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This Grad Student Advocates Individually and Collectively for Higher Stipends

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In this episode, Emily interviews Alyssa Hayes, a rising 4th-year graduate student in nuclear engineering at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Alyssa is a first-generation college student who experienced food insecurity and other forms of financial precarity as an undergraduate. Now that she earns a stipend of approximately $45,000 per year and lives in a low cost of living city, she feels financially secure—and wants the same for all graduate students. To that end, Alyssa shares two advocacy approaches: 1) Ask for what you need. As a prospective graduate student, she negotiated for a top-up fellowship to be added to her assistantship stipend. 2) Share pay information with your peers across universities and use that data to collectively bargain for higher stipends in individual programs. Alyssa and her peers in nuclear engineering are currently gathering this data, including stipends, benefits, cost of living, and university and departmental ranking.

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Teaser

00:00 Alyssa: I think that like all grad students should feel as comfortable as I feel in terms of my financial situation. I think that I make a fair wage, and maybe I’m biased because of my previous financial situation, but I personally have no complaints about the amount of money that I’m making right now. I feel supported by my advisor and by my department. I feel that I am valued for my labor. And I think that shows through how much they pay me. And I think that everybody should be able to feel that way about their department and about their advisor.

Introduction

00:44 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others. This is Season 12, Episode 5, and today my guest is Alyssa Hayes, a rising 4th-year graduate student in nuclear engineering at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Alyssa is a first-generation college student who experienced food insecurity and other forms of financial precarity as an undergraduate. Now that she earns a stipend of approximately $45,000 per year and lives in a low-cost-of-living city, she feels financially secure—and wants the same for all graduate students. To that end, Alyssa shares two advocacy approaches: 1) Ask for what you need. As a prospective graduate student, she negotiated for a top-up fellowship to be added to her assistantship stipend. 2) Share pay information with your peers across universities and use that data to collectively bargain for higher stipends in individual programs. Alyssa and her peers in nuclear engineering are currently gathering this data, including stipends, benefits, cost-of-living, and university and departmental ranking. You won’t want to miss Alyssa’s powerful messages peppered throughout the episode!

02:30 Emily: Longtime listeners of the podcast will remember the interviews I’ve published with Sam Hogan, a mortgage originator specializing in graduate students and PhDs, an advertiser with Personal Finance for PhDs, and my brother. Several years ago, I told Sam how I’d heard over and over again about graduate students and PhDs being denied mortgage loans because of their unusual income sources and income history and asked him to look into the issue. Following that request, Sam actually developed quite an expertise in this area and is now the go-to mortgage originator for people with non-employee fellowship income. He even found a way around what we thought was an insurmountable barrier in the 3-year continuance requirement. If you’re considering buying a home, especially if you have non-W-2 income, I encourage you to reach out to Sam for a quote. He has a new website, which you can visit at PhDHomeLoans.com, or you can reach him on his cell phone, 540-478-5803. You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s12e5/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Alyssa Hayes.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

03:56 Emily: I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today Alyssa Hayes. She is a rising fourth-year graduate student in nuclear engineering at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. And we have a lot to talk about in terms of like her pay and her money mindset. And I’m really excited for this conversation. So Alyssa, thank you so much for volunteering. And would you please introduce yourself a little bit further for the audience?

04:16 Alyssa: Thank you for having me! Yeah. So, I’m currently at the University of Tennessee. I did my bachelor’s degree in the same field at the University of Illinois. My current work involves like, you know, fusion engineering, specifically. I do a lot of computational plasma boundary stuff. But yeah, I guess we’re not really talking about any of my technical work today. <Laugh>

Money Mindset Up Until Starting Grad School

04:38 Emily: No, but very related to your experience as a graduate student. So, let’s take it back a little bit and tell me about sort of what your childhood’s like, and specifically how it relates to money and how that sort of developed your money mindset through your childhood and through undergrad, up until you started graduate school.

04:58 Alyssa: Yeah. So, I come from a biracial family, and my father comes from a long line of Americans in the military where, you know, his family was very like blue-collar labor. Like there wasn’t as big of a push to go to college, especially during the time when my dad was growing up in the seventies. And my mom is an immigrant from the Philippines. And her family was not extremely wealthy in the Philippines. And they came here when she was younger to pursue a better life. And she currently works at Walmart and has been for like almost 20 years and has supported my three siblings and me through retail and fast food. So, I was the first person in my family to pursue college. And we lived in an area where we had a lot of, like, there was a lot of really good funding for the school system, even though we weren’t in the nicest part of town. There were other folks who were pretty well-to-do, so I took advantage of everything that I could at that high school. And I got a full ride at the University of Illinois to pursue nuclear engineering. I didn’t have a lot of financial security while I was there, but I didn’t have to worry too much about student debt or tuition or paying fees or anything like that.

Food Insecurity in Undergrad

06:18 Emily: That’s amazing. The full ride to college, and obviously you went after it, <laugh> starting in your earlier years. But tell me a little bit about like the discretion that you had over money. Like, were you budgeting or like, how did you manage it? How did you manage what money you had above that, you know, what’s paying for tuition and room and board and so forth?

06:39 Alyssa: Yeah. So, I was first of all, extremely food insecure and didn’t realize it until I entered grad school. Once a month, I went out to lunch with like a professor who like, he knew I was food insecure, even if I didn’t know I was food insecure, and he would like pay for my food and we would like go somewhere nice that I couldn’t afford to eat at. For the most part, like there were times when like either because I, you know, couldn’t afford to go out to eat as often, but didn’t have the time because I was so stressed out to like make food from home. I like skipped meals often when I was in undergrad. I was very cheap and frugal all the time. I was constantly like thinking about like, I am hungry all the time and like bringing, like, trying to bring snacks with me. Apples were my thing.

07:22 Alyssa: I brought apples everywhere because they were so easy to just grab and then eat on the go. And then it was mostly about trying to make money to pay the bills and to pay rent. My rent, like in undergrad was only like $450 a month. But I worked a minimum wage job in the like plasma lab on campus. And then I worked as a TA as well. So that added stress onto my undergrad. I wish that I didn’t have to have worked so hard in order to like pay to live while trying to be a student. But that’s what it was like. Luckily, I don’t have any student debt now, but I couldn’t really you know, spend the money that was granted for my tuition on, you know, myself or the ability to make ends meet.

08:14 Emily: Yeah. So, I sort of misspoke or misunderstood earlier. You had a full ride in terms of the education cost, but not your living expenses. So, you were working to pay all of your living expenses.

08:25 Alyssa: Yes.

08:25 Emily: Yes. Okay. So that is a little bit like graduate school in a sense, except you didn’t have like a job that you were given. You had to cobble together like multiple sources of income, it sounds like. And there’s more management. You were probably paid, you know, less than maybe the average graduate student is. So, that sounds really stressful.

08:43 Alyssa: I had a little bit of spillover for my scholarships that I had received. So like it paid for like tuition and fees plus a little bit of extra and then like that would go towards rent, but it wasn’t like enough.

Student Loans for Dorm Payment

08:55 Emily: Why didn’t you take out student loans during that time?

08:59 Alyssa: So, I did have to take out student loans during my freshman year to pay for the dorms. Because dorms are a scam. If anyone who’s like not currently in grad school is listening to this, dorms are a scam. Do not live in them longer than you have to. The university says it’s so that way you can you know, help get acclimated to the college experience, but that’s a lie. They’re trying to take your money. I had to take out student loans to pay for those. Other than that, I didn’t take out any other student loans because I was afraid of the debt like piling up. I knew that like one of the types of loans didn’t charge interest until you were done, but the other type of loan did. And I, you know, didn’t want that to accrue while I was in college.

09:38 Alyssa: And I knew that I like had done all my budgeting and I knew that I was able to work to pay for all my stuff. So, I just kind of like, you know, I didn’t think anything was like wrong with the way that I was living. I didn’t see any like problems with like being so frugal or so cheap or skipping meals or missing sleep and stuff. But like, I guess grateful now to past me that I didn’t do that because now I don’t have any student debt. I paid off what little loans I had in like six months. But I did have to like work a lot to get there. But I was also happy doing the work that I did. I enjoyed being a TA and I enjoyed working in a research lab. And honestly, I’m glad that I didn’t end up like working somewhere that didn’t have anything to do with nuclear engineering. So that way I was able to apply all of that to my career trajectory later on in grad school, by having that research experience.

Funding and Finances in Grad School

10:36 Emily: Yeah. This kind of goes to show you like how we aren’t even aware of our own beliefs around money and our own mindsets around money until we sort of consciously try to take a step outside and examine them. And I understand that you can say now, “Oh, past me, I didn’t even know at the time.” You can say things like that because you’ve now reached a new phase in your financial life, which is the graduate student phase. So, tell us about how you’re funded now and how your finances are going.

11:00 Alyssa: Yeah. So, when I was applying to grad schools, I applied to the University of Illinois where I originally wanted to stay because I really loved working for my advisor there. And I also applied to the University of Tennessee because I had, through conferences and networking, I met my current advisor here. And I told both schools that I would stay at Illinois for less. And Illinois didn’t have the power to offer, or like the nuclear engineering program at the University of Illinois, didn’t have the power to offer me more than like the base research assistantship that they offer to like all of the graduate students there. But the University of Tennessee has these like top-off fellowships that they will add to a base stipend in order to get a student to commit to the university who’s maybe deciding between two programs.

12:01 Alyssa: And with just the base stipend, Illinois, I think pays, I might be mistaken on the exact number, but I think they were offering like $26,000 a year. And the University of Tennessee’s base pay at the time was $30,000 per year. We’ve since gotten a raise and now it’s $33K. But the top-off fellowship that was offered to me was $10,000 a year. So then it became a no-brainer. And I was like, I would stay at Illinois for less, but not this much less. And so, now I am making about $45K with bonuses and like a couple of like, you know, service-based scholarships that I get on a somewhat regular basis. So, it kind of evens out to about $45,000 a year with the raise and the top-off fellowship. And so now, I feel like more of a regular adult that has a livable amount of money and I’m not as worried anymore about like, “Oh God, I saw a movie this weekend and now I can’t do anything else fun for the rest of the week.” And so like, I don’t have any of those like worries anymore, but I do still think about them. Like that mindset is always in the back of my mind of like, “Oh, like, is this like a waste of money? I don’t need to be doing this,” or, “This is so expensive,” you know?

$45K Stipend in Knoxville

13:24 Emily: Okay. There was so much in there. So much good stuff that I want to follow-up on. Let’s take it kind of in turns. I want to put a pin in the negotiation part of it. We’ll come back to that in a moment. But let’s focus now on like again, still your money mindset. You just mentioned some of it. You don’t have to be as worried about small joys and extravagances that you allow yourself. So, you’re making about $45,000 a year. Very good stipend for a graduate student, especially in a, you know, lower cost of living area. How, like give us some context about how much that pays for. Because obviously in other areas of the country, $45K is like, “Oh, I’m barely scraping by.”

14:00 Alyssa: Yeah.

14:00 Emily: How does that feel for you right now?

14:03 Alyssa: Knoxville is very affordable to live in. When you’re going to school, like in not really a big city, but more of like a rural part of the country, that definitely helps. Although there’s definitely, you have to balance that with being a person of color, too. So there aren’t other Filipinos, like in this whole city, it seems. I haven’t met any of them or seen anybody else like that’s the same race as me. There’s also a lot of segregation here. And so like, there are parts of town that you can’t go to. So you kind of have to balance that when you’re like, “Oh, if I live somewhere rural, then that’s more affordable to live in,” but there are parts of those areas that also may not be safe for you if you’re in a similar situation.

14:48 Emily: Yeah. I’m glad that you pointed that out because it’s something that I often don’t acknowledge or that can go unacknowledged that people of color in some cases do not have all of the options available to them that White people do, or, you know, other like races. Because as you just said, there are some areas where you can’t live, you have to pay the premium to live in a different area because it’s simply not an option to feel safe, you know, paying the least amount of rent that you could or whatever. So, a very important consideration when people are choosing graduate schools to kind of, to feel out if you are going to feel safe there, and what is the university going to do to support you?

15:21 Alyssa: And while we’re kind of on this, it might also be worth mentioning the current abortion scenario in the United States. If that’s something that matters to you and you have the ability to become pregnant, like a lot of the 26 states that are passing laws that restrict your access to it may also be something to consider because a lot of those contain the rural areas where it is more affordable to attend a university there.

15:46 Emily: Another wrinkle. Yeah. We’re recording this in May, 2022. I don’t know exactly when we’re going to release this. There may be more developments between now and then. But yes, an issue that I think many of us were not expecting to have to consider when we’re choosing graduate school. So, another good point.

Prioritizing Happiness

16:04 Emily: Let’s talk more about the money though. So like, you’re able to pay, you’re able to live a more comfortable lifestyle. Your mindset is still, how is your mindset doing? Like, are you able to splurge on yourself a little bit, or do you still have some of the mindset lingering from when you grew up or your undergraduate experience?

16:22 Alyssa: A lot of it is more, I guess, in the back of my mind, but I have put like a conscious effort into prioritizing my own happiness. Not just in the way of like work-life balance, but financially to ensure that like, you know, spending money on things that make you happy is not wasted money in the same way that spending time on things that make you happy is not wasted time. And so, like I saw two movies this weekend <laugh> instead of one with my partner, because I wanted to and that helped distract me from some heavy things that were going on in my life. And that was money well-spent. Yeah, it wasn’t on a bill, but it’s something that I like, you know, put effort into not feeling bad about that. So, I’ve been dealing with grief this weekend, and I’ve been spending a lot of money, like additional money than I would in any other week on eating out a lot. Just so that way I wouldn’t have to like do household chores, like dishes or worry about cooking while I’m dealing with grief.

17:29 Alyssa: And so like, those are like, you know, that was part of like, I guess, a change in mindset that I noticed where it was easier for me to do that in my current financial scenario, like situation versus when I was in undergrad. Like I had those thoughts in the back my mind of like, “Wow, I’m spending a lot of money. <Laugh> this week alone between, you know, funeral costs and like the additional money I was spending on food.” I’ve easily spent like a thousand dollars in the last four days on not bills, but that was easier for me to accept now and probably even easier now versus like my first year in grad school, when that would’ve been a harder, like mental hurdle to get over.

18:16 Emily: Yeah. And I’m assuming that this simply would not have been an option for you in undergrad to spend in this way. It is not an option for many graduate students, either, who are being paid less. And in our prep for this conversation, you said to me something along the lines of, you know, you’re living well right now given what you’re paid and given the low cost-of-living, and you think that all graduate students should feel this way. Can you elaborate on that a bit?

18:42 Alyssa: Yes. So, currently, like I said, I make $45,000 about per year. And whenever I tell other graduate students that like, sometimes, like I try not to let it like come off as like a brag because of the low cost-of-living in Knoxville, too. But it’s more of that I obviously agree that like everybody should, you know, talk about their wages, especially to your coworkers. Because I think that like all grad students should feel as comfortable as I feel in terms of my financial situation. I think that I make a fair wage, and maybe I’m biased because of my previous financial situation, but I personally have no complaints about the amount of money that I’m making right now. I feel supported by my advisor and by my department. I feel that I am valued for my labor. And I think that shows through how much they pay me. And I think that everybody should be able to feel that way about their department and about their advisor.

Commercial

19:52 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. I have set a big goal for my business and our U.S. PhD community broadly. My goal is for every graduate student, postdoc, or postbac in the U.S. who is not having income tax withheld from their stipend or salary to be offered training on how to 1) estimate their future income tax liability, 2) determine if they are required to pay quarterly estimated tax, and 3) prepare to pay their tax bill or bills through setting up a system of self-withholding. I provide just such a training, which is my asynchronous workshop titled Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients. Now, some universities, institutes, or funding agencies already offer such a training, and they have no need to work with me. But others won’t allow their employees to touch the topic of taxes with a 10-foot pole, and that’s where working with me can really benefit everyone. Would you please send me an email and tell me which camp your university falls into—or if it’s somewhere in between? You can reach me at emily@PFforPhDs.com. Furthermore, let me know if you want to take Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients for free or think that the cohort coming in this fall should, and I’ll reply with how you can help make that happen. I look forward to hearing from you! Now back to our interview.

