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Why You Should Apply for Fellowships Even If You’re Fully Funded

September 27, 2017 by Emily

PhD students are funded by a variety of sources: research assistantships, teaching assistantships, graduate assistantships, training grants, and fellowships. It’s typical to be funded by two or more of these difference sources over the course of your PhD, and the funding source can change year-to-year or even semester-to-semester. While the differences among these funding sources are sometimes subtle, one stands apart from the others: Being funded by a fellowship, particularly a nationally recognized one, is in many ways superior to other forms of funding.

Last week, there was a very interesting conversation on The Grad Cafe about the various ways PhD students are funded. Ultimately, the original poster asked: “Why are fellowships so highly sought after? I am assured full funding (around $30,000) at every school I’m looking at. As someone who isn’t even in grad school yet, is this something I should be concerning myself with?”

I believe every prospective and graduate student should apply for at least one fellowship per year (assuming you are eligible for any). I recently compiled a list of nine portable, broad, lucrative fellowships that prospective PhD students can apply to. Many on that list plus more fund 1st- or 2nd-year PhD students, and there are fresh funding opportunities for PhD candidates with a clear research focus or who are nearing the ends of their dissertations.

Further reading: How to Find, Apply for, and Win a Fellowship During Your PhD or Postdoc

Why Fellowships Are a Superior Funding Source

At the graduate level, fellowship funding is usually preferable to assistantship or training grant funding.

1) You Don’t Have to Work

This point may seem unclear until you understand the definition of “work” being used. Assistantships are a part-time job and typically require the assistant to work 20 hours/week. Fellowships are a type of award, which means that they are not tied to a specific work requirement. Fellows are still required to make progress toward completing their degrees, which will of course involve classwork in the early years and research throughout the PhD. But students who receive their full stipends from fellowships are excused from doing an assistantship.

The advantage of being paid by a fellowship rather than an assistantship is more pronounced in some department than others.

The ideal situation for a PhD student, and what a fellowship provides, is the ability to put 100% of your effort toward achieving your professional goals (mostly working on your dissertation).

Teaching assistantships confer extra duties that take away from your available time for dissertation work. (Gaining teaching experience may be an additional professional goal, in which case some types of teaching assistantships may be beneficial to you.)

Research assistantships are a mixed bag. In some fields, such as STEM fields, research assistants spend all their time conducting research that will become part of their dissertations (the topic of which is guided by the projects/funding available in the advisor’s lab). In other fields, the research that a research assistant conducts will not become part of his dissertation, so again that is time taken away from dissertation work.

Basically, for teaching and non-dissertation research assistantships, you have to work on your dissertation above your 20 hr/week job, while fellowships and dissertation research assistantships allow you to devote your full working time to your dissertation.

2) They Often Pay More

Most external fellowships provide a specified amount of money for your stipend plus money to go toward your tuition and fees (either to pay them fully or up to a certain amount). For example, the stipend specified by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program is $34,000/year, by the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship is $102,000/3 years, and by the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship is $36,000/year.

The stipend provided by an external fellowship is usually higher than the stipend you would have received from an assistantship or training grant. Even if the fellowship stipend is lower, some departments will supplement the fellowship stipend up to or above the departmental base stipend. It’s unusual, though not unheard of, for a fellow to receive a lower stipend than his classmates funded by assistantships or training grants.

Further browsing: PhD Stipends

An external fellowship also confers rare negotiating power to you. Negotiation is likely to be most effective when you are a prospective graduate student with multiple offers to (tactfully) play off one another. The fellowship stipend might be supplemented by a department every year, or the department might pay a one-time bonus to the fellow. If you receive a fellowship while already enrolled in a PhD program, you can also ask for a supplement or bonus. (Be sure to ask other fellows in your department if any extra money was conferred to them.) Something else you can negotiate for is additional years of guaranteed funding after the fellowship ends.

3) Fellowships Give You More Autonomy

Because fellowship money is separate from your advisor’s grants, it can in many cases increase the control you have over your own research pursuits. It may allow you to shift the focus of your dissertation away from the main thrust of your advisor’s research, facilitate a collaboration with another group, or add a side project to your dissertation that isn’t aligned with your advisor’s grants.

