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This Grad Student Advocates for Higher Stipends Using Cost of Living Data

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In this episode, Emily interviews Alex Parry, a sixth-year graduate student at Johns Hopkins in the history of medicine. Alex is a strong advocate for increasing stipends both in his department and at Hopkins broadly and is deeply involved with the grad student unionization movement. Alex and some colleagues recently released the results of a study of stipends vs. the living wage for about a dozen peer institutions to Hopkins, and he explains in detail the methodology of the study and the patterns that they found, making a case for the urgency to increase stipends at virtually all US universities. Emily and Alex discuss the benefits of this approach vs. how PhDStipends.com collects data. Alex shares a powerful concluding message on the need for collective action among graduate students.

Links Mentioned in this Episode

S12E7 Image: This Grad Student Advocates for Higher Stipends Using Cost of Living Data

Teaser

00:00 Alex: But ultimately, our ability to get what we need as adults and as employees of these universities done is contingent on what kind of pressure we are able to bring to bear. And what data we’re able to bring to bear. And the data are only a starting point, right? They provide the talking points you need, they provide the evidence you need. They provide the ability to do the negotiations, right? But ultimately, we will succeed or fail collectively. And we will succeed or fail on the base of our ability to sort of band together to demand what we rightfully deserve.

Introduction

00:37 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 the 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 7, and today my guest is Alex Parry, a sixth-year graduate student at Johns Hopkins in the history of medicine. Alex is a strong advocate for increasing stipends, both in his department and at Hopkins broadly, and is deeply involved with the grad student unionization movement. Alex and some colleagues recently released the results of a study of stipends vs. the living wage for about a dozen peer institutions to Hopkins, and he explains in detail the methodology of the study and the patterns that they found, making a case for the urgency to increase stipends at virtually all U.S. universities. Alex and I discuss the benefits of this approach vs. how PhDStipends.com collects data. Alex shares a powerful concluding message on the need for collective action among graduate students.

02:01 Emily: If you are a fan of this podcast, I invite you to check out the Personal Finance for PhDs Community at PFforPhDs.community. The community is for PhDs and people pursuing PhDs who want to take charge of their personal finances by opening and funding an IRA, starting to budget, aggressively paying off debt, financially navigating a life or career transition, maximizing the income from a side hustle, preparing an accurate tax return, and much more. Inside the community, you’ll have access to a library of financial education products, including my set of Wealthy PhD Workshops. There is also a discussion forum, monthly live calls with me, and progress journaling for financial goals. Our next live discussion and Q&A call is on Wednesday, August 17th, 2022. Basically, the Community exists to help you reach your financial goals, whatever they are. Go to pfforphds.community to find out more. I can’t wait to help propel you to financial success! You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s12e7/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Alex Parry.

Would You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

03:23 Emily: I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Alex Parry. He is a rising sixth-year graduate student at Johns Hopkins in the history of medicine. And we have a really valuable conversation coming up for you because we are talking about stipends and how to increase them, and the advocacy work that Alex is doing. We are recording this by the way in May, 2022. I know it’s going to be out a few months later. So, just for context, that’s where we are. Alex, would you please introduce yourself further to the listeners?

03:53 Alex: Sure. So, as it was already stated, I’m a rising sixth-year in the History of Medicine Department at John Hopkins. I work specifically on the history of consumer product safety and home accidents in the United States from about 1920 to 1980. And I’m also one of the organizers with Teachers and Researchers United (TRU) which is the currently unrecognized graduate student union at Johns Hopkins. So, one of many people who’s trying to push here and at other universities for increases to our stipends to accommodate a quickly accelerating rise in the cost of living.

Teachers and Researchers United (TRU) History

04:26 Emily: Yes. So, let’s hear more about that unionization movement right now. So, it’s currently unrecognized. Can you give us a little bit of the recent history, and where you’re hoping to go in the near future?

04:35 Alex: Yeah, absolutely. So, TRU has been around since roughly 2014. It started initially at the arts and sciences campus at Hopkins and was focused primarily on parental leave for graduate students as well as to try and increase healthcare benefits, particularly making sure that all graduate students had access to dental care and to vision care. Since then, the union has sort of grown and sort of formalized. And right now, we’re currently in the midst of an ongoing recognition campaign trying to basically work through the National Labor Relations Board or NLRB to try and seek an official union election at Hopkins. So, we’re hoping to basically have a unit that will encompass all PhD students at the university. So, sort of regardless of what division or campus people are located at, which is about 3,000 PhD students altogether. And we’re currently in the midst of trying to build up our core of organizers, have a lot of conversations with other graduate students at the university about things that are working for them and things that aren’t, in the hope of then sort of staging to basically a card petition with the NLRB sometime over the next couple of years.

How to Become an Officially-Recognized Union at a University

05:44 Emily: Okay. And walk me through this because my university was not unionized at the time. There was not even a movement when I was there. So, you basically gain enough support from the people who would be part of the union on campus through this card campaign. What happens next? The NLRB is involved, but then how does the university ultimately recognize the union?

06:04 Alex: Sure. So, there are sort of two main pathways to get to an officially-recognized union at a university, especially for a private university. Either the university can voluntarily recognize you, say that enough graduate students support this, that we’re just basically going to acknowledge your presence and then sort of work towards a contract from there. Most universities don’t take that path because they’re sort of concerned about having to bargain with graduate students. So, what ends up typically happening is, and this was recently reaffirmed by the NLRB over the last year or so, but if one is trying to seek an election through the NLRB, what one does is you can submit a petition to the NLRB to basically arbitrate an election at your campus when you have signatures from approximately 30% or more of the bargaining unit. Most unions will aim for a higher number than that because you don’t want to sort of rely on a third of the people at the university to 1) be a reliable indicator of how much people want a union, or 2) basically, one typically expects to have a more difficult time in the actual in-person election, which is what we’ll follow if the NLRB accepts your petition.

07:14 Alex: Because typically when you’re just signing the initial petition, you can basically do that remotely. So, people can just sign a digital card. During the actual election, typically those are done in person, which means that it’s harder to turn people out. And there, you’re looking for basically a bare majority of the voters. So, ordinarily, people will aim for more like 50% of the entire bargaining unit when they submit a petition to NLRB, and then after that, an election follows. If the election is successful, then you would then sit down with the university administration and basically negotiate directly over a contract.

Winning an NLRB Election

07:48 Emily: Okay. So, if it’s gone through the NLRB for this like official card campaign, then the university has to recognize the union at that point. Is that right?

07:56 Alex: Yeah, that’s correct. If NLRB hosts an election and the sort of proposed union wins, then the university is obligated to negotiate in good faith. So, there are various mechanisms that then both the university and then the proposed union will use to sort of conduct negotiations. Typically, they’ll have like labor lawyers and/or sort of like corporate lawyers involved. And you’ll sort of haggle over the details. A really good example of what this looks like as ongoing right now is at MIT. They’ve just won their election earlier this year. They’re currently in the midst of negotiations which started sometime late April to the beginning of this month. Those are likely to extend for another several months after this.

08:39 Alex: So probably, they won’t have a contract ratified or least put up to a vote because after you’ve had their bargaining committee come up with a contract, you then send it back to the base to all of the membership, to see if people actually approve of the contract that’s been written. So, sometime, probably this fall, maybe this winter, MIT will finish negotiating a contract, will send it back to everyone to basically vote on, and then if a bare majority approves of the contract, then that will sort of be the first contract for MIT’s graduate workers.

Shift to Stipends Advocacy

09:10 Emily: Okay. Thank you so much for explaining that process to me. One other follow-up question. You said when the union at Hopkins was originally introduced as an idea, back in 2014, they had concerns about leave and about vision and dental insurance. But you mentioned that you’re now more focused on stipends. So, were those initial concerns like fulfilled in some way over the intervening years? And why are stipends the focus now?