Learning to Negotiate

21:33 Emily: I wanted to come back now to the negotiation piece. So, I think you mentioned something like, you know, you told both universities that you would accept a slightly lower stipend from University of Illinois. Tell me like, you even brought up money in these conversations. Like why were you even having conversations with the programs? What gave you the idea that you could talk about this and that maybe there would be more for you there?

21:56 Alyssa: So, part of it was because while I was at the University of Illinois, I got comfortable asking for money. One by being a leader in a lot of the different like student programs and then having to correspond regularly with the staff and the department head there. So, I knew a lot of those people well, and at one point I wanted to go to the Nuclear Innovation Bootcamp in the year 2017. And there was like obviously paying for travel flight costs. I didn’t have to pay for lodging as part of that Bootcamp, but there was also a hefty registration fee and I couldn’t afford any of that. And so, like there was no route to like ask for it to be paid for. There was no like standardized path or form that you could fill out for things to be waived.

22:46 Alyssa: So, I wrote like a little one-page request to my department saying like, this is this program. I really want to go. This is what I’m going to get out of it. Will you pay for it? And then at the very bottom, it said more information about why I may qualify for financial need available upon request. But I didn’t really like talk about my financial situation. I just explained what the program was, and why I wanted to go. And I gave that to them, and with no further questions they paid for everything. I think they even, I want to say they reimbursed my flights, but if I hadn’t bought them, they may have paid for them in advance. I don’t quite remember. But I had realized that like they wanted to support me, and that they were okay with students kind of going the outside-of-the-box route in terms of asking for money.

23:38 Alyssa: And that was when I was a sophomore in college. So, that gave me the confidence, then, when I was in grad school to ask for a higher rate or wage when I was applying to grad school. And they, unfortunately, weren’t able to do it or I don’t, you know, necessarily know all the behind-the-scenes that went on there. And sure, they said no, but I wasn’t at all reprimanded for asking in the first place. Like nothing, you know, bad happened to me. The best that I could have done was ask, even if they said no. So, I’m glad that I did. And it turned out well for me because at the University of Tennessee, I didn’t even know that there were top-off fellowships. But I got one because I was upfront with the University of Tennessee about how I would have, you know, taken the lower offer elsewhere and about how I was considering other schools and kind of in the same way that you’re like, I learned how to like negotiate a car price down from my dad.

24:36 Alyssa: So that was, I guess, a little bit of a privilege that I had because I had to buy a car to like move to Tennessee, because they have terrible public transit here. It’s kind of the whole tell the other you know, person that you’re negotiating with about this other thing that you’re also considering. Make that look nice and shiny. So that way they’ll try to give you a little bit of a better offer. I ended up also getting this laptop and all of the accessories that go with it out of the same deal with my current advisor. Like I asked them to buy me, you know, personal equipment that I could use to like, you know, be a person outside of grad school, too. Like I didn’t have a functioning laptop at the time. And so all of that got thrown in as well.

25:23 Emily: I think that’s such a powerful message, like, and I’m glad that you learned it as a sophomore in college and that you were able to then apply it in your process for applying to graduate school. Like just ask, like, just let people know of your need and let them figure out how they can best, you know, work behind-the-scenes to make that happen for you. So, you got this amazing like top-up fellowship. I mean, $10,000 is a very significant, you know, add-on to an already, you know okay base stipend. So, that sounds amazing. Just, I think this is a wonderful message for any prospective graduate students, or anybody at any stage, really just ask for what you need. Let people know, and especially like you said that you have options and this would help your decision. I think you said earlier, like it was a no-brainer to go with the University of Tennessee once they made that, you know, augmentation to their offer. So, so glad to hear that.

Normalizing Talking About Grad Student Stipends

26:12 Emily: Let’s talk more about stipends for other graduate students as well. So, I understand you’ve recently kind of entered into some conversations with peers about how we can, union is not the right word, but sort of collectively bargain or like share information about stipends. So, tell me more about that endeavor.

26:33 Alyssa: Yeah. So, normalizing talking about our wages is like step one in changing the culture around laborers. So that way we can all benefit collectively. But we kind of wanted to take this a little bit of a step further among nuclear engineering grad students specifically because by going to conferences and networking, not just with employers or other universities, et cetera, but we also spend that time networking with each other. And so, because it’s so common for grad students to kind of see the same people all the time in the nuclear engineering programs, because we’re so small, a lot of us just know each other from like all across the country. And I know that this isn’t something that a lot of other fields have the benefit of because it’s not realistic for like every electrical engineering graduate student to all know each other.

27:31 Alyssa: But at least to know somebody who knows somebody at pretty much any nuclear engineering graduate program is realistic for us. So, we got together at the most recent student conference. And we are currently building a spreadsheet that has everybody’s like gross pay, all of the things that you have to pay for that are related to your health insurance or your academic costs, your fees, and then what your take-home pay is, and then comparing all of that to the cost-of-living based on where your university is, your university’s ranking, and your department’s ranking. So, that way you can kind of compare and contrast. So that way, if there is a department that is ranked highly compared to its university’s ranking, which implies that that department has more power to maybe change the pay that their graduate students are receiving, but those graduate students maybe aren’t being paid well, then they can use the collective sheet to say like, this is where we’re falling right now, compared to how much these other similar programs are paying their graduate students. And we think that you should, you know, value our labor a little bit more and that we deserve to have higher wages. And so, use like that collective information for other institutions to bargain. So that way maybe they can get the same level of financial comfort that I am afforded right now.

29:07 Emily: This is an amazing effort. I totally commend you and your peers for like this idea, and starting work on this. It sounds like you’re in the data collection stage.

29:17 Alyssa: Yes.

29:17 Emily: Is that right? Like you’re building the spreadsheet, putting in all these different factors. I love that you mentioned like ranking of university, because I have some work in this area as well, and I just think about cost-of-living. I don’t think about like how, you know, the university is regarded or their program is regarded. So, I think that’s a really interesting like additional element. I’m not sure when this episode will come out in relation to these other ones, but I have some other podcast episodes slated for 2022 on this same issue of like sort of information-sharing about stipends and bargaining in some manner to increase stipends. So, this is wonderful and it aligns very well with that.

Health Insurance (Non-)Coverage

29:53 Alyssa: The thing that like, the one piece of information that like made it, like click in my brain where I was like, “We need to like, do something more about this and just talk about our pay,” was that one of the grad students that I didn’t even know well, like while I was at U of I, that I was just kind of like chatting with at a social at this conference told me that his health insurance was not covered. And like, mine is, like, I don’t, it’s not taken out of my pay. Like, yes, it’s like technically like, “Oh, like you could have just, you know, they could have just given me the money that they’re using to pay for my health insurance,” but like the University of Illinois’ grad student health insurance is like taken out of their pay. So, that’s like a part of like the gross pay that they advertise. And I was like, that’s not cool. <Laugh> what do you mean your health insurance isn’t covered? So then I asked to have a meeting with the department head there because I like knew him well from when I was a student there. And he actually was the one who gave me the idea. He was like, why don’t you get more of this information from other schools? And then, so we’ll go from there.

30:59 Emily: That’s excellent. And I totally agree, like in PhD Stipends as well, I have a way to enter like what your stipend is, but then like, what are you paying out of that stipend in terms of fees and tuition and whatever. And like for health insurance and other types of fees as well, like that can add up to thousands of dollars a year. So, that’s not some insignificant like, oh, it’s a $20 fee, whatever. This is a really big percentage of like that overall stipend that they’re receiving.

31:23 Alyssa: Yeah.

31:24 Emily: The other thing I’m really excited about for your project too, is like this fellowship that you received is probably one that’s offered sometimes to other students as well. So, it’s good to have both sets of information, right? Like what’s the base stipend and then, “Oh, sometimes this additional funding is available.” Wouldn’t it be great if we could pull everybody up to that level or, you know, that kind of thing? So, I just, if you aren’t already, I would definitely encourage you to include that kind of information as well in the spreadsheet. What different students are being paid, even within the same department.

31:52 Alyssa: Yeah, we did get a raise this year, which took effect about two months ago. So, because of the change in the economy throughout the pandemic, all graduate students in the nuclear engineering department at the University of Tennessee received a 10% stipend raise. So, full research assistants are now making 33 instead of $30,000 per year as the base-level stipend. Additionally, this was through the effort of our nuclear engineering graduate student assembly, which is kind of like also not a union, but a collection of just the nuclear engineering grad students. We managed to through a couple of years actually of pressure convince our department to begin covering our academic fees. So, which also kind of feels like a raise in terms of take-home pay. So, now we no longer have to pay as much and many students don’t have to pay any fees anymore for things like, you know, your basic like academic, you know, transportation fee, student health center fee, recreational fee. So, all of that is pretty much covered now.

33:02 Emily: For sure. And it makes it so much easier to compare apples to apples, right? When those kinds of fees are covered. But I’m sure in your spreadsheet you’ll be accounting for everything. So, I love this idea. I’m so excited for y’all to like move forward with this and hope it comes together in the near future.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

33:16 Emily: Well, Alyssa, it’s been such a pleasure to talk with you and I’m so glad that you volunteered to be on here, and you’ve had so many really vital messages that have come through in this interview. And I’m really grateful for that. I wrap up all my interviews by asking my guests one final question, which is what is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD? And it could be something that we’ve already touched on in the interview, or it could be something completely new.

33:39 Alyssa: I had a similar question asked of me in my most recent D&D session with my friends. Just like we were talking after. And, specifically, their question was, how much of my success is rooted in like just being confident? And that applies to so much in that, like I had the confidence to ask to go to all these different programs, the Bootcamp, to different conferences. And when I’m at conferences, then while I’m there, I’m networking with all these different potential employers and powerful people, like some of my future reference letter writers are people that I’ve only ever interacted with at conferences and have no other like relationship with them. And so, by networking with those people that, you know, that’s how I met my current advisor, and that’s how he learned about my work.

34:42 Alyssa: And that gave me the confidence to then talk to him about my financial situation. And you know, even asking to go to conferences in the first place built my confidence in asking for funding and asking for a raise. And it really taught me that, I mean, the best thing you can do is to at least ask and see if, you know, people will just give you money. Because sometimes they will. So, I don’t necessarily like the mindset of, you know, just apply to everything because it also can take resources and time. But apply to the things that you can, or that you have the spoons to. And it’s a way to try to tackle imposter syndrome is to know that other people have it too, but you deserve to have the confidence, regardless of any imposter syndrome you might have, to put yourself out there.

35:41 Emily: Thank you so much, Alyssa, for those concluding thoughts. Again, it’s been great to have you. Thank you so much!

35:46 Alyssa: Yeah. Thank you! Thank you for having me!

Outtro

35:53 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? I have collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance…but it helps! The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

Negotiating Your Grad School Stipend and Benefits: Five Success Stories

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In this episode, Emily presents five stories from anonymous guests of successful stipend negotiations between prospective or current graduate students and their PhD programs. The episode is primarily for prospective grad students going through admission season right now and secondarily for current graduate students. Emily summarizes her key take-away points from these stories and her conversations with graduate students about this issue over the past few years. The goal of this episode is to convince you that stipend negotiation does happen, at least on occasion, and perhaps even to give it a shot yourself to improve not only your own bottom line but potentially that of your peers as well. Most of all, Emily wants this episode to get PhD students talking about their pay—how much, when, from whom, in exchange for what. To that end, please share this episode and enter your stipend into PhDStipends.com.

Links Mentioned in this Episode

Teaser

00:00 Guest 1: Overall, I would say that there’s definitely no harm in asking and negotiating a graduate school offer. If I didn’t ask the answer would have automatically been no. And at first, I was scared to ask and really only did because my advisor, whom I admire, encouraged me to do so, but now that I did, I am very grateful and definitely realized the benefits of asking nicely for a better graduate package.

Introduction

00:28 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 eight, episode seven, and I’m joined today by several anonymous guests. This is a compilation episode, all about negotiating your grad student stipend. It’s primarily for prospective graduate students going through admission season right now, and secondarily for current graduate students. I have collected five stories of successful stipend negotiations between prospective or current graduate students and their PhD programs. I’ll also share my observations from talking with graduate students about this issue over the past few years. My goal is to convince you that stipend negotiation does happen, at least on occasion, and perhaps even to give it a shot yourself to improve not only your own bottom line, but potentially that of your peers as well. Most of all, I want this episode to get PhD students talking about their pay — how much when, from whom, in exchange for what?

01:33 Emily: There are two specific action steps that I’d like you to take to further the cause of pay transparency and increasing stipends for everyone, whether you are a prospective, current, or former PhD student. One, share this episode. I hope it will serve as a conversation starter. Two, enter your stipend into PhDStipends.com. I recently gave the website and database a facelift, so you’ll find an updated and more detailed survey along with the over 9,000 previously acquired entries. After you enter your stipend, share that site too. I’ve been contacted by numerous graduate students and faculty members who have used the data to advocate for higher graduate student stipends in their departments.

02:16 Emily: This is such a thrilling time of year for prospective PhD students. I know most of us want graduate school to be better for the PhDs that come behind us than it was for us. I hope the negotiation, examples and best practices that you hear in this episode contribute in a small way to that goal.

02:34 Emily: Now it’s time for the book giveaway contest. In February, 2021 I’m giving away one copy of the simple path to wealth by JL Collins, which is the Personal Finance for PhDs Community book club selection for April, 2021. Everyone who enters the contest during February will have a chance to win a copy of this book. If you would like to enter the giveaway contest, please rate and review this podcast on Apple podcasts, take a screenshot of your review and email it to me emily@pfforphds.com. I’ll choose a winner at the end of February, from all the entries you can find full instructions pfforphds.com/podcast.

03:15 Emily: The podcast received a review this week titled a masterclass in personal finance for grad students. The review reads quote: “I tell everyone I know about this podcast. Every episode is not only packed with value from others, lived experiences, but also actionable info from Dr. Emily Roberts. My favorite eps are always about side hustling and house hacking”

03:36 Emily: Thank you so much to BKT for this incredible review! I’m really glad to know which subjects are the most relevant for listeners. Without further ado, here’s the compilation episode on negotiating your grad student stipend.

03:53 Emily: I have five anonymous stories for you today regarding negotiating a grad student stipend and/or benefits. I solicited these stories from my mailing list and on Twitter, and they all occurred in 2019 or 2020. I wanted to keep the examples of recent, but just know that several more people volunteered their negotiation stories from earlier years.

04:14 Emily: By the way, I don’t get a lot of pushback on Twitter when I talk about financial matters, which I’m happy about, but soliciting these negotiation stories was another matter. Multiple people responded that they believed it was impossible to negotiate a grad student funding package or that it was unethical to do so because it would create pay disparities among a cohort, as if that didn’t already exist. Anyway, I thought it was interesting that the subject seemed to get some people’s hackles up, even though salary and benefit negotiation is an expected step prior to accepting any other type of job. That is just confirmation for me, that this topic warrants even more sunlight.

04:53 Emily: I’ve covered or touched on negotiation and academia, both at the grad student stage and leader in multiple previous podcast episodes, which you can find links to in the show notes. My intentions with publishing this episode are to: one, bring awareness to the fact that negotiation is at least theoretically possible for graduate students, particularly during admission season. This could be considered part of the hidden curriculum. I want to bring it into the open so that all graduate students benefit from this knowledge. Two, share the stories of grad students who have negotiated successfully, wo that prospective graduate students in 2021 in later years can learn from their examples. Three, raise grad student stipends and improve benefits, generally, not just for the occasional individual.

05:41 Emily: One way to do this is by collective action, such as unionization, which I’ve covered in several other podcast episodes. Another is for prospective PhD students to say to the people who hold the purse strings that livable or dare I say comfortable funding packages are important to them as people and vital to their academic and career success in graduate school. Prospective, graduate students have relatively more power than current graduate students to get this message across.