4) Fellowship Sometimes Pay Above Your Stipend

In addition to paying your stipend and (part of your) tuition and fees, some external fellowships award you additional money for conference travel or professional development.

A Former Downside

Up through 2019, fellowship funding had one major downside: It was not eligible to be contributed to an Individual Retirement Arrangement (IRA) (unless it was reported on a Form W-2, which was rare). However, starting in 2020, fellowship income is eligible to be contributed to an IRA, eliminating this one major downside.

Further listening: Fellowship Income Is Now Eligible to Be Contributed to an IRA!

Why You Should Apply for at Least One Fellowship (Even If You Don’t Win)

While the best result of applying for a fellowship is that you’ll actually win it, there are positive side effects even if you don’t.

1) Shows Initiative/Effort

Applying for fellowships when you’re not required to (like you have a guarantee or reasonable expectation of funding) shows you are willing to take initiative to further your training and career. You are trying to provide for yourself instead of depending on your department or your advisor. Even if you are not successful, this is an admirable quality; your advisor or potential advisors will probably be impressed at your effort.

2) Good Practice

Applying for fellowships somewhat resembles applying for grants, although usually abbreviated. If you are going to be a career researcher, you will have to develop the skill of successfully pitching yourself and your ideas to funding agencies. Applying for fellowships and predoctoral grants is good practice for the larger grants you’ll apply for later.

The Most Compelling Reason to Apply for Fellowships

The most compelling advantage to winning a nationally recognized fellowship is not its superiority as a funding source or how the process benefits you or your advisor, but rather its role as a CV-booster. Winning a prestigious fellowship early on in your career sets you up well to win larger and more lucrative awards later on. While it is of course possible to win fellowships and grants later in your career without winning one in graduate school, it is advantageous to have been favorably evaluated in the past by another agency. Winning a fellowship in graduate school is an early step in creating a track record of obtaining funding for your research, which is something hiring and tenure committees look for.

Prospective graduate students should apply for at least one large, multi-year fellowship (assuming eligibility) so you, if nothing else, can tell the PIs you’re interviewing with that you did it. If you’re in a STEM field, the NSF GRFP is likely to be your first stop. Once you’re enrolled in graduate school, you should consult with your advisor about which fellowships to apply for, at apply to at least one more in your first and second years and any later years in which you are eligible.

The Full Cost of Applying to PhD Programs

August 2, 2017 by Emily

The full cost of applying to PhD programs is significant; it can easily surpass $1,000 and even reach a few thousand dollars if you take a GRE prep course, apply to a large number of programs, and/or pay out of pocket to visit the universities you applied to. Given the enormous impact where and with whom you do your PhD has on your career, it’s vital to present yourself as well as possible in your applications and interactions with faculty. Mostly that’s going to translate to a large investment of time and energy, but sometimes it does translate to spending sufficient money on the application process.

This post outlines the three main direct costs of applying to PhD programs so that you won’t be caught by surprise during the process and can adequately prepare for this expenditure.

Know Your Programs

PhD programs are amazingly diverse. There are field-to-field differences as well as university-to-university differences. It’s imperative that you grasp how the admissions process works in your field and at each university you apply to. There are different expectations regarding the personal and/or research statement that you write, whether you should contact individual faculty members in advance of submitting your application, the purpose of a campus visit, etc.

Another massively important difference is the level of financial support offered to PhD students and what form it comes in. You might be funded by a fellowship, training grant, teaching assistantship, research assistantship inside or outside of your dissertation advisor’s group, or graduate assistantship (or some/all of the above). The support might be year-round or only during certain semesters, and it might be guaranteed for a certain number of years or at the discretion of your advisor or department. You might or might not have to pay fees or insurance premiums out of pocket. You must to know what is typical in your field to evaluate the offers that are ultimately extended to you.

The best way to figure out these largely unspoken cultural and policy differences is to ask current students or recent graduates of the programs you’re interested in. Tap your alumni networks and any relevant personal connections (LinkedIn can help you find these). Faculty members in your field at your current institution or a faculty advisor charged with supporting prospective PhD students are also wonderful resources.

