In 2016, Columbia graduate students launched a landmark case that resulted in the National Labor Relations Board deciding that it should be legal for graduate students at private universities to unionize. Since this case, there has been a surge in graduate efforts to unionize. 

Auburn is a public institution rather than a private university, but it still is recognized at a research 1 university. That means that it falls under a certain sector of universities that perform high amounts of research activity. Because of this ranking, Auburn is appealing to graduate students seeing as how a large part of their education is conducting research and crafting a thesis surrounding it. 

Auburn currently has 6,232 registered graduate students, but despite this, these students still have not unionized. However, with graduate student unions sweeping across the United States, will Auburn graduate students move toward unionization? If these students did, what conditions would they want improved? 

To get to the bottom of this, we spoke to graduate students at Auburn University about their experiences and looked at what other schools in the nation have student unions. 

This is a collaborative, multimedia news story by Katie Carroll, Miki Erickson, Theresa Knee and Juliane Vo