This PhD Student Feeds Her Family Largely from Her Garden

October 7, 2019 by Lourdes Bobbio Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Jane CoomberSewell, a PhD student in Media and Cultural Studies at Canterbury Christ Church University. Jane is self-funding her PhD through several part-time jobs and self-employment as part of the gig economy. Jane and her wife embrace this lower-earning phase of life by making frugality and budgeting into a game for their household of five. They are serious gardeners with a long-term plan to become almost completely self-sufficient in their food consumption. Jane explains what she grows in her garden, how she creates standard daily meals from the produce, and how gardening helps her work-life balance.

Links Mentioned in This Episode

Teaser

00:00 Jane: Financial balance is tricky. If you treat it as a challenge that it’s almost certain that you’re going to overcome and therefore it becomes a bit of a game, then it all becomes a lot more fun. And why are we here if not to be enjoyed and enjoyable?

Introduction

00:27 Emily: Welcome to the personal finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season four, episode eight and today my guest is Jane CoomberSewell, a self-funded PhD student in media and cultural studies at Canterbury Christ Church University. Jane and her wife are avid gardeners. They have dramatically reduced their food spending by eating largely from what they produce and have a 10 year plan to become almost totally self-sufficient with respect to their food. In addition to discussing her garden and favorite recipes, Jane shares her positive attitude toward this lower income phase of life and how she makes budgeting and frugality into a game. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Jane CoomberSewell.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:15 Emily: I am delighted to have joining me today on the podcast, Jane CoomberSewell and she’s gonna take a moment to introduce herself to us a little bit further right now.

01:26 Jane: As you said I’m Jane. I’m the equivalent of a third year PhD student, but it’s a bit complicated because I’ve been part time until very recently, so I’ll be looking to submit in March 2020. I have a wife and we’ve been married for nearly eight years and in our household we have three grown-up young men, a 20 year old and two 24 year olds, all of whom are on the autistic spectrum to whom we give care. We’re trying to go self-sufficient, as much as we can, but we also have a range of jobs that we do to keep the wolf from the door and because we love doing them. My background is that I was a civil servant, I worked for the local authority, and now I work as a study skills support tutor to mainly students with disabilities at a couple of local universities. That gives you a starting point on me.

02:33 Emily: Could you say what your field is and where you attend, if you like.

02:39 Jane: I go to Canterbury Christ Church, which is one of three universities in the city of Canterbury, which is about 45 minutes drive from where I live. I come under media and cultural studies this week because they keep changing the name of the department. Might be media and design by the time we finish this. What I’m doing is I’m studying the life of a British war-time and post-war comedian/entertainer/actress called Joyce Grenfell.

03:14 Emily: Thank you. So you’re not employed by your university as what we would say in the States as an RA or TA. What is your relationship with your university and where does your money come from?

03:31 Jane: My relationship with the university, as such, is that of pure grad student. I’m counted as self-financed, so I don’t have any scholarships from any external bodies. My bio on university websites says I’m funded by the sweat of my own brow, and that’s basically how it is. In the past, when I was part time, I had up to four jobs that I was juggling along with studying, but now, because we’ve been able to secure a contract directly with disabled students allowance, it means we’ve been able to become become more stable. I’m actually better paid per hour, so I can cut my hours back and be full time on my PhD. But I also do all sorts of portfolio career and gig economy work. Whatever it takes to keep a roof over my boy’s head and keep funding. But yes, it’s my bank account that my fees come out of every month, not anybody else’s.

04:36 Emily: Right. That sounds like a very busy lifestyle. Full time on your dissertation, part time work, full time parenting of multiple children.

04:46 Jane: Yep, never bored, never bored.

04:49 Emily: Can you share with us what is your household income?

04:55 Jane: Okay, so it’s actually quite difficult to work out. Our household income is low enough that of the last seven years, we’ve only actually paid income tax twice so that indicates that in pure earned money, we’re earning less than £26,000 a year between the two of us, who as such, are heads of the house hold. But because of the boys disabilities, they get a variety of other income streams which works out to not huge amounts, but the impacts on the sort of total household income, about another £12-15,000 pounds a year. That’s all. So if you put that together, you’re talking, you’re still talking under £40,000 pounds. Not quite sure what the dollar conversion is but I think that would be about $60,000 for five of us.

05:53 Emily: Yeah, that’s a pretty tight of income to work with. Can you give us broad strokes how you’re making that work at a really high level?

06:04 Jane: Okay, so at a really high level, we treat it as a game because if you treat it as stress you would probably go a bit kabloo-y. So everything is a game. When the boys were younger, it was about challenging them. How quickly could they turn off all the switches so nothing’s on standby except the freezer and the fridge. Everything is a game. Everything is about how low can you get the costs for the necessities, so then you’ve got a little bit of money left over for fun, but also how much fun can you have for free. That’s basically how we treat our total income. We’ve very lucky we don’t have a mortgage, because in past years we earned more and we were able to get rid of the mortgage when we got married. We’re also very lucky because we live in a beautiful part of Kent in the Southeast of England. We are less than a mile from a beach and well, if you want some entertainment, go outside.

07:11 Emily: Yeah. I love that attitude of keeping the necessities down, leaving room to spend money on fun, but then also just maximizing the amount of fun that you can have for free. I love that.

Food Spending and Starting on the Path to Self-Sufficiency

07:23 Emily: So, specifically what we’re going to be talking most about in this podcast is food. Food spending and generating —

07:29 Jane: My favorite subject!

07:31 Emily: Yeah. So please give us kind of a sketch of how food works in your house.

07:37 Jane: So how food works is the two biggest boys, who are husband and husband — one is our grandson, so the other is our grandson in law — they have an apartment down the side of our house and they have part time jobs, so they generate their own money for food, or nearly generate their own money for food and they’re responsible for their own shopping and their own cooking. As I said, they’ve all got disabilities, but hopefully by the time they’re in their mid thirties, those two will be completely independent. When I’m talking about food and budgeting and I’m talking in the context of three people. Now the first thing to say is that, bless him, the youngest, the one who’s still most dependent on us, he has some food issues with his disabilities and he doesn’t eat any homemade food. He will only eat ready meals. So of our, approximately £40/week food budget, about £12 is for Ruki’s food.

08:43 Jane: After that, one of the ways we do it is that, my wife’s gone vegetarian. That’s for health reasons, but it has benefited the budget. I’m a bit cheeky, I only eat meat when I’m at my mum’s so she can pay for it. Or you know, if it’s a treat. Going vegetarian isn’t to everybody’s taste, but if you’re careful and you like veggie food, it can save you a lot of money. We are in love with beans, pulses and lentils and things like soya mince. Cooking is one of the things I’m best at, so I’m really good at flavoring things so they don’t taste boring. But we also have a Costco card and a Booker’s card, because it’s a similar cash and carry type thing, and we’re really good at stretching that out when they’ve got deals on.

09:49 Jane: But we’re also going self-sufficient. So until very recently, unfortunately I’m between flocks at the moment, but until very recently we had six chickens. We were producing our own eggs. And we have an enormous garden. My wife’s a lot older than me, so we have raised beds so that as we get older we can still garden and we are probably seven years into a 10 year plan to go almost entirely self-sufficient. We’re not quite there yet, but very nearly. We grow all our own, particularly potatoes, tomatoes. Then big crops at the moment I’ve just planted 240 sweet corn, or corn on the cob. We have three freezers and as long as you run them full rather than empty, they’re very cheap to run.

10:45 Emily: So when you say self self sufficient, is that the term that you used?

10:49 Jane: Yeah.

10:50 Emily: What does that mean?

10:51 Jane: Okay. So within as far as we can without actually starting a small holding, we’re trying to produce as much of our own food and to an extent later on, I want start adding so herbal medications as we can. We’re also beginning to try to be kind to the environment, so we try to keep, not only to keep costs down, things like single-use plastics out of the house as much as possible. We’re not quite there yet and realistically, I’m never going to own a cow and make my own cheese, but as much as you can in an ordinary domestic, suburban street, it’s about having as much in-house as we can.

11:46 Emily: Yeah. I’m glad you added that detail of the kind of place that you live. So it is a suburban environment? You have like sort of a back yard, we would say here.

11:55 Jane: Yes. When we talk about yards, we tend to think of something that’s concreted over, but yes, we have a very large garden. It’s 50 feet wide by a 100 feet long. I’ve got enough room to have — I mean my chickens are so spoiled. They don’t have a coop, they have a whole summer house that I’ve adapted and they have an 8 foot by 10 foot run, plus a mobile run on wheels. We have a greenhouse, and basically apart from one area that I let one of the boys have to plant flowers, if I can’t eat it, I don’t grow it.

12:35 Emily: Gotcha. So it sounds like, for your 20 year old, that’s most of the grocery budget you said, which was about £40 a week which is a over $50 in US. That’s almost all supporting him, is that right?

12:53 Jane: Well, no. I would say considering, considering that he’s one person, about half the budget is being spent on him, but even then, one of his disabilities is a very bad relationship with food. And if he doesn’t finish it, it supplements the chicken’s feed. As long as it’s nothing that can harm a chicken, I have a bit of a thing about feeding chickens, chickens, but apart from that, there’s very little things chickens won’t eat. So if Ruki can’t finish it, then either the chickens get it or the cats get it. Nothing, nothing is wasted. We have a lot of composting. It’s not only about how little you can spend, but it’s also about how far can you stretch it.

13:42 Emily: Yeah. So then the other half of the grocery budget is for you and your wife, but really mostly you’re eating out of your own garden and you’re cooking at home, it sounds like exclusively vegetarian meals.

13:57 Jane: Almost exclusively. At the moment we’re about 50% self-sufficient. We’re not quite to growing entirely out of the garden. I’m not sure whether I’ll ever crack the volume of beans and pulses that we would need to last us all year round, but certainly for six to eight months of the year where we’re pretty much eating out with the garden. And eventually I hope to make that all year round.

14:26 Emily: Well, yeah, I’m glad you mentioned seasonality. So how does that work there? Is your actual money you spend weekly on food, higher in certain seasons and then lower in others and how do you handle that?

14:39 Jane: I think it’s certainly lower in high harvest. We do a little bit of bartering as well. So among neighbors, friends and family, if I’ve got a glut of rhubarb, I’ll happily swap it with a neighbor for some green beans if mine haven’t been very good this year. And the wonderful thing about the barter economy, of course, is you can’t be taxed for it. But yeah, our fresh fruit fruit, veg, and salad bills are a lot cheaper in the summer than they are the winter. But as I said, I have three freezes and as harvest time approaches, everything has to be finished from last year, so we can start fresh and really stock them up.

15:31 Emily: Do you do any other food preservation, like canning or anything like that?

15:35 Jane: We are practicing. I don’t think we’ve quite cracked it yet and I’m very fortunate in that I have a very — they live a ways away but I have a very efficient mother and I’m not very good at things like jams and jellies, so I will turn up with the fruit, the sugar, the pan, and the jars and she will give me back the jam and the chutneys. I am very lucky from that point of view. I think the big thing with going self-sufficient — gardening, cooking — is you never stop learning. I think that’s maybe that’s one of the reasons why I love it so much. At the moment, I could honestly say I’m really good at making fruit syrups to go on ice cream, but my jam never sets, but next year I might crack it. I’m going to keep trying.

16:22 Emily: I liked that attitude as well.

Commercial

16:25 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. Through my business, I provide seminars and webinars on personal finance for graduate students, postdocs and other early career PhDs, for universities, institutes and conferences, associations, etc. I offer seminars that cover a wide range of personal finance topics and others that take a deep dive into the financial topics that matter most to PhDs like taxes, investing, career transitions and frugality. If you’re interested in having me speak to your group or recommending me to a potential host, but you can find more information and ways to contact me at PFforPhDs.com/speaking, that’s P F F O R P H D S.com/speaking. Now back to the interview.

Long Term Plan for Food Self-Sufficiency

17:14 Emily: So you mentioned that you have a ten year plan and that you’re seven years into it, I was just wondering how you have managed to make that plan, and to plan for that kind of long term time period? And you said at the end of it you want to be nearly self sufficient, but what’s changing between now and then?

17:36 Jane: I think part of it is about getting the boys as independent as they can be. The more independent they are, the more time I have to spend on the garden. So the reason why I say seven years of a ten year plan, originally it was a five year plan. We bought this house seven years ago, August coming, and it was a very different house to how it is now. And at the time we had a little bit of savings. So what do you do when you find the perfect house? You rip it to shreds and reconfigure it. The first two and a half years were about making the house how we wanted it. What is now the boy’s apartment had been the office of the previous owners. So that was a big part of it. We knew for the first two and a half to three years that the garden would be on the back burner and we really weren’t self sufficient then, but it was always part of the dream. Then, we were on track and we had a really bad year. We lost my mother in law. Ruki came to live with us having been in a very desperate house situation. He’s another grandson. He’s the one who we have to buy most of the food for. Also, another of our grandsons was murdered. It was a hell of a year and it was also the year I started my PhD, and that’s when your relationship with the university becomes really important because several times they offered me an interruption and it took me quite a lot to persuade them that actually, doing my PhD was my solace and what was actually keeping us going because it was the one part of my life that wasn’t wrapped up in all this chaos. That, and doing a bit of gardening, so that’s one of the things that slowed well.

19:46 Jane: I think we’ve always wanted to go self sufficient and be as independent as we can. I think the plan has developed and I think any plan that doesn’t develop and isn’t organic is just a document. Ours is a document, it’s on pieces of paper and backs of envelopes, but it is a working document. Every few months we’ll go out in the garden, we’ll say, “You know what, that crop isn’t growing there on the plan of our garden, next year we’re going to grow it in raised bed — they’re very originally titled raised bed one, two, and three. It’s not growing in raised bed one, let’s try it in three next year or it’s not growing under the cherry tree. It’s too much shade. Let’s try it next to coop where there’s full sun next year.” And so I think one of the big things, whether you’re planning a business or anything that you’re planning to develop yourself, you have to keep revisiting that plan. And I’m hoping it’s not going to turn into a 12 year plan or a 14 year plan. I’m hoping that by 10 years the garden will be fully productive and every year it will just be about giving it that first seasonal weed and getting the crops in, or indeed, not even having a seasonal weed because it’s productive 365 days of the year. My big dream this year is having spuds I’ve grown myself for Christmas dinner.

21:12 Emily: How much time are you devoting to it?

21:21 Jane: Well, an ideal day for me looks like getting up around seven, being in the garden by eight. This is obviously if it’s not throwing it down. Doing a couple of hours and if Joyce is free to come with me too, so much the better. And then spending the rest of the day either studying or earning money. In an ideal world, I literally do that seven days a week. When you have a portfolio career like us, there’s no such thing as a working week. Every day has the potential to be a day off or a day of work. That’s why we also try and only do things that we love because then it never feels like hard work. You might be exhausted at the end of a day of heavy digging or of working very hard with students who nearly got what you’re trying to get across them, but they’re not quite there, but Joyce says if it doesn’t move, touch and inspire you, you can do without it in your life.