The GRE(s)

While the predictive capabilities of the general GRE have come under fire, most universities in the US still ask for general GRE scores and sometimes subject GRE scores on their applications.

Further listening: Seriously, Can We Ditch the GRE Already?, Does the GRE Predict Which Students Will Succeed?

The registration fee to take the general GRE is $205 and to take the subject GRE (biology, chemistry, literature in English, math, physics, and psychology) is $150 as of July 1, 2017. Test-takers with qualifying financial needs can receive a 50% discount on the fee.

If the programs you’re applying to weight the GRE in their admissions decisions, such as by setting a minimum score, you could decide to study for the exam so you can perform your best. You can avail yourself of free resources available through the ETS website or purchase a review book (tens of dollars), course (hundreds of dollars), or tutoring (thousands of dollars). Whether or not you spend money preparing for the test, you may choose to devote significant time to it. However, extensive preparation for the exam is totally optional, and your time may be better spent on other aspects of your application.

Download the PhD Applications Budget

This spreadsheet lists all the application costs in detail and calculates your total budget.

Application Fees

Most application fees for US PhD programs fall between $50 and $100. Here are a few examples of fees for the 2017-2018 application cycle:

Clemson University: $80 for domestic applicants and $90 for international applicants
Indiana University at Bloomington: $55 for domestic applicants and $65 for international applicants
Johns Hopkins University: $75
North Carolina State University: $75 for domestic applicants and $85 for international applicants
Rice University: $85
University of California at Davis: $105 for domestic applicants and $125 for international applicants
University of Kansas: $65 for domestic applicants and $85 for international applicants
University of Notre Dame: $75
University of Utah: $55 for domestic applicants and $65 for international applicants
Washington State University: $75

Many universities also offer fee waivers for qualifying applicants, the details of which can be found on their websites.

In addition to the application fee that the university charges, you will also usually pay a fee to send your GRE scores and transcripts to each university. You can choose to send your GRE scores to four universities for free on test day for the general GRE and upon registration for the subject GRE. To take full advantage, make sure your application list has four schools finalized on it before you are prompted to send the free scores. ETS charges $27 to send your score from each test to each additional recipient.

With the full cost of each PhD application hovering around $100, the cost of applying to a handful of PhD programs adds up quickly. Determining the number of schools to apply to is a challenge: too few, and you risk the randomness of the application process leaving you with no acceptances; too many, and you spend a lot of money and spread your time thin, possibly harming your chances of getting into the university that would fit you best.

Visits and Interviews

Another field-by-field difference is whether the application process involves an interview or campus visit.

Some programs admit or reject applicants outright, and if a prospective student wants to visit the university, she’ll do it on her own dime and schedule. Some programs request interviews, but the interview is conducted over video or the prospective student pays to visit campus. Most STEM programs arrange for a visit weekend, where a group of prospective students is flown to campus to meet with faculty and be courted by the program. That visit weekend might include interviews upon which the admission decision will depend or simply serve to sell the program to admitted students.

The out-of-pocket costs for the visits could be $0 if everything from the flight to your meals are paid for by the department or reimbursed (be prepared to front money, though!) or the applicant could be responsible for the full cost (up to hundreds of dollars for flights, lodging, ground transportation, and food). Even if you think the program will pay for everything, it’s a good idea to budget some walking-around money for each visit in case a meal ends up going unreimbursed or you want to do some sight-seeing or buy a souvenir.

While deciding what programs to apply to and preparing your applications is very time-consuming, it can be done on your schedule. One of the hidden costs of campus visits is the time it takes to leave school or work for 1-3 days. If you have a (part-time) job, save some vacation time or try to shift your hours around so that you don’t have to forgo any wages to go on the visits. However, for schools you are seriously considering, it’s worthwhile to miss work to properly evaluate the programs, and that will need to be factored into your applications budget.

The temporal and monetary cost of applying to PhD programs generally – and the application fee in particular – serves as a disincentive to apply to too many programs. It takes so much time and money to fully investigate and apply to each program (not to mention actually choosing which you will attend!) that you should be judicious about which institutions make your list. This requires carefully evaluating your own research and career goals as well as the programs, but you will without question benefit professionally and personally from this careful introspection in the application stage.