06:11 Emily: Okay, I’ll get off my soapbox now and play for you the five stories I received. Four of these negotiations occurred during admission season, before the person formerly committed to the PhD program in question. One of the negotiations occurred after the person was already enrolled in a program. So don’t think that negotiation is out of the question just because you are past the admissions stage.

Guest One

06:37 Guest 1: Hello. I want to thank Emily Roberts for having me on this podcast. I’m going to be talking about how I successfully negotiated my graduate student stipend offer. For some background information on me, I recently graduated from my undergrad and I did a double major in psychology and biology. And this last year I applied to graduate school for a PhD in neuroscience. When I heard back from all of the schools that I interviewed at, I was accepted into a few different programs and I managed to narrow down my decision to two programs that I really, really liked. Since I really liked both of these programs, I was really stuck at that point, and I was kind of struggling on which one to decide where I would attend graduate school.

07:39 Guest 1: However, there were a few differences between these two schools. One of them was offering me an additional scholarship on top of the stipend and the other one wasn’t. I was actually leaning more towards the one that was not offering me the scholarship. So I thought that I could even just get a little more money from them then that would completely solidify my decision to attend that school. I figured if one of the schools was offering me more money than other programs like the other one, I was debating between probably do the same thing. I was lucky enough to know someone else that also interviewed at the school that I was deciding on and they told me that they were offered an additional $2,500 for the first year. So I was like, okay, I know the school could provide me at least $2,500 more. So I talked to one of my advisors and I told her the entire story and she encouraged me to negotiate for more money. She is a very powerful woman in the STEM field and I look up to her tremendously, so I trusted her and wanted to follow her.

08:56 Guest 1: After that, I wrote a very kind email to the program coordinator asking if there was any possible way that the school could provide me additional support as it would aid in my decision to ultimately attend that school. My email to her included that, I told her I was very seriously considering accepting the offer to attend that school because I really enjoyed the program, the campus, the location was incredible, and it perfectly aligned with my criteria in selecting a graduate school. However, I told her that while I’m excited for the opportunity to attend the school, another school who I’m also considering for graduate school is offering me an additional scholarship on top of the stipend to attend their program, so I was wondering if there was any possible way that this program could offer me any additional support to attend. I told her if, so I’m certain I will choose the school to complete my graduate studies. And of course, I thanked her for her time and her consideration. After I sent that kind email, the program corner coordinator replied back and told me that they could offer me the $2,500. Obviously after that, I was very thankful to them and I decided to attend their program.

10:16 Guest 1: I would like to note that this $2,500 still did not match the scholarship that the other school was offering me. They were offering me about $17,000 spread out over three years. So although the offer made to me by the other school was not nearly as much, I figured that if they were willing to at least give me no whatever they had, and that I was leaning more towards that program anyway, that I would do well there and that I was thankful to them for giving me additional support.

11:01 Guest 1: Overall I would say that there’s definitely no harm in asking and negotiating a graduate school offer. If I didn’t ask the answer would have automatically been no. At first I was scared to ask and really only did because my advisor who I admire encouraged me to do so, but now that I did, I am very grateful and definitely realize the benefits of asking nicely for a better graduate package. I hope all of that helps anyone that is trying to negotiate their student offers and know that it is possible. Thank you, Emily again for having me. Bye.

Guest Two

11:41 Guest 2: Thanks for covering this topic of negotiation. And I’m excited to be telling you a bit about my experience with this. This past season, the admission season starting in 2019, I applied to PhD programs mainly in biological and biomedical sciences with a couple of neuroscience programs mixed in there as well, and I ended up getting a decent number of offers. I think I had five acceptances by the end, which was great.

12:10 Guest 2: I was mainly deciding between two schools. So there was one on the East coast and one on the West coast. The East coast school was a very well-respected and highly ranked program. They had a lot of really great research that I was interested in, and they also had a pretty decent stipend. It was about $34,000 for I’d say a moderate cost of living area. It wasn’t low cost of living, but you could certainly live very comfortably with that stipend in that local area. That was also with, you know, health insurance covered and tuition and fees all paid for all that good stuff.

12:46 Guest 2: The thing I didn’t like about the East coast school was the location. I really didn’t like the city all that much. It also wasn’t the best area for having a good job market for my husband. I wasn’t against it, but I was still kind of shopping around and then the other school, which was actually the last program that I interviewed at, was on the West coast and this program basically checked off all my boxes for me. It had great research, it had a pretty strong reputation and I loved the city. I loved the weather. I liked the vibe of it. It really strong job market for my husband’s field. The only downside was the cost of living. This school actually had the exact same stipend as the East coast schools, about $34,000 with the same benefits and tuition coverage and all that, but it was quite a bit more expensive. And so the quality of life you could have on that stipend would just end up being a little bit lower. You would have to budget a little more carefully. And in particular, the main difference was housing. Housing in that area, if we wanted my husband and I to get like a one bedroom apartment, especially one that was fairly close to campus, it would have been at least $2,000 a month, which would be pretty hard to swing on a $34,000 stipend. And I didn’t want to count on my husband’s income just because we hadn’t moved there yet, we didn’t know how long it was going to take him to get a job and all that. That made me a little bit nervous.

14:13 Guest 2: What I did is I went to the West coast school after I was accepted and I basically laid out everything I told you — that I really liked their program. It was exactly what I was looking for in graduate school. The only issue was that the cost of living made it really hard to live there, and I mentioned that I had this other offer that checked off all the other boxes, other than location. As I went in, I knew vaguely that they had some kind of a priority housing system. At the school, the way graduate housing normally exists, they have subsidized graduate student housing, but you can only live in it for up to two years. And I had heard vague rumors without much detail that there was some way that they would allow you to live there for your entire PhD, not just two years. And the subsidized housing is literally about half the cost of what would normally be. You can get a one bedroom for about a thousand dollars a month. So I just asked them directly, can you nominate me for whatever program that is? And if you do, I will commit to the school immediately. I sent this to the admissions coordinator basically. He emailed me back. He said, I have to check with some people and I have to confirm how many spots they have for this program. So I said, sure. And then a week later they emailed me back and said, Hey, we’re nominating you for this program, congratulations, and I accepted right away.

15:31 Guest 2: I’m really happy with how this negotiation turned out. I think it’s going to make our living situation much more comfortable with not having to pay basically twice as much for our housing. And also not having to stress about like moving and trying to find an apartment before I moved to that city because I don’t live in the area currently. I think it all worked out really well and I would definitely encourage other students to try to negotiate their PhD offers as well, and especially be open to not just negotiating the base stipend, but also those other benefits. Hope this is helpful for other people who are in the same situation.

Guest Three

16:05 Guest 3: Hi. I am currently a first year PhD student in neuroscience at an R01 university and when I was trying to decide which program to attend, I did negotiate my offer a little bit. I’m not sure if I would super consider it a negotiation, but basically what I did do was I had several offers, and one of them was financially a lot more attractive than the other, as well as being from a very fancy name school. Not that the school I ended up with wasn’t a great university, but the other one I had an offer from that was financially a little bit better was one of the top three universities for my area of study. What I did was I emailed the program director and said that a few days before the deadline was to decide and basically phrased it as I know this is a bit of an awkward question, but I was wondering if the graduate fellowship package, which was about $31,500 a year for six years, was something that was potentially negotiable.

17:13 Guest 3: I basically told them that I was accepted to another program, mentioned the name of the university and mentioned that it was a special fellowship offer for underrepresented minority applicants, because I did fit into that category and that because it was such a difference, it made it hard to ignore this other factor that because I was more excited about the university I ended up at, that I was wondering if there was anything they could do to make the offer a little bit better, if there was any possibility for getting additional fellowship because I know the university does give out a few, or if there’s any wiggle room, another area of the offer.

17:53 Guest 3: My email was very casual and very sincere. I was a little bit overly apologetic, I think, but considering my request, I thought that was appropriate. I let him know that if there’s any more information I could provide them with that I could definitely do that. I think for me, what was important was like something that I think certain people wouldn’t mention is that I did fit into this underrepresented minority category in case that was something that might increase my eligibility for certain offers. I did get a reply from the professor that was the director of graduates studies for this program saying that all the offers are out and they weren’t able to negotiate an increase in actual stipend, but they would include an additional incentive called some sort of award. I’m not going mention the name, that they discussed with the director of the institute. It would be $1,500 a year for the first three years of graduate study to be used on educational or training expenses, such as like a new laptop, travel, anything like that, that would help me in the early stages of my graduate career. And that would compound for the first three years. So I can use it for pretty much anything that could potentially contribute to my education.

19:15 Guest 3: This was something that they were adding, in addition. I realized that they couldn’t actually add something to my offer, but this was something that was possible to add on top. It obviously isn’t that big of a difference, but it was something that showed me they did care a little bit more and just made my decision a little bit easier. It did end up, well for me. They also mentioned that they were considering offering it to me, before I emailed them, that’s why I mentioned, I’m not sure how much of a negotiation this truly was, but it seemed to me that it’s pretty common for universities to be able to offer additional money that’s not technically considered part of a stipend, like something like educational costs because a stipend seems like a pretty unchangeable type of offer.

20:07 Guest 3: So that was my situation. The process was easy for me. My decision was easy after that. My phrasing was in my email was very sincere and apologetic. I think it was also important that I mentioned that I really did want to accept an offer from the university I ended up at and that the main thing was that with such a financial difference, it was something I had to consider. So if you are planning on sending an email to someone, I would make sure that they know that you do want to accept their offer. That it’s only financial aspects that are making you hesitate. I wouldn’t ask if you aren’t sure about accepting an offer for that university. Thank you.

Commercial

21:00 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. This announcement is for prospective and first year graduate students. My colleague, Dr. Toyin Alli of The Academic Society offers a fantastic course just for you called Grad School Prep. The course teaches you Toyin’s four step Grad Boss method, which is to uncover grad school secrets, transform your mindset, up-level your productivity, and master time management. I contributed a very comprehensive webinar to the course titled “Set yourself up for financial success in graduate school”. It explores the financial norms of grad school and the financial secrets of grad school. I also give you a plan for what to focus on in your finances each season of the year that you apply to and into your first year of grad school. If this all sounds great to you, please register theacademicsociety.com/Emily for Toyin’s free masterclass on what to expect in your first semester of grad school and the three big mistakes that keep grad students stuck in a cycle of anxiety, overwhelm, and procrastination. You’ll also learn more about how to join grad school prep, if you’d like to go a step further again, that’s theacademicsociety.com/Emily for my affiliate link for the course. Now back to our interview.

Guest Four

22:28 Guest 4: I am an international student from a lower middle income country, and I’m studying at a large public flagship university in the US located in a college town that’s within a significant metro area. I’m in a social sciences PhD program and my department is ranked quite highly, I think in the top 10. Here, there are different funding sources, but the most basic and common that’s guaranteed for everyone comes from the department itself. It pays $20,000 over nine months with no annual increase. Starting in 2020 first year, students get $5,000 for the first summer, but otherwise there is no guaranteed summer funding.

23:10 Guest 4: The stipend is service-based, which means students receiving this must work as TAs for every semester for about 12 hours a week. That’s what’s written on our contract, but in reality, it fluctuates quite a bit. This funding package means that the department covers your tuition, all your fees, like printing, student health, recreation, or fitness, et cetera, and also covers your health insurance, including for your dependents. There’s no other deductions except for taxes. Living wage here is $26,000. So that $20,000 we get is below the living wage. And if you can believe it, many other social sciences departments here have even smaller stipends. But the reality is if you’re single and can budget, well, you can survive. You can live quite decently with the $20,000, but it is below the living wage and there’s no way around it.

24:04 Guest 4: As for negotiating, I wasn’t even aware that you could do it, at first. I did my undergrad outside of the US so I had no idea about funding models here. And also, I guess I just didn’t have the cultural capital, so to say, to know about this process, but luckily at the first open house that I went to, another visiting student told me about it and gave me pointers. He told me to say something during the one-on-one meetings with some professors along the lines of an important factor about going to graduate school includes financial considerations for me, making sure I can live decently while studying, without having to worry about being able to pay for emergencies, blah, blah, blah.

24:50 Guest 4: At that point I prepared my spiel before I started my one-on-one meetings. I was really torn between two universities, both paid the same, same living cost as well, so I didn’t really have full leverage, but both paid below living wage, so that was my first argument. My second argument that I prepared was about the extra constraints I had as an international student, financially speaking. And my third argument was that I received a traineeship from a research center in both universities, which was great. It had certain requirements and usually pay extra, but I found out then that I wasn’t eligible for the funding because of my international student status. I brought up this last point towards the end of the meeting as a way to steer the conversation towards the topic of money. I subtly hinted that I was quite surprised by that and then I just shot straight and brought up my other two arguments. I ended up getting a very validating response, but also as you expect diplomatic. It’s like, we’ll see what we can do, we’ll get back to you. Later that day, I heard other visiting students talking to the director of graduate studies about this, about negotiating during social events or downtimes, so I decided to do the same thing, of course.

26:11 Guest 4: A week after the visits, I emailed the director of graduate studies, again, in both places, just echoing the same points and offering to provide any extra information if they need anything. But that email was mostly just a guise to make sure that this was still on their radar. About a week before the deadline, one school told me that they don’t have news yet it’s still pending. But by then, the other school had promised me an extra $6,000 for the first to work as a research assistant paid for by the professor’s research funds and an award that gave me an extra $5,000 from the research center, so I ended up going with this school. That is when I learned that different professors have different pots of money, of different sizes, sometimes very considerably different. And if you talk to upper year students, they’re likely to be very open about this.

27:09 Guest 4: A few other lessons that I learned from this process, if you have concerns about money, you can be transparent and open about it. You can talk to other visiting students or upper year students because it’s likely on their minds too, or it has been in the past and the conversations may yield interesting insights. If you want to do it, do it. And when you’re talking about money, of course, you need to be polite, and if you’re uncomfortable, I learned that saying something explicit about your discomfort can help the conversation go better. Like, “Oh, I don’t love talking about money,” something like that.

27:48 Guest 4: When you’re doing the ask itself, maybe keep it vague because the prof already usually know what you mean and they know how the department stipend compares to similarly ranked programs, so you don’t have to be too pushy or give a concrete number or anything. I personally think that talking about money with them and reason to your professors should not be a turn off, especially because you will have to talk to them again about money once you’re in the program, and again, when you go into the job market and you’re negotiating or learning what the salaries are like. I think this is good training for you and for me, and part of the hidden curriculum of academia that people talk about. Also, I think expecting your profs to be validating of your concerns when you explain it to them is a very important thing, especially when you’re going to work with them for the next four to six years. In a way this negotiation process can be a method for you to gauge whether or not that professor can be that validating kind of support system for you once you’re in the program. And the worst that can happen is that you realize that they’re not that person and that might be a deal breaker, or that might not be.

29:05 Guest 4: I also realized that international students can be somewhat in a double bind. We are more financially vulnerable, but also we’re not always aware of the system here. Again, this is the hidden curriculum and cultural capital problem. We don’t know that the system here in the US is maybe more flexible than in other countries when it comes to giving accommodations for people. And also we might not be culturally comfortable or adept at negotiating in the American way and advocating for ourselves. I think talking with other international students about this is really important as I learned when I was going through the open house visits as well.

29:49 Guest 4: And lastly, I think the negotiation does not and should not end after you’ve accepted your offer. Negotiation is actually not always an equitable solution to what is ultimately not really an individual problem. It might actually lead to more unequal outcomes when one student is able to get more out of their negotiations than others, just because they have that privileged background to know how to negotiate well and all of these things. I think some ways to address this is to ask upper year students about what advocacy efforts are happening in the department to support graduate students in general, or maybe support international students specifically, if that’s your demographic, especially early in their careers, when they’re more vulnerable and have less resources. To give you kind of an example of the power of advocacy, in our department, we managed to get a promise from our department to fund summers for all first year students after, you know, working with the department to make sure that they know that this is a concern that was important for us students.