22:29 Emily: Yeah, I love that. And I relate to it very much, as well, as a self employed person. It never stops, but if you’ve chosen what you love to do, then that’s great, because it never stops. It sounds like you’re trying to have, maybe not work-life balance in the sense of hard weeks versus weekends, but just the daily “I’m doing what I love, I’m doing what’s rejuvenating, what’s refreshing” right away after you get up and then you can tackle the rest of the day.

22:56 Jane: Yeah. And I think particularly for trying to create a balance between study or an external job and growing even some of your own fruit and veg — lots of people go to the gym first thing in the morning, I go and garden. And because I have to put the chickens to bed, they don’t have their own little beds, I wish they did, I’m also out in the garden probably for the last 20 minutes before I go to bed, or before I start getting ready for bed. That starting and ending the day, even if it’s just time to have a walk round and see where I’m at, really helps set my mind up. Especially with one of my part time jobs, it’s all a bit stressful at the moment. Just keep it in perspective sometimes. Actually, just don’t do anything for a day or two, wait, see what develops, and the garden could really give you that message.

23:54 Emily: Yeah. Thank you for sharing that with us.

Frugal Food Recipes

23:57 Emily: I asked you to prepare to tell us a few different recipes that you like that are both inexpensive, and you mentioned earlier that you are great with seasoning, so I want to hear how you’re doing with that because I am not so good with seasoning the food that I create. What are some of your favorite low cost recipes?

24:13 Jane: Okay, so really simply, you asked me t0 think about each meal of the day. Nine times out of ten, we’ll have — okay, mandatory translation — porridge or oatmeal for breakfast. So this time of the year, that might be in the form of overnight oats or Bircher where I’ve taken the fruit, we’ve grown ourselves. Yesterday we had our own strawberries. We have a microbiotic drinks that we buy, one of the few things I will never be able to replace, called Actimel. So it would be, oats, this microbiotic drink, and the strawberries. Goes in the fridge the night before and just get it out the fridge next day.

25:03 Jane: Lunch. Our favorite is always some kind of salad, which at the moment is very much from the garden. We are also quite fortunate that one of the boys works part-time at a local salad packing factory and anything that they’ve decided is not appropriate to sell, they’re allowed to bring home to supplement their wages, and he’s not a salad boy, so he passes it all onto us. So yeah, we have a lot of salad, often, as I say Joyce is vegetarian, with a boiled egg or with a little bit of grated cheese.

25:40 Emily: And then what about a dinner meal?

25:43 Jane: Okay, so a a dinner meal. I’m a big fan of, as I said, lentils and pulses, and also, soya mince. But supplementing it with as much fresh fruit and vegetables as in season as I can. I’ve almost got what I would refer to as a soya mince base that I can then get a tub out of the freezer. That’s what I’m going to do tonight. Tthen I add to it to turn into, so it’s a bit like, again, post-war Britain or post-war anywhere really. You would often have the stew on the stove that you added to every day. My absolute classic one is the equivalent of a can of tomatoes, half cup of lentil, any lentil, normally red in this house, an ounce per person of soya mince and whatever small vegetable, for example peas, sweet corn, mushrooms, onions, peppers, that you’ve got available, chopped up, really small. I make a vat of it in the slow cooker, and then I will portion that down. And then today we want something akin to Shepherd’s pie or cottage pie, so I will take out enough for the two of us I’ll add more vegetables that probably need using up, yet more mushrooms, yet more whatever. And we’ve got some potatoes that need using up, so I’ll put a top on it, but then next week I might get out the same base add some red kidney beans and some chilies. I’ve even managed to dry and caramelize my own chilies now. And that will be chili. Joyce’s mom was always teased because she could take mince, add different flavorings and turn it into anything. But actually if you’re imaginative, especially if you’ve got access to fresh herbs in the garden — right now my rosemary bush isn’t doing very well at the moment and we grow rosemary at university, so every time I’m on a break at uni, I go around and pick some rosemary from the university garden. And I’ll bring it home and dry it. I make rosemary biscuits.

Jane: And really if you’ve got those core mixes that you can cook very quickly and have available — we do a lot of batch cooking — then it being a good cook doesn’t have to be standing in front of the stove for another two hours when you finished your day’s work. It also doesn’t have to be having things sent to you in a box with a recipe card. When you said to me, what’s some classic recipes, it’s actually really hard for me because I am very much a “this is what I’ve got available” type of cook. How much have I got? Chuck it in! My boy Jason, the eldest, he says, you know you’re a good cook when you can open the fridge. Go damn, there’s nothing there. I know what I can make from that!

28:59 Emily: Yeah, very good point. I’m really, really glad that what you shared with us basically is what you’re eating on a daily basis. You have patterns in what you eat every day, and I like that because, of what you said. When you have more or less the same mix of things available or at least things that you can sub out, like this is going to work or that is going to work, depending on the time of year, you can be really efficient with using up everything you have. And it doesn’t take a lot of mental energy to figure out what you’re going to eat every day because it’s more or less a variation, it’s the same pattern.

29:36 Jane: It’s also, both budget-wise and health-wise — I mean I’m not exactly wasting away here and I’m trying to lose a few pounds –if you plan it will become sort of easy. Normally, Friday is shopping day for us. The boys have to be taken to the shop because neither of them have passed their driving license test yet. On a Thursday evening, while Joyce is watching the news, because I know everybody should be interested in current affairs, but I’m not, I will write the menu for the following week and then every day I will check, so I’ve got out what I need.

Tips for Starting Your Own Garden

30:16 Emily: As we conclude, we’ve talked a lot about like cooking tips, which I think is awesome, but do you have any tips for let’s say another PhD student or busy person, busy PhD, who’s interested in maybe dipping their toe into gardening? Not doing the full ten year plan that you have, but where would you get started? Maybe even for someone who just could do container gardening for example?

20:41 Jane: People would say start with the simple things, like potatoes and tomatoes. I would say yes, they are great things to start with, but don’t just grow things because they’re easy. Grow things because you like them. Okay. If all you’ve got is a window sill and you like spices, grow ginger and garlic. You can grow ginger from just planting a knob of the little head of ginger you buy from the supermarket. And if you’re patient and you water it, well, it will grow. I suppose my big thing for gardening is, as with everything that we try to live by, only do the bits you love or start with the bits you love until you get the bug.

31:38 Emily: Thank you for that suggestion. I don’t do any growing of my own food or anything right now. I live in an apartment so it’s inherently challenging, but I do love garlic and so I really liked the idea of having a little container in the window sill and having fresh garlic because I don’t really buy fresh garlic right now even though I love using it. It’s that you just use a little bit at a time. So, thank you for that suggestion.

Living a Frugal, Yet Enjoyable Life

32:00 Emily: Anything else you’d like to add before we sign off?

32:04 Jane: I think I’d go back to what I said earlier which is that I was a very serious person before I met my wife. I’m very lucky in that she will always see my funny side. Financial balance is tricky. If you treat it as a challenge that it’s almost certain that you’re going to overcome, and therefore it becomes a bit of a game, then it all becomes a lot more fun. And why are we here if not to be enjoyed and enjoyable?

32:43 Emily: Yeah, I do like that shift, because really, if you’re living on, let’s say a fixed, fairly low income, like you said, there’s certain challenges or certain realities to that, but your attitude towards it goes so far to make it bearable, enjoyable, horrible, whichever way. It can really go a lot of different directions just depending on how you approach it.

33:10 Jane: And however busy you are and however passionate you are about your studies, because we are after all dealing with PhD students or people who are maybe doing a postdoc even, try and put something aside for another passion, whether that’s playing the guitar or walking your neighbor’s dog or whatever. Anything you do that you’re passionate about, will benefit the PhD as well.

33:43 Emily: Thank you for adding that. I think PhDs can, some of them can get caught in this trap of 100% of my effort has to go towards my studies. And as you said, having some balance is good for you. It’s good for your work. You can’t be so 100% into that. It’s not healthy.

34:02 Jane: I sometimes get accused of telling people to abandon their responsibilities and that’s not true. I have very high sense of duty, but actually, if we don’t love it, especially if we are serving somebody else like helping to try and bring up the boys or doing some charity stuff, if we don’t love it, we’re not blessing the people we’re serving. So the more we love what we do, the more we’re not only blessing ourselves, but we’re blessing well the people around us. And I try to live like that. It’s not always easy because I’m not a naturally positive person, but I’m really lucky in that I have a wife, and who particularly around the boys, who is almost always positive. And you know, if you’re not surrounded by positive people and you need that positive energy, go and find somebody who is.

35:04 Emily: Yeah, thank you for that. Can you share with us your Twitter handle or where else people might find you so that they can get some doses of that.

35:12 Jane: So my personal one is, I’ll just spell out, is at J A N E, capital C, O, capital S, E. So @JaneCoSe and our business one is @CoomberSewell. But I have said the business one is slightly neglected because I’m so busy trying to finish this PhD at the moment.

35:32 Emily: Okay. Well, thank you for sharing that with us and thank you so much for joining me today.

35:36 Jane: Thank you very much for inviting me. It’s been lovely.

Outtro

35:39 Emily: Listeners. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode. PFforPhDs.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. There you can find links to all the episode’s show notes, a form to volunteer to be interviewed, and a way to join the mailing list. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you want to support the show and my business, please go to PFforPhDs.com/helpout. There are plenty of ways to sell without laying out any of your own money. See you in the next episode, and remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it doesn’t hurt. The music is Stages of Awakening by Poddington Bear from the free music archives and it’s shared under CC by NC.

How to Advocate for Yourself and Your Income with Respect to Conference Travel, Job Offers, Fellowships, and More

September 30, 2019 by Lourdes Bobbio Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Mallory Smith, a staff scientist at a large public research university. Mallory learned to advocate for herself with respect to her income during graduate school. Her message to graduate students is that they are not merely students but professionals within their fields and should be treated as such, and the skill of being assertive but not aggressive is useful across a lifetime. Mallory and Emily discuss negotiation, where to find funds to pay for research and conference travel, and Mallory’s experience tutoring undergraduate physics students as a side hustle.

Links Mentioned in This Episode

Teaser

00:00 Mallory: When you’re an undergrad student, you’re a student. When you’re a grad student, they still make you feel like you’re a student, but you have a degree and the work that you’re doing is furthering the objectives and benefiting the university and you really do deserve to be compensated for what you do.

Introduction

00:24 Emily: Welcome to the personal finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season four, episode seven, and today my guest is Dr. Mallory Smith, a staff scientist at a large public research university. Mallory has a message for graduate students. You deserve to get paid and asking to be financially compensated, doesn’t have to be gauche. We talked through several applications of this mindset from rectifying a lapse in pay to finding creative sources of travel funding, to negotiating a job offer. Mallory also shares her experience side hustling as a tutor for undergraduate students in physics. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Mallory Smith.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:15 Emily: Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Mallory Smith. Mallory came to me with several ideas that she wanted to speak about from her own personal life, all relating to income, so that’s what we’re going to cover today. Income as a PhD trainee. So Mallory, will you please introduce yourself to our audience a little bit further?

01:33 Mallory: Sure. I got my PhD in 2016, officially 2017. I was a postdoc for about two years and now I’m a staff scientist. I’m on the staff. We use the term staff scientists to say that you’re promoted and I haven’t been promoted, so I always add that disclaimer, it’s a new position for me. I went to a small state school for undergrad and to a larger, but not very large, private university for grad school, so that’s kind of definitely colored how I see income and what opportunities I’m able to talk about because it’s defined by what I’ve been exposed to.

A Message for Grad Students: Practice Self-Advocacy

02:20 Emily: Yeah, definitely. We’re looking for your personal angle on this here. So you came to me saying, I have a message, I have a message for PhD trainees. What is that message?

02:32 Mallory: So I have had a couple of experiences in grad school and a couple of friends in grad school. One particular story stands out. I have a friend whose professor was just absent-minded, and completely forgot to figure out summer funding for her. She kind of had assumed that he was on top of it and he completely wasn’t, so it got down to the last minute and it’s like, “Oh by the way, next week you’re not going to be paid anymore because I don’t have summer funding for you. Oh, well.” And she said, “Oh, okay.” The deadlines for everything had passed. And I’m like, “You need to tell the department,” because our department was really trying to make sure that they got some funding, somehow, for every single one of their students, whether it be a summer TA position or working something else out, and she didn’t want to ask because she was afraid that was passed all the deadlines and you know, I think she kind of felt like, “Oh, it was my responsibility have figured this out earlier,” or something like that.

03:48 Mallory: The thing is that when you’re an undergrad student, you’re a student. When you’re a grad student, they still make you feel like you’re a student, but you have a degree. And the work that you’re doing is furthering the objectives and benefiting the university. Whether you’re training and especially when you’re presenting at conferences and when you’re doing any TA positions or anything like that, you are furthering the objectives of the university and you are an employee of the university and you really do deserve to be compensated for what you do. That also is a piece that I think departments can use some help in, in realizing where their gaps are. Because if you don’t feel valued, you’re not going to be as productive or as enthusiastic about where you’re at.

04:46 Mallory: So for example, with that particular professor, he had grad students sporadically and I think the network of communication can get lost, the thread can get lost. If you are letting your department know to say, “Oh yeah, that professor, they have that problem, they’ve done this to four other grad students, we have a backup option for you.” Or the department doesn’t know this is going on and say, “Oh, okay, now I know”, and the department chair or the heads can look out maybe for future grad students and prevent that from happening.

05:23 Emily: I have so many things that I want to say about this topic as well. It’s such a strange relationship that graduate students have with their advisors and also with their departments and universities. And it varies so widely across different universities and across different departments and with different students in different advisors. During what you were saying just there that you’re an employee is only the case for some graduate students, right? So many, many graduate students are employees and should absolutely be empowered by what you just said, that they bring value to the university in one way or another. That’s why they’re being employed and if their employment should lapse by accident, of course that’s something that should be rectified. But anyway, it’s such a strange relationship between the trainee and the institution because, in some cases you’re treated more like a student or a trainee and in some cases, you’re treated more like an employee. And it usually seems that the university wants to do whatever is in their best interest — treat you as a student in one case, employee in another case whenever it benefits them and it’s a real shame, but it does fall to the student or to the trainee, in many cases, to push back against that and it shouldn’t be that way. Like in your example of this, the student’s advisor should have been looking out for her, should have been on top of things, but in that case, he wasn’t and so it did fall to her, unfortunately, but it did.