How much did you pay to apply to graduate schools? Did you incur any costs not listed here?

How Graduate Students Are Financially Distinct from Young Professionals

July 5, 2017 by Emily

Two young adults graduate with the same major from the same college in the same year. One of them gets a job and the other enters a funded graduate program. Their financial lives have just diverged, despite their similar professional starting points, and it’s not because the graduate student lacks an income.

Here are the top ways graduate students are financially distinct from their young professional former peers.

Limited Income, Unlimited Training

Graduate students are among the best and the brightest college graduates, but that isn’t reflected in their stipends/salaries.

The value proposition of graduate school is that the student will be provided with training, and therefore the stipend is only intended to cover living expenses (more or less) to keep the student from undertaking outside work. (Of course, some students undertake unfunded PhDs or lose their funding at some point.) So the grad student’s income is suppressed, and there is little opportunity to increase it without engaging in a side hustle. This is very different from a regular job, where there is a chance for promotion or at least opportunity to take a different job with a better salary without derailing your career trajectory.

A compounding factor in this situation is the uncertainty of the length of the training period. It’s unusual for a PhD in the U.S. to take less than five years, and apparently the average is 8.2 years. This is such an issue that asking a PhD student when she’s going to graduate is viewed as a faux pas. It takes an unusually driven graduate student and motivated advisor to accurately set the end date for the graduate degree more than a year in advance, let alone at the start of grad school. And even the end of graduate school doesn’t mean the student will get a big income boost, as 65% of PhDs will continue their training as postdocs.

These factors together mean that a grad student has a low salary for an uncertainly long amount of time: at minimum half a decade, and for many a decade or more.

Not a Full Employee

The exact nature of the relationship between the university and the graduate student is being reinterpreted at many universities around the US due to the recent National Labor Relations Board ruling that allows the unionization of graduate student assistants at private universities.

Graduate students are certainly “students” in the eyes of the university, and graduate assistants are also considered “employees” secondarily. The benefits offered to graduate students therefore often straddle these two statuses; they receive some or all of the benefits that undergraduate students do, but virtually always less than other classes of employees like faculty and staff.

Commonly, graduate students take part in the student health insurance plan, and the premium might be partially or completely paid as one of their benefits. Beyond that, benefits vary widely by university, school, and program. Some graduate students may have defined vacation policies while others’ are left to the discretion of advisors; some get dental and vision insurance alongside health insurance; some receive subsidies for housing or childcare; some receive a free or subsidized gym membership; very few even have access to a 403(b).

Common financial advice to young professionals to take full advantage of employer benefits by contributing to a 401(k) at least to the full match amount and maximizing the value of life, disability, health, dental, and vision insurance benefits therefore does not apply to graduate students. Conversely, graduate students may access to student benefits that are very unusual outside of universities, and it’s very important in those cases that the students are aware of all their benefits.

Fellowships Do Not Provide Taxable Compensation

While grad students receiving stipends have an income, they don’t all have “taxable compensation” or “earned income.” Graduate students (and postdocs) whose salaries are paid by fellowships are not being compensated/earning their income. (Their income is still taxable, however.) They are not employees, but neither are they self-employed. Therefore, they are not eligible for tax benefits that are tied to having compensation or earned income, such as IRA contributions and the earned income tax credit. Having an income that is not reported on a W-2 also may throw a wrench into the process of taking out a mortgage. This situation is very hard to wrap your mind around when you first hear about it because it is so different from what (self-)employed people experience.

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Low Taxes

The silver lining to having a low income is that you don’t have to pay much in the way of income taxes. Nearly all graduate students whose only income is their stipend will fall into the 15% marginal tax bracket or lower. Therefore, tax reduction strategies that might be recommended to young professionals are not as beneficial for graduate students. For example, contributing to a Roth IRA is a great idea for a graduate student with taxable compensation, while a young professional with a higher income might benefit more from using a traditional IRA or 401(k).

The unexpected bonus to being in the 15% tax bracket or lower is that the current federal tax rate on long-term capital gains and qualified dividends is 0%. Therefore, even graduate students who are saving for retirement outside of tax-advantaged retirement accounts can minimize the tax bite on their investments.