09:36 Alex: Yeah, both great questions. Sort of to answer the first one, most of the things that TRU has been advocating for, eventually we were able to win. So, at this point, at least at the school of arts and sciences, vision and dental, they’re not perfect coverage. I don’t want to give the impression that it’s phenomenal, but they do have paid for health insurance, dental, and vision now, as well as parental leave at the Homewood campus. So, overall TRU has been relatively effective in terms of getting sort of these smaller asks dealt with, things that are relatively lower cost, and also things where Hopkins had sort of fallen behind many of its peers. One of the reasons this campaign on healthcare had been so successful is that, one, Hopkins is a world-renowned health provider and the hospital is literally attached to the university.

10:24 Alex: So, it was kind of a bad look that people weren’t getting the kind of healthcare coverage that they needed. But the other sort of major factor there is that other universities that Hopkins considers its peers had provided much better coverage than Hopkins was. That same sort of rationale is part of the reason why stipends have now come to the fore. If you look at Hopkins vis a vis some of its peers, one, of private universities, like private R1 universities, it has one of the lowest raw PhD stipends of almost any school. If you adjust for the local cost of living, it ranks basically in the bottom third regardless of division. So if you look at, you know, engineering, stipends versus medical students stipends versus like biomedical, I should say, biomedical PhD stipends, or social sciences, humanities stipends, more or less across the board, Hopkins ranks the bottom third.

11:16 Alex: The other sort of major reason why we’ve shifted to stipends, in addition to, again, this sort of increasing gap between Hopkins and its self-described peers, is that a lot of us have been hit very, very hard by the inflation post-pandemic. And many people were also affected financially by the time that they were trying to deal with the pandemic, whether that’s in terms of childcare, inability to use research funds that people had earmarked to go on research travel that couldn’t be deferred or delayed. In addition to basically just as soon as the pandemic was starting to change to the current moment we’re in, obviously the pandemic is not over, but we seem to have entered a new way of dealing with it from public health terms and in terms of the community. Since then, rents have skyrocketed, grocery prices skyrocketed. And because of that people, who used to feel a little more comfortable with their stipend here are really starting to feel pretty significant financial pressure.

12:16 Alex: So, the other reason that we really started to push for this at the school-wide level and university-wide level is because we’ve been hearing from many of our members that people are both feeling less able to pay their bills month to month, and are also becoming more and more financially precarious. Where if someone has an unexpected expense, like a major medical bill, or like last summer my car battery died and I had to replace all of my tires all at once. That thousand dollars was, was a pretty substantial hit for me. So, these are the kind of things that we’ve been concerned about, and this is why we’ve brought this to the administration. It’s something that really needs to be addressed sooner rather than later.

Departmental Advocacy

12:54 Emily: And you’ve been speaking about you know, school-wide and university-wide initiatives, but I understand that you’ve also been working just within your department on advocacy. And I really was happy to hear the example earlier of some, I guess, some success with advancing the benefits that are offered at Hopkins. Not even necessarily through unionization, but just through bringing awareness to it. And Hopkins realizing, as you said, it’s falling behind its peer institutions. So, you know, advocacy can be successful even before unionization is totally in effect or even without that being in effect. So, not that that’s not also worthwhile, but that’s a long process and there can still be wins along the way. So, I want to hear also from you about what you’ve been doing, like in your department, specifically.

13:39 Alex: Yeah. And I hundred percent agree. Like, you know, obviously I am a card-carrying union member. I, you know, really want us to have an election to have a contract, but one thing that’s important for people to know is that sort of just the gradual growth of pressure that accompanies unionization, where you’re sort of talking with your peers, gathering together, working as a group, is often enough to get small wins. Those wins aren’t necessarily protected because you have a contract, right? And those wins are not necessarily of the degree or magnitude that one would hope for in a contract. But there is something to be said for just doing the work initially will get you somewhere and you can just get further than with unionization. So, I think it’s definitely sort of a both-and situation, not an either-or kind of situation.

14:26 Alex: In terms of what we’ve done specifically in our department. One thing that initially brought stipends to our attention even before inflation started spiraling even more out of control, is I’m part of an interdivisional working group that brings together representatives from the student government associations, the recognized ones at the university, as well as the union, to sort of talk together to share information and to make sure that everyone’s on the same page about what advocacy issues are pressing to the community. And also sort of how then to mobilize both institutional channels, talking directly to the administration and sort of like more grassroots advocacy-style channels, more militant-style organizing. So, we were having one of these conversations and realized that apparently the School of Medicine as a whole has a minimum stipend that at that point was approximately $34,900 a year. At that time, folks in my department were making $30,500.

15:23 Alex: So, we were a little bit confused and concerned about the fact that we seemed to be making $4,000 roughly less than our peers while working in the same school and, you know, being under the same umbrella. And everything we saw online was indicating at least that this should have been an across the board minimum. So, we went to our department and asked basically why this discrepancy had appeared, or why this was the case, and didn’t get phenomenally helpful answers. And so we went then to speak with the Dean of the school, Peter Espenshade, who works on basically like graduate student affairs and graduate student research at the School of Medicine. And eventually what sort of came out is that our stipends in particular were tied to the stipend of the school of arts and sciences for a series of sort of complicated and frankly not super compelling <laugh> historical reasons.

16:18 Alex: So, this kind of got us to think more about the fact that, one, not only are all graduate students at Hopkins being underpaid relative to the local cost of living, but also there are significant and often sort of inexplicable disparities between programs and departments at the university. There really is no good reason why social science and humanities students are paid less than hard science students at the school of arts and sciences, and why those students are then paid less than the biomedical science students and the engineers at this university. And then at the very sort of bottom of the economic food chain here, people at the School of Education and people at the School of Public Health have even lower stipends. And at the School of Public Health, some students aren’t even guaranteed stipends at all. In which case they have to basically perform hourly work.

17:06 Alex: So, part of what this advocacy looked like was, you know, going through institutional channels, sort of talking to both sympathetic faculty and our department chair and our DGS. Then sort of like going to Dean Espenshade, being then redirected to the School of Arts and Sciences, where we were able to basically lobby successfully both folks from my department, as well as other members of TRU and other folks at the School of Arts and Sciences to get all of our stipends increased to $33,000. So, it’s a substantial raise, $2,500, at least for my department. But it’s also still not close to enough. The estimated cost of living for Baltimore as of this previous December is over $38,000, which means that even after this raise, we’re looking at a $5,000 shortfall.

TRU Study Comparing Stipends Across Institutions

17:51 Emily: Yeah. So, you can pump your arms and say, “Okay, great! Like good job, partial win here, but like, let’s keep on going. Like, people are listening to us.” And yeah, that’s great. Okay, well, let’s talk more about this study that you did. So, I found you because of something that you shared on Twitter that got a ton of traction. So, I wanted to talk to you more about it.

18:12 Alex: Yeah. So, essentially what I and some other folks from the TRU data and resource committee have spent some time doing was, one, trying to find basically stipend figures for particularly biomedical science and social science and humanities programs at a few sort of select institutions. And then comparing those stipends with the cost of living estimated by the MIT Living Wage Calculator for a given county. And then what we did is basically to calculate the raw difference between those things, and then to calculate basically the percentage of the living wage that a stipend would cover in those areas. Some first major results, then we could talk more about method and why we did this this way and not some other set of ways. One, we found that only two schools actually did meet or exceed the local cost of living out of the set that we used. Out of our sample, only Brown and Princeton actually exceeded the cost of living. Every other institution, including big names like UPenn, Yale, MIT, and Cornell as well as Harvard, Columbia, and others, were falling anywhere from about, you know, 98-99%, so close to local cost of living, all the way down to closer to like three-fourths, like 75% of the local cost of living.