06:59 Emily: I observed something similar actually when I was in graduate school. This happened to a postdoc that I knew that her pay just lapsed for several months. And she was an employee, so I don’t know, maybe she was switching positions or something. I’m not sure what happened actually. I think it had to do with being a visa issue because she was an international postdoc. But anyway, she went unpaid for several months while this was being sorted out by our, by her advisor and like you said with your friend, she was kind of OK with it. I was shocked and appalled when I found out that was happening, but she didn’t really want to rock the boat. And maybe that was because it had to do with visa stuff. I don’t know. But in any case, it did unfortunately fall to her. I’m sure this happens to a lot of different people, what should these students and postdocs do if they find themselves in this kind of situation where they’re kind of being taken advantage of, although maybe it’s unintentional, and it’s not necessarily malicious, but it’s just bad management?

08:07 Mallory: I think it’s departments and professors, people, they take the path of least resistance to getting the thing crossed off their list. I think when you’re a grad student, you have to start looking out for yourself to some degree. There should be better policies in place at a lot of universities to prevent a lot of this from happening but until we’re there, I think when you start, you have to know what your parameters space is. Your offer letter will tell you how many months of funding you’re guaranteed. I think, it’s been a while, I started grad school in 2010, so I think my offer letter said that I was employed 11 out of 12 months, but that it was nine months of like serious pay and then two months of summer pay to be covered by the professor. There was some language in there that you would know ahead of time. Also, if your professor is someone who’s not paying attention to deadlines and not being forthright in communicating things with you, you kind of have to take that on yourself to find out in March if you have summer funding because that leaves you not enough time to work something out.

09:40 Emily: Unfortunately, again, these advisors are very rarely trained in any kind of management. They’re often kind of flying blind and doing whatever they’ve done in the past and it’s really an unhealthy situation, something that really, really desperately needs reform within academia. Yet, this is the system that we’re working with right now and students and trainees do find themselves there. So in the case of your friend, in the case of my friend, how could they have phrased this request so that they’re likely to have it fulfilled but also not feeling whatever is holding them back from asking the first place? Maybe they didn’t want to feel pushy. Maybe they didn’t want to draw attention to the mistake of their supervisor. How could they have maybe tried to rectify this?

10:30 Mallory: If it’s hard to start that conversation, you know it’s intimidating to make an appointment with the department chair and say, “I’m lodging this formal complaint that I’m not getting paid and I’m angry.” That’s a very hard approach. That’s not what I would personally take. That’s definitely not one my friend would be comfortable with taking. So I’d say find someone that has a low barrier of entry to talk to. Departments have a lot of other people beyond the administration, the secretaries and other people who have been working with the department, sometimes for decades — they’re often in this position that they’re not someone directly responsible for your management as a grad student, but they know the department. You can sort of start to find the people who know the things in the department. In my graduate school, we had someone who was really looking out for graduate students and you could go very easily to her and say, “Hey, like I’m having this issue, how should I approach it?” and get some real feedback that wouldn’t be going all the way and lodging a complaint. Also, older grad students; if there’s an older grad student in your group with that professor, say, “This is happening to me did this happened to you, what do you think I should do?” and you can kind of get some tips on the least “causing the boat to rock” way of getting what you really deserve.

12:07 Emily: Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, in my department as well, when I was in graduate school, we had an excellent administrative assistant who was handling all the graduate student’s stuff. And she, as you were saying, was really an advocate for graduate students. I feel like I could have easily gone to her and said, “I’m having this problem. What do I do about it?” And maybe that is escalating it to the DGS and doing something formal and she would know, or maybe it’s as simple as, she’s just going to go have a conversation with someone and it’s going to be fixed, no problem. I don’t know how it could be resolved, but that person would know. Identifying your resources within the department, absolutely, I think that’s a great idea. Even if you don’t know how to do that, as you said, to ask an older student or someone else who’s sort of serving kind of as a mentor to you or that you look up to within the lab or within the department and they’re going to know who that person is to go to. So I think that’s an excellent way to approach it.

Self-Advocacy Post-Grad School

13:00 Emily: I can definitely see how this skill of advocating for yourself when necessary can apply to post PhD life. Isn’t this the purpose of being a student? We’re learning how to do thing. We’re gaining knowledge and gaining skills and so forth. And some of these soft skills, like speaking up when something isn’t right, are very valuable to learn within graduate school and can be used later. Do you have any thoughts about using this skill of self-advocacy post training phase?

13:34 Mallory: Typically PhD programs, in my experience, which is a narrow set field of physics, is narrowly defined, like here is the tuition that graduate students in this department get. That’s it. I didn’t know this ahead of time, but during graduate school, I learned there’s other ways to ask for money. The postdoc I applied for, it also had like a set salary — this is what we paid postdocs, that that’s it, but someone else I know actually asked for additional travel funding and they were able to give that to that person, so they had their own travel budget to go to whatever conferences they wanted to. They didn’t need approval or to worry about funding regulation, like it has to apply to the grant that’s paying for it. They could just pick a conference and go. That’s a type of perk that you can ask for.

14:38 Mallory: I think some postdocs do allow you to negotiate for salary. Then every job post-postdoc, maybe not every but most every job post-postdoc, is the negotiate-for-your-salary type of position. The graduate school I went to had a big business school and it was big on their undergrads being successful and so they had a lot of professional development events about how important it was to negotiate for your salary. They could just show you this graph that if you ask for an additional X thousand dollars in your salary now, the impact over your career is substantial because when you’re starting out, the next position you go to, the salary will be based off what you were paid previously.

15:36 Mallory: When I applied for my job, I had been, for years hearing, “You have to negotiate for your salary” and I’m like, “Oh God, they’re offering me such a great salary. I’m so happy with it, but like I feel like I have to negotiate.” So I went to one of my mentors, my boss, and I said, “Hey, I’m interested in negotiating.” And they were like, “Well, typically you have some skill that you can say, ‘Hey, I can bring this and you should pay me more because I’m bringing this skill’” I didn’t have anything like that but I actually ended up crafting this response letter to my offer and saying, “Oh, I just looked it up and I was wondering if a salary increase to this amount would be possible.” And they actually came back and said, well, not to that amount, but to a slightly lower amount that was still higher than what they had a base offered, and that felt really cool of course, but hopefully over the long run, that’s the type of impact that is meaningful, in terms of salary.

16:48 Mallory: When you go to negotiate for your salary, there are web sites like glassdoor.com and other places where you can find out the range of salaries that are possible for your position. Typically, there’s a lower end and a higher end, and they have a cap. They can’t pay you higher than this amount for this position. That’s it. You always want to ask to be in the top half of that bracket and they’ll put you somewhere, hopefully in the middle, but not the lowest part of that bracket in that negotiation. But just kind of note, I knew when I was asking that I was not asking for an exorbitant thing and also, I was intimidated because I knew everyone that I would be working with already. When you ask for money, you’re not asking from the people that you’re working with. You’re asking from the university and really from HR. You shouldn’t feel like, “Oh, I’m asking for some special treatment that I don’t deserve.” It’s really a linear, top down thing from the administration and just ask. We have this sort of negative connotation about asking about money and talking about money, but if you just simply ask and say, “Hey, I was wondering if this is possible” and you’re not being aggressive about it at all. that’s not, that’s not an aggressive question to ask.

18:22 Emily: I think you’re exactly right and I’m so glad that you shared the exact phrasing that you use because it’s one sentence, the way you phrased it. It’s so easy to throw that up there and if you didn’t have what you felt was justification like, “Oh, I’m bringing X, Y, Z skills to the table,” you can still ask, especially if it’s in line with whatever the ranges that you know are appropriate for that position. I think that’s a pretty standard thing is that you’re looking at taking a new position and you look up what people are paid and you have a range there and if your offer is coming in on the lower end of that range, just ask for, as you said, the higher end of that range and maybe they’ll meet somewhere in the middle.

19:01 Emily: My husband did the exact same thing when he negotiated his current industry position. He just said, “Hey, I looked up the salary range for this position in the city that I’ll be moving to and it looks like this is a fair number. Can you do that?” And they said, “No, but we’ll bring it up by a certain degree.” That was really successful and once you get over the mental hurdle of doing it, the actual phrasing of the one or two sentences is really not like that much. But as you said, it pays off so much every single year for the rest of your career going forward in the compounding of the raises that you’ll be getting. It’s the same way that compound interest works with investments or reverse ways with debt works exactly the same with your salary to the degree that your new salary is based off any previous salaries. I just love that you said that.

19:55 Emily: I also want to point out that negotiation is more rare but is possible at the postdoc and even the graduate student levels. I wanted to point the listeners to two websites I have that function similarly to Glassdoor, which are PostdocSalaries.com and PhDStipends.com and so there you can just go and look up what are postdocs or PhD students being paid at that university or in this field or what have you and get an idea of whether your offer is livable, whether it’s more or less than other people in the same city are making. You can even, especially as a postdoc, start using that as justification for negotiating your salary. I actually do have a question within the survey in postdocsalaries.com did you negotiate your salary or benefits? And as you mentioned earlier, a lot of people forget about negotiating benefits. Maybe that salary number can’t move, but something else on the side can move. Because the thing is that when you take on an employee, like you said, the salary ranges are set above levels than just your advisor that you’re going to, it’s a few levels above that. The thing is that the cost of taking on an employee is actually much more than just the salary. They have to pay taxes for you, they have to pay benefits for you, and so asking for an increase in salary, you may be like, “Oh, I’m asking for a 5% or 10% increase in the salary,” but that’s not a 5% or 10% increase in the total package that they’re taking on, by hiring you, it really is a smaller number to them then it looks like to you. Keep that in mind when you’re going to negotiate.

21:33 Mallory: When you get a new job, you get this salary offer and it’s more than you’ve made before because if you’re coming from grad school, anything’s going to be, should be more than what you made as a grad student. When you get out of grad school, you have to calibrate yourself to not be like all blown away by that number because typically, they’re going to offer you the low end of the bracket. It’s more efficient for them.

Commercial

21:59 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. Through my business, I provide seminars and webinars on personal finance for graduate students, postdocs and other early career PhDs, for universities, institutes and conferences, associations, etc. I offer seminars that cover a wide range of personal finance topics and others that take a deep dive into the financial topics that matter most to PhDs like taxes, investing, career transitions and frugality. If you’re interested in having me speak to your group or recommending me to a potential host, but you can find more information and ways to contact me at PFforPhDs.com/speaking, that’s P F F O R P H D S.com/speaking. Now back to the interview.

Finding Sources of Travel Funding

22:48 Emily: You mentioned a little bit ago that a friend negotiated for some travel funding. What ways have you gone out and gotten extra funding? Or what ways have you seen other people do that?

23:08 Mallory: I know that for example, the American Physical Society often has a pot of money for helping grad students attend conferences. You can apply andI think the one that I knew about gave everybody who applied and they accepted $300 toward traveling to this conference. And it’s not much, but it helps cover some of the difference,

23:40 Emily: Especially if it’s something you are going to pay out of pocket anyway, that’s a big help

23:45 Mallory: The other thing is that departments sometimes are strapped for cash and I think that if you’re running up and you’re asking for money and they really are like, “we don’t have money, we’re sorry, we really don’t have money,” they will say that and it will be clear. But a lot of times departments have pockets of money around and if you know to ask, this will become accessible to you, but you have to know to ask and sometimes they’re not advertising that part as well. I know that for certain universities, they often have some study abroad relationship with one country in particular, so if you want to go to, if there’s a conference and it happens to also be in that country and your university already has a relationship with sending students there, even if it’s undergraduate students, there might be a pipeline for getting funding. That’s pretty easy. I got travel funding from a private fund that came from the donation that existed for grad students to travel internationally and present their work or attend a workshop and learn, and I didn’t know about that until my advisor said, “Hey, I don’t have money to send you to France, but you should apply for this thing.” And that worked out. Then there’s pockets of professional development funding around that, if you’re presenting your work, is accessible to you. The other thing is that sometimes graduate student unions have money set aside for helping grad students with this. I think our graduate student union had a some sort of rolling application that you can apply to get a couple hundred dollars towards travel and preference given to students that haven’t gone anywhere yet, that kind of thing. There’s a lot of weird avenues that you can find out there. There’s also cross-disciplinary or interdisciplinary types of collaborations and alliances that if you’re doing anything related to them you can reach out and say, “Hey, I would like to go to this conference that you guys are holding because I’m doing this thing, it’s related. Can you help me cover some of that cost?”

26:08 Emily: Thank you so much for listing all those different, as you said, little pockets of money that might be accessible to you if you have the secret key, the unlock code, to inquiring about them. It’s too bad that this is kind of secret grad school knowledge that has to be passed by word of mouth instead of sort of being out there and clear. And maybe it is clear in some places, but this is another one of those reasons, these are the ones that you’ve like observed that were relevant for your university and your department and they may or may not be similar with somewhere else, but hopefully if a newer grad student or a newer post doc entering a new place can ask some people a few years ahead, “Oh, I’m looking for funding to go to this conference. I ran into a barrier, there is no more pools of money in the standard place. Do you know how people have gotten funding.” Just asking those questions of maybe there’s some kind of work around here. I love all the examples that you threw out. I hadn’t heard of half of them before, so that’s wonderful and everyone can try those. But also, still ask your peers, what are the secrets to this place, these funding pools. Hopefully, if you ask enough people, you’ll get the right answer. Especially, go to people who have been traveling internationally, who have clearly done the thing that you want to do, and ask them how they went about doing that.

27:29 Mallory: I think a lot of times during our PhD we’re in our bubble and a lot of the things that are unique for us are not unique for the department and not unique for graduate students. You’re probably not asking for something new that’s never been done before. The other thing I’d like to mention is professors who have been professors for a while think about this differently. I think they kind of have the mentality of it’s ridiculous not to get compensated and of course, why wouldn’t you ask? So they’re not saying, “Hey, by the way, I can pay for if you ever want to do something like this, this or this.” It’s not because they’re trying to keep it a secret from you. It’s just, it doesn’t occur to them that you wouldn’t know about this already, which is crazy, right? If you’re a new student, why would you know? But they get kind of stuck in their experience within their bubble of what they see and what they deal with and how they think about salaries and funding, which is on a whole different level.

Tutoring as a Side-Hustle

28:36 Emily: Going back to your first point about simply asking and advocating for yourself in a very gentle way can be done with respect to this additional travel funding and so forth. Another topic that you wanted to bring up was regarding side hustling. Can you tell us about your experience with side hustling in graduate school?