Finally, graduate students do not have to pay FICA tax, either because they have a student exemption or because they aren’t receiving compensation. Young professionals can’t easily avoid that 7.65% tax bite.

Access to Student Loans

Lastly, graduate students have the option to take out student loans. If the student experiences an income drop or a personal emergency, they could take out a student loan to cover it, whereas a non-student would more likely turn to credit cards or personal loans. While using a student loan in these circumstances might be advantageous in some ways (for example, the interest rate is almost certainly lower than the interest rate on a credit card), student loans are more uniquely dangerous than other kinds of debt because they cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. A graduate student, because of this access, therefore needs enhanced information and counseling when looking to take out a new loan.

In what ways are graduate students financially different from their age-mates who have real jobs?

Simultaneously Earn Extra Money and Advance Your Career

April 17, 2017 by Emily

In my final year of graduate school, I participated in a leadership program at my university. In the course of this program, all the participants worked on group projects, the subject of which was how to improve graduate student and postdoc career development. My group decided early on that we would focus on how trainees could participate in internships to gain work experience.

A version of this post was originally published on GradHacker.

Instantly, our group uncovered a culture clash: I was coming from an engineering program in which internships were fairly encouraged and some students even consulted or started their own companies. Two other group members were in the biological sciences, where the farthest you were allowed from the bench was Woods Hole, MA. The fourth group member was in a humanities program and insisted that 100% of his classmates got tenure-track teaching positions and therefore would be totally uninterested in any career development aside from teaching (a claim the rest of us found dubious).

Ultimately, we were able to agree on a project that helps students gain relevant experience outside of academia by thinking beyond internships to volunteering, part-time jobs, freelancing, launching new programs, taking courses, etc. The process of collecting testimonials on these career-developing experiences opened my eyes to the many ways grad students can advance their careers, even if their advisors or programs frown upon it.

Since I’m a money-minded person, I was particularly interested in the examples of grad students who earned money from their career-developing experiences. That really seems to be the best of all options—gaining relevant work experience and some extra cash, of course in balance with dissertation work. Internships are the most obvious way to accomplish this, since they often pay more than assistantships, but I found that many grad students had strategically chosen a variety of non-internship experiences that also fit the bill.

Below are a few examples of students who landed or created career-developing work experiences that also paid them. These examples are drawn from our Think Beyond Internships project from last spring (not specifically paid experiences, but many are) and my series on side jobs (not specifically career-developing experiences, but many are).

1) Summer intern

Alice completed a paid summer internship at a medical device company doing work related to her dissertation research, which confirmed for her that she wanted to pursue an industry career after her PhD. In addition, she gained “great contacts and references,” and “it was also really helpful to see the way PhDs were viewed at a big company … and understand the corporate mindset.”

2) Weekend consultant

Kathayoon created her own consulting practice evaluating zoos and aquariums, which was in line with her dissertation work. She found her first client through a mentor, and then more clients approached her; she traveled on weekends to complete the evaluations. Consulting helped her “build a lot of important skills … make connections to people in [her] field who acted as study subjects for [her] dissertation, and … get a job after graduation.”

3) Part-time analyst

Adam worked on a part-time, hourly basis as a research analyst for an investor relations firm, writing reports and updates. Not only was this a paid position that “made [him] realize how underpaid [he] was as a graduate student,” but he took a full-time job at the company after he finished his PhD. He said, “The best part was that I had an opportunity to try out my job before starting full-time. How else do you know if you want to launch a career in a certain field?”

4) Freelance editor

Julie and Amy freelanced for a scientific journal article editing company as contract editors. They edited articles related to their fields of study on a pay-per-assignment basis. Because of this this experience, Julie “read much more widely than [she] ever would have on [her] own and… [thought] more critically about what [she is] reading.” She also noted the networking benefits to working for her company. For Amy, “the contract job was perfect because [she] learned a lot and could do as much or as little as [she] wanted.”