19:34 Alex: And basically, our goal here was to demonstrate that stipends, while they have risen and have been rising, one, are not keeping up with inflation. So, even though a lot of these schools have been getting somewhat regular raises, the raises have not been enough, especially in recent years to cover that inflation. And that sort of given that the MIT Living Wage Calculator is really only supposed to cover bare essentials, not sort of the comfortable lifestyle, not, you know, it explicitly says in a technical documentation that it doesn’t account any eating out, basically no savings, you know, no travel. And some of those things, at least travel, often graduate students are expected to pay for out of pocket if they need to do it for their own work. Unless they’re able to get an external grant or have access to enough research money to cover things in full, which is pretty rare.

20:27 Alex: Given all of that, it was also important for us to note that the MIT Living Wage Calculator data is supposed to be sort of a minimum standard of living that is not the poverty line. As we all know, the poverty line in the U.S. has fallen well below what is even reasonably livable in basically any part of the country. And so, this is an alternative measure, and graduate students are consistently getting paid less than that sort of bare minimum standard of living.

20:53 Emily: Yes. I also point people to the Living Wage Calculator, which is an incredible resource. It covers every county and every major metro area in the country. So, you can look up, basically depending on your family size, how much this sort of, again, just to pay for basic expenses, I’m not talking about poverty level, but just basic expenses, basic housing, basic food, basic transportation, healthcare, these kinds of things, what it would cost for a single adult. That’s what I usually reference for graduate students. But there’s also like if you have a number of children or if you have a partner, et cetera. I love referencing this, especially for prospective graduate students who haven’t yet moved to the city that they’re going to be attending and haven’t yet experienced what the costs are. This is one way to give them kind of a touch point.

21:36 Emily: But as you said, what I also very much try to emphasize to them, and I don’t want the listener to miss this, is this is only talking about necessary expenses. There’s no saving included in this calculation. There are no discretionary expenses included. It’s just to run a baseline lifestyle. And as you said, not even those numbers are being met at the institutions that you studied. I do want to sort of reiterate, because I think this was maybe missed on Twitter, but like you were only looking at, it sounded like maybe a dozen different institutions. Private institutions, R1 institutions, maybe all in the Northeast to Mid-Atlantic. Is that right?

22:11 Alex: Not just Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, but only a handful of schools for other regions.

22:16 Emily: Yeah, so like, and I just sort of know from experience that the situation is worse at other places outside of private universities, outside of R1 universities. So, even this bleak picture is sort of like the best picture of the data that probably you could have selected.

Commercial

22:34 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude! These action items are for you if you recently switched or will soon switch onto non-W-2 fellowship income as a grad student, postdoc, or postbac and are not having income tax withheld from your stipend or salary. Action item #1: Fill out the Estimated Tax Worksheet on page 8 of IRS Form 1040-ES. This worksheet will estimate how much income tax you will owe in 2022 and tell you whether you are required to make manual tax payments on a quarterly basis. The next quarterly estimated tax due date is September 15, 2022. Action item #2: Whether you are required to make estimated tax payments or pay a lump sum at tax time, open a separate, named savings account for your future tax payments. Calculate the fraction of each paycheck that will ultimately go toward tax and set up an automated recurring transfer from your checking account to your tax savings account to prepare for that bill. This is what I call a system of self-withholding, and I suggest putting it in place starting with your very first fellowship paycheck so that you don’t get into a financial bind when the payment deadline arrives.

23:54 Emily: If you need some help with the Estimated Tax Worksheet or want to ask me a question, please consider joining my workshop, Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients. It explains every line of the worksheet and answers the common questions that PhD trainees have about estimated tax. The workshop includes 1.75 hours of video content, a spreadsheet, and invitations to at least one live Q&A call each quarter this tax year. If you want to purchase this workshop as an individual, go to PF for PhDs dot com slash Q E tax. Even better, recommend that your grad school, grad student association, postdoc office, etc. sponsor the workshop on behalf of yourself and your peers. I offer a discount on these bulk purchases. Please point the potential sponsor to PF for PhDs dot com slash sponsor Q E tax. Now back to our interview.

Resources for Comparing University Stipends

25:00 Emily: What I would love to talk more about right now is how you found the stipends. So, the Living Wage is very easy to work with, a calculator from MIT, but how did you find the stipends to compare it to at these different institutions?

25:13 Alex: Yeah, so it was not super easy. A lot of universities do not make their stipend data particularly public, which is one reason why we’ve also used data from your basically database of self-reported data, PhD Stipends, which is, you know, a great sort of way to get self-reported information about what people are making in different departments at different places. We found that when we were working with the administration to try and lobby for increased wages that self-reported data weren’t as compelling to them as having something where we could point to an official university communication. So, all the data that we’ve collected have been sourced directly from offer letters, from university websites, or from internal university correspondence. So, you know, announcements of raises, for example, that went out to a graduate student listserv.

26:04 Alex: This has its cost and benefits. On the bright side, what this means is that it’s very, very difficult or impossible for administrators or other folks who are sort of less willing to provide increased stipends to sort of just basically wave the results away as badly reported self-reported data, or as sort of potentially not being an accurate reflection of all the quote unquote benefits that accrue to a graduate student. On the flip side, it means that we were then very limited in the amount of data we were able to collect. We’re a small team, it’s about four or five of us who work on this. And all of us are obviously also full-time graduate students. So, this is kind of a spare hours what little free time we have kind of project.

26:51 Alex: And so, that’s part of the reason why, as you’d mentioned that we really limited ourselves to the schools that Hopkins like self-describes as its peer institutions, which means R1, private, mostly Northeast, right? Which also as you pointed out means that this data is looking at the schools that should in theory provide the best of the best in terms of stipends. And the data looks substantially worse if you start looking at schools that, and there are many of them, that pay closer to like $16,000 a year, in some cases, in large metro areas. So, things could be better <laugh>.

27:29 Emily: Yeah, I’m really glad you brought up, like, so my website, my database PhDStipends.com. I say mine, but I just put it up. People can use it how they want, they can enter what they want into it, because it’s, as you said, it’s all crowdsourced and self-reported. We have thought about different ways to sort of verify like what people are reporting, the way that you’ve done for your study. But as you said, it’s very labor-intensive, and you’re asking people to give up very personal information. In my case, to an anonymous website, which is like out there and what protections do they have, you know? So, I think it really does, these are like complimentary approaches, I think. Because PhD Stipends can give you kind of a starting point. And that’s all it’s really meant to be, is like the more people use it, the more people enter, the clearer the picture gets. Yeah, you’re going to have some people write in typos or like people who are clearly making things up, but it’s a starting point. And you’ve, you know, jumped off from that point and done much more in-depth verification, which is wonderful.

28:23 Emily: But as you said, the data set only get so big when you go that route because it takes so much willingness on the part of the participants to let you have access to this information and then for the volunteers to verify it. So, I love that approach you took, and I know there are some other people working, you know, with similar approaches at different universities and different fields around the country. It’s all great work. And I love it. And that’s why I wanted to have you on to talk about this, but yes, I totally can understand. Some people do use PhD Stipends for advocacy work, but I think it’s, as I was just saying, a starting point rather than like the end all be all of what the data can be.

Stipend vs. Living Wage Patterns

29:00 Emily: Are there any other patterns that you want to share with us when you were doing the study regarding the stipends versus living wage?

29:08 Alex: Sure. So, one other thing that we’ve tried to do, and this is still sort of in the early stages, we’ve only gotten a few schools’ data collected so far for this, but we’re also trying to compile some longitudinal data. So, the table at the beginning of the Twitter thread and things that I think, you know, PhD Stipends sort of attempts to do is basically primarily to give like a one year snapshot. Like this is kind of like where things were in this single year without sort of then trying to do the detailed work of trying to figure out exactly what that means when you start accounting for inflation or especially inflation and cost of living in the local area. But one thing that we’ve been trying to do with the data set is now to compile using sort of both either sort of synchronic pictures at different moments of what the MIT data look like, or using right now, we’ve just basically been using data from the consumer price index to look at inflation over time and then tracking the stipends backwards for about five to six years.