29:04 Mallory: My side-hustling was a tutoring, so I didn’t aggressively side hustle. I didn’t need to really supplement my income, but it was nice to. Tutoring is something that one, there’s always a need for tutors for freshmen level physics; and two, if you look up what the typical tutoring charge per hour is, if you have your bachelor’s, that level is typically $25 to $30 or so, and then if you’ve got your master’s or your PhD, it’s $30, $40, $50 an hour. A couple of things with that. One, I hate charging students that are struggling with physics, like, “Okay, yeah I can help you but it’s going to cost you,” and so I never charged the whole amount that I should have, but I learned something in getting to the point where I was comfortable with charging: one, the students that were undergrads at my graduate school, their parents were paying their tuition bills, so I was not making some student broke, they were able to afford it; two, when I was getting compensated for my time, $20, $30 an hour, I was very happy to prepare for that well and to do a good job. Once I had some experience tutoring, because I went in with very little experience and I always joke I have to write the students I first tutored and say, I’m really sorry, I learned how to tutor with you and you didn’t learn any physics. But I learned after! But that’s okay. The other thing is that when you get stuck in graduate school and you can sit down at the end of the day and help someone learn physics, that’s really gratifying. I got stuck in my research, I struggled with my classes and being able to help someone else was like, okay, I’m not a failure as a physics person. I’m clearly benefiting younger students.

31:11 Emily: I think that tutoring, I would say it’s the number one thought of side hustle for a grad student, because clearly as you were just saying, you do have something to teach. You have a great deal of expertise in some areas, even if it doesn’t feel like that on a daily basis, once you can look back a little bit, you’ve really come a long ways within your field, and so it’s so accessible to be able to teach people coming along behind you by a few years. The other thing about charging students and feeling a little bit weird about that is that you have to remember that this is above and beyond all the resources that the university itself is transferring to those students. They have the class that they’re in, they have the TA for that class, they have their professor, they have maybe, at least at the college that I went to, there was sort of a free tutoring center available that you could just make appointments out for various subjects. Being a private tutor — well, they’ve already maybe either gone through those resources and haven’t found them sufficient or they don’t want to use them for whatever reason. They’re willing to pay someone for their time, for the individual attention, whatever it is. Just to keep that in mind when you are going into that situation that you’re charging for. They already have a lot of resources available to them that are included with what they’re paying already for tuition. They have decided that they want something above and beyond that.

32:36 Emily: I wanted to ask you about the difference between how you distinguish yourself as a TA versus a tutor. And maybe you weren’t teaching during that time. Was there ever a time when you were both TAing and tutoring and how you sort of draw a distinction there? Presumably, you are not tutoring the students who are enrolled in your class.

32:54 Mallory: Our department actually, they had a list of tutors that they just said they gave the undergraduates and these people said they’re interested in tutoring, contact them. But you were not allowed to tutor someone that you’re TAing. That’s probably a good rule, because then they’re paying you to get preferential treatment in some sense of it. The other thing is, when I got to be on my feet about tutoring, I would have more students that could contact me than I could handle. I can’t tutor more than five or six students in a given week. That’s a significant time investment. But what you can do is try to get all students that are in the same course so that you’re not having to cover new material. It would get to be, I do one hour of prep and then I tutor four people because it’s just bang, bang, bang. It’s the same material.

34:03 Emily: That’s a really good idea. I hadn’t thought of when you have such a demand for your skills, it makes sense that you could then select among the potential clients that you have. The other thing I’ll say to that is raise your rates. If you have more demand, raise your rates. Standard thing. Did it ever occur to you to do group tutoring? Would that have been possible when you were already lining up these students in the same course?

34:31 Mallory: Yeah, I had done some group tutoring and I think that, at least for my style of tutoring, more than two people becomes really less one on one. My one on one rate was one thing. My group rate was like lower per person because I just think that the experience that I could offer in that environment was a little bit less. But that’s a good way to do it if there’s a lot of demand and you feel like you want to really help the students. That’s a good way to minimize the impact on your time to help the maximum number of people.

35:13 Emily: It’s a little bit of a win-win: lower the rates for them, you raise your hourly rate for yourself. Don’t just split the same rate among everyone, you’re working harder. Or raise it and then split it.

35:25 Mallory: Yeah, raising it and then splitting it, absolutely. But then also, I think, at least the undergrads that I encountered, they were like, “Well no, we’re paying for one on tutoring experience. I don’t care how much it costs the, I’d rather have that than that group thing.” I couldn’t really convince them to make the group thing a thing, but that’s okay.

35:48 Emily: Yeah, that makes total sense. Well, I’m really glad that your department made that easy for you because often when I think about tutoring, I guess I don’t really think about going through the departments first, but that’s a very, very natural match. If the departments are willing to have a running list you know grad student tutors available, then that’s great. Did your advisor know about your tutoring side hustle? You were on a list somewhere so he or she maybe could have known?

36:17 Mallory: Yeah, definitely. I’m sure my advisor knew. It was something that I did after hours and so I didn’t consider it like I need to ask for permission for this. It’s my time. Also, since the department encouraged it, there’s some advisors, I’m sure that would discourage you thinking about anything other than your own research, but it was sort of okay because it was normalized.

36:48 Emily: Yeah, I guess I would say for an environment where it hasn’t been normalized, like maybe that list isn’t available or you don’t really see other grad students working with undergrads at the same institution, tutoring is still available. It’s just you might have to look to a different population like in your city, like high schoolers or students at another university or community college. Or do it within your own university, but keep it a little more quiet. There are just a lot of options available for tutoring. And like you were saying earlier, it’s not really necessarily a distraction from your research if it’s reinforcing basic principles for you and improving your teaching skills and improving your confidence within your own field or whatever it is. I feel like tutoring is one of those side hustles that’s both easily accessible and potentially has benefits in your primary professional life, not just, “Okay, I’m earning an extra income here.”

37:43 Mallory: Yeah, absolutely.

Any Last Words of Advice?

37:45 Emily: To close out, Mallory, what advice do you have for a grad student or postdoc who’s looking to increase her income?

37:53 Mallory: I’d say find out the resources that are available in your department. Find out every opportunity for getting expenses covered. If you’re traveling to a conference, typically there’s some expense coverage for doing that traveling. That includes the meals when you’re traveling, and just sort of knowing what’s reasonable. There’s always fellowships and things to apply for and my advice is to apply. I wanted to apply for a fellowship and I applied for one and I didn’t get it. I didn’t feel like I really deserved a fellowship. I had a friend who applied for a different fellowship and she was encouraging me to apply for that fellowship also. And I said, “Oh, no, no, no, I don’t qualify for this.” And she applied for it and she got it. I don’t think our background experiences were so different. You looked at our records on paper, we had a lot of similar things. Don’t close yourself off to opportunities because of where you think you’re at or what you think you’re worth. Go for everything and let them tell you. You might be surprised.

39:29 Mallory: The other thing is just doing everything. If you care about maximizing your income, minimize your expenses. Don’t get a Netflix account on your own, share it with 10 friends. If you can bundle your car insurance into a six-month payment or yearly payment that’s on auto pay, you can get significant discounts. Other weird things like, do you ever need a rental car? Because if you are considered in any way an employee of the university, there are often just global discounts with major car rental companies that you can say, “Hey, and I work for this university,” and even if it’s for personal travel, they’ll still say, “Oh, okay, well we can give you an 18% discount.”

40:19 Mallory: I never really went out to maximize my personal, wealth. I just wanted to sort of do well and, and keep my head above water. I think that if you really want to maximize your wealth, then you’re the expert in providing all of the information for how to do that. But you don’t have to maximize everything in order to just do well financially. I’m happy with where I’m at financially. I could be somewhere else entirely, but I’m doing well and that’s all I need.

41:06 Emily: I think finding that point for you where you can have whatever income level it is, where you feel comfortable and happy and if you can have a job that allows you to have that income level and you can feel fulfilled professionally and have the lifestyle that you want, that’s a really sweet spot. Right? I think because we’re speaking to academics, people who have been in academia at least in the past or maybe in the present, I think it’s a pretty well, you know, shared value that being wealthy or being incredibly rich is not the number one priority for everyone, because you wouldn’t have made the life choices that you have at this point if that were the case, right? You would have gone into high finance or you know, high tech or whatever. You would’ve made different choices. But I think what you’re saying is exactly right. If you can find that professional fulfillment, know what the standard things are in that area and just try to optimize where you can within that. I think, for example, your goal as a student or as a postdoc should be to not pay for your own professional travel. Your goal should be to not pay for any component of that out of pocket. You should find funding to cover completely. Now if you fall a little bit short and you end up paying for your meals on one trip or what have you, that’s okay, that’s acceptable. But you should just be trying and striving to find the funds that will cover that. That’s a small way that you can maximize your income/minimize your expenses. After all, this is professional related travel, right? It should be covered by someone else other than you.

42:44 Mallory: I was shocked when I was the young student at traveling and I didn’t know that this was sort of expected people were like, “Why would you be paying for anything? You’re taking this trip because you’re asked to for your career. You shouldn’t be paying for anything.” And I thought, “Oh, you paid for my flight. That’s more than enough. I shouldn’t ask for more.” No. When I went to my first trip to go to this other lab for a couple months and do this research project, they said, “Okay, here and you get $5 a day for food.” And I said, “Okay.” And another student from my group joined and said, “This is ridiculous.” And immediately called up our advisor and said, “They’re giving us $5 a day for food. This is completely unreasonable.” And it immediately became like $10 or $15 a day. So it’s the squeaky wheel gets the grease, a little bit, with stuff like that

43:41 Emily: Well, Mallory, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today and for sharing your insights into these areas.

43:48 Mallory: Thanks very much for having me Emily. It was a lot of fun. I’m happy to talk. Thank you very much.

Outtro

43:49 Emily: Listeners. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode. PFforPhDs.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. There you can find links to all the episode’s show notes, a form to volunteer to be interviewed, and a way to join the mailing list. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you want to support the show and my business, please go to PFforPhDs.com/helpout. There are plenty of ways to sell without laying out any of your own money. See you in the next episode, and remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it doesn’t hurt. The music is Stages of Awakening by Poddington Bear from the free music archives and it’s shared under CC by NC.

How This Multi-Fellowship Winner Managed Her Applications and Finances

September 9, 2019 by Lourdes Bobbio Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Anne Rocheleau, who holds a PhD in biomedical engineering and currently works in industry. Anne won several fellowships during grad school (and applied for many more), including ones that paid her stipend and tuition and fees and ones that paid for conference travel expenses. Anne shares her process of finding and applying for fellowships and the extracurricular activities she pursued to make her a competitive candidate. Anne’s established budget helped her manage her income as her pay frequency changed while going on and off the fellowships, but she did have an unpleasant surprise one April since her fellowship did not withhold income tax. Overall, Anne’s fellowships greatly contributed to her development as a researcher and science communicator as well as her personal finances.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

Teaser

00:00 Anne: Fellowships can be a really wonderful way to broaden your experience in grad school and I know a number of students that studied in a different country, for instance, which is a great experience that they wouldn’t have gotten necessarily if they had stayed on a research assistantship or a teaching assistantship.

Introduction

00:23 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season four, episode four and today my guest is Dr. Anne Rocheleau, a PhD in biomedical engineering who won several fellowships and travel awards during grad school and her postdoc. Anne gives advice for other fellowship seekers based on her experience of finding and applying for several fellowships each year and shares the enriching experiences she sought out that made her a competitive candidate. The fellowships had a positive effect on Anne’s personal finances and scholarly development and we discuss how to avoid the financial pitfalls that come with some types of fellowship income. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Anne Rocheleau.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:13 Emily: I’m joined today by Dr. Anne Rocheleau. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast and we are going to be discussing fellowships, how to win them and what happens to your finances once you do win one. Anne has plenty of experience with this, so thank you so much for joining us today and will you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

01:33 Anne: Sure. Thank you so much for inviting me to be part of this podcast. I’m really excited to be here. I got my undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. I did my Masters of Science degree at Cornell University in chemical engineering, as well, and I did my PhD in biomedical engineering, also at Cornell. Then I worked for a year as a quality engineer in Massachusetts, before moving out to the west coast to Portland. I was a postdoc for a year and a half at Oregon Health and Science University and now I work as a research scientist at a startup medical device company here in Portland.

02:17 Emily: Well, we’re going to get on a little diversion here already because I’m curious about you having a real job for a year and then going back to having a postdoc. I didn’t know that was a thing. Was there any difficulty in landing that postdoc, having been out of academia for a little bit of time? And also, what was the reasoning behind that? Was it just, “I want to live in Portland and this is the kind of job I can get”, or what?

02:41 Anne: Yes, it was largely a geographic. I wanted to move out to Portland to be with my now fiance, but also, it was really fun to work in industry for a year. It was very different and it got my mind working in a totally different way, being a quality engineer, and then when I wanted to move to Portland, I had a connection from my PhD advisor, who knew my advisor that became my postdoc advisor here in Portland, so that was a really natural fit and I really liked OHSU, Oregon Health and Science University. To work in the med school environment was really great, so that was a really cool transition. It was interesting going back into academia. I felt like I had a little bit of a different take on things and it really solidified my desire to stay in research. I love research.

03:37 Emily: Glad to hear that it added to your career. It sounds like you networked your way into it, so that’s very natural.

Finding and Applying to Fellowships

03:45 Emily: Let’s hearken back to your grad student and postdoc days when you were applying for and winning fellowships. Which fellowships did you end up winning?

03:56 Anne: I did my master’s degree on the National Science Foundation Science Master’s program fellowship. That one I actually got lucky, I didn’t have to directly apply for it. I was offered that program by my department, so that was the first one. Then, during my PhD, I received the National Science Foundation GK-12 fellowship. That was a full tuition and PhD stipend fellowship and also included a teaching element. I was part of the Society of Women Engineers as a grad student and so I received a scholarship through them, that was $3,000. I applied for and received two travel grants for the Biomedical Engineering Society’s annual meeting, so those travel grants covered the meeting registration as well as $400 for travel. When I was a postdoc, I received a travel grant for a conference and I wasn’t presenting there, but I did attend some workshops and I think that was about $2,000.

05:03 Emily: I’m glad to hear that list because I just want students and postdocs to get an idea of the diversity of fellowships that are out there, it’s not only from the NSF, it’s not only the GRF, there’s a lot of other ones as well. There’s all these travel grants from the conferences and everything. Conference travel is a big pain point for grad students and postdocs and so it’s just good to hear that there is money available. You have to ask, get a little bit lucky, or put together the right kind of application and the money’s there for some people, so that can help a lot.

05:39 Emily: Can you tell me a little bit about your process of applying to fellowships and finding out about these fellowships. You said there was one you were automatically nominated or awarded, but other ones you had to seek out. What was that process like? How did you find these fellowships?