5) Semester-long science policy fellow

I participated in the Christine Mirzayan Science & Technology Policy Fellowship after I finished grad school, but many of the other fellows in my class were current graduate students. We worked at the National Academy of Sciences for 12 weeks, learning about careers in science policy, gaining relevant work experience, and networking like crazy. The fellowship was designed to give graduate degree-holders a taste of science policy; they know that some of the fellows will pursue careers in science policy, but others will take their experience back to academia or into other sectors. My mentor agreed to serve as a reference for me for future positions, and many of the other fellows were able to stay on at the Academies after the fellowship or landed other science policy positions in DC. We received a stipend for participating in the fellowship.

I hope these examples have excited you about the possibility of finding paid work that also advances your desired career path. Before I conclude, I offer three tempering notes:

1) Some graduate programs explicitly disallow outside work in their assistantship or fellowship contracts, so you should check whether being paid will get you in hot water with your funding source or advisor. However, I think the spirit of this exclusion is more important than the letter. The point as far as I can tell is that your program wants you to make progress on your dissertation at a reasonable pace and not get distracted by outside commitments. But are a few hours of paid work a week really any more or less of a distraction than many other activities graduate students engage in (socializing, hobbies, self-care, raising children, etc.)? I think you should use your own judgment in how to balance your main goal of completing grad school with your side job and other pursuits and discern when you might need to refocus more or solely on your graduate work. In my own observation, some programs that state their students are not allowed outside employment will actually encourage work that is related to the student’s thesis topic.

2) All of the examples above and most in Think Beyond Internships involve students in STEM disciplines. I am hoping that is selection bias because the vast majority of my group’s contacts were STEM grad students and that students in other disciplines are also able to find paid, career-advancing work. I would love to hear from some non-STEM graduate students who have engaged in this type of work in the comments below.

3) Even if you aren’t able to find a job that combines both purposes of advancing your career and paying you, you can still achieve the goal that is more important to you (or both, through separate experiences). You can volunteer your time in such a way that advances your career (there are plenty of examples on Think Beyond Internships), or you can earn some extra money from unrelated work.

I wish you all the best in both setting yourself up for your post-grad school career and generating some extra cash flow!

Did you have paid outside work during graduate school, and if so what did you do? How strict is your department in disallowing students from working? How have you advanced your career during graduate school, aside from your dissertation work?

Can a Graduate Student Have a Side Income?

February 8, 2016 by Emily

Graduate students receiving stipends are often interested in supplementing their stipends with some kind of outside work, yet unsure if such work is permissible or advisable. The short answer is yes, of course, as an autonomous individual you can generate an income outside of your pay as a graduate student. The better question is ‘What are the possible repercussions – both negative and positive – for developing a side income during graduate school?’

Further reading:

Is outside work/income explicitly disallowed in your contract or the terms of your funding?

Graduate student stipends come from one of two broad sources at any given time: an assistantship or a fellowship.

Some universities require students serving as research assistants or teaching assistants to sign an employment contract. If you signed such a contact, check it through carefully for prohibitions against outside work/incomes. If outside work is explicitly disallowed and you work anyway, you are putting your assistantship at risk.

When you accept fellowship funding, you likely agree to some kind of terms. Check through the terms for the funding carefully to see if outside work is disallowed either by the funding source or your university.

It may be worthwhile to figure out what exactly is considered outside work for the purposes of the contract/funding terms. It is unlikely, for example, that rental income would be considered a violation, and there may be other exceptions for passive or self-employment income as well.

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Is outside work ‘frowned upon?’

Sometimes outside work has not been explicitly disallowed in a contract or no contract has been signed. In this case, evaluate the culture of your department to decide if developing an outside income will somehow get you in trouble, and if so how much trouble. The adage that it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission may apply here. If any student caught with outside income is immediately dismissed from the program or put on some kind of probation, the benefits of a side income may not be worth the risk. However, if students seem to be allowed a reasonable work-life balance, the time commitment for a side income would probably go unnoticed.

(For international students) Is outside work explicitly disallowed by your visa?

F-1 visas issued to graduate students allow them to work up to 20 hours per week for their universities (e.g., as research assistants or teaching assistants), but not to have any other type of outside work (with the exception of work approved under the Curricular Practical Training or Optional Practical Training programs). This type of visa permits passive income, though what exactly constitutes passive income is not well defined. If you are an F-1 visa holder, developing a non-passive side income may jeopardize your visa.

