UW-Madison attempts to compensate for student unemployment concerns with Starship emotional support positions

Many students who have lost their opportunity to work due to the coronavirus pandemic are struggling to make ends meet and to finalize their summer plans. While the university has offered some remote working positions, there are many students who don’t feel secure and remain concerned for their future. 

In a feeble attempt to address some of these concerns, the university released a limited number of part-time summer positions titled “Starship Emotional Support.” Students chosen for these positions will “provide companionship and emotional guidance to our campus’s beloved Starships. You will serve as a role model for the ’bots while nurturing their dwindling sense of safety and well-being.” 

“I think we’ve all seen the Starships struggling around campus, and it’s truly heartbreaking to watch,” a UW-Madison official said. “The purpose of these emotional support positions… it’ll all be about giving them that extra push up Bascom Hill, for example.”

Even though they’ve only been on campus for a short time, the Starship robots have a long history of mayhem and chaos at UW-Madison. They’ve fallen off elevated surfaces without any means to recover. They are often seen taking a “concerning amount” of breaks intermittently throughout their treks across campus. They sometimes even put themselves in dangerous situations, like jaywalking across a busy University Avenue. It doesn’t help that passing students take every chance they can to yell demoralizing, ill-mannered insults at them. 

Many would say that the Starships are simply just misguided and confused

“Quite honestly, these positions should have been created much sooner… the robots are in desperate need of help,” a Starship robot behaviorist said. “And who knows? Maybe the Starships could return the favor and act as companions for students during a time when they are overwhelmed and stressed at the thought of their futures in the next Great Depression!” 

While there was much optimism in response to these new student positions, there was an equal amount of push-back. Some students were concerned about how they would explain their time as an “emotional support animal” to future employers while others said it was utterly insulting.

“They really went through all of that trouble to ‘address’ our concerns… Well here’s something that I thought of in the last two seconds: why don’t they instead just sell the Starships and give the money to all us?” one disturbed student said.

Realizing that this stunt might reflect back poorly on the university, UW-Madison public relations internists finally got their time to shine. 

“The University of Wisconsin-Madison cares more about their students than they do their Starship robots,” were the final words uttered by a broken-down internist who was clearly the sacrificial lamb put out by the university at a last minute press conference.