other nation.The problems arise, Stephan argues, from how that money is allocated: who gets to spend it, where, and on what. Unlike a number of other countries, the United States structures university-based research around short-term competitive grants to faculty members. The incentives built into this system lead universities to behave “as though they are high-end shopping centers,” she writes. “They turn around and lease the facilities to faculty in [exchange for] indirect costs on grants and buyout of salary. In many instances, faculty ‘pay’ for the opportunity of working at the university, receiving no guarantee of income if they fail to bring in a grant.” Those who land funding staff their labs with students enrolled in their department’s graduate program, or with postdocs. Paid out of the faculty member’s grant, both types of workers depend on the primary investigator’s (PI’s) continued success in the tournament.Universities, however, also face considerable risks. They must, for example, provide large start-up packages to outfit new faculty members for the competition. Newcomers generally have about 3 years to establish a revenue stream -- to start winning “the funding to stay in business,” Stephan says. The need to reduce risk explains universities’ growing penchant for hiring faculty members off the tenure track and using adjuncts for teaching. “Medical schools have gone a step further,” Stephan notes, “employing people, whether tenured or nontenured, with minimal guarantees of salary.” Where tenure once constituted a pledge to pay a person’s salary for life, it now constitutes, in the acerbic definition I’ve heard from some medical school professors, a mere “license to go out and fund your own salary.”Risk avoidance has scientific as well as financial consequences. “The system … discourages faculty from pursuing research with uncertain outcomes,” which may endanger future grants or renewals. This peril is “particularly acute for those on soft money.” Experimental timidity produces “little chance that transformative research will occur and that the economy will reap significant returns from investments in research and development.”As in all financial ventures, cost determines much of what goes on in the laboratory. “Cost plays a role in determining whether researchers work with male mice or female mice (females, it turns out, can be more expensive), whether principal investigators staff their labs with postdoctoral fellows (postdocs) or graduate students, and why faculty members prefer to staff labs with ‘temporary’ workers, be they graduate students, postdocs, or staff scientists, rather than with permanent staff.” Postdocs often are a PI’s best staffing buy, Stephan writes, because their excellent skills come with no requirement to pay tuition, which at top private institutions can run $30,000 a year or more. Overall, the need to reduce risk and cost in the grant-based system produces “incentives … to get bigger and bigger” by winning the maximum number of grants and, because grad students and postdocs do the actual bench work, to “produce more scientists and engineers than can possibly find jobs as independent researchers.”Many universities, meanwhile, took out large loans during flush times to finance buildings and equipment intended to give them an edge in attracting grants. They find their fiscal stability “severely threatened when funding from grants plateaus, or does not grow sufficiently to keep pace with the expansion. They face even more serious prospects when budgets decline in real terms.” The nation’s enormous investment in biomedical research has also “created a lobbying behemoth composed of universities and nonprofit health advocacy groups that constantly remind Congress of the importance of funding health-related research,” Stephan adds. This gives rise to unceasing claims that no amount of science funding is ever enough.Although one topflight report described this setup as “ 'incredibly successful’ from the perspective of faculty,” Stephan observes, “it is the Ph.D. students and postdocs who are bearing the cost of the system -- and the U.S. taxpayers -- not the principal investigators.” Undergraduates also carry an increasing share of the load, she adds: Their tuition, often paid with student loans, rises as more funds go to research. Their teachers, meanwhile, increasingly are cut-rate adjuncts rather than the famous professors the recruiting brochures boast about.'This decision to greatly expand graduate student enrollment and use them as poorly paid, poorly protected, temporary academic labor in a greatly expanding academic research landscape has fueled years-long demands for unionization across the US university landscape.On August 23, 2016, the National Labor Relations Board - Wikipedia ruled that graduate students at private colleges are also employees of the colleges where they work and study (12, 13, see below from 14).'The National Labor Relations Board issued a 3-1 decision in Columbia University that student assistants working at private colleges and universities are statutory employees covered by the National Labor Relations Act. The Graduate Workers of Columbia-GWC, UAW filed an election petition seeking to represent both graduate and undergraduate teaching assistants, along with graduate and departmental research assistants at the university in December 2014. The majority reversed Brown University (342 NLRB 483) saying it “deprived an entire category of workers of the protections of the Act without a convincing justification.”For 45 years, the National Labor Relations Board has exercised jurisdiction over private, nonprofit universities such as Columbia. In that time, the Board has had frequent cause to apply the Act to faculty in the university setting, which has been upheld by the Supreme Court.Federal courts have made clear that the authority to define the term “employee” rests primarily with the Board absent an exception enumerated within the National Labor Relations Act. The Act contains no clear language prohibiting student assistants from its coverage. The majority found no compelling reason to exclude student assistants from the protections of the Act.’This groundbreaking decision will surely reverberate across US academia. For example, in April 2018, Harvard graduate students voted 1931 to 1523 to join the United Auto Workers (15, 16).Bibliography1. How Economics Shapes Science: Paula Stephan: 9780674088160: Amazon.com: Books2. Academia's Crooked Money Trail3. The Pyramid Problem4. Moss-Racusin, Corinne A., et al. "Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109.41 (2012): 16474-16479. http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/109/41/16474.full.pdf5. Clancy, Kathryn BH, et al. "Survey of academic field experiences (SAFE): Trainees report harassment and assault." PLoS One 9.7 (2014): e102172. Survey of Academic Field Experiences (SAFE): Trainees Report Harassment and Assault6. Better advice for ‘Bothered’7. Sexual harassment is rife in universities, but complaining means risking your career8. It's Time for the ‘Harvey Effect’ to Reach Academia9. SEXUAL HARASSMENT OF WOMEN: Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, Medicine, 2018. Sexual Harassment of Women10. Why science breeds a culture of sexism11. The 2018 Science & Engineering Indicators published by the National Science Board (NSF). https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=4&ved=0ahUKEwiBksjdu5PcAhVF7FMKHdCZAX8QFghJMAM&url=https%3A%2F%2Fnsf.gov%2Fstatistics%2F2018%2Fnsb20181%2Fassets%2Fnsb20181.pdf&usg=AOvVaw1SAjBmXcf-Vc40_J8JHvV012. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=5&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjL84SL-ZTcAhVCmuAKHXkKAjwQFghMMAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.chronicle.com%2Fitems%2Fbiz%2Fpdf%2FChronFocus_GradStudentUnionv4_i.pdf&usg=AOvVaw1wWE-XamAyB6bgczMEUKgW13. Grad-Student Unions14. Board: Student Assistants Covered by the NLRA15. Harvard graduate students vote to form a union16. Harvard agrees to negotiate a contract with graduate-student union