Lauren Mitchell uses her own body to teach medical and nursing students how to perform breast and pelvic exams. “It’s me, a glove and some lube,” she says.
However, as a 23-year-old freelance gynecological teaching associate, or GTA, Mitchell doesn’t consistently earn enough to cover basic needs. Her rent, student loans and grocery bills often swamp her – forcing her to lean on her boyfriend for support and use discarded clothes to satisfy her fashion bug. Although she is a college graduate helping to train the next generation of doctors, Mitchell cannot afford health insurance. She has even stopped buying birth control pills. Like many New Yorkers, she is young, well educated and struggling.
A resident of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, Mitchell says she “still lives like a student.” Her main source of income is an irregular pattern of GTA sessions. Depending on how many students Mitchell instructs she can take home from $125 to $300 for a few hours of work. But she can go days without a call.
Wild grocery price swings
Before creating an online map to depict grocery store prices in Washington Heights, I was sure the supermarkets would have similar prices. Isn’t there a commodity market somewhere that determines a gallon of milk should be $3.79? There isn’t. Instead of total prices falling within a dollar of each other (as I feared they would, thus rendering a boring map) the totals differed dramatically. At one store our shopping list (a pound of chicken, two apples, a box of cornflakes and a gallon of milk) came to less than $8. Another store, just two blocks away, charged more than $12 for the same items. Shop around -- it will pay off.
Non-nosy New Yorkers
Walking into a Bank of America ATM vestibule with a camera and recorder makes you conspicuous. So as my partner and I followed Lauren Mitchell, our profile subject, through the process of checking her bank account balance, I avoided looking directly at the security cameras, sure that any minute bank guards would appear and escort us out. Not only did security fail to stuff and cuff us but no one even seemed to notice us. One woman did look up from her ATM for a couple of seconds before taking her cash and leaving the bank without a backwards glance.
—Mariel Clark
She travels to her jobs via public transportation, always choosing the cheapest option: $1.35 for the bus instead of a cab. But getting to her jobs in places like Newark, N.J., and the Bronx can sometimes take three hours.
The paychecks often fall short. When med schools are busy, so is Mitchell and she can earn $3,000 a month. During the summer, Mitchell doesn’t get many calls for her training services and makes as little as $1,000 a month. She picks up other work speaking at women’s health conferences and is currently looking for a steady part-time job to help make ends meet.
Mitchell admits her boyfriend, an information-technology administrator, is her financial safety net. He is able to cover the majority of the $1,700 monthly rent for their one-bedroom apartment. Mitchell chips in what she can. During a “good month,” she contributes $700 toward the rent. During a “bad month,” she can only afford $300 to $400. Mitchell says she doesn’t let her boyfriend in on how bad her financial situation is.