30:03 Alex: What we have been noticing is that for almost all these schools, if you look at the, at the four, five-year trend, the overall real wage is declined. So, not only is the situation now that stipends are below the local cost of living, but in fact, we were making more in real terms five years ago than we are now. So, a lot of schools have been sort of touting the fact that they have increased stipends or are trying to increase stipends either, you know, a couple years back, or even now in response to inflation, but we still haven’t even recouped the amount that we’ve lost over the last few years, let alone actually gotten to the point where graduate students are making a livable wage. So, that’s another major trend. This long-term decline is something that we want to do more research on and sort of see how consistent it is, and also try and assess this magnitude in a more systematic way.

Effect of Unionization on History of Stipends

30:53 Emily: Yes. Wow. I guess also another question that I have, and I don’t know if you’ve looked into this at all, is to see what effect unionization and unionization movements have had on that history of stipends, because I would guess that, at the point when a union contract is first ratified, there’s probably going to be a substantial jump in at least some of the stipends at these universities. Maybe they’ve been falling behind in recent years and that jump helps catch them up a little bit, but it may be these sort of not gradual changes, but very abrupt changes when certain outside circumstances like that occur.

31:29 Alex: Yeah. I mean, I think what I’ve noticed from schools that have recently gotten contracts or have been, you know, in the process of getting contracts for a few years is, typically, if you look at the year when the contract is ratified, even if it doesn’t bring them up into sort of like the absolute upper echelon of schools in terms of the pay given to graduate workers, in many cases, because there’s been a many-year delay that added to the pressure that led to the unionization campaign to begin with. A lot of those schools have a very substantial percentage raise. So, if you look at the stipend table that was on the Twitter thread, you’ll notice that Columbia is near the very bottom in terms of relation to local cost of living.

32:08 Alex: Columbia would be even further behind, like closer to, at the moment, humanities and social science programs there are paid about 75% of the cost of living for New York. Without the most recent raise, which was substantial, I think like a 10% raise or something along those lines, you’d be looking at closer to like 68%. So, it’s important to note, when sort of interpreting the effect of unionization, yeah, there are some schools like Brown. Brown is the best-paid program relative to cost of living in the country. And a big part of that is the fact that they have a very strong militant union that has done a lot of great work. But even for schools that you might turn around and say like, well, how is it then that Harvard and Columbia, which have unions, don’t rank higher? There, it’s just a factor of 1) that the cost of living in Boston and New York is so high, and 2) that they actually are getting raises that are outpacing the annual raise of other places, but because they were so far behind to begin with, those additional raises or that super added raise is only just bringing them sort of further out of the gutter, so to speak, not necessarily actually again, launching them into an above cost of living style wage.

33:18 Alex: So, those are the things I would sort of initially note. I guess the last thing I would say about this is that one other effect that we’ve seen that’s happened a lot in unionized schools that is really important is that wages tend to get standardized across the school. And what that actually means in practice is that the folks at the lowest end of the income scale get pulled up to the highest. I’ve heard concerns or rumors that graduate students are afraid that if a union contract passes that wages will “meet in the middle.” That has literally never happened in a graduate student unionization campaign. In all cases, what’s basically happened is, if schools of public health or humanities and social science students at the bottom end of the income scale, they get boosted either all the way up to where the hard science students are, or get boosted up to some arbitrarily set lower level. And we can talk more about the fact that hard science students are consistently paid more than humanities and social science students, and more than public health students. But regardless, the effect is raises for everybody, but really big raises for folks who are at the bottom.

Consideration of Non-Employee Stipends

34:23 Emily: Yeah. So good to hear. Very, very reassuring for anyone who has that concern, or like heard that rumor or anything. Something that has always interested me about these let’s say the stipends that universities claim that they pay their students, or like announcing, okay, everyone in this school is now going to be paid this baseline stipend, is that I believe it’s focused on people who have assistantships, usually. Because they are the employees of the university and that’s where the best and most consistent data comes from. But as you well know, there are many, many, many graduate students who are funded, not because of assistantships or employee positions, but through fellowships or training grants or other non-employee sources of funding. My understanding is that technically, if a union does come into place those people would not officially be part of the union when they have those types of positions, because they’re not employees, and unions are just for employees. But I think at some universities, they found a way to sort of include people who are non-employee graduate students in some of the benefits that may come about with a contract, like, you know, better health insurance, for example. Did you consider these non-employee stipends in your study at all? Or do you have any comments about how they might or might not be included in like these advocacy pushes?

35:43 Alex: Absolutely. So, it is a complicated question, sort of how external fellowships are factored into a bargaining unit effectively. Or how they would be folded or not folded into a filing union. One thing to keep in mind is that basically, if any of your revenue or any of your income is being given by the university, it doesn’t matter if you have an external fellowship, really. That seems to be the consensus that we’ve seen from previous cases. So, for a lot of training grants, especially at places like Hopkins, almost all graduate students are paid above the NRSA rate, which is basically the NIH training grant stipend level, which I think for this coming year is somewhere on the ballpark of $26,000, roughly.

36:27 Alex: At Hopkins, because most people on those grants are then paid a super added stipend on top of that to basically get them up to the School of Medicine level, we have a bunch of people who are on external money who actually would be a part of a final bargaining unit. And at least in our case, when we’re looking at School of Medicine stipends, they’re sort of equivalent across the board. There are places and there are some grants where that’s not the case, right? One of them is the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship program. Depending on what institution you’re at and how much money that’s valued at, in many cases that will come out to above whatever the university’s pay is. So, in those cases, many times during NLRB elections, those folks have been excluded, and actually they were recently excluded in the MIT election.

37:18 Alex: One thing that’s important to keep in mind, as you already indicated though, is that if we’re able to push for higher stipends for everybody, right? Then ideally <laugh> we’ll be able to push things above the GRFP rate, and/or make sure to apply external pressure to the GRFP so that it pays better as well. And obviously, our benefits are not often given through the external fellowships. Things like the healthcare access to library resources, additional research funds that are not controlled by a granting agency but are coming from your department from your institution, are still things that we can lobby for. Another thing that we’ve been pushing for at the School of Medicine that’s sort of along the same lines is to provide relocation funds for folks who are moving from other states or overseas to Baltimore.

38:05 Alex: So, those types of benefits, even if we can’t necessarily include someone explicitly in a contract, those benefits that apply to all graduate students enrolled in the program would sort of directly accrue even to those who are not sort of an official part of the bargaining unit and therefore sort of attached directly to stipend benefits. So, these are other things to consider when we’re talking about a unionization contract, we’re talking about benefits as we’ve already sort of been indicating. Stipends are one indicator and are, I think, the most important indicator, but things like healthcare coverage, access to research money, relocation money, things like childcare support. These are all also really important aspects of thinking about what a graduate student needs to survive and also sort of what is and is not made available by their institutions.

Look-Back Formula for Voting

38:58 Emily: Would someone who is, at the moment, not considered an employee of the university be able to sign a union card or vote on a contract? I ask this because at other points in their career as a graduate student, they may be an employee, and it may, you know, very well affect them at that point. But maybe at the moment those things are happening they’re not an employee. How does that work out?