Guest Five

30:59 Guest 5: Thank you, Dr. Roberts, for having me on this episode of your podcast. I would say you are doing the Lord’s work. Importantly, this work of yours is sure to prepare one or two howto ask for what they already deserve. Here’s my story in fall 2018 I got an offer, actually two offeres from two universities in the US that I applied to, to come study insect science. Both offers were juicy, or so I thought since I was living in a third world country at a time. Interestingly, I went with the least offer, which was about $5,000 less than the next offer. And by offer, I’m talking about the annual stipend which was $17,000 at a time. So money was never the motivation for me.

31:51 Guest 5: One year in, in the PhD program and I was about $2,200 in credit card debts. Besides my health insurance was so basic that it couldn’t cover for my high insurance. I had to live miserly to be able to get my glasses and whatnot. This began to bother me a lot. This is because I live very simply. I do not eat out. I always cook from home and if I cannot eat in the morning, I bring food along with me to the school. I do not use any fancy gadgets. In fact, 80% of the things that I own were donated to me by graduate students or churches, or I brother was kind enough to lend a brother a helping hand.

32:39 Guest 5: Importantly, I was in debt because my annual stipend was below my standards of living. For emphasis sake, my average monthly expenses, my rent was $595. I pay on average $75 on electricity bill per month. The university bill, which is about $1600 every semester. Now keep in mind, this bill covers the health insurance, international students fee, or what have you. So that means to be able to pay for the $1,600 bill, which is every semester I had to save about three $20 from my monthly stipend. My phone bill is $55 and I pay $65 on my car insurance. I spend about $300 on food. Now, if you had add all of these figures together, you get $1,410. And my monthly take home pay was $1,416.67. And this is the figure before tax. In other words, I get just about $6.67 cents above what my monthly bill is. Again, this figure $1416.67 cents is what I get before tax. Now, if you make the federal tax deduction and the state deduction from my fee, you get way less. I know my federal tax is about $200, but I do not know what the state tax is right now. I’ll probably need to check my pay stub to be able to know what the figure is, but the federal tax is about $200.

34:26 Guest 5: Now, given I’m an international student, I was super nervous about asking for a rise. I went to meet other grad students and post docs whose opinion I value very much on how to navigate this murky water. They all said the same thing: I should never ask for a raise as it might come back to haunt me. So I wasn’t just scared, I was terrified to ask for a raise. But on a certain day, I was reading the book “Self-reliance” by Ralph Emerson in which I saw the quote “Who so would be a man, must be a nonconformist.” And I was all pumped.

35:08 Guest 5: The next day I got to school and I approached one of my advisors. I was more comfortable approaching my male advisor because the atmosphere around him is much more relaxing. I explained how I struggled to meet up with my daily needs, given my monthly stipend. As I anticipated, he was so kind and I listened attentively. He reassured me that I had done the right thing and appreciated me for speaking up because he said he would never have known that I was struggling to make a living had I not approach him. What he did after that was even more amazing. He called me on my way out of his office and he said, “we never had this discussion.” So that way, nothing comes back to me. Later I got an email notifying me of an increase in my annual stipend by $2,500. What is even more interesting is that after six months I got another email notify me of another $2,500 increase in my annual stipend, bringing my current stipends to $25,000, as we speak. And that is my story on how I approached and asked for a raise from my advisors. Thank you.

Key Takeaways

36:34 Emily: Thank you very, very much to the five people who contributed these stories and the others who volunteered. Here are my key takeaways from these stories. One, only negotiate with a program if you are seriously considered enrolling in it. I agree with the approach in these stories of narrowing down to a couple final programs and negotiating with just your top choice or two. Don’t waste, everyone’s time by negotiating with a program that you aren’t seriously considering.

37:01 Emily: Two, there are many different levers that programs can pull to improve your financial situation. The examples we heard in these stories are giving a supplemental scholarship for professional development, giving a general supplemental award, guaranteeing a spot in subsidized housing, increasing an annual stipend and increasing a summer stipend. I’m sure that the constellation of options is unique to each program, which is why your request should be rather general.

37:30 Emily: Three, if you already know who your advisor would be, go ask that person for direction. They may be able to negotiate on your behalf or point you to a next step to do on your own. They are the person most invested in having you complete graduate school successfully. If you don’t yet have an advisor assigned, you’ll likely negotiate with the director of graduate studies or similar.

37:53 Emily: Four, during your negotiation conversation, you should be very polite and express gratitude for the offer of admission, acknowledge that you’re bringing up an awkward subject and express the specific reasons that you want to join their program.

38:07 Emily: Five, while I don’t think you must have a specific reason to be asking for more in your funding package, it doesn’t hurt to have one. Leverage can be in the form of a competing offer, a comparison to the local living wage or personal data regarding the cost of living. I’ve spoken with other graduate students who negotiated after winning outside funding.

38:28 Emily: Six, several of the students in these stories mentioned that of course money was a factor in their decision, but it wasn’t the end all be all. A program being willing to negotiate shows that they are supportive of you. Even if your attempt at negotiation is unsuccessful, there is a world of difference between a program that listens to you, acknowledges your concerns, and cast around for additional opportunities on your behalf, and one that dismisses you out of hand.

38:55 Emily: Seven, several of these students said they only knew that negotiation was possible because other students had tipped them off. I encourage you to talk about the subject openly with your peers and older students. You can use this episode or PhDStipends.com as a conversation starter. You may learn of a financial resource that you can tap. However, as in our last story, don’t be discouraged by people who tell you not to negotiate, if they never tried it themselves. The absence of successful negotiation stories in your circle is not proof that successful negotiations cannot occur.

39:31 Emily: Speaking of unsuccessful negotiations, I did not solicit these kinds of stories, but I have heard a few. Don’t take it personally, if your negotiation is unsuccessful. Like I said earlier, programs have different levers they can pull and some might be super limited. However, if you were attempting to negotiate out of financial need, you should really think about whether you can afford to get your PhD from a program that is unable or unwilling to sufficiently support you financially. Financial stress will curtail your ability to perform academically as well as magnify the financial opportunity cost of getting a PhD.

40:10 Emily: Here are your action steps after listening through this episode. For prospective graduate students: consider negotiating one or two of the offers you have received or will receive this spring. This signals to PhD programs that finance has matter, and that it is a field upon which they can compete for students. For current graduate students: don’t count yourself out on the negotiation front. If you want to be paid more approach your advisor, like the person in our last story did. They should be able to brainstorm with you about methods for accomplishing that and even advocate on your behalf. Speak with your peers and prospective grad students openly about your income and even encourage them to negotiate. The worst case scenario is that nothing changes for you. And the best case scenario is that the department realizes the stipend is an issue and raises it for everyone. For everyone: please share this episode with prospective and current graduate students and enter your current or former stipend and stipend offers into PhDStipends.com. If you can’t already tell, I really want to bring more attention to this issue and sharing this episode will go a long way, so thank you in advance for doing so. If you are a prospective grad student who wants a private space, where we can have more of this type of conversation and even access a training video on how to decipher your offer letters, visit PFforPhDs.com/decipher and join the Personal Finance for PhDs Community.

Listener Q&A: Investing Savings Rate

Question

41:37 Emily: Now onto the listener question and answer segment today’s question actually comes from a survey I sent out in advance of one of my university webinars this past fall, so it is anonymous. Here’s the question: “What percent of income should be used for investment?”

Answer

41:54 Emily: If you’ve been consuming personal finance material for a little while, you’ve probably already heard a few different benchmark answers this question, at least with respect to investing for the goal of retirement. One benchmark that I heard a lot, pre-financial crisis was 10%. 10% of your gross income toward your retirement accounts. If you are a Dave Ramsey follower, he tells you 15%. If you are a FIRE Walker and want to retire early 50% is a common benchmark in that community.

42:29 Emily: So you can see these benchmarks are kind of all over the map, although certainly above zero. Now, since this question comes from a graduate student, I want to emphasize that it is not appropriate, or possible, or necessary for all graduate students to be saving for retirement from their grad student stipends. Some graduate students are simply paid way too little for investing for retirement to even be a possibility. For those of you who were closely following that negotiation conversation from earlier in the podcast, this is something that you should take into consideration when you are planning your negotiation:will you be able to save for retirement from your grad student stipend? So if you have more pressing financial needs than investing for retirement, the answer to this question might be 0%.

43:20 Emily: Now, for those of you who are able and inclined to save for retirement, I will refer back to the financial framework that I talked about in the last episode. In my financial framework, which I developed specifically for our grad students and early career PhDs, investing for retirement comes at step four. So assuming you’ve taken care of steps one through three, and you’re on step four, my answer depends on your age. If you are starting to invest for retirement in your twenties, my answer is 10%, for the moment. If you’re starting in your thirties, my answer is 15%. If you are starting in your forties or later, my answer is 20%. This is a percentage of gross income, by the way, pre-tax income.

44:03 Emily: Now, when you first arrive at step four, it’s not a given that you will have that 10 or 15 or 20% of your income available for retirement investing. So step four is your process of increasing your income and, or decreasing your expenses to the point that you can get to that benchmark. After that you move on to steps five through eight while maintaining that retirement savings percentage in step seven of my framework, we come back around to investing and that’s where I encourage everyone who was saving at 10% from step four, to increase to 15% at a minimum. The logic here is just that most people, most of the time, saving 15% of their income will allow you to retire at approximately what your pre-retirement salary was at age 65 or so. It’s perfectly okay if that savings rate seems lofty to you right now. It’s something that you can work up to over time and of course you have a better shot at achieving it post-graduate school.

45:03 Emily: For my own personal choices in this matter, when I started graduate school, my goal was to save 10% of my gross income toward retirement. I gradually increased that over the course of graduate school so by the time I finished, I was saving about 17% of my gross income into retirement accounts. Fairly shortly after that, my husband and I increased that rate to 20% and it has stayed there for approximately the last five years, as we have been saving for a house down payment. I’m really happy with that savings rate for us right now. After the house purchase, the retirement savings rate might have to come down a bit so we can actually make our mortgage payment, but I’m hoping over the long term to increase it above that 20% benchmark as we do pursue early-ish financial independence.

45:52 Emily: So that’s my answer. And there’s a few different stages, a few different nuances to it, but I hope it gives the listener some clarity. It’s okay if you aren’t able to save anything, especially during graduate school. It’s a really financially difficult time of life, but if you can get to that 10%, 15%, 20% figure you’ll be doing really well. And above that, the question is simply how soon do you want to become financially independent? The higher savings rate, the sooner that date arrives. If you would like to submit a question to be answered in a future episode, please go to PFforPhDs.com/podcast and follow the instructions you find there. I love answering questions, so please submit yours!

Outtro

46:35 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPhDs.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. On that page are links to all the episodes show notes, which include full transcripts and videos of the interviews. There is also a form to volunteer to be interviewed on the podcast and instructions for entering the book giveaway contest, and submitting a question for the Q&A segment. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, here are four ways you can help it grow. One, subscribe to the podcast and rate and review it on Apple podcasts, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. If you leave a review, be sure to send it to me. Two, share an episode you found particularly valuable on social media, with an email list serve, or as a link from your website. Three, recommend me as a speaker to your university or association. My seminars cover the personal finance topics PhDs are most interested in, like investing, debt, repayment and taxes. Four, subscribe to my mailing list at pfforphds.com/subscribe through that list. You’ll keep up with all the new content and special opportunities for Personal Finance for PhDs. See you in the next episode! And remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. Music is Stages of Awakening by Poddington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC podcast, editing and show notes creation by Lourdes Bobbio.

 

How to Negotiate as a Graduate Student or PhD in Industry and Academia

by

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Abby Rainer, a PhD in organizational communication and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. Abby’s dissertation focused on women in STEM careers negotiating their first jobs, and the expertise she brings to our interview is from her education, her research, and her personal experience. We discuss the correct way to frame your negotiation and why that’s challenging for some PhDs; the importance of considering all aspect of your offer, not just your salary; the similarities and differences between negotiating in academia vs. industry; and the biggest misconception people hold regarding negotiation.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

PhD negotiation

Teaser

00:00 Abby: Realizing that negotiation doesn’t have to be a one-shot, do or die, black and white kind of mindset. It can be over time. You will get many, many different chances to negotiate your worth or negotiate your package and everything.

Introduction

00:18 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 six, episode 11, and today my guest is Dr. Abby Rainer, a PhD in organizational communication and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. Abby’s dissertation focused on women in STEM careers negotiating their first jobs, and the expertise she brings to our interview is from her education, her research and her personal experience. We discuss the correct way to frame your negotiation and why that’s challenging for some PhDs, the importance of considering all aspects of your offer, not just your salary, the similarities and differences between negotiating in academia versus industry, and the biggest misconception people hold regarding negotiation. This is a jam-packed episode that will be valuable for graduate students and PhDs at every stage of their careers. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Abby Rainer.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:22 Emily: I have joining me on the podcast today Dr. Abby Rainer, and we’re going to be talking a lot about negotiation and mindsets around that, particularly women in negotiation. I’m so excited for this topic, and Abby is an actual expert. This is related to her PhD work, and she now has a business related to this area. So, she’s going to tell us all a lot more about that. Abby, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. And will you fill our listeners in about your background?

01:48 Abby: Sure. Thank you for having me, Emily. I really appreciate being on here. So, to cover my background in a pretty brief term, I got my PhD from Michigan State University in 2018 and got a similar combination of a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Wake Forest. I got the master’s in 2015 and the bachelor’s at the end of 2013. So, I combined both of those degrees into five years just so I could hurry up and get onto the PhD.

02:14 Abby: I was cross-trained in several different areas that are relevant to today’s topic, including communication, industrial organizational psychology, management, human resources, and then education administration. And then areas that I trained on and did research on as well as other administrative work included areas like social support, stress, family planning, and some health topics. But then I also had a lot of business topics like specifically, if you are looking to negotiate your benefits and compensation packages. And then I looked a lot at STEM career trajectories. So, how women were flourishing and more male-dominated areas and the strategies they use to choose their careers and kind of how those paths sort of manifested for them. And then on top of, with my recent background, I have made courses for grad students on Udemy that cover areas like negotiating your benefits and compensation for grad school. And then also if they want to do more of a process improvement project on their finances, then they can find my green belt training there too, which covers a lot of very simple and straightforward ways to save money and document how you do that. It gives you a lot of tools on how to figure that out.

What is Your Udemy Site?

03:22 Emily: Yeah. Could you repeat the name of your Udemy site?

03:26 Abby: Sure. So, the Udemy is just a sort of, what’s called a MOOCs So, a Massive [Open] Online Course website and people can go to Udemy’s website and then they can just type in things like “grad school funding.” That would be a series of keywords that would bring up my training on graduate school benefits and compensation. And then they could also type in green belt, Six Sigma Green Belt, or Lean Six Sigma Green Belt and also my name. So, that should help them see where that pops up. I’ve only created one green belt training. I’ve not had more than one, so it should isolate that one particular training very quickly.

Abby’s Dissertation: Women in STEM + Negotiation

04:01 Emily: Oh good. Yeah, I wasn’t sure if it was going to be under like your name or like a business name or something. Abby, what’d you tell us a little bit in more detail, what was the subject of your dissertation?

04:10 Abby: Sure. So, I kind of in connection with what I was talking about earlier, I had done research on women in STEM careers and then work on negotiation in general. Like I gave some presentation work on hostage negotiation and terrorism, and this is a very different type of negotiation, but having a background, like a family background in finance, I kind of wanted to combine all those areas and some finance research I had done and specifically look at how women going into STEM careers, specifically their first STEM careers, how they negotiated not only their salaries, but really other types of compensation they could get like their health care packages, how much family time, like leave they had for, for instance, caring for children, and then other areas like bonuses and just work assignments as well.

04:56 Emily: And what drew you to that area? Why did you choose that for your PhD work?