05:57 Anne: I have a couple of recommendations for that. First of all, I found internal university resources to be excellent for finding fellowships and talking to other folks that were in my department that had received these fellowships in the years before me, that was really useful. There were some databases at my university, where they aggregated fellowship opportunities. Professional societies are a great way to find fellowships, both for conferences and I also received one that was a scholarship. My other recommendation for this is ProFellow.com. This is an awesome website. I’m still on the email list. It’s post-bac, post-graduate fellowships, graduate fellowships, both long term, short term, all fields, all over the world. It’s a fantastic resource for fellowships.

06:52 Emily: It’s so funny that you mentioned that because we’re recording this on a Tuesday and I’m interviewing Vicki, who’s the person behind ProFellow, on Thursday for the podcast. I don’t know which order they’ll come out in, if yours will come before hers or vice versa. I’m not sure, but listeners, these two podcasts episodes are coming together, they’re a pair. Thank you so much for mentioning those resources. I have a post, I’ll link to it in the show notes, on how to find fellowships, which includes a couple of the databases you mentioned that I saw. Some universities have really extensive ones, but I’m going to add some of the things that you just mentioned to it. So listeners if you want to see some links to this, go to the show notes and find that post. Thank you so much for adding that. I really liked the tip about the professional societies. I hadn’t thought about that at all, but it totally makes sense.

07:42 Emily: So you found some fellowships you applied for. You told us which ones you were successfully awarded, but did you have some others that you applied to that you didn’t win? Were you applying for a lot or maybe only one or two a year or what was it?

07:55 Anne: Oh, yes, I definitely applied to a number that I wasn’t successful in. This is definitely a numbers game and sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you don’t. So yes, there were certainly several from all levels — from scholarships, fellowships, travel grants — that I did not get.

08:14 Emily: Well, it’s good to hear that you were just trying a lot. Since you were submitting a number of these applications per year, how did you think about that in terms of the usage of your time? Did you feel like it was, not a waste of time, but not really within your core mission of what you were doing in graduate school? Like something you had to do that was kind of extra, or did you really see it as just grant writing and building a skill set? How did you view it?

08:43 Anne: I do enjoy writing, so that’s part of it, and I was happy to develop those skills. In the case of the NSF GK-12 fellowship, it was a great way to enhance what I was doing with another skill set. In that case it was teaching and mentoring. I was paired with a teacher that I mentored for a project in the summer. I think fellowships can be a really wonderful way to broaden your experience in grad school and I know a number of students that studied in a different country, for instance, which is a great experience that they wouldn’t have gotten necessarily if they had stayed on a research assistantship or a teaching assistantship.

09:40 Emily: Yeah, that’s a really good point because, what I tend to forget about is fellowships pay you or pay your expenses, but really their purpose is to further your development as a researcher. That could be through doing whatever you’d be doing as an RA at your university, or it could be having these much more independent experiences, as you just mentioned, that are really enriching in a variety of ways. That’s what a fellowship is for, right? It’s good to be reminded of the core mission of a fellowship, which is to develop an individual, not necessarily to further some larger grant or whatever that you’re working on.

10:24 Anne: I have one more thing that I can add there too. I felt like it really deepened my connection to the professional societies that I was part of as well. I’m actually now involved in my local chapter of the Society of Women Engineers as a scholarship chair, so it really inspired me to turn around and give back after graduate school. It really meant a lot to me and it was inspiring to me that those organizations believed in me and I felt like that also came out as well in these.

Fellowship Application Tips and Tricks

11:00 Emily: Wonderful. What about the process of actually writing these applications? Did you have any tips for another grad student or postdoc going through that? What was that process for you?

11:12 Anne: I generally kept these materials together and it was my folder of preparation for what I needed to write some of these applications. First of all, you almost always need a copy of your transcripts, so I just had that handy so I didn’t have to go searching for it when I needed it. You almost always need a CV, so again, I just had that handy, a two page CV. I also had my set of go-to recommenders because many of these a fellowships also require recommendations. Then I had some talking points that I used as a basis for the essays for these different fellowships. They all require something a little bit different, but they almost always have a research component — what you’ve previously done, what you would like to do, some quantifiable results if you have those. Many of them have an outreach component, so I had this running list of what I was involved in with volunteer efforts and professional society involvement. Many of them have leadership component too, so again, I just kept that list of bullet points of some of the things that I’ve done and this just really helped me make the process smoother and faster, and when I went to go actually write one of these, I had something already there to go off of.

12:39 Emily: It kind of seems to me that the more of them you write, the easier it gets, right? Because you can reuse the themes and reuse some of the wording and so forth from your previous submissions.

Building Up Your CV

12:51 Emily: We talked a little about the process of writing applications, but what about the other things that you just mentioned, which was building up your CV, building up your leadership experiences, building up your outreach experiences. What did you find were relevant experiences that you had that you think helped you win these when these awards?

13:16 Anne: I got involved in some of the organizations through my department and through my university. We had some outreach events through my departments that were really fun. I had a good time participating in those. I also started getting involved in the leadership executive board of the professional society chapter at my university. I did that throughout my years in grad school, so I felt like that was really valuable. And again, I kept a list of the deliverables for my research, so I always had that ready to go. I think that was helpful too.

14:02 Emily: Define deliverables, because I’m thinking papers, but maybe there’s some other things in there too.

14:09 Anne: Yeah, papers, presentations. This wasn’t applicable for me, but if there was any media coverage of your research or anything special like that, if your university highlighted your work or a local news station highlighted your work, something like that. Those would be the main deliverables that I’m thinking of.

14:30 Emily: Did you have publications early on that were easy to point to when you have these further applications, like from your masters, for example?

14:40 Anne: Yup.

14:42 Emily: Yeah. I think that just goes into being the kind of candidate who wins these fellowships, having those deliverables come out early. So push for that, I think, is the advice for a current grad students. Don’t try to publish all your papers right at the end. It’s nice to get maybe one out the door early on.

15:00 Anne: Yeah, absolutely.

Writing the Fellowship Application

15:02 Emily: Anything else around advice for writing and winning fellowships?

15:08 Anne: I would say, first of all, if you have any questions about the content of the materials of the application definitely reach out to the organizational contact. It’s an obvious thing, but make sure you’re completing the full application packet. Sometimes they can be pretty long, a little bit complicated, and also don’t give more than they ask for. That might be held against you, potentially. If there’s an essay limit, stick to the essay length limit, things like that. When you’re organizing your essay, make sure you have an introduction. Make sure you have a section that’s organized around your research, the content of what you’ve done before, what your proposal is. Make sure you group any other outreach and leadership experience together. And then also explain how the fellowship could benefit you and your career path. I think the people that are reading, and having been now on the other side, I think it really is nice to know that it really would make an impact to the person if they received the fellowship. They’re not just applying willy-nilly to these. It really would be meaningful and helpful to them, financially too.

16:30 Emily: Can you give an example of that? What’s beyond the obvious of how a fellowship would further your career? Maybe something that you included in one of your essays?

16:41 Anne: Yeah. For instance, the NSF GK-12 fellowship had the teaching component and I think learning about science communication, that was really something that was really important to me, and being able to translate my work to others, that was what I included in that essay. And even though I’m not actively teaching in a professor capacity right now, that really was valuable to me and that really was something that meant a lot to me to gain out of that fellowship.

Commercial

17:18 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. Through my business, I provide seminars and webinars on personal finance for graduate students, postdocs and other early career PhDs, for universities, institutes and conferences, associations, etc. I offer seminars that cover a wide range of personal finance topics and others that take a deep dive into financial topics that matter most to PhDs, like taxes, investing, career transitions and frugality. If you are interested in having me speak to your group or recommending me to a potential host, you can find more information and ways to contact me at pfforphds.com/speaking, that’s p f f o r p h d s.com/speaking. Now back to the interview.

Financial Impact of Winning a Fellowship

18:08 Emily: Let’s shift gears and talk about the financial effect that winning a fellowship has on you, the awardee. So in your case, what happened? You won some fellowships, what happened with your personal finances?

18:25 Anne: One of the really great things about the fellowships I received was they were actually higher than the RA or TA stipend that I would have otherwise received, so that was really great and definitely a motivation for others to apply for fellowships. They’re often higher than what you would receive from your university. One thing to note is that different fellowships pay out slightly differently, so I had different payment arrangements depending on the years. One fellowship paid at the beginning of the semester, so just twice, and the other paid biweekly, every other week. It made a difference in my monthly budgeting. I didn’t change really how I budgeted because of that necessarily, but depending on how you operate with your budget, it might. The other thing is that the year that I received the the $3,000 Society of Women Engineers Fellowship Scholarship, that was actually on top of the GK-12 fellowships, so I stacked those, which was really cool. That’s sometimes possible as well. I’m trying to think of what else.

19:44 Emily: Well, there’s already a lot there. Let me ask a couple follow-on questions. Okay. So the first one — it sounds like, in total for your years in graduate school, were there two years when you received a fellowship that paid above the baseline stipend or was it more than two years?

20:01 Anne: It was two years.

20:02 Emily: Okay, so two years out of how many?

20:04 Anne: Five.

20:06 Emily: Did you do anything different in those years compared to the other three? For instance, did you live in a different place that was maybe more expensive or were you a little bit freer with your discretionary spending? Or did you end up saving more? What happened to the increase in pay since it wasn’t the entire time since it was only a couple of the years.

20:30 Anne: No, I didn’t change my budget really at all. I probably should have saved a little bit more when I was making the slightly higher salary that one year, but no, I didn’t change it really very much.

20:46 Emily: Okay. I just kind of always think about people who win a multi-year fellowship at the beginning of grad school and then they set their spending level in line with that fellowship. Then at some point they go down to the base stipend and I worry about those people. I’m a little concerned for them. Okay, so you didn’t really change anything but you could have saved more during that time. I think it’s really just about being intentional. Whatever you decided to do with it, just decide and don’t kind of float along with it. Okay, so slight increase in pay, that was one thing. Another thing you mentioned was a change in pay frequency and pay timing. Out of curiosity, when you were an RA or otherwise not on these fellowships, what was the pay frequency for that kind of position?

21:36 Anne: It was every other week.

21:38 Emily: Every other week, so also biweekly.

21:41 Anne: Yes.

21:41 Emily: So the same with one of your fellowships, and then the other one was once per semester?

21:46 Anne: Yes.

21:47 Emily: I can definitely see that the ones per semester might be a challenge, but it sounds like since you were already budgeting, already in that mode, maybe you could handle it a little bit better. How did it work for you? Just explain to me how you managed it.

22:06 Anne: It didn’t change too much. I tracked every dollar in graduate school, I still do, so I was very aware of what my base spending was. It didn’t vary a ton over my years in grad school, so that was the basis of how I budgeted.

22:25 Emily: It sounds like you got this influx of cash into your checking account and you just left it there and kind of drew it down according to your normal spending pattern as the semester went on and then you got another in flow for the next semester. Yeah, I just think that that can be a really challenging situation for someone who doesn’t already have a handle on their finances. Maybe someone who it’s their first semester in a new city — you don’t really know what the expenses are going to be, and you have to make sure that money lasts you until you get that next check coming in. I was thinking actually, how did you handle irregular expenses with your budgeting in grad school? Maybe it’s traveling, or health, dental, vision, those kind of expenses, anything that’s kind of big and occurs one time a year, a couple of times a year. How did you handle that, let’s say with your biweekly pay?

23:22 Anne: Yeah, that’s a good question. I didn’t have a giant emergency fund, but I did keep a small emergency fund throughout grad school. That was where I would draw out of, and again, I kind of honed it in over the course of five years when those expenses would come, so I knew to expect them. I did track it throughout my five years so I could make sure that I wasn’t getting a lifestyle creep or anything and made sure I kept that cushion my emergency fund at all times.

23:57 Emily: Okay, so if that was your method, then having the once per term fellowship wouldn’t change it that much, it’s just you have more money on hand and it goes towards paying these normal, same expenses as always. Because you already had that stuff in place, sounds like it was pretty easy for you and not much difference. I also wanted to ask, you mentioned taxes, right? In one case you didn’t have automatic income tax being withheld, so did you end up paying quarterly estimated tax during that year?

24:30 Anne: No. I remember it took me by surprise when I was filling out my taxes, and again, thankfully I had the emergency fund, but I was just not in that mindset at that time, so I didn’t. I was lucky I had that emergency fund to smooth it over when tax time came and I owed taxes.

24:54 Emily: So it sounds like you weren’t even aware that it wasn’t being withheld.

24:59 Anne: Maybe vaguely, but not properly.

25:00 Emily: But not enough to prepare for it. Fair warning, to any listeners. It sounds like in one case you did have automatic tax withholding, in one case you didn’t, so hey, figure it out. Maybe you’ll be pleasantly surprised that you are having tax withheld from your fellowship. That could be the case, but you certainly need to know if you’re not, either for that large tax bill in April or for paying quarterly estimated tax, if required to.

25:30 Emily: Yeah. Any other effect on your personal finances from winning those fellowships?

25:36 Anne: No, I think that’s about it.

Professional Impact of Winning a Fellowship

25:38 Emily: And how about effects on you as a researcher, as a PhD? Did the fellowships do what they were supposed to do and further your development?

25:48 Anne: They strengthened my credentials, which was wonderful. They gave me the opportunity to attend conferences and present my work. I learned a lot of those conferences and they were inspiring to me. I definitely improved my writing skills through the application process and that continues to help me today. I also feel like the application process, in general, helped me hone my elevator pitch about what I was doing in graduate school, which I thought was really great. Like I said before, I do think it helped me to explore some other interests that I had, while a graduate student, and it also gave me encouragement and support while I was a graduate student, and that meant a lot.

26:42 Emily: I have an article on my site and again, we’ll link it from the show notes. It’s called something like why you should apply for fellowships, even if you’re fully funded as a grad student or postdoc. It was for me, to some degree, tempting to kind of just rest on, “well, I’m going to be funded, I know that’s going to happen, I don’t need to go this extra mile or many extra miles submitting all these applications”. But it really sounds, based on your experience and others, that it’s worthwhile, even just applying, even if you don’t end up winning anything, which like you said, if you end up applying a lot, it’s a numbers game, so hopefully here and there you’ll win something. But even the process of applying without even winning is valuable. Plus, if you do win then further and further, it really develops you as a scholar. I’m really glad to hear your examples of that.

Advice for PhDs and Postdocs Applying to Fellowships

27:37 Emily: Any final concluding words of advice from you on how a person who wins a fellowship can get the most benefit possible out of it, whether it’s financial, whether it’s benefiting them professionally? Any words on that?

27:56 Anne: I would really encourage people to take a look at some of those lesser known fellowships. Especially in my field, I remember there were some really big ones that everybody knew about that were more competitive, but there’s a lot of fellowships out there for all kinds of things. And get creative, try something new. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t get one, because yeah, it’s a numbers game. And have fun.

28:28 Emily: Well, thank you so much for sharing your experience with us and I’m really glad to hear such a positive process and outcome from you.