39:20 Alex: Yeah, that’s another complicated question. The NLRB clearly does not think first and foremost of graduate students when they’re coming up with their policies, but they do actually have a workaround for this. The NLRB has something called a look-back formula. So, if you’re a graduate student who goes on and off of external fellowships, for example. So, just as a personal note, right? This spring I’ve been off of department funding. I’ve been using money from the Center for Injury Research and Policy at the School of Public Health. It’s internal to Hopkins, but it’s an external grant funded by the CDC. But for that period, I am not a W2 employee with Hopkins, right? When I’m teaching, I am. But when I’ve been on this fellowship and when I’ve been on, Hopkins provides to graduates in my department basically two years of what’s called fellowship funding, which essentially is just, you know, you’re paid without any TA or assistantship work requirements.

40:23 Alex: Obviously, we’re still working, right? We’re applying for grants, we’re still publishing papers, we’re going to conferences. We’re doing everything except for the teaching or assistantship stuff. So, I always find it a little funny that it’s called a fellowship as if it’s not work. We are actually still doing work, just different work, right? But the point being that, for folks who move on and off of different kinds of funding what the NLRB will say is like over the last, you know, two years or something, were you at any point being paid directly by the university? Especially if it was a W2 employee. And if the answer is yes during any of that period, you are eligible at that point to vote in the election. So, the other thing to, I guess, keep in mind along those lines is that, even if you’re technically receiving fellowship income from the university, so not from NSF or NIH or somewhere else, we’re pretty confident at this point, and again, the legal aspects of this are a little murky, but we’re pretty confident that for all those graduate students, they also count even if they’re not receiving a W2 and even if they’re not TAs or RAs in the same way that other people are. So, basically, if your paycheck is coming from the university, you can be pretty sure, or part of your paychecks coming from the university, you can be pretty sure you’d be included in the final bargaining unit.

41:40 Emily: It’s very interesting. I had not heard that update yet. So, I’m really glad that the NLRB has been examining the special case of graduate students to kind of figure out how to handle those. Because it is so common to switch on and off of external or internal or whatever, you know, employee, non-employee kind of statuses.

Best Practices for Advocacy

41:56 Emily: So, as like kind of takeaway messages for the listener, are there particular best practices that you have identified or put in place with respect to advocacy that you’d like to share with other graduate students, et cetera, who are trying to do the same on their campuses?

42:12 Alex: Yeah, I think one thing is, as we were talking about earlier, to be a little bit agnostic about sort of what approaches work. You know, you should try to talk to faculty, you should try to talk to the administration. Institutional channels sometimes will get the job done, right? However, that’s not always going to be the case. And especially when it’s something as dicey as stipends, where universities, many of them, I won’t say Hopkins is one, right? But many universities are relatively cash-strapped right now and are sort of deeply concerned about sort of their futures and how much money they have. And in situations like that, often, even if there is money out there to basically increase graduate student stipends or priorities need to be reshuffled at the level of the university budget, really the only way to do it is going to be talk to your colleagues. If you can, try to unionize and sort of work together.

43:00 Alex: I think the main thing that’s essential to both kinds of advocacy, whether you’re doing it within the institutional channels or outside of them, or some combination, is that graduate students really have to work together. You know, obviously faculty can be supportive, undergraduates can be supportive, administrators can be supportive, right? But ultimately, like our ability to get what we need as adults and as employees of these universities done is contingent on what kind of pressure we are able to bring to bear. And what data we’re able to bring to bear. And the data are only a starting point, right? They provide the talking points you need, they provide the evidence you need, they provide the ability to do the negotiations, right? But ultimately, we will succeed or fail collectively. And we will succeed or fail on the base of our ability to sort of band together to demand what we rightfully deserve.

43:48 Emily: Very strong message. Thank you.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

43:50 Emily: Alex, thank you so much for this incredible interview! It’s been wonderful to have you on. Glad to hear about all the wonderful work that you and your colleagues are doing. I’d like to finish up by asking you the question that I ask of all my guests, 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.

44:12 Alex: I guess I would say to prospective students to, you know, choose wisely. Even a funded PhD does not mean that you’ll be really making the kind of money you’d be making without doing the PhD. So, you know, I think just having your eyes open about both what it means in terms of your financial future to get a PhD is important. And also, you know, also being aware that in some fields, a PhD will significantly improve your earnings potential and in others, it might not. And in some cases, it can even sort of be, frankly, a pathway to downward economic mobility. So, just think very carefully before doing a PhD.

44:53 Alex: For those who have already committed to it. And, you know, I don’t regret my PhD at all. I’ve found this a very intellectually rewarding experience and have really appreciated the chance I’ve had to both do my own research and to work with others, both on, you know history of medicine topics, but also on things like unionization. I’d say the big thing is join your union if there is one, and make sure again, to work with your colleagues. Figure out what people need to get through this degree. It’s a long slog, and it’s a very, very difficult job. But I’d say, you know, get together with your colleagues, make sure that you know, what you need and what they need, and do whatever you can to work together to achieve it.

45:33 Emily: Thank you so much, Alex, for joining me!

45:35 Alex: Thank you. That was really a pleasure!

Outtro

45:42 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.

The Necessity of Both Economic Justice Advocacy and Personal Financial Responsibility

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Ian Gutierrez, a PhD in clinical psychology and former union leader at the University of Connecticut. While in graduate school, Ian served on the bargaining committee for the newly formed graduate student union, and viewed a higher income as the solution to his personal finance challenges. During his internship year, despite earning about what he had as a graduate student, Ian challenged himself to live within his means and pay down his previously accumulated debt and in the process reformed his practice financial attitudes and practices. At the end of the episode, Ian and Emily discuss the importance of both advocating for economic justice and, to the extent possible, having good personal finance practices.

Links Mentioned

grad student union

Teaser

00:00 Ian: It was about at that time when all of the failings of my financial planning became extremely evident. Suddenly I realized that I had to live within my means, which was sort of embarrassing to say 29 or 30 year old.

Introduction

00:23 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season six, episode four, and today my guest is Dr. Ian Gutierrez, a PhD in clinical psychology and former union leader at the university of Connecticut. While in graduate school, Ian served on the bargaining committee for the newly formed graduate student union and viewed a higher income as a solution to his personal finance challenges. During his internship year, despite earning about what he had as a graduate student, Ian challenged himself to live within his means and pay down his previously accumulated debt. And in the process reformed his financial attitudes and practices. At the end of the episode, Ian and I discuss the importance of both advocating for economic justice, and, to the extent possible, having good personal finance practices. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Ian Gutierrez.

Would You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:23 Emily: I have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Ian Gutierrez, and Ian and I first connected actually when I was looking for guests for my “Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise” episode that came out season five, episode two. That was the one that was a compilation episode, with a lot of people and had a couple of guests talking about unions. Ian and I connected and we had such a great conversation that I was like, “Can we just have a whole episode, just your own interview instead of trying to cram all you have to say into just this little tiny spot. So that’s how this episode came about. So Ian, will you please introduce yourself a little bit further to the audience?

02:01 Ian: Sure. Well, first of all, thank you for having me on the podcast. This is very exciting for me. My name is Ian Gutierrez. I have a BFA from New York University in recorded music, which was actually my first love. And then I got my Master’s degree in psychology from the New School, prior to becoming a doctoral student at the University of Connecticut, where I was enrolled from 2012 to 2018 when I defended my dissertation. So I now hold a PhD in clinical psychology from UConn. Shortly following the completion of my clinical training at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio, I was very briefly a postdoctoral fellow at the Uniform Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. And I am currently a research psychologist with Tech Works LLC in the Washington DC area, where I conduct psychological research on mental health and resilience in support of our nation’s service members.

The Intricacies of Unionization for Graduate Employees

03:03 Emily: It sounds like a fascinating career path, something that would be great to explore at another time, but we’re actually going to go back to your graduate school days at UConn. And of course you were involved at that time with the union. Can you talk a little bit about what the climate was UConn at that time and why you got involved with the union movement?