05:01 Abby: I chose that because there was a lot of work that involved experiments, for instance, that created hypothetical situations, but these women were real-life women who had actually gone through actual negotiations in different companies across the United States. And so, I wanted to get a sense of reality. I wanted to see what women were actually going through and I collected a mix of quantitative and qualitative data. I used most of the quantitative data for the PhD sort of dissertation part, but I also created a series of questions in the survey that looked at, for instance, what were the descriptions of the negotiations actually happening, like who was involved in the negotiation? Did they say anything that was maybe discriminatory or that showed some sort of bias toward the women? And so, really looking at those areas, I started to pull some data on things like how much training impacted different outcomes, like how much money women were thinking of walking away with, or how much they actually walked away with.

05:59 Abby: And then I also looked at about 20 different benefits that women were able to get during negotiations, like a series of negotiations, and which ones they tended to get, so I could isolate different trends as to what people were more likely to walk away with other than just the salary being increased.

06:16 Emily: Yeah. I love that you actually took this forward into, let’s not just look at what’s going on, but what interventions are possible to actually help the situation a bit. That’s great. And I’m sure that we’ll talk more about that in a minute here, but just for the listeners. I mean, Abby obviously is an expert in this area. She has a lot to say, so we’re going to move really quickly through a few different questions in this interview. And if you want to follow up with her, which I imagine many of you will want to, check out the website that she already mentioned, her courses and so forth, and you’ll get a lot more of the content there.

Role of Mindset in Negotiation 

06:48 Emily: So, okay. I have been talking more and more recently about mindset and about its importance in personal finance. And I know that you also know something about mindset with respect to negotiation. So, what role does mindset play when you’re going into negotiation?

07:07 Abby: I think that mindset has everything to do with not only how confident you are, but also how effective you are. And you have to monitor how you are coming across in an interview so that you have to develop that sense of mindfulness. That way you can do what’s called pivoting. So, pivoting will be that you notice that someone’s not responding particularly well to a negotiation tactic, like using too much silence, for instance. You can turn the conversation around and ultimately start executing a series of steps based on that reaction to get what you want. So, you have to really stay in the present with the conversation, that way you’re able to assess the situation ongoing.

07:40 Abby: And you’re just able to create new strategies or choose ones that you already have in mind as you go along and just keep responding to what’s there, not what’s going on in your head and not what you think should be happening.

How Can PhDs Overcome a Scarcity Mindset when Negotiating?

07:50 Emily: I see. So, kind of what I’m hearing is what happens in negotiation is not totally set, linear, this is the exact script kind of path. And you have to be kind of adaptive to what is going on in the situation. And how can a PhD–like I know a lot of PhDs come into this whole post-PhD career thing with a lot of hangups that they developed in graduate school, around money and around their worth and so forth. And, you know, we might even call this like a scarcity mindset, or like a poverty mindset. And so, how does a PhD set that aside when they’re going into a negotiation? Like how do you actually overcome that if that’s what’s happened during graduate school?

08:31 Abby: I think that one really good way to look at it, especially if you were going into a non-academic job or if you were going into your first professor job and you’re not really sure, kind of where you stand compared to other people is, think through how to calculate and communicate your ROI or return on investment. That’s a very important business term not a lot of PhDs really think about or know how to calculate or communicate. But whenever you’re in a negotiation, let’s just say, I’m going to use a real life example of mine. I was interviewing with a major retailer, specifically in the jean sector, once for a job. I had to fly out to a different state to do that. And as I was there, I talked with, I think about 10 to 20 people.

09:11 Abby: And just one day, I had a series of individual meetings with some people, like higher-level directors, and then a larger lunch with a smaller group of people who were lower-ranked. I think they were maybe talent recruiters or something. And so, what I learned while there was that people wanted to hear how you were able to contribute to the table in ways they understood. So, with that particular case, I was interviewing for a jean company. So, some language to use when communicating my ROI would have been things like “best-sellers.” Like if I wanted to predict who was going to be engaged in a company over time, so looking at employee engagement, how to improve that, I could say the five best-sellers or in more or less research terms that grad students might understand, the five predictors of work engagement would be, let’s just say supervisor quality and four other things.

10:03 Abby: So, learning how to speak in ways that people in industry understand that don’t necessarily rely on statistics, because a lot of them don’t really know very much, if anything, about statistics is a good idea. And you can apply that mindset too if you’re applying to academic jobs like being a professor or a postdoc. You just have to know, for instance, let’s just say for ROI, you wanted to calculate how much grant money you’ve brought to the table when applying for different grants, or how many students you’ve taught, or ways that you’ve saved the university money. Other things like those can be communicated in a way that’s specific to your department or organization and what they care about. So, match what you’ve done to what people care about, and communicate it in a way that uses industry-specific language that they understand. And you should be good to go and sort of like start to defeat that poverty mindset over time. Because you can physically see–you can’t really contradict numbers in that case–you can see on paper, “Okay, I’ve done a hundred thousand worth of grants in one year. That’s a lot of money.” So, just starting to visualize that, but also learn how to be precise is important.

Focus on Thriving, Not Just Surviving

11:07 Emily: Yeah. What I’m hearing you say in this portion is like, I think part of the problems, and these are universal outside of academic training or whatever. Some people, a lot of people come into a negotiation thinking, “What do I need to survive? What kind of salary do I need to command to have the lifestyle that I want?” And coming out of graduate school, it’s probably not a high number because you’ve probably been living on a pretty, pretty low salary for the last several years. And you’re reframing this not as, “Okay, well, what do I need to get by?” But rather, “What value am I bringing to this organization? What metrics, what proof points do I have to back this up?” And also the further step of, “I need to communicate this to them in a way that they’re going to latch onto and appreciate,” not necessarily your most natural way of communicating. Does that sum up what you were saying?

11:55 Abby: Absolutely. And what a lot of people have to think about is not really putting themselves of “How much money do I need to survive,” but, “What is my, what’s called, market value?” So, when you look at market value, it’s a completely different mindset from what you’re taught in grad school, because the norms in your particular field, like if you’re going into tech, the norms for salary and benefits will be different they. Somewhat depending on the company, but also compared to other industries. Like if you work in manufacturing. So, you have to just consider those differences. But also you have to think of the whole negotiation as a win-win mindset. So, it’s not just about what can I get from this company. You have to think about me, myself, and family, because realistically speaking, and I know this is kind of harsh, but a lot of people, and especially in HR, will, if people say something in an interview, like “I need this much mind to live,” unfortunately they’ll just tell you perhaps even bold facedly, they don’t care, you know, what you need to survive, which it knows is harsh and I would never–I’m in HR.

12:48 Abby: So, I would never say that to an applicant. But really the company just cares about what you can bring to the table, because the implication of you bringing things is that they will take care of you in turn. So, you don’t really have to communicate, “This is what I need.” You have to show them based on, for instance, your certificates, what your capacities are, just different software and other skills that they find relevant. You can use all of that to get more money because you are clearly bringing more to the table. They’ll be generally more willing to pay for all those skills. Because especially, at least in my case, for instance, I bring a lot of really rare skill sets to my particular job. And I got that job through a contract. And so, you know, just being able to show what all you bring that will help the company give you the money and you won’t have to worry about surviving as much. You’ll be able to think about thriving, which is completely different, as far as the psychological response goes. Survival schools, more of grad school, it’s just the bare minimum. What can I possibly scrape by? With industry, you should present yourself as what can I do to thrive and help people at work thrive and just kind of frame it like that.

Big-Picture Negotiation Items Besides Salary

13:47 Emily: Yeah, so this is really, you know, taking a step back from being very me, me as the applicant, very me-focused and more about what am I bringing to this organization? What other big-picture items should applicants be thinking about when they’re going into a negotiation process?

14:02 Abby: I think that one of the big ones that a lot of people don’t really particularly talk about, and sometimes I’ve heard in even other podcasts, maybe discourage a little bit, is thinking about what’s called the total reward lens. So, the total reward lens, if you think of the big pie, for instance, like the kind of pie you can eat, not the number. If you think of a pie and you think of all the possible pieces that could come out of it, those are all interrelated, but they’re also their own separate entities once they’ve been cut out of the pie. So, they’re able to be standalone items. Whenever you think of a total reward lens, whenever it comes to getting what you want from work, you have to think of that kind of like a pie, too, because salary is naturally going to be a big part of that pie for a lot of people. But you also have other pieces of the pie like your healthcare, which projects you can work on, the quality of your supervisor.

14:51 Abby: And then some other areas like how much autonomy do you get? Or how much natural light does your office get? And those pieces of the pie in terms of their size or their weight, depending on how you want to think about it, are all different for different people. So, you have to think about, “If I were to make my ideal pie, what would that look like in terms of where all the pieces are and how much those matter relative to the overall sort of picture that I’ve got going on?” Because different people are going to have different needs. If you’ve got a parent who’s got young children, then maybe flexibility might be more important for them. Or if you have someone who’s more into work-life balance, like they want to go ski on the weekends, then that might be very important to them, too. But it might not be as important to someone who maybe like myself is single and doesn’t really have to take care of kids, at least right now. So, it really depends on your specifics. So, you just have to like define those numbers for yourself, but also realize if you don’t get a bigger part of the pie focusing on salary, maybe you could get a bigger part of the pie that would focus on another area or two or three other areas that you also care about.

Is Everything Open for Negotiation?

15:53 Emily: Yeah. I think this is an area that people definitely don’t pay enough attention to. Like you were saying, it’s kind of all about the salary, but there are so many other aspects to your benefits or just your work culture and work style that should play into your decision about which kind of job to accept and also what to negotiate. So, would you say that is every piece of this pie up for negotiation? Or like where might one focus your negotiation if you’re not quite happy with all the different pieces?

16:22 Abby: A lot of it depends on the type of job you have. So, for instance, if you are working in a government position that is governed by a shared contract, like a collective bargaining agreement, for instance. Then certain areas of your package, like the initial salary may very well not be negotiable. I actually had to tell, whenever I was hiring people, several individuals who applied, this is part of the collective bargaining agreement. You can’t negotiate it. Over time, you can perform better and get a bonus that way. But at least with this contract, your salary, at least your base, is set. So, if you want to get more money over time, it’s really on you. You have to perform in terms of exceeding expectations. And then you can get more money that way. You can also get other money by doing other tasks that the job would be open to.

17:08 Abby: So, for instance, if you did overtime, that might be something that you’d be able to get more money from, but it again depends on whether that’s available. So, those are some examples of what all you could do besides money. And then, of course, you have to think about too, what other options are available? And most places have a lot of different options when it comes to healthcare. For instance, you might have a lower deductible, and that works for you whenever it comes to healthcare, compared to someone else who wants to have a higher deductible. Or you might want to put more money in your 401k, like a retirement account, or, you know, the company might match whatever you do put in. So, you just have to look at/get sort of an initial view. If you can, if there’s an employment handbook, that will usually tell you different things like the possible packages available, the benefits, like maybe gym membership.

17:53 Abby: So, try and look there first. And usually those come through websites, they might be coming through HR. Like HR might directly send you them. Once you get your initial offer letter, just take a look at not only the offer letter, but the information they send over through those handbooks. A lot of people don’t even bother to look at those handbooks, but they’re very useful. So, I would just say, take a survey of what you’ve gotten initially. And then if you’re not happy with something, think about, “Okay, what could I bring to the table in terms of ROI to argue why I should get that thing?” So, it’s not like, most places are not going to have a huge conversation about negotiating healthcare. You go on and enroll yourself. So, that’s kind of a proxy for negotiation, but if it’s something like maybe extra days off, you would want to be able to come up with an argument to justify that. Personally, from an HR standpoint, I wouldn’t start from the job like day one saying, “I want more hours off.” I would wait until over time, maybe six months once you’ve had a little bit of tenure there, to propose that. But it just really depends on your situation. Try to take into account whatever information you do receive. And if you have questions, of course, ask at that time into your discussion, depending on your situation.

Commercial

19:04 Emily: Hey social distancers, Emily here. I hope you’re doing okay. It took a few weeks, but I think I have my bearings about me in my new normal. There is a lot of uncertainty and fear right now about our public and personal health and our economy. I would like to help you feel more secure in your personal finances and plan and prepare for whatever financial future may come. You can schedule a free 15-minute call with me at pfforphds.com/coaching to determine if financial coaching with me is right for you at this time. I hope you will reach out, if only to speak with someone new for a few minutes. Take care. Now, back to our interview.

How Employee Training Benefits the Employer

19:50 Emily: I want to mention one of the things that my husband actually negotiated for when he took his current position was, I guess you would call it, like training. So, like professional development. Maybe it’s something like, it’s not clear whether that actually like increased, you know, what he was going to get anyway, but it made it more explicit to his employer that he was looking to advance his career. And this is how he saw, you know, that he wanted to do it. And they said, “Yes” to it. Like, “Yes” to his proposal. So, I would imagine that would apply in a lot of other places, maybe where negotiation on salary or something else is a little bit more rigid. But you know, you can set yourself up right from the beginning to, you know, to seem like a go getter, right? You’re going for a promotion like right away, you know, you’re eager. You’re going to be growing your career. You want to grow with that company and how can they help you do that?

20:37 Abby: Right. And one of the things that you want to communicate whenever you’re proposing for something like more training is what kind of value that would also bring to the company, because that will set you up. For instance, one of the trainings I received during my government job, my last job, was that I was able to become a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt and a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. And a lot of people might not know what those are or what they mean in terms of quantities, but in the process improvement area and finance and some other areas, those are very well sought-after certifications for people to have. And you can bump up your salary over time by anywhere from 5,000 with green belt to maybe 20,000 plus with a black belt.

21:13 Abby: But at the same time, you’re also able to save companies a lot of money because you’re able to go in, create change interventions, lead people through those interventions, and then identify ways that your group can maybe devote money to other resources. Like if you’re spending too much on training, for instance, and you could maybe cut costs or reallocate those costs, then maybe you can use that money to give people higher bonuses or something to that effect. So, as you’re proposing that increase in training, definitely make sure to communicate how that would benefit the company too, because in some way, shape or form, it probably will. You just want to make sure that people understand what that is from a very early standpoint. That way, you can frame your training as, “Okay, I propose there are five key goals that I’m going to get out of this. I’m going to go in, get those and I’ll show my team whatever those things were.” That way I can make sure I’m consistent with what I promised.

Negotiation in Academia vs. Industry

22:00 Emily: Excellent. So, I imagine we have people in the audience who, you know, they’re hearing your talk and you’ve mentioned industry a lot so far. But many of my listeners may be, you know, gunning to stay in academia. So, is the process of negotiation different, the same between those two different types of workplaces?

22:20 Abby: I would say that some of the behavioral norms and perceptions are very different. Because when I was in academia, I was in grad school and then I negotiated for my negotiation packages, like my benefits and compensation packages. And so, the first time I did it, wasn’t really negotiable as we were kind of on a collective bargaining agreement. Again, meaning that we all just had the same benefits and compensation. Like our stipends were all the same, and there wasn’t really a step-raise as much. But a lot of people in academia can negotiate quite a lot, too. And I would say that one of those critical parts of you negotiating, whether you’re a faculty member or a grad student of any level coming in, is that make sure you go do a campus visit. If you’re not invited to, definitely make sure you go do one. Because you want to get kind of a survey as to what your office area might look like, what the different resources like laboratories for instance are or libraries, and really how the people are, too, and kind of how everything is arranged. Because what I’ve noticed over time is that the way a department is arranged in terms of its space, its people, and its resources will tell you a lot about how you’ll fit well there or not.

23:23 Abby: So, for instance, I went to whenever deciding between two different PhD programs, I decided which one based on the visit that I went to with each one. So, whenever I went to grad school A, Choice A, I noticed that for instance, the offices had no windows whatsoever. And that’s very common in a lot of places in academia, especially if you’re in a much larger, more kind of cloistered building. And I was thinking, I’m definitely the kind of person who needs natural light. And that might not sound like a big deal to many people. But when you’re in an office for three years, constantly working on high-stress projects, maybe dealing with students who have a lot of problems and then other people who come in with different requests, you want to make sure that you have an office that’s inviting to at least some extent.