28:39 Anne: Well, thank you very much, Emily. I had a good time. Thanks.

Outtro

28:42 Emily: Listeners, thank you so much for joining me for this episode. PFforPhDs.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. There you can find links to all the episode show notes, a form to volunteer to be interviewed, and a way to join the mailing list. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you want to support the show and my business, please go to PFforPhDs.com/helpout. There are plenty of ways do so without laying out any of your own money. See you in the next episode. And remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it doesn’t hurt. The music is Stages of Awakening by Poddington Bear from the free music archive, and it’s shared under CC by NC.

This PhD Student in Texas Side Hustles to Overcome Her Unique Financial Challenges

August 26, 2019 by Lourdes Bobbio Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Allie Judge, a second-year PhD student at Baylor College of Medicine. Allie outlines her top five expenses in Houston, TX as well as her financial goals. Allie receives a good stipend, but her pet sitting side hustle enables her to supercharge her financial progress. She uses her stipend for her living expenses and Roth IRA contributions and her side hustle income to pay down her student loans and medical debt and fund her travel to see her long-distance partner. She concludes with excellent budgeting advice for other graduate students.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

Teaser

00:00 Allie: Now during a slow month, I usually net about $300-400 a month. Right now during the literal hot months, also when people are taking a lot of vacation and wanting to get out of the Houston heat, I’ll usually net $700-800. so it’s going well.

Introduction

00:24 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season four, episode two and today my budget breakdown guest is Allie Judge, a PhD student at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. Allie details her income from her stipend and lucrative side hustle and her top five monthly expenses. Two of Allie’s unique financial challenges are high medical bills and her long distance relationship and her ongoing financial goals are to max out her Roth IRA and repay her non-deferred student loans. You won’t want to miss the budgeting advice she shares at the end of the interview. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Allie Judge.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:16 Emily: I have joining me on the podcast today Allie Judge, who is going to share with us her budget breakdown — her top expenses and financial goals for her recent months. Allie, it’s a real pleasure to have you here and I’m looking forward to all the interesting subjects we’ll be covering in this episode. Will you please tell the audience a little bit more about yourself?

01:26 Allie: Thanks. I am a second year PhD student at Baylor College of Medicine in the Biochem department living in Houston, Texas right now.

01:46 Emily: Excellent. Is it just you in your household?

01:51 Allie: I have a roommate and a cat, but other than that, just me.

01:56 Emily: Great. How much money do you make?

01:59 Allie: Our stipend actually recently went up. It was $32,000/year coming in and went up to $33,500 starting this month, I think.

Pet-sitting Side Hustle

02:10 Emily: Very nice. Decent raise year over year. I understand you have a side hustle as well.

02:16 Allie: I do. I am a dog sitter on Rover. I started when I was a research tech and was paid even less than I am now, and have continued through grad school.

02:27 Emily: I’m sure a lot of people will be interested in that side hustle, so can you tell us about what it entails a bit, how much money you’re making, maybe hourly, if you know that, and that kind of stuff?

02:39 Allie: Getting started was pretty easy. You just have to do a background check that costs $10, which was nice. Of course, I had to earn reviews on the site and that took a little while. I didn’t make a whole lot of money at first, but now during a slow month, I usually net about $300-400 a month. Right now, during the literal hot months, also when people are taking a lot of vacation and wanting to get out of the Houston heat, I’ll usually net $700-800, so it’s going well.

03:13 Emily: That is very nice. What kind of time commitment is that?

03:18 Allie: I primarily do house-sitting, just because the other services tend to be requests that come in the middle of the day and I don’t like to take time in the middle of the day from lab. When I house-sit, I usually just stay at their house overnight and it’ll be maybe an hour or two a day of taking a walk with a dog or feeding, and cumulative attention time that I can usually multitask a little bit during.

03:47 Emily: That’s really interesting. I didn’t know anything about this service. Although I’ve heard of it before, I did not realize that hous-sitting was a component. That definitely seems like a pretty lucrative way to do this. I’m really glad you found a way to be able to stay at work all day and not be walking dogs in the high heat of the day. And presumably you love animals. Is this a fun thing for you to do?

04:11 Allie: Yeah, definitely. I’ve always grown up with dogs and cats and I had pet-sat for neighbors and such, so it was pretty easy to get testimonials on my little profile, but you can have friends and family do it too to get you started.

04:25 Emily: Thank you so much for telling us about that side hustle because if anyone is interested, loves animals, and wants a side hustle, that seems like a really, really good one to be doing. Why did you choose to go through Rover instead of striking out on your own?

04:45 Allie: As opposed to just independently pet-sitting? They do take 20% of your profit, so that’s a huge chunk, but the exposure that you get is so much better. I’ve lived in major metropolitan areas, and I just would not be able to network. Even with the 20%, I feel like it’s for sure worth the advertising.

05:12 Emily: Do you end up getting any repeat clients?

05:18 Allie: Absolutely. I think right now, this summer, it’s almost been entirely repeat clients just because now they’re going on longer vacations and want someone they’ve had before. A few of them will kind of go off platform, or some of them will try to suggest that at first I say, “No, we should stay on the platform because I don’t know you and you don’t know me.”.

05:44 Emily: Thanks again for that detail. You’re making what sounds like pretty decent stipend income, especially for Houston, I would imagine, plus you have this very significant side hustle.

#1 Expense

Emily: I’m really curious now to dive into your top five budget line items for each month. You said you’re going to be doing your most recent months in this summery, right?

06:07 Allie: Yeah.

06:08 Emily: Let’s dive into it. What is that top expense?

06:10 Allie: My top five would be my rent, some recent medical bills, student loans and groceries, in addition to travel, which I try to contribute to monthly, but doesn’t always happen.

06:25 Emily: Yeah, that sounds great. So top one, rent, of course, unsurprising there. What are you paying and what are you getting for it?

06:32 Allie: Thankfully I have a roommate that shares my two bedroom, two bath in Houston. We each pay $600 right now.

06:40 Emily: Sounds very decent. What’s the proximity to campus?

06:45 Allie: It’s about a 15 minute bus ride

06:48 Emily: And that’s how you typically commute?

06:50 Allie: Yeah. Gigantic medical center with very expensive parking.

06:55 Emily: How do you like using the buses? Is it a decent system?

07:01 Allie: I would say that given Houston traffic, I’d much rather take an extra five minutes on the bus, then have to deal with people on the road in the morning and in the evening.

07:12 Emily: And do you own a car at all?

07:15 Allie: I do. That’s pretty necessary in Houston. I am fortunately not paying my car insurance yet because it’s still in my parents’ name. That is not crucial but helpful.

07:30 Emily: So, fifteen minute bus ride — how do you like the location where you live other than that? Are we talking city, is it walkable to a lot of stuff, how is it?

07:42 Allie: It’s an area called “”condo land” so there’s a lot of condos, and it’s a lot of families, that type of thing. It is not the safest place if you go a block this way or a block that way, but generally where we are is pretty quiet.

08:01 Emily: That sounds good. Is your roommate another graduate student, or someone you found outside of the university?

08:07 Allie: I moved into the two bedroom by myself because I didn’t want to just find a roommate on Craigslist. Then, after about six months, my roommate was looking for a place to live too and moved on in.

08:22 Emily: That’s a nice way to be able to vet the person you live with before you commit to that relationship.

08:29 Allie: She is a grad student. I don’t know if I said that.

#2 Expense

08:32 Emily: Yeah, it sounds great. Okay. Expense number two?

08:36 Allie: Expense number two would be these medical bills I have coming up. It’s about $450 a month and then this month I had to make a quick trip to the emergency room and it was about $350 extra. So if you can go to urgent care, this is my big takeaway from that.

08:56 Emily: How is your health insurance?

09:03 Allie: We do have free health insurance through our graduate program, like a lot of biomedical students do. It’s generally pretty good for the most routine stuff. Hopefully I’ll be meeting the maximum out of pocket expense soon.

09:22 Emily: There are probably some people in my audience who have never really dealt with health insurance that much. What we’re talking about is usually you’re used to paying a copay and maybe co-insurance, a percentage of the bill above a certain amount. Maybe there a deductible to meet. But at some point, hopefully the plan will have a not crazy-high maximum amount of money you will pay out of pocket, after which everything should be 100% covered, usually in network, right?

09:51 Allie: Yes.

09:53 Emily: You’ll may be meeting that at some point. And it’s hard, it’s tough to pay until you get to that point. But you can kind of look forward to say at least after that point for the rest of the calendar year, I’m not going to have any more out of pocket expenses should things go as they usually will. For those of you who are thinking about creating an emergency fund, having the amount of money to meet that whole out of pocket yearly expense in an emergency fund is a pretty good number to take a look at. It may be a few thousand dollars, or may be lower or may be higher depending on the type of plan that you have.

#3 Expense

10:29 Emily: Thanks for telling us about that. Hopefully this will not be a large expense in your budget forever. So your third expense?

10:37 Allie: So my third expense is my student loans. Right now with the medical expenses, I’m paying the minimum payment, which is $204, I think, but prior to those expenses I was throwing more like $500 or $700 a month, whatever my Rover income allowed.

10:57 Emily: Why are you paying student loans right now as a grad student?

11:04 Allie: As an undergrad I went to my small liberal arts college and took out plenty of student loans for it.

11:11 Emily: I guess what I mean is you have the option to defer your student loans, but you’ve sounds like you’ve chosen not to. Talk me through that decision.

11:20 Allie: My student loans are through the government, they’re public student loans and they granted discount of 2.5% interest if you set it to auto pay. I not only wanted to get my loans paid down, but there is actually a benefit to having them not deferred and being able to set them to auto pay.

11:40 Emily: Are any of these loans subsidized or are they all unsubsidized? Is there any calculation you’ve done there?

11:49 Allie: They’re unsubsidized. I believe that if you have subsidized loans, they don’t collect interest during deferment. So that 0.25% would be irrelevant.

11:59 Emily: It’s an unusual decision, I think. Some graduate students I talk to pay on their student loans, but you’re the first person I’ve talked with who has chosen not to defer at all, but it sounds like based on your totally decent stipend income, plus all your side hustle income, that minimum payment of $200 a month is totally manageable. Plus, you usually are able to pay much more than that, so I definitely think this can be a very, very smart decision. It’s just an unusual one, but I think it potentially is a really good one in your situation. It must feel good to be working on paying down that debt at whatever interest rate it’s at since it’s unsubsidized. You know, many, many people in our community will, during graduate school be watching that interest accrue if they’re not able to make payments, and that’s a painful thing to do, right? I’m glad to hear that you are being proactive about paying these down.

12:57 Allie: And it helps to know that I could defer them if expenses really were tight.

#4 Expense

13:03 Emily: All right, fourth expense?

13:07 Allie: So my fourth expense would be groceries. I spend about $200 a month on groceries. I probably could bring it down, but I’m trying to prevent myself from going to restaurants more and more.

13:21 Emily: There’s, of course, an interplay there, between grocery spending and eating out spending, so you’ve chosen to maybe spend a little bit more on groceries but not eat out very much, sounds like.

13:33 Allie: Yeah, I keep my restaurant budget to $50 a month or less.

13:38 Emily: Do you have any guidelines for yourself around when you do choose to eat out?

13:46 Allie: I’m in a long distance relationship, so when my partner, who lives in a small town in New York, comes to Houston where there’s an array of restaurants, that’s when we tend to eat out.

13:58 Emily: $200 a month on groceries sounds pretty low to me, actually, for one person. Are there any particular strategies that you use around grocery shopping, or around cooking, that you’d like to share?

14:11 Allie: It helps that I do live in a major urban area, so I’ll usually check out the mailer on Aldi deals and I’ll go shop at Aldi and then I’ll check out the same for Kroger and I’ll make a trip there and they’re within 10 minutes, which is convenient.

14:28 Emily: Love that your using Aldi. I used to shop at Aldi when I lived in Durham. I don’t have one close to me now, but if anyone in the audience is near an Aldi and has not checked it out, you really owe it to yourself. You won’t necessarily get all your grocery shopping done there, but you can get a lot of your staples and the prices are amazing. It’s a different kind of shopping experience. I prefer it to the standard grocery store. And Allie, how do you manage cooking as a graduate student and also as someone who’s doing all this house-sitting. If you’re not in your home a lot of the time, how do you manage that?

15:03 Allie: I do usually meal prep. Not to an extreme where my freezer is stocked full, but I’ll usually have at least half of the meals I need for the week done on Sunday. So that for the rest of the meals I can take a little more time or enjoy cooking a little more. Or sometimes it’s just a very quick canned soup kind of night.

15:28 Emily: I presume you bring your lunch with you virtually every day and then you would also be packing food when you’re going on job somewhere?

15:39 Allie: A lot of my friends do buy food almost every day in the cafeteria. I can’t imagine how much more that would cost.

15:50 Emily: Do you eat lunch with other people or do you eat by yourself?

15:54 Allie: I’m not in the immunology program, but the first year immunology students have adopted me into their friend-circle, so I usually try to catch up and eat lunch with them now that we don’t have classes together.

16:06 Emily: I think that’s one of the wonderful things about being on a campus is that it’s totally fine to bring your lunch into cafeterias or whatnot, public-ish eating spaces, and it’s not a weird thing to do. It’s not like you’re paying to have access to that space with the food that you buy. It’s great that you can be social and bring your lunch every day. I wanted hear a tiny bit more about meal prep, maybe just the resources that you use to learn about that?

16:35 Allie: I’m subscribed to a lot of subreddits that have recipes, Eat Cheap and Healthy and Meal Prep Sunday and that give some loose inspiration for recipes that all then go search for myself.

Commercial

16:53 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. Through my business, I provide seminars and webinars on personal finance for graduate students, postdocs and other early career PhDs, for universities, institutes and conferences, associations, etc. I offer seminars that cover a wide range of personal finance topics and others that take a deep dive into the financial topics that matter most to PhDs, like taxes, investing, career transitions and frugality. If you’re interested in having me speak to your group or recommending me to a potential host, you can find more information and ways to contact me at PFforPhDs.com/speaking. That’s p f f o r p h d s.com/speaking. Now back to the interview.

#5 Expense

17:41 Emily: All right then, your fifth expense in your budget?

17:44 Allie: That last expense that has not gotten much love recently is typically travel. That’s a secondary savings account where I throw whatever extra I have that I have decided not to put toward my student loans that month into a designated savings account for travel. That way when I find a cheap flight, I can go ahead and book it and I don’t have worry about whether I can afford it that month.

18:12 Emily: It sounds like it varies, but what would you say average you’re putting into that savings account?

18:19 Allie: On average it’s about $200.

18:23 Emily: Tell me a little bit more about how you’re managing the long distance relationship with respect to the money and the travel components of it beause I know this is a really common thing in the PhD population. How does it work for you?