Impetus for the Union

03:22 Ian: Sure, absolutely. I would actually say, first and foremost that it was one of the best parts of my graduate school experience was being involved with the graduate student unionizing effort. I often tell people that the experience that I had negotiating our first contract after we unionized was one of the best classes I ever took in graduate school. I first got involved with the unionizing effort in 2013. I was serving on our university’s graduate student government, and at the time the university was moving, or attempting to move graduate students over from a state-based employee health insurance plan into a student health insurance plan. Some people call it a SHIP. And bottom line was that we were getting worse health coverage for a higher price. Within the graduate student government we tried to advocate as best we could, but parallel to that, a number of other students thought that maybe unionizing was the way to go.

04:37 Ian: Now, personally, I grew up in a union family. All of my parents are union members in the theater business, actually. So that naturally struck me as the far more effective way to go about advocating for what we needed. I joined the organizing committee for our nascent union at the time and we, after interviewing a number of international unions, where you talk to the Communication Workers of America, Service Employees International Union, AFT, the American Federation of Teachers, we ultimately decided to organized with the United Auto Workers, which had had a lot of success in the area, unionizing graduate students, for instance, just up the road at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. So we organized our union in 2013 we ran a membership drive, a card counting campaign, to get legal recognition for our union, and that it was a very successful campaign. Very exciting. The state of Connecticut recognized our union in April of 2014, and from that point we moved into the bargaining process with the university administration. At that point, ran to be one of the six members of the bargaining committee, and then over the course of the following year from starting about August of 2014, up until June of 2015, we met with the university administration, I don’t remember exactly, a dozen times, maybe more, as we negotiated our first contract. We were fortunate enough to successfully negotiate our first contract with the union in 2015.

Issues at Play in Union Negotiations

06:29 Emily: Thank you so much for giving that context. I’m wondering when you, when you went into negotiate that first contract, was it mainly the health insurance issue that you all were focusing on, or were there some other issues that also came into play?

06:42 Ian: When we went into negotiating our contract with the administration, of course health insurance was a major issue for graduate students. Of course, it wasn’t the only one. I think actually the university was quite surprised by the litany of issues that we brought up and the many things that we wanted to negotiate over. Healthcare, in the end, turned out to be a remarkably, I won’t go so far as to say easy, but there was a very equitable solution that we were able to come to. In this particular case, the state of Connecticut had what they called the Connecticut Partnership Plan, where the state would work with local governments to work out affordable health care plans for local employees, and so that provided a very nice rubric that could be applied to graduate employees at the university.

07:39 Ian: But that was again, not the only issue that we covered. I think the biggest issues that really came up for us were fee waivers, and then a lot of the rights and protections for the union itself. One of the major differences from being a graduate employee who’s not unionized to being graduate employee who is unionized is that there’s a clear grievance procedure, which in my opinion is actually one of the strongest components, one of the most important components of being unionized as an employee anywhere, is that there’s some kind of legal recourse when something comes up in the workplace, and there’s very clear rules about who to go to, who to raise the issue with, and how the difference can be resolved.

08:34 Ian: But second to that, of course money talks, right? Fee waivers for us was, I very clearly remember, was sort of the last issue that we negotiated over it at some great length and turned out to be the hardest thing for us to come to an agreement on. We ended up coming to a resolution where, what the university called it’s infrastructure fee, which was a $460 per year fee, ended up being waived for graduate assistants. And then the university provided GAs with a hundred dollar credit every year, that ramped up by a few dollars over the course of the contract, to help offset the cost of fees. So those were some of the major issues that came up. I think that barely scratches the surface and certainly we could talk for a long time about the, the 30 to 40 provisions in the contract, but healthcare, tuition and fees, and a grievance procedure where, I think, some of the biggest issues that we really cared about.

09:45 Emily: Yeah, I think all of those are also really common ones to come up in these negotiations across many universities. And I really appreciate your point about the grievance procedure being one of the most important components because it is like the wild west out there in academia. I mean, there’s all these power structures and imbalances and just lack of clarity, and so that actually sounds really great that you would have that in place after that point. Something I wanted to ask you about is from your position at the bargaining table, how did you come to understand that the university, or at least that university, that administration, the people who you were talking with, how did you understand that they viewed graduate students and especially around their financial issues?

Grad Students vs. the Administration

10:27 Ian: Yeah, really interesting question. That to me was one of the more shocking components of the experience. You know, university administrators talk a lot about how important students are to the university, and will say things about how the student body is the lifeblood of the university and the reason that it exists, of course, and there’s a whole political rhetoric around the way in which administrators talk about students. And I think a lot of that comes primarily from their dealings, especially with undergrad, what the undergraduate population, where things are a little bit cleaner. Undergraduates are the public consumers of the education that the university is providing. And they also make up the majority of the student body at almost almost any university.

11:20 Ian: With graduate students, it’s a little bit more complicated because on the one hand graduate students are students. We are receiving an education, but in our roles as research assistants, teaching assistants, graduate assistants, generally, we’re also employees. So things get a lot murkier there and they’re very comfortable talking about us as students. They’re much less comfortable talking about us as employees and at the bargaining table where we’re really presenting fully and in that context only as employees, a lot of that kumbaya rhetoric about us being students really falls away remarkably quickly.

12:03 Ian: At the same time there’s a lot of nostalgia that comes up for a lot of these administrators because most of them, not all of them, but most of them, were graduate students at one point, too, but a lot of their touchstones to what the graduate student experience was like, is what it was like in the sixties, seventies, the eighties, the nineties. And they were looking at a much different financial picture then, than graduate students are looking at now. Not only that, but the demographic of graduate students has in many cases shifted pretty dramatically as well. So it’s not like you’re getting…I mean, who’s ever heard, nowadays of somebody getting out of school through PhD at the age of 24 or 25. Impossible? No, but pretty rare. A lot of folks are getting their PhDs, I know at least in clinical psychology, the average age is about 31. So we’re talking about folks who might already have kids, maybe elderly parents to care for, potentially. Possibly chronic health problems.

13:08 Ian: We’re looking at a much different, a much more complicated picture of who we are, and for the administrators to come to the table and understand who we are, I think was a leap for them, in as much, to be perfectly frank as it was for us to understand the complicated financial picture that the university has to deal with. And I want to be clear in saying that, well certainly there are many acrimonious relationships between graduate employees and administrators at many institutions. I actually came away from the process being more proud of being a graduate of the University of Connecticut, because I think that, while we didn’t always see eye to eye, the administration was really fair in their dealings with us, and I think that we returned that to them in kind. It was certainly a learning experience for us, and I like to think of what’s a learning experience for them as well.

14:11 Emily: So fascinating. Thank you so much for adding that. And I am glad to hear that it wasn’t totally an adversarial relationship there at the table. I actually thought you might’ve been going in a little bit of a different direction when you mentioned the shifting demographics of current graduate students versus maybe some decades ago. Because I’m thinking about more like first generation students getting to graduate school and earning their PhDs. Also people who don’t necessarily come from families that can provide them financial support in the case of an emergency or just on an ongoing basis. I don’t know the stats on this, but I would assume that’s more common now than it was some decades ago, as you know, diversified who’s earning a PhD, which is a great thing, but it certainly comes with different sets of issues and problems then maybe people who got their PhDs some decades ago were facing

14:59 Ian: Just to jump in on that point, I think it’s also really important and one of the other really key components of what makes me proud to have been a part of that union too, was the union’s strong focus on diversity and representation. I understand full well that as a white man, receiving a PhD at a university that I come to the table with a lot of privilege and a voice that some other people might not have. But one of the things that really struck me in the way that our union organized is that the people who in my personal view really made it happen were the student employees of color, and the women who were in our organizing campaign. And it was really actually two women in particular who really made our union possible, and in many ways, to the extent that I was a part of it, I think I sort of rode on their coattails. And when we were negotiating at the table, equal protection policies for our students who might have green cards, or students of color, making sure that there was bathroom access for the trans community at the university — all of these things were a very large component of what our union was about. And I’m very proud of that.