What are the exceptions to the above rules?

While “No way!” may be the first-pass answer you receive when you ask if outside work is permitted by your program, there are often exceptions.

Career-advancing side jobs such as short-term fellowships and internships are encouraged in many fields, and these positions are sometimes far more lucrative than grad student stipends over the same period. Grad students sometimes consult within their academic areas of expertise with their advisors’ blessings and sometimes alongside their advisors. One of my grad school classmates co-founded a company prior to applying for her PhD (she pursued the PhD to better serve as the company’s CSO), and her ongoing involvement running the company was well known and respected among the faculty.

These are just a few examples of ways that outside work may be viewed by your department and advisor as aiding your progress through graduate school and career development rather than detracting from it. Even if your department doesn’t allow outside ‘jobs,’ it may be receptive to certain types of employment opportunities that are sufficiently educational.

Can you generate a side income without appreciably taking away from your degree progress?

You are already undertaking an enormous opportunity cost by pursuing a graduate degree. Despite the benefits you will likely experience by having a side income, make sure that they are not outweighed by the side income’s subtle costs. The main cost to watch out for is your progression through your program slowing. If your side work is taking time, energy, or creativity away from your primary job of being a grad student, you may want to forgo it in favor of focusing more completely on your work. In contrast, some grad students may consciously or subconsciously have a limit to the number of hours they are willing to work on their research, yet have additional time and energy available for other activities.

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How would your advisor react to learning of your side income, and how likely is it that he/she will find out?

Your advisor’s attitude toward outside work or income probably matters more than any other person’s. If your advisor has high expectations of time spent working on your dissertation or RA and is generally a strict or unforgiving person, you likely won’t want to risk getting on his or her bad side by developing a side income. Red flags for that situation are an expectation of significant amounts of face-time in the lab or office and other advisees not having outside pursuits like hobbies, an exercise regimen, a social life, or children. On the other hand, if your advisor does value work-life balance and has been satisfied with your progress, a judicious choice of side job will probably go unnoticed or not be objected to.

What are the benefits of having a side income?

For all the potential risks of developing a side income, they can be enormously beneficial to a graduate student’s quality of life and career. The best type of side job, in my opinion, is one that both pays well and advances your career.

The additional income generated by a side job is the most obvious benefit. Grad students are paid so little per hour in their primary work that many types of side jobs come with a better hourly rate. For some grad students, a side income is the main reason they are able to stay out of student loan debt, build an emergency fund, start saving for the future, or take a well-deserved vacation.

A side job can help you learn or practice new skills, gain work experience, and network, all of which increase your post-graduate employability. Many graduate students with side jobs report that the work directly or indirectly helped them land their first post-PhD jobs in “alternative career” positions.

Finally, a side job done well or a side income that steadily brings in earnings generates a sense of accomplishment. It seems that every graduate student goes through one or more periods of projects falling apart or low motivation during her degree. Having something to do outside of your research that you feel competent in or that has a tangible positive outcome can be quite beneficial for your mental health.

Further reading:

Can you develop a passive income stream?

If you have concerns about your advisor or department’s approval of a side job or want to work completely on your own schedule, a passive income stream may be the perfect solution. With passive income, you put in capital (usually time) up front, and then collect the income in perpetuity without any ongoing work. There isn’t much to object to about that!

If you are/were a grad student with a side income, please share it in our Side Income Series!

Vote with Your Feet, Prospective Graduate Students

November 9, 2015 by Emily

When I was applying to and interviewing for grad school, I told myself that the only factor I would consider when selecting a school was the advisor with whom I would work. I wanted to do high-quality research in my sub-discipline of interest and wouldn’t let the reputation of the program, the city, or anything else get in the way of working with the best advisor (for me) possible.

Thankfully, my preferences with respect to the non-research factors crept into my decision-making subconsciously when I compared the programs I’d been accepted to. Ultimately, I decided that two potential advisors at different universities would be equally excellent for me to work with, and I allowed the cities the universities were in to break the tie. Namely, one city had better weather… and my then-boyfriend-now-husband was already enrolled in a PhD program there.