24:08 Abby: And so, I thought a natural light kind of office would be better for that. That wasn’t as big of a pie piece. Getting back to my pie analogy earlier, compared to the travel stipend that I got, for instance, but it definitely was important. So, use the visit that you get to kind of determine what you need to negotiate and think about because you can actually get a lot more by going to visit. Because whenever I went to visit, I got an extra, I think it was 4,000 at the start, from Place A compared to Place B just by contributing during the discussions that people had about, you know, why you want to become a grad student here and so on. And you’re able to meet people and add value to them. And that’s the key thing is make sure you add value that way. People are more likely to give you things in return because you can leverage that powerful principle of social reciprocity, which is if someone gets something from you, they’re more likely to give back in return.

Virtual Campus Visits

24:56 Emily: So, we’re recording this on March 23rd, 2020. And I think all PhD grad visits are probably off at this point for the remainder of admission season. Now, we’re actually going to publish this episode, I think after April 15th. So, after all the decisions have been made. But I’m just thinking about for students in this current situation, or maybe in future years when a visit is not possible for whatever reason. Of course, it’s ideal, but if it’s not possible, how can an applicant as a graduate student, or even at a later stage, get a sense of these things remotely, somehow? What do they need to do to create a facsimile of an actual visit?

25:36 Abby: Sure. So, there are different options. And I think that departments, if any faculty are listening, I would highly encourage them to explore this option. I’ll really just lay out two quick options. One would be to see if there’s any way–some departments already do this, depending on the school and the department you’re in, some don’t. Some departments offer digital tours. So, if students cannot come for whatever reason, they might have someone doing kind of a vlog of the laboratory, that might be something that’s interesting and valuable to you. And maybe you can live tweet them while you’re doing that. It really just depends on who all is leading that. Another option would be to, and you probably should do this in addition to option one, if you can. But another option would be definitely talking about your office setup and other things with faculty and grad students. Grad students would be more likely the safer option whenever it comes to communicating about what their offices are like. Faculty may very well not know anything about what current grad students are doing with their offices.

26:28 Abby: A lot of places do publish things about their grad student groups. Like who’s the president, VP, finance person, so forth. I was the finance chair with my group. But try to get out to reach that person, and they will probably connect you. If they don’t know something, they will connect you with someone who does. So, I would follow those steps. And then also just if the place has a Facebook group, for instance, definitely see what all people are taking pictures of there. And really over time, I would just say, try to ask a lot of really good questions. Because faculty and grad students love it when someone not only praises their work that they’ve been working on, but they have a mutual interest in, but also they appreciate someone who asked really thoughtful questions about things that they care about, too. So, I think if you frame it still as a win-win, like I’m giving this person a valuable, interesting conversation and they’re giving me information in turn that’s useful, I think that that will help you come across a lot more effectively. Because email conversations were very instrumental for me, too, whenever applying to grad school and deciding between different schools as well.

Misconceptions Around Negotiation

27:25 Emily: Yeah, I think if at all possible those conversations should happen over the phone or over video conferencing. Just because if a grad student, for instance, has anything not so nice to say about their department or their advisor or their group or whatever, they’re probably not going to want to put that in writing. So, it’s much better to speak live and not in a recorded fashion when you’re having those really candid conversations with current graduate students. So, thank you so much for those thoughts, Abby. And finally, can you clear up any misconceptions for us around negotiation and negotiation strategies?

28:03 Abby: I think that one of the biggest ones that I didn’t really think about early on, but started to realize over time, and then of course in retrospect, see a lot better is that a lot of people worry about negotiation if they don’t get it right the very first time–like their first semester right as, for instance, they’re getting into grad school or right as they’re becoming a professor or an industry professional–that they’ll never be able to do negotiation over time, or they’ll never be able to get it right. So, there’s that kind of fixed mentality of, “If I don’t get it now then I never will.” And that’s not necessarily true because the truth is that your job is very dynamic over time. People change. Sometimes departments get reorganized as we’ve seen more lately, whether you are in academia or in industry. Sometimes entire companies get reorganized to where their benefits and compensation structures change.

28:46 Abby: So, always be aware of what’s going on in your organization or in your grad school or your department, if you’re a faculty member or person wanting to join that. And just keep aware of the changes going on. That way, you can see different opportunities. Also make sure to realize that you are still, no matter where you are in your career, adding some sort of value, like a service, to your department or a company, for instance. So, keep abreast as to what ROI you are bringing to the table. And you can even keep, for instance, like a shout out sheet. I know a lot of people will use that. So, it’s like a list of all those accomplishments you have, what value that’s added, like making employees more engaged or improving organization, like even organizing a closet or like an area of the office where people store papers or files can be very useful. That may or may not be in your job description, but it depends on your situation.

Negotiation Can Happen Over Time

29:36 Abby: So, just realizing that negotiation doesn’t have to be a one shot, do or die, black and white kind of mindset. It can be over time. You will get many, many different chances to negotiate your worth or negotiate your package and everything. Because for instance, whenever I went into grad school, the grad school I chose for my PhD program had a lower stipend than the one that was offering me a package in return. And the reason I chose that other one was just that it really seemed to fit more with what I was hoping to do regarding the research methods path I wanted to go on, regarding the kind of set up of the department, and some other factors. But what happened was that over time I actually got, I think it was 15,000 extra dollars from that department during my three years there because I got 3,000 extra dollars in conference funding that I didn’t even have to apply for. The department chair just told me I qualified for it based on how I was a domestic student.

30:31 Abby: There were other things like consultant contracts which I was able to get and work on that brought in extra money. And then there were some other things too, like dissertation grant money that I got a lot more of there than I would have at the other place. So, I actually ended up kind of starting from a lower place at that Choice B university or not really Choice B, but Option B, and then working my way up to where I got actually a lot more money, pretty much almost a year’s worth of extra money, for only going three years. So, it doesn’t have to be like a one shot kind of picture. You just have to think over time, how can I find ways to negotiate? And if people want to read an area of IO psychology that deals with this a lot too, but not necessarily in money terms, they can look at what’s called the job crafting literature. And so, job crafting will show you different opportunities that you have to negotiate and it’s got four different categories and several of those papers. Very useful.

Where Can People Find You?

31:24 Emily: Yeah. Thank you for that tip. And speaking of, you know, where to go more, can you just mention again where people can find you if they want to hear more from you?

31:31 Abby: Sure. So, other than my Udemy course on negotiating your funding for grad school and then on another for Lean Six Sigma Green Belt, which shows people how to save money, people can also go to Twitter. My handle is @rainer_abby. And then they can also go to find me on LinkedIn a lot. And it’s just Abby Rainer PhD Lean Six Sigma Black Belt on there. So, those are the main places right now that they can go.

Best Financial Advice for an Early-Career PhD

31:59 Emily: That’s excellent. Thank you so much. And I always conclude my interviews with this question, which is what is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD? And it could be something that we touched on today in the interview, or it can be something completely different.

32:13 Abby: I would say that my best financial advice would be, and one of my early advisors told me this as well, is that if you do anything regarding finance, make sure to get it in writing and to make sure it’s in very clear writing. Because sometimes especially if you’re in a company or in grad school, people will promise you things like working on projects or grant money, but they might not be very upfront about it, or very clear as to when you’ll get that money, how, and so forth. I break a lot of this down in my Udemy training on funding for grad school, but just make sure that you get everything–the who, what, when, where, why and how–very clear, because you want to know exactly where your money’s coming from, why you were getting it, how it’s going to be dispersed to you.

32:56 Abby: And if you need to return part of that for any reason, like if you’re writing a grant, how you do that. Just so that everybody is very clear about what expectations are and there’s no fuzzy area regarding what needs to be done and by who.

33:09 Emily: Yeah, I think that’s excellent advice. And it’s also not even necessarily people being like underhanded and like purposefully leading you on or whatever. Sometimes people are just forgetful. And especially, you know, like in graduate school, faculty members, they’ve got a lot on their plates, so it really is better for all parties to be really clear and put it in writing, as you said so that everyone’s on the same page about what’s going to happen and when and so forth. So, thank you so much for that advice. And thank you for this interview, Abby.

33:36 Abby: Yeah. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. And I hope that people find this very useful because I didn’t know any of this before grad school or my time in academia. And some of it, I didn’t even know before my time in industry, but now that I’ve kind of been in both worlds, I see a lot of things that maybe I wouldn’t have before. And they can do that, too. It’s not just, you have to have a background in finance. You can do it regardless of where you’re from.

33:58 Emily: Absolutely. Negotiation is a topic that I don’t know as much as I would like to know about it. And so I’m highly interested in getting more of this content out to my audience. So, thank you so much for providing it.

34:08 Abby: You’re very welcome. Thank you. I appreciate you having me and hope everybody does well.

Outtro

34:13 Emily: Listeners, thank you 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 and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, please consider joining my mailing list for my behind the scenes commentary about each episode, register at pfforphds.com/subscribe. See you in the next episode! And remember you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is Stages of Awakening by Podington Bear from the free music archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

This Grad Student Is on the Lowest Rung of the Pay Ladder and Side Hustles to Compensate

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In this episode, Emily interviews Sarah ‘Frankie’ Frank, a grad student in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Frankie describes the hierarchy of grad student positions at UW; the positions she’s primarily held over her years in grad school, teaching assistantships, are on the lowest level in terms of hourly pay. To make ends meet, Frankie side hustles doing activities that she truly loves, chiefly tutoring and baking. She concludes the interview with excellent advice for a grad student who wants and needs to do it all.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

Teaser

00:00 Frankie: You feel so subjected to whatever the institution tells you you’re worth–what you can do, what you can’t do–and the honest truth is that you have a little bit of bartering that you can negotiate. If you are in a position that you can make that kind of offer, you should because it’s possible that they find that money somewhere.

Intro

00:22 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 five, episode six, and today my guest is Sarah Frank who goes by Frankie, a grad student in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Throughout most of grad school, Frankie has been a teaching assistant, a position that receives the lowest hourly pay rate at her university. We discuss the various types of positions a grad student might have and the advantages of being paid through a fellowship or research assistantship. Frankie’s $15,000 per year stipend isn’t enough to make ends meet, so she is engaged in many side hustles, the best of which were tutoring NCAA student athletes and her cake business. You won’t want to miss the advice Frankie gives at the end of the interview to grad students who are juggling a lot of responsibilities and activities at once. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Frankie.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:22 Emily: I’m delighted to be joined today on the podcast by Sarah Frank who goes by Frankie. And we’re going to be talking today about TA-ing, having a teaching assistantship and how that compares to other jobs you might have on campus as a graduate student. So, Frankie, thank you so much for joining me today.

01:38 Frankie: Thank you, Emily. I really am excited to be here. I feel honored.

01:42 Emily: Oh, well that’s lovely to hear. Would you please tell us a little bit more about yourself, you know, where you go to school and so forth?

01:48 Frankie: Yeah. So, my name is Frankie. I am a PhD candidate and a lecturer now at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Department of Sociology and in the Department of Legal Studies. I’ve previously spent three years as a teaching assistant and lecturer. I’ve also worked for athletics. And yeah, I think I have about two years to go before I have a job somewhere, hopefully.

02:10 Emily: Sounds good. So, you’ve already mentioned you’ve had a few different positions, so let’s talk about what your current position is and what your pay is right now.

02:20 Frankie: Yeah, so current position for lecturers, right now it depends on how many students will be enrolled in the course, but at a 33% appointmentship for one course in the fall, I’ll make about $7,000. So, over the whole course of the year, that can fluctuate to about a $15,000 baseline salary. And then adding in other jobs thereafter, I don’t make more than about $22,000 a year.

Level of Pay Variation at UW-Madison

02:45 Emily: Okay. So, that gives us a good idea of the range. So at a 33% appointment, if you did that approximately for the whole year, it would be about $15 K. Plus, your side hustle and such, have other jobs on top of that, of course, to make that work, naturally. Okay. And how has that level of pay varied over your time in graduate school?

03:06 Frankie: Yeah. So, when I first came as a TA in 2016, University of Wisconsin had one of the lowest pay rates for TAs. So, in our tiers of graduate studentship, being a teaching assistant was at the very lowest, at about 15 and a half thousand dollars per year at a 50% appointmentship. And then the union here, there’s a teaching assistant union that put a lot of pressure on our administration to raise that salary. So, we have gotten substantial raises. And then just this year, lecturers also got another bit of a raise. So, it has increased a little bit as we’ve gone on. But we still pay student fees. So, we pay segregated student fees that go into like student clubs and student rec centers that are mostly undergraduate. So, we lose a little bit of our salary there to the tune of six or $700 each semester that you’re taking full load.

03:55 Emily: Yeah, that is a huge bite. Okay. So, I just want to add in like a couple of notes there for the listener. So, if you want to see what other people are being paid at Wisconsin or in other places, one of the websites I run is phdstipends.com. So, go there and check out what TAs and RAs and other types of grad students, fellows are being paid in various places and enter your own data. So, there are a couple of things you mentioned I want to follow up on. You mentioned that TA pay was the lowest among the different sort of options, the way graduate students might be paid. So, what are those other options at Wisconsin?

04:31 Frankie: So, typically the lowest tier would be teaching assistants. The next tier up would be research assistant, and the tier after that would be project assistant. And then the top tier is obviously fellowship. So, if you’re on fellowship, you make the most. After the raise, teaching assistant and research assistant are more in line with one another. So, this is the first year that they’re really in line.

04:54 Emily: Yeah. That was something curious that you said that I wasn’t really sure about, that TAs and RAs had been paid differently. Now you mentioned that the union was just a TAs union, or does it also cover RAs?

05:09 Frankie: Right, so it’s strange. It’s called the Teaching Assistant Association, so it would sound like it’s just for TA’s, but it’s actually for all graduate student workers. So, it includes RAs, PAs, and it includes people on fellowship actually as well. So, graduate student workers generally.

What is a Project Assistant?

05:23 Emily: Okay. That’s really interesting to hear. I would love to follow up more on that actually with you, but I actually have multiple episodes scheduled with other people talking specifically about unionization movements at their own university. So, I’m excited to dive into that more in other episodes. But I’ve never heard of this job title, project assistant before. Can you tell me what that is?

05:43 Frankie: So, there are research assistants and project assistants, and it depends wholly on the grant that a supervising faculty applied for or the amount of responsibility or ownership that the student is taking over the project. In the mix, there is something called a traineeship, which seems to be blended with both project assistant and research assistant. I think it’s a matter of just titles, honestly. Because I’ve heard very different projects, very different gamuts, it depends on the department, what they call a traineeship versus a research assistant or project assistant. To me it sounds like, as far as hours worked, I know that teaching assistants have the most, and then research assistants have the second most followed by project assistants and trainees, and then fellows should have the least amount of work. They’re not required to do any specific work activities.

06:34 Emily: Okay. So, you mentioned a 50% appointment for a TA position, so that’s ostensibly 20 hours per week, is that right?

06:42 Frankie: Yeah, it’s supposed to be 20 hours a week. Yeah.

06:43 Emily: Yeah. Well, we all know how that really goes. So, what is it for RAs and PAs then? Do you know?

06:49 Frankie: They’re supposed to be 20 hours a week as well.

06:52 Emily: But in reality…

06:54 Frankie: Yeah, so the common thread is people know that RAs and PAs don’t work that much. They usually do closer to like 10 or 15 hours a week, if that.

RA-ing Does Not Always = Dissertation Work

07:04 Emily: Okay. So, this is something that I and other people get a little bit confused or conflate together. So, are you talking about for an RA position, a research assistantship, is that distinct from the student’s dissertation work?

07:22 Frankie: So, this is a really good question. It can be. It may be that’s the way you are earning your income, working on a supervising professor’s work and using their data. And depending on your relationship with that professor or what you want to do for your dissertation, their data might be your dissertation. And in some cases it is, but in other cases it’s not. So, the way that those things help you out in the long run dissertation-wise varies. The variation is incredibly wide.