Commercial

16:35 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.

Personal Finances in Grad School in Relation to Unionization

17:21 Emily: Okay, so you’re in graduate school, you’re at the bargaining table, you’re working for better benefits, better processes, higher stipends, fee waivers and so forth. That’s one aspect of personal finance, right? What income is coming in, what your benefits are and so forth. What was going on with you? How were you handling the money that you actually received at that time?

17:43 Ian: Oh man. I would say that despite my heavy involvement in the union, I would mostly describe my practice for personal finance in graduate school as primarily relying on some degree of magical thinking. I didn’t really have a theory of the case regarding my personal finances really in any sense. I had a big picture sense that “more money, good, less money, bad,” but I never had any kind of robust plan on how I was going to move away from debt and towards wealth. I think the implicit thought process that I had was, well, I’m a graduate student and I’m poor and I’m in debt now, and somehow it all kind of come out in the wash after I get my degree and get a real job.

18:40 Emily: I think that’s super common. That sentiment is everywhere in graduate training.

18:47 Ian: And for me, even thinking about personal finances, a component of my life was…I engaged in a lot of avoidance around my own money management. And I think, as I have read into more financial guidance, you know, your Dave Ramsey or your Suze Orman’s or whoever — where do they start? They always start with, in a budget you want to first take a look at how much money you think you have coming in every month. Well, personally, speaking personally about my family background, my family worked in theater and even though you might be a part of a union, how much money you’re making in a month, you don’t know how much money you’re necessarily making in the next week or two weeks. You don’t know when your paycheck is coming and when it comes, you don’t necessarily have the best idea of how large it’s going to be. I never really had a financial budget education from my family background. But then sort of even more strikingly, I never had it in high school. I never had it in college. I never had it in graduate school. I just never had it, which, for being a pretty well educated person, still kind of leaves me. floored. Talking about money, it was almost like talking about sex. It was like everywhere and defining the culture, but you couldn’t actually get a grasp on what was going on.

20:34 Emily: That’s a great analogy.

20:34 Ian: Really striking. I think it really is because money is so personal and it’s such a component of who we are that we all have a lot of the feelings — good, bad, otherwise — around what it says about who we are and our understanding of what our life is and where our lives are going. Long story short, I just really engaged in a lot of avoidance around it, and I also think that part of the way that my own income from graduate school was structured led me into some poor practices as well. For one example, I received half of my income from a GA stipend that I received every two weeks, like a paycheck, but then the other part of my income I received from a fellowship check, which came in these two big checks every year. What it sort of led me to believe was that, well, as an adult, twice a year, you’re just going to received this huge windfall, so I can just spend up a lot of money on a credit card, and, well, no big deal because I’m going to get this big windfall every August and every January. Come to find out, at the end of this golden brick road, that’s actually not what happens in the course of typical adult living. Suddenly, after graduate school, I had this student debt and the cavalry’s not charging over the hill anymore.

22:18 Emily: That’s so interesting. I haven’t interviewed anyone before who’s spoken about the pay frequency, which I mean what you described as maybe a little bit unusual, but there’s plenty of people who deal with a couple of times per year, big checks coming in, or maybe just a pay frequency that they were unfamiliar with, like monthly instead of biweekly, or just any kind of shift. It’s interesting just to hear how that impacted actually the way that you handled your money. Of course there are many budgeting techniques to deal with this and that’s a conversation with me for another time. But I’m really curious now to hear about what actually caused you to change these attitudes in this behavior. Was it getting out of graduate school and realizing that you had a steady paycheck and it wasn’t ever going to be these windfalls? What was your motivation to start exploring the subject area?

23:05 Ian: Well, the one thing that I did decide, and this is a little bit particular to the way that graduate education is structured in clinical psychology, is that if you’re pursuing a doctorate in clinical or counseling or school psychology, you have to complete a year long internship. Most people move for this year long internship and the internship pays a stipend that is roughly similar to what you would get paid as a graduate assistant, depending on locale. It’s anywhere from $20 to $30 grand a year. When I made this move, I knew that I wasn’t going to be enrolled in enough course credits to access loans and I can either fork up a bunch of money to take on six credit hours or whatever it was, so that I could have access to student loans, or I could not sign up for those credit hours and not be eligible for loans.

24:03 Ian: I chose to not sign up for the credit hours and not be eligible for loans. I sort of took the cold turkey approach to student loans. And it was about at that time when all of the failings of my financial planning became extremely evident, because now I wasn’t receiving my windfall fellowship twice a year and I had cut myself off from student loans and a lot of my credit card balances were fairly high. Suddenly I realized that I had to live within my means, which is sort of embarrassing to say as a 29 or 30 year old, but that’s part of the reason I’m here on the podcast saying it, is because I know that my assumption in life is that if it’s affecting me, it’s probably affecting someone else. I can only imagine that there is a silent, I don’t know that it’s a majority, but a silent plurality, of current or former graduate students out there who have also suddenly realized at the ripe age of 30, that they know nothing about financial planning, have been behaving, you know, somewhat irresponsibly, and now they’re in a bad situation.

25:26 Ian: I never really took myself as someone who lived wildly outside of my means. I bought and paid off and used car and sure, my wife and I would go out dinner from time to time, but I wasn’t living the high life by any stretch of the imagination. And yet still, after all of that, I realized that I just didn’t have any scheme for how I was going to manage any of this. To keep on with the language of addiction, and there’s certainly many parallels to be drawn between credit cards and addiction, to be sure, I had sort of hit a rock bottom, where I suddenly realized that I need to come up with a plan, not only so I can pay this stuff off, but so that I can build and save for the future.

26:20 Emily: Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that because I think you’re absolutely right that many people are waking up at some time or another to realize that in the same way that you did. So first of all, average American kind of thing, a lot of people don’t live within their means or they do in some aspects of their budgeting and they don’t in other. Like they are racking up credit card debt and then occasionally will pay it down, and there’s this cycle there. That’s pretty common. But I think that the graduate student experience sort of exacerbates that mentality. I think academia tells us that well, while you’re a graduate student, even to some extent while you’re a postdoc, you’re excused from the general financial responsibility that you might feel at another stage or at another time in life because well, you know that your pay is going to be low and so what expectations can you really have of yourself when your pay is so low. That’s one aspect of it. The other one is, as you mentioned, the access to student loans, which I think that if people aren’t necessarily using them, they may kind of forget that they do have access to them all the way through graduate school really. But it is there as a backstop, as a good decision or as a bad decision to take it out. You really are given an out all through graduate school that you don’t have to live within your means, unless you choose to, because the culture is telling you you don’t have to do, you have student loans there if you need to take them out. It kind of just contributes to that overall problems. I definitely don’t think you are at all alone.

27:46 Emily: I really think about myself going into graduate school. I very intentionally told myself I’m going to live within my means. And I actually thought about it that way at that time, for various reasons. But that was partially because I had a break between undergrad and grad school, where I had to live within my means. I didn’t have access to student loans, and so it was like, okay, I’m just going to carry forward into my graduate degree with what I learned when I was out of school. But if you don’t have the same attitudes that I do or didn’t have exposure to the same stuff, or you went continuously from college to graduate school, you may not have had the wherewithal to even think about it that way.

Personal Finances After Grad School

28:22 Emily: Okay, you’re getting into your internship year, you don’t have access to the loans, you have the high credit card balances, you’re realizing you actually have to live within the paycheck — what did you do? How did the story evolve?