18:36 Allie: What we do is we split our flights 50/50 pretty much every time and those tend to be between $300 and $500 because it is a pretty small airport that I’m flying into. Unfortunately, he is in law school and collecting student loans at 9% interest, so while we do split 50/50, kind of as the agreement because we’re not married yet, I try to be mindful and foot some of the bill if I can and have a lot of extra.

19:18 Emily: Do you find that you are traveling about at the same frequency to see one another or does one of you travel more?

19:24 Allie: It’s varied, just on convenience for whichever one of us has the time. At Baylor, we have a week break between terms in the first year that we take classes, so it made more sense for me to go see him for a couple of those breaks. Then of course he had a fall break and spring break, so he came to see me for that. It was more circumstantial than it was just trying to keep it even on who had to travel.

20:00 Emily: I almost forgot that classes were involved with being a PhD student because that will not be the case for much of your degree, but presumably he’ll have classes that he has to attend the entire time. Do you see that changing up at all once you’re free from that aspect of your scheduling?

20:20 Allie: Good point. We finish classes in a year at Baylor so I’m done, which means I will probably be taking more time to go see him. He tends not to have classes on Fridays in law school, so it’s more likely that I make a Thursday night trip to go see him.

20:38 Emily: Are you able to work remotely when you travel or are you still considering one of those days a work day?

20:45 Allie: I have not talked depth with my PI about any kind of specific arrangement, but I do have a pretty heavy computational component to my research, so that would probably make it easier.

20:58 Emily: Yeah, it’s really nice to have that flexibility. I remember much of my PhD having to go in and feed cells on weekends and that it makes travel a little bit difficult. You have to really plan long-term to be able to be away from more than a couple of days. Have you started using any kinds of travel hacking strategies or travel rewards strategies since you are taking the same kinds of flights pretty frequently?

Travel Hacking and Strategies

21:25 Allie: First of all, your best friend is Google Flights. It’ll help you track prices so you can decide when is the best time to buy your tickets and it’ll send you email notifications and it’s been really helpful. We tend to just fly the cheapest airlines that will fly between us, which includes three different airlines, so I have not gotten a co-branded credit card, but I have used points and cash back from credit cards. Right now, I have a Chase card that gives me 2% back on all travel and the points can be redeemed usually at a higher value than just simple cashback. That’s what we’ve been using to book flights, when we can, through their travel portal. The signup bonuses have also been really helpful in getting us a couple free flights back and forth.

22:22 Emily: That’s excellent. The Chase card that you’re using, or maybe in general, do you use cards that have an annual fee or always ones that don’t?

22:31 Allie: That is my only card that has an annual fee actually, and I mostly got that card for the signup bonus. A lot of them you can do the first year with no annual fee, so I’ll have to decide at the end of the year whether that annual fee will be worth it for next year.

22:49 Emily: Thanks for sharing those strategies. I did not really get into travel hacking when I was in graduate school because living in Durham and flying to lots of different parts of the country, I was always taking different airlines, so at that time I was kind of like, “Well, it doesn’t really make sense. I’m never loyal to one airline.” I didn’t get a co-branded card at that time. Now that I live in Seattle, I fly Alaska so much because it’s a hub, so at this point, for my specific situation, it makes a lot more sense to get that card and just take the strategy a whole different way. I’m really glad to hear that you found a solution that’s working for you, even though you aren’t loyal to one airline, and using those general rewards cards that work across any type of travel is an excellent way to do that, so thank you so much for sharing that with us.

23:34 Allie: Still make a frequent flyer account for any airline that you’re going to fly on, because if you fly on it again, you might collect enough points to do something with it.

23:45 Emily: Great point.

What are your top financial goals?

23:46 Emily: Okay, so that was your, your top five expenses. Let’s then switch to talking about your financial goals, if you have any. We’ve already talked about paying above the minimum payment on those student loans, so that’s awesome that you’re doing that. Are you working on any other financial goals?

Maxing out Roth IRA

24:02 Allie: I’m also at the moment maxing out my Roth IRA for retirement, so that’s $500 a month since the maximum contribution is now $6,000 a year. I decided not to dip into that goal for these medical expenses that have come up because my student loan interest is only 4% and generally that’s kind of the breaking point on when you’re likely to beat the market and a non-taxable account versus paying down debt.

24:34 Emily: Thanks for that insight. I really love that now in 2019 we have that $6,000 limit on the IRA because it makes the math so much easier. It’s $500 every month. I don’t know if you think about things this way, but are your Roth IRA contributions coming from your stipend, or are they coming from your side hustle income?

24:55 Allie: So I do track my budget on Mint, but I’ve also been putting it into a spreadsheet so I can plan ahead because Mint won’t let you plan for next month. I put my money in one big pot, but because my IRA is something that I would not stop contributing to if I didn’t have Rover income, I’d probably say it comes from my stipend.

25:22 Emily: That makes sense. In terms of your priorities, maxing out your IRA comes before paying off your student loans and so you’re using a side hustle income really for the student loans and the contribution to the IRA as the more stable, constant goal that you have. Well, I think that’s just fantastic that you’re able to and that you’re choosing to max out that IRA. I’m so excited for you.

Emily: If anyone is thinking about doing an IRA during grad school, I’ll link in the show notes, a post that I’ve done about how much of a difference to your net worth doing that IRA during graduate school will make. Top line numbers, you can read more about it in the post, is that if you contribute $250 per month during grad school for five years, and we make some assumptions about your rate of return, if you look out 50 years from when you finish, you will be solidly into retirement at that point, that contribution just during graduate school turns into $1 million based on these compound interest calculations. You contributing $500 a month, if you do that for five years, we’re looking at $2 million, 50 years out from graduate school. Again making certain assumptions, but that’s the kind of scale that we’re talking about for making room for this within your stipend and your budget and so forth. I’m really excited for you, Allie, and what the future holds for your finances.

Targeted Savings Accounts

26:52 Emily: Any other goals that you want to discuss now?

26:55 Allie: Other than that student loan, which is kind of on the back burner, I’ve hit my emergency fund goal and some other savings goals. I do have separate designated savings accounts for my cat in case of medical expenses and for my car, just for repairing and eventually in like five or six years, probably buying a new car.

27:23 Emily: It sounds like you’re employing what I call the targeted savings accounts model or sinking funds model, which is excellent. I really love that for graduate students to help them through the months where one, two, three large expenses hit and your normal cash flow can’t handle that. I’m really glad to hear about that.

What are your top financial tips for your peers?

27:41 Emily: So let’s wrap up here, Allie, with your best advice for your peers.

27:46 Allie: One big thing is keeping some extra money in that checking account. This will allow you to automate everything. What I did is I contributed to my emergency savings until I had some extra and then I just pulled that back into the checking account. That way I had $500 buffer so that on first of the month I can always pay my rent, so that I set those credit cards to auto pay, so that I set my targeted savings accounts to auto withdraw, and the same for my retirement and my student loans. It just makes me worry so much less. Then my second tip is for those with a side gig, if you can, push the income you get from that side gig into next month’s budget. For a little while, I was taking the $50 I made last week and including it in this month’s budget, which made for really erratic budgeting and also made me more likely to put that $50 toward something I want to do instead of a savings goal.

28:49 Emily: I think those two pieces of advice are really excellent and I’ll just expound on them a little bit more. The basic concept that you’re talking about, with pushing your income forward into next month, is what I call being on time with your budget. I recently read the book, “You Need a Budget”. So there’s a budgeting software “You Need a Budget”, there’s an associated book called “You Need a Budget”. What they call it is aging your money. What this means is basically in the course of a month, whatever paychecks you receive, those go towards funding your next month’s budget.

Emily: A lot of people play a game, especially people who are paid bi-monthly or bi-weekly, where the paycheck they receive is immediately going to pay for expenses — so it’s like first paycheck of the month pays for these immediate expenses, second paycheck of the month pays for the bills I’ve time to be in the second part of the month. Instead, to give yourself a little bit more margin, a little bit more space and calm, take all the income you make in a given month, and say that’s funding my next month’s budget.

Emily: That’s exactly what you’re doing with your side hustle income, so you’re not turning around and spending the money you make the next week, you’re saving it for the next month. I think that’s really smart, especially for what you just said. When you put off spending the money until the new budgeting period, you can have some more time for reflection and planning and making sure that you’re using the money in the way that you think is best and not something more impulsively. I actually think that it’s somewhat easy for graduate students, if they’re paid monthly, to do this. Are you paid on a monthly schedule?

30:21 Allie: We’re paid biweekly.

30:23 Emily: If you haven’t already done this, my suggestion would be to age that second paycheck or the first one, I guess to be for that next month. It’s a very challenging thing to do, especially for someone who has really, really tight cashflow because essentially you’re saving up half your month’s salary to be delayed until using it the next month. It’s a very, very challenging thing to do, but a really excellent one and again, I really admire the “You Need a Budget” framework for calling that out as ageing your money and they have a specific tool within the software that helps the user do that. So thanks for those two pieces of advice.

31:06 Emily: Allie, thank you so much for breaking down your budget with us today and giving us this wonderful insight and wonderful advice and best of luck to you with your finances and the upcoming year.

31:16 Allie: Yeah, absolutely.

Outtro

31:19 Emily: Listeners, thank you so much for joining me for this episode. PFforPhDs.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. There you can find links to all the episode show notes, a form to volunteer to be interviewed, and a way to join the mailing list. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you want to support the show and my business, please go to PFforPhDs.com/helpout. There are plenty of ways do so without laying out any of your own money. See you in the next episode and remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it doesn’t hurt. The music is Stages of Awakening, by Poddington Bear from the free music archive and it’s shared under CC by NC.

This PhD Lecturer Found Her Perfect Side Hustle and Teaches Others to Do the Same

August 12, 2019 by Lourdes Bobbio Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Toyin Alli, a lecturer at the University of Georgia and founder of The Academic Society. Through her own blogging journey during grad school, Toyin found her passion for helping other graduate students excel in their programs. Two areas of particular need she notices were in productivity/accountability and side hustling. Toyin now teaches graduate students how to find their own perfect side hustles and gives several examples of side hustles that are well-suited for PhDs.

Links Mentioned in this Episode

Teaser

00:00 Toyin: And how you don’t need to be an expert. You only need to be an expert about where you are. One of my favorite quotes from someone was what’s duh to you is mind blowing to your audience.

Introduction

00:15 Emily: Welcome to the personal finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Emily Roberts. This is season three, episode twelve and today my guest is Dr. Toyin Alli, a lecturer at the University of Georgia and founder of The Academic Society. Through The Academic Society, Toyin creates for other graduate students, the community and accountability structure that helped her succeed during her PhD in particular around productivity and side hustling. Toyin explains what kinds of side hustles are best suited for grad students and gives examples of highly accessible side hustles that early career PhDs can excel at. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Toyin Alli.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:02 Emily: I have joining me on the podcast today Dr. Toyin Alli and she is a side hustler, in fact, a side hustler who has now launched her own business, part of which is about helping other grad students, early career PhDs with their side hustles. Toyin, thank you so much for joining me today and will you please introduce yourself.

01:22 Toyin: Thank you so much for having me. I am Toyin Alli. I am from Mississippi and I’ve always loved math. I went to grad school to get my PhD in math. I went to the University of Alabama and I actually had an amazing experience at the University of Alabama in the math department. It was a very nurturing and supportive community. While I was in grad school, I started blogging towards the end and then over summer after I graduated, I put in a lot of effort into my blog and then I started my career. I’m a lecturer at the University of Georgia in the math department and I started The Academic Society to help grad students with all the things that I excelled at in grad school, as well as the things that I learned in grad school because I realized people weren’t really talking to grad students very much. I’m so happy to be here to talk to you all about what The Academic Society is about and my journey to get here.

The Grad School Exerience

02:26 Emily: When we talked before this call, you said something to me along the lines of “I kicked butt during graduate school” and that was such a completely different thing to say, righ?. That’s not the narrative that I usually hear, the self-conception that I hear from PhDs who are out of graduate school. It’s not the one that I have, certainly. So I just thought that was so refreshing to hear from you. And I assume that you bring that attitude of “I am competent and are too” to what you do with this work with graduate students. Is that accurate?

03:06 Toyin: Definitely. And I will say grad school was hard. I mean I got my PhD in math. It was not easy at all, but the experience was actually enjoyable. Not that I would want to do it again, but I actually had some great takeaways from grad school. I made some great friends and I realized that my department was very supportive. I think part of it was that I came in with a bunch of women, which is pretty rare in the math department and we all had the same fellowship. It was for underrepresented groups in your field. There were at least maybe a seven women who started with me in my grad program and we worked together. Just the whole community of my department was very nurturing and supportive, even if the program was very difficult. I will say, early on I realized that grad school was different from undergrad and my time was not structured anymore. I knew I needed to have structure, it’s a part of my personality, so I imposed my own structure on my grad school experience. I made a schedule every single semester, even if it was different and somehow setting up my organization helped me to be more productive in grad school and get stuff done. My advisor really advised me well and just a great experience. I just want every grad student to feel that way, even though I know they don’t, to just to have some sense of joy in grad school, which is pretty rare.

04:45 Emily: That definitely makes sense to me. We’re skipping ahead a little bit to talking more about your business, but I can see how you can help other graduate students learn those skills that you developed during grad school and that you found really helpful and around having a community because maybe they don’t have that built in community of like this great cohort that they’re coming in with. But hey, the internet, we can find that kind of thing online now.

Blogging as a Side Hustle

05:08 Emily: Okay, let’s not skip ahead too far. Let’s go back to your days in graduate school when you were blogging and I know you blogged about different subjects at different times. You were sort of casting around. Something that you told me before that I really identified with was that you had, I believe leading up to graduate school, lost all of your hobbies. You were so singularly focused on academics. I had that experience too. My hobby was sleeping. I told people that. I mean, I needed sleep, that was true. So tell me about these things that you were trying out as you were trying to find some things to do with your time.

05:40 Toyin: I was doing an interview or something and someone asked me, “What are your hobbies and what do you like to do?” And this was when I was well into graduate school and I said, “I don’t know. I was just a grad student. That’s what I do.” And I remember thinking that when I was younger, I had all of these things that loved to do. I was so into fashion. I loved beauty stuff. I loved hair, I loved different fandoms. I was super into movies and TV stuff. I don’t know, I just felt like I had more interests before I started grad school. And I was like, “Well, why should grad school change who I am that much? I need to have something outside of grad school.”

06:23 Toyin: I discovered blogging on Pinterest and I thought it sounded cool. I should try and start a blog. I didn’t really know what to talk about, so I just talked about my experiences in grad school and I kind of brought in the fashion element, writing about what I would wear to teach my classes, what I would meal prep for the week for school, how I organize my desk in my office and things like that. I really found a passion surrounding organization, productivity, as well as style and fashion and stuff like that.