07:52 Emily: Yeah. Because it’s always seemed to me–so, I come from a STEM field, biomedical engineering. And so what was common in my field and others that I observed in STEM is that most of the time most people had RA positions, and their RA work was the same as their dissertation work. So, it was like, really, once your classes were done and so forth, your full-time efforts could go towards your dissertation. And, you were also being paid off of the grant to do that work. Now, that means you don’t have as much freedom in what you do because it depends on what the grant is, of course. And so it’s all worked out between you and your advisor. I do think that it was more rare in my observation to see someone have an RA position that was different from their dissertation work. But it sounds like that is maybe more common where you are. And I’m sure this is very like field-dependent, right?

08:40 Frankie: So, in sociology, because someone might be working on some specific project long-term, or like a demographic project that takes many years of data collection, people might use some part of a dataset. Or you know, they’re becoming really familiar with the general science survey through their research assistantship, and then they use another element for their dissertation. Or, they end up meeting their professor who will chair their dissertation based on that project or find out who shouldn’t be their advisor via those kinds of projects. But I mean it does vary incredibly widely. I have heard that sociology is one of the few disciplines where it’s not a direct relationship, like you are working on what you will dissertate on. But I know very few people who are earning their income on exactly what they’re dissertating on. They’re usually right next to it somehow. Particularly, in sociology here we have demography. So, you have a lot of quantitative people working together. As far as qualitative researchers, not one of them have I heard is working on the same data set that they will use in their dissertation unless they get some sort of fellowship or specialty grant or something or have access to a professor’s previously collected research.

Perspective on Assistantship Tiers

09:51 Emily: I see. This is really interesting for me to hear because it’s such a different field than where I’m coming from. So, it’s good for me to learn about this. So, what I’ve always found as the important distinction, let’s say as a prospective graduate student, when you’re looking at different offers and different programs, I’ve always found an important distinction to be what percentage of your time is going to be available for you to work on your dissertation versus doing some other thing. You know, classes, TA-ing, RA-ing not for your dissertation, whatever that might be. And I would think that the advantage would be going towards programs where you can put a higher percentage of your time towards your own dissertation work. Now, that’s not to say you can’t find value from these other activities, but I don’t know, that’s kind of what my thought has been. Do you agree with that or what’s your perspective on that?

10:40 Frankie: So, for me and where I’ve been located, the more lucrative offers coming into graduate school are the ones that have more money or the fellowships. So, it’s sort of like you have to be higher ranked I suppose, or like at a higher admit level. So, then you have to take classes, right? But you can only take so many classes if you’re a teaching assistant, especially for the first time. And you know you have the highest workload, but you have the lowest pay, so you have to take on more classes or you just have to stay in graduate school longer. So, the system seemed really backwards to me when I first got here. Like, why would TAs be your lower tier? Or like, you know, not your highest admit student. Not that the people who teach are necessarily not as smart or anything, but the grant money is really in that quantitative data that the demographers are collecting.

11:33 Frankie: But then you have to work really hard, possibly more years while you’re taking classes. And at the same time, the expectation to publish is exactly the same across the board. And some people are given data from professors or they have quantitative data, but then you have qualitative people who have to conduct their own studies from the ground. So, IRB approval, to recruitment, to interviewing. And so, the people who are teaching have to do far more hours, far more work, but they’re also the least paid, so they may also have to take on these outside jobs. So, I think that those are the people who I see being the most stressed out. I think that they have the highest turnover as far as dropout rates as well. I think it’s just incredibly stressful to have little money and not enough time to accomplish every single thing you’re supposed to accomplish. At the same time, you’re supposed to be applying for every grant in the book while you’re doing all of this.

12:20 Emily: Yeah, it does sound to me like we’re on the same page. If you can land a fellowship, either an outside fellowship or something that’s provided by your university or whatever, that’s going to free you from these other responsibilities, it’s going to pay you better and as many years as you can do that for, that’s amazing. Minimize your TA responsibilities. If that is the thing that has the highest workload at your university, it sounds like it’s the case for you. Not to say that teaching experience isn’t valuable. Maybe you need to have that for moving onto your next stage, but you don’t necessarily want to do that every single semester. That’s a lot of teaching. Anyway, so really glad to hear your perspective on those things. So, it’s a very complex issue, especially for prospective graduate students who may not be that familiar with the academic system.

Determine the Standard Offer in Your Field Ahead of Time

13:01 Emily: I mean, I’ve been through graduate school and I’m still struggling to understand the structure that you’re talking about, you know, in the fields that you come from. So, this is just kind of a plug to do as much field-specific research as you possibly can. Well, I actually wrote an article about this a little while ago. It was titled something like “before admission season starts, determine what a standard offer in your field is.” So, is a standard offer going to be, “Okay, you’re going to TA the entire time”? Or is a standard offer, “Well, you’ll TA a couple semesters and then you’ll be an RA and if you want a fellowship that’s cool”? Like, what is that standard? So, then you can know if any individual offer you receive is at the standard, a good offer, a really not good offer. It’s just something you have to do your homework on before you even start like looking at those offers, and it’s very difficult. It’s very field-specific. So, I’m really glad to hear from you about that.

13:50 Frankie: I was going to say I feel really lucky, actually. So, for two reasons. One, my program decided to fully fund five years. So, students who come to sociology at UW Madison will be funded for at least five years. After that, they cannot guarantee you funding. But the second piece is I came here to teach. I’m becoming a professor to teach, which is not always common at an R1. I have been discouraged from teaching multiple times, but I think I would have left graduate school without it. So, I feel really lucky that it’s in my heart because it makes it worth it. It’s still very challenging, but I feel luckier in some ways than I know other folks in other universities.

A Deep Dive into Frankie’s Side Hustles

14:24 Emily: Yeah, well it totally makes sense. If it’s part of your career path and you want to go that direction, it’s great to have that experience and for you to get better at your own craft before you move on to that next stage. So, totally valuable in that sense. For people who don’t want to stay in teaching, it’s something probably to be minimized. Yeah. So, are you ready to talk about your side hustles that you have to put on top of this graduate student stipend to make it?

Tutoring for the Department of Athletics

14:49 Frankie: Yeah. So, the first one I did was I worked for the NCAA, the Department of Athletics at UW Madison. Of course, this is a big school for athletics, so you might think that we’re the only place with money, but I actually did this in undergrad, too. And the money tends to be excellent, particularly if you already have your undergraduate degree, they can pay you more. And so this is to the tune of about $20 an hour for group tutoring, closer to $18 for single tutoring sessions. And you make your own schedule. It’s very flexible. You only tutor what you want to. It was really fun. I loved my students. Student-athletes are highly exploited by universities like Wisconsin. And so it was awesome to build relationships with them. And I mean, I absolutely loved that job. When I gave it up to finish my Masters, I was very sad. But that was probably my favorite side gig, and I recommend it to literally everyone. If you want to pick up extra tutoring hours, the Department of Athletics wherever you are has money. And they have a need for sure.

15:48 Emily: That is a great tip. I’m always really curious when people talk about having side gigs on campus. How does that play with your stipend? Were you actually a W2 employee or was it like an independent contractor position?

Self-Employment: Frankie’s Cupcakes

16:01 Frankie: Great question. So, it’s still a W2. So, you can only work 75%. That means that I had a cap on how many hours I could work at the same time as being a TA. So, then comes in my other side hustle. In the last 18 months or so, I’ve started a cupcake company. So, I now sell cupcakes and cakes to everyone in the Madison or surrounding area here in Wisconsin. It started as a self-care hobby and then I got good enough that people would start paying me. So, now that’s my side hustle and also my hobby and self-care at the same time.

16:35 Emily: That is so much fun. What is your business name? Do you have an Instagram?

16:39 Frankie: I do have an Instagram. You can find us @frankies.cupcakes, which is the name, as well. We just went to the state fair yesterday to find out that I won a bunch of first place ribbons. So, that’s feeling good. Wisconsin state fair representing. But so yeah, you can find me. It’s Frankie’s Cupcakes. We have a Facebook and an Instagram.

16:57 Emily: That’s awesome. And so that, of course, is your own business. That’s total independent, not even a contractor. It’s just self-employment kind of stuff. So, I have this framework for side hustles that I like to talk about, which is one type advances your career. That could be like the teaching or tutoring for you, for example. Another type is just something you really enjoy doing that you can monetize. That is exactly this cupcake thing. And then there’s stuff you don’t like to do so much, but it gives you money. So, you do it. That’s a third category. And then the fourth one is passive income, which is a whole other can of worms. So, I love to hear that the cupcake thing sort of hits different satisfaction areas in your life for you. So, that’s awesome to hear. Have you pursued any other side hustles besides those two?

Arbitrage via Poshmark

17:42 Frankie: Well, so as far as passive income, actually, there’s an application called Poshmark, which lots of young people are using and they’re installing themselves on college campuses. And I’ve made a couple of thousand dollars selling stuff on Poshmark. Homewares, jewelry, designer bags, whatever. I’ll go to Goodwill, buy something designer that someone donated and then sell it on Poshmark and keep the profit. Or if I grow out of something or gain or lose weight, which you do in graduate school, it’s a great way to replace/cycle out your clothing. But also make some good money, especially if you come across anything valuable.

18:16 Emily: So, that’s a cool side hustle. Anything else you’ve done?

GRE Tutoring and College Application Assistance

18:20 Frankie: I know that I’ve done like tutoring on the side. Or like, unofficial tutoring for entrance exams, GREs, college application essays, things like that. For sure.

18:29 Emily: Yeah, that’s another really accessible one for graduate students because presumably, you got into graduate school, so you’re probably good at taking tests. You may be able to help other people with that.

Commercial

18:43 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. Tax season is upon us, and while no one loves this time of year, it’s particularly difficult for post-bac fellows, funded grad students, and postdoc fellows. Even professional tax preparers are often thrown for a loop by our unique tax situation. And don’t get me started on tax software. I provide tons of support at this time of year for PhD trainees preparing their tax returns, from free articles and videos, to paid at-your-own-pace workshops, to live seminars and webinars for universities and research institutes. The best place to go to check out all of this material is pfforphds.com/tax. That’s P F F O R P H D S.com/T A X. Don’t struggle through tax season on your own. Visit my website for the exact information you need in the most efficient form available. Now, back to the interview.

Prioritizing Valuable Side Hustles

19:46 Emily: When you are looking for a side hustle, what’s something that has really brought value to your life? In terms of like, what’s a really good pro of one of your side hustles? Where you’re like, “Yeah, this was a really great reason to be pursuing this particular one.” Or maybe, another one, “Hey, I stopped pursuing this side hustle because it turns out it wasn’t serving me that well for this reason.”

20:05 Frankie: Yeah. When I started with Poshmark, it was working really well for a while, but then it ended up being really time-consuming, and it’s not going to add anything to my resume. But tutoring for athletics–and then I ended up becoming a sociology and psychology tutor trainer, so I would help train other people–that’s going to look great on my resume. I ended up getting tutor-certified, and they pay for your training. So, they’re paying you to put lines on your resume. So, that ended up being wonderful. I wrote a couple of pieces about athletes and education. I ended up meeting some amazing people. It was great to meet people outside of my department. Not that I don’t love the people in my department, but it is nice to meet people who are not in the same building all the time with you who are also in graduate school. So, it was both personal and professional.

20:49 Frankie: Like what is it that you’re spending your time on that is good for you, your resume or your CV? But also, whether it’s because it’s something that you enjoy personally and the people you really like, or because you’re like, “Well this is a good way to make money that doesn’t like break my heart or soul somehow,” or like isn’t drawing you emotionally. The emotional drainage or some of the side hustles can be extreme. So, I knew that and needed to keep my emotional energy spent kind of low because I was spending so much of it teaching. I spend so much of it teaching. So, the cake thing is pretty much something I do by myself. And so it’s really nice because it’s something I pretty much do alone. You know, listen to a podcast or something on the radio and make cakes and it’s really good for my introverted side.

Managing Work-Life Balance

21:32 Emily: Yeah, I think that’s one really important thing. Just recognize about the whole, you know, work-life balance thing–like, the graduate school-“other things you do”-balance–is that it’s sometimes really, really wonderful to have an escape from research. I know for example, for me, if research was not going well, which it didn’t for like three years, it was great to have some things going on outside of that that I could find some success in or some satisfaction. So, how do you manage your actual dissertation work, your main job, your grad student job and all these side hustles and you know, taking time for yourself. Like, how do you make all that work?

22:11 Frankie: It’s a really good question. And I answer this question so many different ways and have answered it so many different ways. So, I think today my best response to you is that my work-life balance is less of a work-life balance. Just because my work is my life, and my life is much of my work and I have to be in love with everything I’m doing for it to be possible that way. So, I’m running these different organizations. I’m also committed to teaching. I’m deeply invested. I interview people about menstruation. And so, I have to love all of those things because I do them all the time or they’re always on my mind. So, I think for me, my work-life balance ends up being calming my mind or like finding good headspace. And for me, actually, it ends up being that my partner is not an academic.

22:57 Frankie: He is not part of academia at all. And that ends up being a blessing. And I put a lot of time into–we have wonderful cats and I do cat-sitting–finding peace in both cakes and cats. And also taking the time and being okay with not doing work for a minute or two. Not always having to do something–I have such productivity anxiety–convincing myself that it is okay to go see a movie, to just sit on Instagram for an hour and be okay with it and not judge myself. And so the first couple of years of graduate school, I had to learn to do that and know that that was actually self-care and healthy. I cannot recommend enough that anyone in graduate school go to therapy. Even if you don’t think you need it or if you’re like, “Well, I don’t need that yet.”

Benefits of Therapy in Graduate School

23:49 Frankie: It’s great to establish the tools you do need for when you need them. And I wouldn’t have made it, I don’t think this far, without having great support both at the university health system and in our own–I have this wonderful woman who I see in Madison–and sometimes it’s when I need it, and sometimes it’s when I don’t. And it’s a great tool that, like I said, I recommend to everyone in academia or any stressful life situation. It really is wonderful to have someone outside your department who won’t affect your resume, your hiring decisions, your teaching appointments, someone who you can really talk to. And you know, it’s hard to build friendships in graduate school. It’s hard to build really like noncompetitive community sometimes. And I recommend that people find spaces that they feel like they’re part of a community or they feel like they have friendship. And not that my therapist is my friend, but it’s someone who I can talk to candidly and not worry about anything. So, I definitely recommend that as a resource to anyone.

Best Financial Advice for Early-Career PhDs

24:46 Emily: You know, you put that so well. I really don’t have anything to add to that. I hope that everyone listening just kind of rewinds a couple of minutes and listens through all that again because I think what you said is so, so valuable. What really resonated with me was when you said that you have to love everything that you do. And I think that it’s something that we sometimes forget about in academia and in graduate school that, ultimately, you’re there by choice and presumably at some point there was some reason why you chose the field you did and the advisor that you did. And there’s something that you love about it, and you might be going through a really hard period. It might be a long period, but it should be something that you’re passionate about, right? Or else why are you doing it? And hey, go ahead and leave your program if it’s not your passion anymore. But it’s so refreshing to hear you say that you do love all these different aspects of what you do, even though it’s not paid that well and you have to string all these different things together. It’s something that you find great joy and satisfaction in in all these different areas. I’m really, really happy to hear that. And as we wrap up here, Frankie, what is the best financial advice that you have for another early-career PhD?

Save for Unexpected Expenses (E.g., Medical Emergencies)

25:52 Frankie: That’s also a great question. I have a little experience running into medical emergencies. I had two surgeries my first year of graduate school. That’s something I don’t recommend. If you can avoid it, don’t do that until the summer of any school year. I don’t recommend doing it over Christmas. And then again over spring break. That’s–don’t recommend. So, I was hit with some medical bills in a harsh way. And I wish that I had budgeted a little bit better, like my moving expenses my first year, and not spent money on cat trees and whatever else that I thought was necessary at the time. Because I was like, “Oh, I still have more money,” or, “Oh, I still have more money. I could spend a little bit more.” Or, “Oh, you know, I can make this $50, $100, $200 go a little bit further.”