Now that I have completed graduate school and corresponded with thousands of students at universities across the US, I realize just how fortunate I was that my decision-making process didn’t completely backfire on me. Yes, your research advisor and the quality of the research produced by your department is an important consideration, but not to the exclusion of other factors affecting your quality of life.

Your stipend and benefits offer will greatly affect your lifestyle during graduate school and possibly your net worth for the rest of your life. Consider the same student accepted to two programs, one of which would force her to live paycheck to paycheck while the other would allow her to save. This disparity in savings ability over even this short period of time can result in a difference of hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in retirement due to the power of compound interest.

Further reading: Whether You Save During Graduate School Can Have a $1,000,000 Effect on Your Retirement

If you are a competitive applicant—meaning you’ve been accepted to two or more programs—you have the opportunity to take your financial offers into consideration. While you shouldn’t necessarily accept the largest stipend and benefits offer (after adjusting for cost of living), you should vote with your feet by vocally declining offers that too low to provide you with a reasonable lifestyle.

If you do decline any admissions offers for this reason (perhaps among others), you should let the departments know why. At the same time that you are competing with other applicants for admissions, the departments are competing with one another to attract the best individuals and overall class. Universities pay attention to how well they are doing in comparison with their peer institutions on various metrics, and many of them try to offer stipends and benefits that are in line with their chief competitors. (Some programs even offer unusually high stipends when they are trying to move up in rankings.) The departments pay attention to which programs they they lose students to and why. Giving them the extra information that the lower stipend (relative to the local cost of living) or lack of benefits played into your decision is a great act of service to both the departments and students if they choose to use this information to improve how they treat their current and future students.

Once you have accepted a program’s offer of admissions, you still have the opportunity to advocate for higher pay and better benefits, especially through assembling with other students. However, your strongest position for making your voice heard is often before you accept an offer or upon your rejection of it. Once you have started graduate school, the switching costs become so high that departments practically have you over a barrel. Graduate students rarely negotiate their offer letters, so one of the best actions they can take is to vote with their feet by declining unacceptable offers outright. It’s hard to overstate how much universities depend on graduate students and postdocs to bring in grant money, produce research that raises their prestige, and create their other major product (undergraduate education). This value should be reflected in the pay students receive, and if it’s not, the departments need to hear about it.

Further listening:

There are two practical steps prospective graduate students can take to strengthen their position when accepting or rejecting admissions offers:

1. Apply to a number of programs. I know it’s expensive and time-consuming to add schools to your application list, but that cost pales in comparison to how much going to a poor-paying or unsupportive program will hurt you over the years you are in it. Having multiple admissions offers will give you the best chance of attending a program that will support you as a whole person.

Further reading: The Full Cost of Applying to PhD Programs

2. Thoroughly research the stipend offer letter extended to you by each program you gain admission to as well as the benefits provided by the university and how the benefits have changed over time. While some of that research is available online, you will almost certainly need to talk with multiple current students to get the real scoop. Ask them if they can live comfortably on their stipends and how they define comfortable. Ask them if there are any common financial pain points that students gripe about. Ask them if out-of-pocket fees have increased in the past few years, whether the ACA has changed their health insurance benefits, and about any special considerations you have such as partner benefits, childcare subsidies, or support for students with chronic medical conditions. If the students share their perception of an “us vs. them” attitude on the part of the administration or an administration that is powerless protect students from federal and state funding changes, take that as a major red flag.

Further reading: Before PhD Admissions Season Starts, Discover What a Standard Offer Is in Your Field

When I was applying to grad school, I didn’t know about benefits, unions, how states cutting higher education funding affects grad students, or health insurance subsidies. I had no idea that a good advisor or good department could be housed in a university that has an adversarial relationship with its students. I consider myself very fortunate that I ended up at a university that provided a reasonable stipend and benefits and had a supportive administration just by following my research and weather preferences.

I don’t want you to get ‘unlucky’ in this process simply because of a lack of information or that you only received one admissions offer. I want you to accept an offer that allows you to live a reasonably comfortable lifestyle in graduate school for your own well-being, and I want you to signal to departments whose offers didn’t meet that standard where they are lacking for the benefit of their current and future students. If enough of us vote with our feet by rejecting low offers, the departments and universities will hear us and be forced to change.