06:56 Emily: Was that one single blog that you then talked about these different things? Or did you have different iterations of these side hustles/blogs?

07:07 Toyin: That was one blog. It was called Your Unfading Beauty. Me and my friends always joked because when you read it, it looks like “you run fading beauty” and it was just supposed to be about me. It was just one blog where I talked about all of these things. And then after grad school, I took a course on how to run a fashion blog. The thing that the person said was that the fashion or style niche is very oversaturated so you have to bring in something extra or be super niche and talk about one thing in fashion. I asked myself, “What am I uniquely kind of qualified to talk about and what am I interested in?” Here I was, a grad student, I had never really had a job before and it was the summer after I graduated starting my job as a lecturer. I didn’t know anything about personal finance but as a mathematician whose research area actually had to do with financial and economic policy. I found I was kind of qualified to talk about finance. My blog was fashion and finance for newly minted professionals. I talked about what I discovered regarding how to learn about personal finance because I never learned it before. I transitioned from talking about everything to talking about style and finance and how to manage a budget and things like that when you’re new to a career. Later on that got draining and then that’s when I started The Academic Society.

08:43 Emily: You really found like a crossover point that probably very few other people were looking at. Of course I love it and I would read that blog. Let’s step back a little bit because we are talking about side hustling during this episode. Did you monetize any of those blogs, before we get to the academic society, your current website?

09:01 Toyin: Just barely. I did a lot of affiliate marketing where you have a link to something that you like and that your audience may like and when your audience clicks your link to purchase, you may get a commission for that thing. I did Amazon Affiliates and I also did Shopstyle Collective, I think that’s what it’s called, for the fashion thing. I could like link to the different outfits that I wore and get a commission. I would not say that was very lucrative, but that’s where I started. That’s also what I did with my fashion and finance blog. Then I realized for affiliate marketing to be really, really profitable, you have to have a huge audience. You had to have a lot of people to click on these things. I really wanted to find something that I didn’t have to have a huge audience for. What I’ve learned since then is having your own products or service-based business is really helpful and you don’t have to have a huge audience to be profitable from things like that.

Other Side Hustle Experiences During Grad School

10:19 Emily: That’s setting us up really nicely for the next phase, but before we get there, did you have any other side hustles during graduate school, maybe unrelated to the blogging stuff?

10:30 Toyin: Actually, no. Math departments are very much a service department. Almost every major comes through our department, so we need a lot of people to teach. Grad students taught, so along with my graduate teaching assistantship, I would teach two classes and I had a stipend from that. Math grad students are actually pretty well paid so I didn’t think that I needed the extra income. I didn’t really have to do any side hustling and I didn’t other than my affiliates.

Conceptualizing The Academic Society

11:05 Emily: Okay, so you’ve had these couple different blogs, you’re talking about fashion and stuff, but then you had this realization affiliate marketing wasn’t the best fit for you. I know that’s a really tough field to get into, so you were looking more into service-based businesses, creating your own products. How did you hit upon The Academic Society, your current business?

11:25 Toyin: I discovered the world of online course making and I took a course on making a course. The instructor of that course, Mariah Coz, she’s really big in the course-making industry, said typically the people you teach are where you were six months to two years ago. At that point I was trying to monetize my fashion and finance blog and I was going to create a course related to that. Then, when she said that, I asked myself, “Where was I? I was actually in grad school applying for jobs.” I actually got offered three positions really early and I thought, “Oh, I did a great job applying for jobs. That’s where I was. Maybe I can help grad students apply for academic jobs.” My first course was how to build an amazing application packet to apply for jobs. I said to myself, “This is not fashion and finance, but I’m interested in this. Maybe I like to help grad students and I actually did amazing in grad school, maybe I should help grad student.” Thus, The Academic Society was born.

12:39 Emily: I love that tip of looking to your recent past because I think a lot of people get scared off of creating courses or even blogging and putting their knowledge and perspective out there because they think “I’m not an expert,” but as you just said, you don’t really have to be, it all depends on where your audience is. If you can find an audience that you’re just a few steps ahead of, that’s going to work out really well. Kind of like teaching a course. You don’t need to necessarily be miles and miles ahead of your students, you just have to be a few chapters ahead in some cases

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13:15 Emily: This summer I’m putting forth extra support for PhDs undergoing career transitions – into grad school, a post doc or a real job. If you’re moving onto the next stage in your career or thinking about it, please visit PFforPhDs.com/next to check out my articles, webinars and coaching program. Allow me to come alongside you during this transition to ensure that you set yourself up for financial success.

Monitizing A Blog Through Courses

13:44 Emily: That’s how you discovered who you wanted to serve through The Academic Society. Now your business is a little bit more developed. What are the different income streams and what are the different ways that you make money through The Academic Society?

14:01 Toyin: Before I do answer that, I do want to go back really quickly to what you said about like teaching and how you don’t need to be an expert. You only need to be an expert about where you are. One of my favorite quotes from someone is “What’s duh to you is mind blowing to your audience.” Even when you’re teaching, I’m always only two days ahead of my students.

14:22 Toyin: The Academic Society was pretty tough to monetize. Luckily I have a job where I don’t have to have the extra income because I realize trying to sell to grad students is really difficult because grad students don’t make a lot of money and I wouldn’t feel right charging a lot for my products and services to grad students because I know the struggle is real as a grad student. I had some pretty cheap things. I learned from the course model of business. I started with courses. I had my job application crash course, as it is known as now. I also had the grad school toolkit where I taught graduate students how to use Trello to organize their life and grad school experience. They were very cheap products, but I ended up making them free and using them to build my audience. I decided to not be instantly profitable in The Academic Society because I was so passionate about helping grad students. I decided the profitability will come later. I think it’s really important to help grad students. I just decided to make all my content free at first until I built my audience. Now, my email list is over 600 and is big enough. I know exactly what I can help my grad students with and I can create things that they really, really want.

15:55 Toyin: Last winter I was saying, “okay, what do my people really need?” I have a Facebook group for Grad students and upon entry I asked them what do they struggle most with grad school? All of them say time management, productivity and motivation. What can I offer them that will help them with this? That’s when I came up with my program, The Productivity Accelerator and it’s a two week program. I called it a productivity program, but it’s really more accountability. When students join that program, I pair them up with another grad student to be accountability partners because in my business, I actually do have an accountability partner who also owns a business. I’ve grown so much just from being in that partnership. I think this will be helpful for grad students and I remember when I was in grad school, I had all of those women that I could work with, they were my accountability partners. Other grad student need accountability; I can give them accountability partners and then we can work together. I decided virtual coworking sessions will be part of the program and we would do Pomodoro method, where we work for 25 minutes, take a break for five, work for 25 minutes, take a break for five. That’s The Productivity Accelerator. You join the program, you get partnered up, I do a couple of group coaching sessions, and we just work every day in the afternoon and at night. I also have grad students who facilitate the coworking session so it’s not just me, you really get to know the other grad students in the program. Even I was the most productive I’ve ever been in The Productivity Accelerator. I am currently running a free mini course to help grad students and academics start their own side hustle. When they finish the mini course, they have the option to join my program, Side Hustle Summer School, which is a little course on how to take your side hustle idea to market. Now I’m currently writing a book, A Grad School Survival Guide and I will have a book as part of monetizing The Academic Society as well.

18:03 Emily: That is so fun and I love that you listen to your audience and were trying to really tap into what they were telling you that you needed. I love that idea of having the, the productivity, especially the accountability. Even within personal finance, accountability – people don’t want it, but it’s so effective, if you can get it in a good way. So, yeah, that sounds really fun.

Different Types of Side Hustles for Grad Students

18:28 Emily: Let’s talk more about Side Hustle Summer School and side hustling in general. Aside from blogging, you were not a side hustler during your grad degree, you didn’t have a need for it, but if someone either does have a need or just once extra income or something to do, what are some ideas for how they can side hustle during grad school?

18:49 Toyin: I definitely think a decision needs to be made if they want to be instantly profitable or have a slow build and become profitable later. What I did with my business was a slow burn. It took two years to become profitable. That was because I was passionate about what I was doing and I was okay with waiting, I had a job. But I would say if you want to be profitable immediately you should have a service-based business where you provide something for someone else or you do something for someone else and you only need one client to make money instantly. You don’t need a big audience and it’s probably someone you know that can be your first client. I actually wrote a blog post called “Nine Cheap and Easy Side Hustles for Grad Students and Academics”.

19:35 Toyin: It doesn’t have to cost money to start a side hustle. You don’t need a website. You just need to let people know what you’re doing. You probably just need like an email address and a PayPal account. Something that grad students and academics can do is tutoring. By being in grad school, you are an expert in your field, especially to undergraduates or high school students, so you can tutor them. Something that’s really interesting is being a virtual assistant. I know you have a virtual assistant and you can help someone else who owns a business by doing a little task for them or being a social media manager. If you’re great at social media and you know what kinds of posts perform on different social media platforms, you can help a business who doesn’t know or doesn’t have time to invest in learning all about that. Especially old brick and mortar businesses, they don’t really know how social media works, so you can help them.

20:33 Emily: I want to jump in and say my virtual assistant is actually a grad student. Hey Jewel! I went to my own email list when I was looking for someone to help me with my podcast editing and a lot of grad students responded and ended up working with Jewel and it’s been amazing for me and I think it’s been good for her too.

20:53 Toyin: That’s so awesome. I think it’s really awesome to work with someone who has a business because you can learn from them and figure out what you might want to do for a side hustle or business and become an entrepreneur yourself, just from that experience. There are multiple ways, especially living in a college town. If you’re in grad school, you’re probably in a college town, so your professors are maybe going on sabbatical or leaving for the summer, going on conferences. They may need someone to house sit or pet sit or nanny their children. There just so many creative things that you may not think about that you are uniquely qualified to do as a side hustle and providing a service for someone else.

21:37 Emily: Thanks so much for pointing out. The way to make money right away – this month, this week – is to go for something service-based and I think that is really accessible for a lot of grad students. The examples that you mentioned were great. It’s just important to realize that developing passive income streams, which is some of the kind of things that we’ve been talking about, like developing courses or something like that – the “make money while you sleep” billing that you sometimes see in online business – that can be a great route, but it’s not immediate. It takes a long time, as you were just saying in your own journey, to build that audience that you need before you can get to that point. So, that’s not “pay your rent” money, that’s “I want to have a long-term vision and I enjoy this thing and if it makes money later on, that’s amazing”, that’s that approach over there.

Advice for Starting Your Own Side Hustle

22:30 Emily: What advice do you have for a current grad student or an early career PhD who wants to develop a side hustle? What advice do you have for them for figuring out what is going to work best for them?

22:43 Toyin: I like to start with three things: coming up with an idea based on your why, like what you want to do; figuring out who you can help; and also knowing your financial goals. I think those are the top three things you need to be able to come up with a great idea that will work for you. In my mini course that people take before Side Hustle Summer School, I always ask them, what are the things that you are good at? And also, to go out to their friends and family and ask them what do they come to you for? It may surprise you. I actually did this exercise and asked my friends and family, “what do you think I’m good at, what have you come to me for it?” and I was blown away at their answers. They were very kind and they pointed out some things I actually never thought about.

23:32 Toyin: Figuring out what you’re good at, figuring out if that thing that you’re good at can help someone else, and then figuring out, okay, who would actually want this thing that I could offer and who could actually afford the thing that I could offer? And figuring out how to price it based on how much you actually need to make. It determines how elaborate and high level your product will be. You can make something that could be pretty cheap or you can build up the client experience to make it more expensive to fit your needs as well. But yeah, figuring out what you’re good at and how you can help someone I think is the best way.

24:14 Emily: I think, as we were kind of talking about earlier, grad school can take a toll on your mental health. This imposter syndrome, obviously is totally widespread. I just want to say, grad students, you are good at something. Definitely. Even if it’s primarily academically related, like you have found with your own business. You are good at something. You can offer things to someone else. If you go through these exercises that Toyin is talking about, if you take her mini course, etc., you will be able to discover something in this area that will be an effective side hustle for you. Toyin, please tell us where people can go if they want to jump into this mini course, maybe even prior to taking Side Hustle Summer School?

24:59 Toyin: I have a mini course that has a five lessons. You can do it in five days and it takes you from getting your idea to coming up with a way to monetize it. If you want to just go to my website, it’s theacademicsociety.com and you can go to theacademicsociety.com/side-hustle-cheatsheet, you will get a cheat sheet full of all of the logistics of starting a side hustle as well as the workbook for all of the lessons in the mini course and you’ll be invited to the Facebook group where the mini course is hosted. You can find all of this at theacademicsociety.com.

25:43 Emily: We will also add all of those links into the show notes as well as you know, I’ve already done several podcasts episodes on people who have side hustled during graduate school or after psi or after graduate school, so we’ll add links to those previous episodes as well so you can get even more ideas for what to do next. Toyin, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today and for lending your expertise in this area.

26:06 Toyin: Thank you so much for having me! I really enjoyed this.

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26:10 Emily: Listeners, I’m so glad you joined us for today’s episode. PFforPhDs.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for a PhDs podcast. There, you can find links to all the episode show notes, a form to volunteer to be interviewed, a survey, and a way to join the mailing list. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. See you in the next episode! The music is stages of awakening by Poddington Bear from the Free Music Archive, and it’s shared under cc by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Jewel Lipps.

Lourdes Bobbio

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Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

Food Spending and Starting on the Path to Self-Sufficiency

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Long Term Plan for Food Self-Sufficiency

Frugal Food Recipes

Tips for Starting Your Own Garden

Living a Frugal, Yet Enjoyable Life

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A Message for Grad Students: Practice Self-Advocacy

Self-Advocacy Post-Grad School

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Finding Sources of Travel Funding

Tutoring as a Side-Hustle

Any Last Words of Advice?

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Finding and Applying to Fellowships

Fellowship Application Tips and Tricks

Building Up Your CV

Writing the Fellowship Application

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Financial Impact of Winning a Fellowship

Professional Impact of Winning a Fellowship

Advice for PhDs and Postdocs Applying to Fellowships

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Pet-sitting Side Hustle

#1 Expense

#2 Expense

#3 Expense

#4 Expense

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#5 Expense

Travel Hacking and Strategies

What are your top financial goals?

Maxing out Roth IRA

Targeted Savings Accounts

What are your top financial tips for your peers?

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Teaser

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Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

The Grad School Exerience

Blogging as a Side Hustle

Other Side Hustle Experiences During Grad School

Conceptualizing The Academic Society

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Monitizing A Blog Through Courses

Different Types of Side Hustles for Grad Students

Advice for Starting Your Own Side Hustle

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