26:37 Frankie: I wish that I had saved it and thought to myself, “If something does happen, I’m at a low enough income that I need to be collecting what I do have, even the pennies, so that if something bad does happen to me or if I do end up needing to take, I don’t know, a semester off, a summer off, something like that–which is totally normal–that I would be able to.” And I wish that I had prepared a little bit better for that because I spent the better half of my second year paying off medical debt from surgeries that, I mean my insurance plan “covered” so to speak, but I needed to more carefully plan that out my first year. I think I spent more money out of stress or thinking, “Oh, if I spend more money, I’ll feel better.” And then when I did need to have surgery and pay that off later, you know how medical bills work, they send you the bill after the whole thing’s over.

Own Your Negotiating Power (Yes, Even in Grad School)

27:25 Frankie: So it’s not like I could have avoided it. And I did fight the insurance companies. I did fight the doctors to get things lower. And then the other thing I would say is that I did end up going to my department one point and asking for more money for a certain job that I was being pushed to do. You can do that, and if you are a graduate student and you feel like you’re between a rock and a hard place, you can negotiate or ask for help or ask your university for help and put yourself in a place where you can say, “I need a little bit more for this semester or in advance or something.” And do try to work with the people around you just in case it does help you.

28:01 Emily: Two really amazing pieces of advice there. And thank you so much for those. On the first one, I totally agree. I mean, I think especially for someone who’s like a young adult, maybe you haven’t been navigating insurance on your own before. Maybe you’re new to budgeting, maybe you’re newly independent from your parents. These irregular events, these unusual events are not something that you necessarily budget in from the beginning. The thing is that, you know, maybe you didn’t know in particular you were going to have these surgeries or what the bills are going to be. Right? There is no way, really, as you said, that you can know that in advance. But the thing is that something’s going to come up in some category in some way at some time. You’re guaranteed that something’s going to happen like that.

28:40 Emily: So, as you said, just saving up in advance a bit as best you can. Obviously, it’s going to be challenging, but saving up in advance can really save you a lot. Both financially and stress-wise, like on the backend of whatever that emergency happens to be. So, thank you so much for sharing your story about that. And I am curious to hear a tiny bit more about your negotiation because it’s not something that I usually hear about, let’s say after the admissions process is done. So, can you say like what was the job that you’re being pushed to do?

Know Your Worth, and Advocate for Yourself

29:08 Frankie: Yeah, that’s a really good question. So, I was actually sort of between departments where one department had offered me a better-paying a job and one department really needed me to teach a job. Like, they were lower on teaching faculty and they needed someone to step in. And if they don’t admit enough people to teach each cohort year, then eventually they run into these issues where they don’t have enough people to lecture or people who have experience in the field. So, it was just this past year, and I had accepted this job in another department which would’ve been a lot more work, but they were going to pay me more. And I was excited about the opportunity. But then I had also said, “If I could work both jobs.” Well, UW intervened, the Dean’s office said, “You can’t work two lectureship jobs before you officially have dissertation status.”

30:00 Frankie: And I said, “Okay, so I have to choose one.” And so I was like, I’m going to choose the one that pays me more. And then basically I positioned to the other department and said, “This is less work for me. If you can match that salary and raise mine to meet the salary that this other department is going to pay me, I’ll take your job. And I’ll tell them that I’ll defer their job until next year.” And that’s exactly what happened. And people were like, “Well, I don’t think we can do that.” And I said, “Well, I don’t think I can take your job then.” So, I felt really lucky that I could sort of position that way. And it sounds very corporate, but the truth is that you feel so subjected to whatever the institution tells you you’re worth–what you can do, what you can’t do–and the honest truth is that if you have a little bit of bartering after a year or two that you’ve been part of a lab, part of a TA-ship, part of a union of some kind, to say, “I’m willing to do this for you. I’m willing to help out this department in whatever way.” You have a little bit of bartering that you can negotiate. If the department asks you to lecture and you can say, “Hey, I need about a thousand more dollars to really make that work or I can’t.” If you are in a position that you can make that kind of offer, you should because it’s possible that they find that money somewhere. Or they do this thing where they give you a top out scholarship where the department will just add on another thousand dollars in a scholarship fund to your tuition account and then you can refund, check it back to yourself. And that stuff happens and is possible. They can offer you greater hours. Like, they find little ways around the bureaucracy to help you. And I really recommend that students understand all of those different positions and also have those conversations.

Ask for Help: Get to Know Your Administrative Staff

31:33 Frankie: And if, if anything else, the administrative staff of your department are the people you need to know almost better than your advisor. Those are the people who have changed my life at the University of Wisconsin in every way. They know the system, they know the money, they know how I can get through the bureaucracy or challenges I’m facing. So, hats off to the administration at my university and my department and particularly in legal studies and sociology. They’re amazing people and they’ve made my life much, much easier on the financial end.

32:02 Emily: Yeah. Thank you so much for making that point. And I totally agree that they are the people to know. And it’s really good to hear that, you know, sometimes bureaucracy seems like this total juggernaut. It is what it is. It can’t be changed. It can’t be gotten around, whatever. But no, there are creative solutions. You just have to talk to the people who are familiar with their bureaucracy, who know all the tricks, who are going to be really advocating for you and working on your behalf to make whatever you need to have happen, happen. So, I’m really glad to hear that example of what was basically two competing job offers. Hey, you would have taken both of them if the bureaucracy had told you that it was possible. That wasn’t possible, but you were able to negotiate. That’s a perfect story, and I’m really glad that you shared that.

32:41 Emily: I’m glad to have another negotiation story that’s not right from during admissions season because that’s a really unusual one. So, Frankie, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast day. This is a wonderful interview.

32:52 Frankie: Yeah, Emily, thank you so much for having me. I feel really honored that I was able to talk to you and get to meet you. I recommend that everybody follow the advice given by other people who’ve spoken here. It really is valuable and it makes it so that everyone else’s life can be easier and everyone doesn’t have to experience it for the first time.

Outtro

33:08 Emily: Listeners, thank you 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 and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, here are four ways you can help it grow. One, subscribe to the podcast and rate and review it on Apple podcast, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. Two, share an episode you found particularly valuable on social media or with your PhD peers. Three, recommend me as a speaker to your university or association. My seminars cover the personal finance topics PhDs are most interested in, like investing, debt repayment, and taxes. Four, subscribe to my mailing list at pfforphds.com/subscribe. Through that list, you’ll keep up with all the new content and special opportunities for Personal Finance for PhDs. See you in the next episode. And remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is Stages of Awakening by Podington Bear from the free music archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

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

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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

PhD income negotiation

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.

This PhD Couple Combined a Cross-Country Move with a Vacation

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In this episode, Emily tells the story of her 2015 cross-country move from Durham, NC to Seattle, WA for her husband Kyle’s first post-PhD Real Job. Emily breaks down their decision-making around how to move and secure their housing in Seattle. Ultimately, they chose a pod-based moving company and a cross-country road trip/vacation, and Emily shares the exact amount of money they spent on each component of the move and how the logistics worked. Emily concludes with what she wishes she would have done differently. For more discussions on how to financially navigate a move and starting a new position, see pfforphds.com/next.

Further reading:

Links Mentioned in the Episode

cross-country move vacation

Background

In the summer of 2015, Emily and her husband Kyle were one year out from their PhD defenses. Kyle had been postdocing in his PhD advisor’s lab, and Emily had been doing various jobs (Personal Finance for PhDs, freelance editing, and a science policy fellowship).

In May 2015, Kyle applied for several positions, and ultimately was offered a postdoc and an industry job. He accepted the industry position in Seattle, Washington, at the end of May, and set his start date for the beginning of August.

Finding Housing in Seattle

Emily and Kyle’s first step was to research the rental market in Seattle. They were accustomed to the durham housing market, in which you arranged housing several weeks or a couple months in advance of your desired move-in date. However, in Seattle, rentals are typically “available immediately” or only a few days out. Therefore, searching for housing in June for an end-of-July move-in was not the proper timing. However, they used this research to familiarize themselves with the market.

They decided to limit their housing search to 1.5 miles from Kyle’s new work. This was not in downtown Seattle, so the rents were not as exorbitant as it is in other parts of the city. At that time, the rental market in Seattle was very hot, so there was a lot of competition for rentals.

They knew in June that they couldn’t conduct their final housing search right then, but rather got an idea of the range of prices they could expect to pay. Their official housing search would have to wait until after they had moved to Seattle and were ready to take possession of a rental a few days in advance of Kyle’s job’s start date.

Planning the Cross-Country Move

Emily and Kyle’s second step was to start planning their cross-country move: how to get themselves, their car, and their stuff from Durham to Seattle.

There were two main constraints on moving process:

  • As they didn’t yet have housing secured, they had no address to which to deliver their stuff. They had to consider how fast their stuff would move cross-country.
  • They had a relocation budget of $5,000 from Kyle’s new job, which Kyle had ‘accidentally’ negotiated for.

Further reading: The Reluctant Negotiator

Emily and Kyle decided to keep the direct moving expenses within that $5,000 budget so they wouldn’t have to dip into their own money.

Upon starting to research their cross-country move, they found three broad categories of moving styles:

  • Full-service moving: Professional movers load your boxed stuff into a truck, drive the truck to your new home, and unload the stuff. You can additionally pay for packing/unpacking services.
  • DIY moving: You do the entire move yourself. You box and load your things into a rented truck, drive it to your destination, unload it all, and return the truck.
  • Pod-based moving: A pod (portable storage unit) is delivered to your old residence. You pack it up, the company moves it to your destination, and you unpack it. Additional storage time at the destination is easily available. This is at an intermediate price point between full-service and DIY moving.

Emily and Kyle ruled out full-service moving because it cost more than their entire budget and they didn’t have an address to which the boxes would be delivered. DIY moving is the least expensive way to move a lot of stuff but it wasn’t attractive to Emily and Kyle for this particular move. They didn’t want to drive an unfamiliar rented truck and be responsible for their stuff during their entire cross-country drive and throughout their housing search. It seemed a bit too stressful.

Pod-based moving seemed to be a happy medium for Emily and Kyle. The option to store their stuff in Seattle until they concluded their housing search was very attractive. They paired the pod-based moving with driving their own car cross-country. Instead of taking only a few days to drive cross-country, they decided to make the trip into a vacation as well. This slower pace worked well with pod-based moving.

Further reading: Moving Cross-Country with a Pod

Emily and Kyle secured seven quotes for various companies that did pod-based moving. PODS, the most well-known brand, was the most expensive. The lowest quote was from Door-to-Door, and the second-lowest quote was from UPack. They looked most carefully at Door-to-Door and UPack.

The size of the pod became important. The PODS pods were about the size of a parking space, whereas the Door-to-Door and UPack pods were about the size of half a parking space. For Emily and Kyle’s two-bedroom townhouse, PODS recommended using one pod, whereas Door-to-Door and UPack recommended using one pod. Using smaller pods was attractive because Emily and Kyle suspected they might be able to squeeze all their stuff into one pod only. As UPack allowed them to pack their own pod (Door-to-Door did not), they ultimately chose to move with UPack. UPack’s quote for moving two pods cross-country was $3,708.

Emily and Kyle sold and gave away some of their stuff. They sourced moving boxes mostly for free, but had to buy some packing materials as well. Emily’s parents came to town to help them pack, which they did in about a day and loaded their boxes into the two pods. But after getting everything out of the house, they decided to repack everything into one pod, with the remainder going into their car. Dropping down to using only one pod reduced the price to $2,472.

Some other direct moving costs were $155 for one month of storage of the pod in Seattle, $232 for a street permit for the pod to be delivered to the public street.

The total direct moving-related expenses that they asked to be reimbursed from Kyle’s employer was $3,052.39.

Cross-Country Vacation

Emily and Kyle decided to turn their cross-country road trip into a vacation, which was a strategy they had used many times for obligation travel during grad school. It was a much-needed break for rest and relaxation as they had not taken a vacation with just the two of them since their honeymoon five years earlier. They were also hopeful that they would have a baby in the near future, so this trip felt like a last chance at a vacation without other people for a long time.

They decided to arrive in Seattle about a week before Kyle’s job’s start date to give them time to conduct the housing search.

While Emily and Kyle typically planned their travel thoroughly, in this case they prioritized planning their move over planning their cross-country trip, so they basically winged it across the country. All they knew when they left Durham was where they were staying that night, some other friends to visit along the way, that the whole trip should take about 1.5 weeks, and some national parks they would like to see.

The general pattern for the trip was that each morning they would arrange for lodging for that night in the city they expected to drive to that day. They tried to alternate long days of driving with days of staying in one place and doing an activity. This fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants trip was rather uncomfortable for Emily and Kyle!

One unexpected challenge to the trip was that Kyle’s phone died on the first day. They relied only on Emily’s phone for the entire trip. Emily’s phone was and is with Republic Wireless. Once they got a little ways west of the Mississippi River, they didn’t have much phone service outside of major cities. They didn’t even have a paper map with them! So every morning when they booked their lodging, they also wrote out their driving directions for the day because they couldn’t rely on having cell service. Emily does not recommend any of this, but they got through it and it was still fun!

Emily and Kyle’s cross-country road trip included:

  • Visiting and staying 1 night with extended family
  • Visiting and staying 1 night with friends from grad school
  • Dinner with a friend
  • A day at Six Flags with Fast Passes
  • An outdoor festival and fish fry
  • Badlands National Park
  • Mount Rushmore
  • Yellowstone National Park (two full days parts of two days)
  • Grand Teton National Park

Further reading:

Another snafu that caused some overspending had to do with the last-minute travel booking and lack of cell service. They booked a night at the Bear Lodge Motel through Priceline and wrote out their directions to that address. While searching for the address, they saw a sign for Bear Lodge and went there. They didn’t have the booking, so they had to rebook. They realized upon getting into the cabin, they realized they were at the wrong location. They were at the Bear Lodge Mountain Resort, which was about one mile away from the Bear Lodge Motel on the same road. They ended up paying for both hotels that night, which was about $100 wasted. Make sure you go to the right address!

The total cost of the cross-country trip was $2,317.97. Emily and Kyle asked for $1,339.71 to be reimbursed by Kyle’s employer because it was direct moving expenses. The remaining vacation-related expenses were $978.26.

Finding Housing in Seattle

Emily and Kyle arranged to stay with two sets of friends in Seattle to give them about a week to conduct their housing search.

They were ideally searching for a 2BR 1BA apartment in an older building with no amenities as it is fairly expensive to live in Seattle and they were determined to keep their housing cost down.

Further reading: Apartment Search in Seattle

They only viewed three places before they found what they were looking for. The apartment they chose was only 0.2 miles from Kyle’s work. Within just a few minutes of entering this apartment they decided to apply for it, and they had to race another couple to submit their applications and $500 to skip to the front of the application line (which would ultimately go toward the security deposit).

Another challenge to obtaining housing in Seattle was that Emily and Kyle needed to provide their up-front rent and security deposit as a cashier’s check or money order. Because they bank with Ally, they had to find places to provide the needed money orders, which took a couple days.

Emily and Kyle’s total costs to get into their apartment were:

  • $302.48 in one-time fees for applications, processing, and money orders
  • $48 for July 31 rent and water/sewer/garbage
  • $1,495 for August rent and water/sewer/garbage
  • $1,375 for security deposit
  • total: $3,220.48

In addition, Emily and Kyle had already paid a full month’s rent in Durham, and they had not yet received their expected reimbursement for their unused rent.

Another unexpected cost to moving is eating out due to your limited time and lack of access to a full kitchen. Additionally, you can expect to spend more on groceries in your first month following your move as you stock your fridge and pantry.

What Would Emily Do Differently?

Emily hopes you learned from this story and its implicit advice.

If she had a do-over, Emily would have done a few things differently:

  • Spend more time planning the cross-country trip itself to keep costs lower.
  • Get rid of more stuff! They didn’t even unpack some boxes for a year and didn’t even notice that we were missing their contents.
  • Consider their longer-term needs for our housing in Seattle. Their apartment does not have a dishwasher or washing machine and dryer! This was fine before they had kids, but is now a strain with two children.

Emily is focusing a lot of her material on moving and starting a new job this summer, which you can find at pfforphds.com/next. She is offering webinars and coaching on this topic. A move and job transition is the perfect time to set yourself up for financial success!