Not to piss on anyones parade, but most phd students get work study/federal aid. Mba student like me, not so much. I don’t generate research income...
This is true. Many institutions and organizations in both the public and private sector provide funds to university departments to carry out research activities on behalf of the donor organization.
Typically PhD candidates participate in this research and receive compensation in the form of research assistantships.
This is pretty much a standard procedure. It provides aspiring PhDs with research experience and allows the donor organization the benefit of a temporary research team for short term research projects - leaving their researchers on staff time to concentrate on other projects.
I think it is important to remember that there are certain forms of mental illness involving brain chemistry that tend to surface in young people around late teens and in the twenties. It is usually unforeseen and is a family’s worst nightmare.
The saddest and most frightening element of this to me is that the illness is often accompanied with a resistance to seek treatment or care because usually the person has reached majority, making it virtually impossible for the family to intervene.
You get them through childhood and into young adulthood safely, then when something like this happens you realize your child is not out of the woods yet.
Ironically there may be a PhD student somewhere right now with a research assistantship working to learn more about how to detect this problems within the brain earlier so that these anomalies can be detected and treated early on.