28:36 Ian: Well, let’s see. I would say that I didn’t start by coping with it in a very…I mean, despite my training in clinical psychology, I want to say that I dealt with it like in a very logical or sensible way. I think mostly I felt terrified, and then anxious, and then afraid, and then hopeless, and then angry, and I cycled through all of this stuff. That was my first reaction, and of course none of that was really particularly helpful. Eventually, I took out a Dave Ramsey book from the library. And I would say that I have mixed feelings about his guidance. I certainly have mixed feelings about prosperity gospel, for sure. But I think the basics, like the super, super basics of what he, or I mean really anyone — him, or Suze Orman, Gaby Dunn — any of these folks out out there, is that the 101 clearly gets you on the right path of figuring out how much money you have coming in every month, determining your expenses, and figuring out what you need to do to balance that equation. There were some other components that I found particularly helpful, where my feeling was, I had heard about this thing called debt snowballing with credit cards and I knew that I wanted to do that, but reading, at least based on Dave Ramsey’s recommendation, that if your finances are really a hotness, which that’s me, the first thing you want to do is save $1000. Save enough money so you have some kind of stop gap if car breaks or unexpected medical bill or what have you.

30:41 Ian: I think that’s what really got me started with it, but I do also want to say that what also got me started with it was after graduate school, having an income that gave me enough hope that I could pay down some of these debts, which I think brings me sort of full circle to a point of balance in my own way of thinking about finances, where I personally believe that true financial responsibility is not just about managing your own finances, but also advocating for greater economic justice. That they’re not separate. Blaming all of your financial problems on the world and the way it is, is not the healthiest way to look at things. Viewing your finances as a personal responsibility that you, yourself need to carry like Atlas to the end of time, come hell or high water, no matter what else is going on out in the world, I also don’t think it’s particularly healthy.

31:52 Ian: There needs to be a balance where we can say to ourselves that the world can be a cruel and unfair place. We have to do whatever it is that we can to live a financially healthy life now, while advocating and fighting for a better future for ourselves and for our children. Even in sort of tying it back to my time in the graduate students union, if I have two legacies that that I left at university of Connecticut, one is my dissertation, which is going to metaphorically collect dust on a server, because the likelihood that anybody will read it except for figuring out how to format own dissertation is pretty low. But the legacy of knowing that we have left, that I and all of the other students who worked together, hand-in-hand, to create a union so that future students could have a more prosperous future while they were in graduate school, that’s something that I can really look back on with pride. I think coming to that sort of healthy balance for me is where I’m currently at in my own thinking about financial health.

33:15 Emily: Yeah, thank you so much for that articulation, that was absolutely fascinating. And I think I also am going on a similar journey to come to the same place, but starting from the opposite side of, okay, just keep your head down, focus on your own business, and not necessarily look up at the wider picture as much. I’m sort of emerging from that viewpoint. Thanks to a lot of these interviews that I’m doing through the podcast, it’s been really a big growth experience for me.

33:45 Emily: What I wanted to ask you about though is in coming to that healthy place of being able to do both of these things, what you think about the idea of the necessity of having your own personal finances in the best shape that they can be in as enabling you to go out and do that good work in the world and advocate for others. I won’t say it’s impossible to do the latter without the former, but I think if you come from an area of personal strength, that it just further enables you to do that work. What do you think about that?

34:17 Ian: I like that idea. I think it resonates with this idea that to help others you need to help yourself, like on the airplane where you’ve got to put the oxygen mask on yourself before you help somebody who’s sitting next to you. I think that that can be true. I don’t think that one needs to preceed the other, however. I think that it’s important that we have a broader conversation, both within higher education, but within society as a whole, about the relationship between economic justice and the economic structures that we’re embedded in, and our own personal financial health. I think, actually, that unions could be a really nice and really good nexus at which students can find that, because at least to me, if a university administrator who’s making $200,000, $300,000 a year comes and lectures me about financial responsibility, my response is not going to be, Thank you, I appreciate that. As a graduate student, my response to that would be, go take a hike, to put it politely.

35:46 Ian: However, I think if unions can sell this idea that a stronger union, a more just economic society is one in which its advocates and its members and its stakeholders are able to responsibly manage their own finances, I think that’s really important. While, at the same time recognizing that there are some situations in which financial responsibility is not itself always the primary problem for someone who’s having financial difficulties. A few examples that come to mind are if you have a child or a loved one or yourself who has had a severe medical emergency and suddenly you have a six figure bill put on your doorstep, the problem there is our healthcare system, and not necessarily how you’ve managed your own money. Of course you still have to come up with a solution and that’s important, but let’s not lose sight of the big picture.

36:59 Ian: I think it’s also important that we recognize the impact that mental health can have on a person’s finances. While I was in graduate school, one of the things that I studied was gambling disorder, for instance. The processes that underly gambling disorders, I mean, I’m sure there are graduate students out there who have issues with gambling, but sort of more broadly just than gambling, if you think about shopping addiction, any kind of mental health problem that might lead to episodes of irresponsible financial behavior. Bipolar disorder would be another one that would fall very neatly in that category. We have to make enough room within our economic justice advocacy to recognize that there are people for whom their financial problems are not primarily caused by a lack of what you might call personal responsibility. I think we can come at it from both directions, but part of getting folks who are able to be financially responsible, to be financially responsible is to have the right vehicle for learning about that, that says the world can be a terrible and unfair place, but in light of that, in recognition of that, let’s help give you the skills to thrive to the best of your ability, financially, in spite of that adversity.

Best Financial Advice for Graduate Students and PhDs

38:27 Emily: I’m so glad you put that in the larger context. I’m really glad that we took the time for that. So as we wrap up the interview, what is your best financial advice for maybe a graduate student or another early career PhD, perhaps something that you’ve learned, post this transformation after you’ve reformed your own practice of personal finance?

38:50 Ian: Sure. I would say that I have three small pieces of advice. The first is keep track of everything that you spend. And this is just personally, I think if you keep track of every little thing you spend, you really understand where your money is going, and it starts to sort of become like a fun game of saving money, where you can go “Oh, well, you know, I could spend, you know, $4 at Starbucks or I could buy a bag of beans and make a cup of coffee at home for 25 cents.” That’s sort of my simple suggestion.

39:29 Ian: Number two is forgive yourself and it’s never too soon to start. Again, sort of having worked in the world of recovery, it’s never too soon to start. Whether you’re 22 and just thinking about graduate school or whether you had gone back to graduate school and you’re 37 and you have two or three kids and you’ve never really seriously considered how to build wealth, it’s never too soon to start.

40:07 Ian: And then number three, my final point would be make economic justice advocacy a core component of your own financial responsibility. Really own the idea in your heart, that taking care of others is taking care of yourself, and taking care of yourself is taking care of others. And in that spirit, hopefully, all of us can create a more economically just life for graduate students in higher education and more broadly, in society at large.

40:45 Emily: Thank you so much Ian. I’m so glad to learn from you and to have your perspective here on the podcast. So thank you so much for giving this interview.

40:53 Ian: Thank you so much. If you would like to, you can follow me on Twitter at @ianagutierrez and it’s been a real pleasure to be here.

Outtro

41:02 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 Poddington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC podcast editing and show notes creation by Lourdes Bobbio.

Insights from the Bargaining Table with a Graduate Student Union Leader

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In this episode, Emily interviews Mary Bugbee, a fourth-year PhD student in anthropology at the University of Connecticut. Mary tells the story of the grad student union at UConn, from its inception in 2013 to through the start of the second and current contract. Mary served on the bargaining committee for the second contract and gives her insights from the bargaining table into how the university views graduate student labor. She tells graduate students what they can do to support higher pay and better benefits at unionized and nonunionized universities. Mary also shares how her personal finances have benefitted from the strong union contract and her excellent financial advice for other early-career PhDs.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

grad student union bargaining

Teaser

00:00 Mary: The economic model of universities is exploitative. We’re cheap labor. A lot of us aren’t going to get tenure-track jobs. It’s designed this way for a reason. The problem is structural. Sometimes it’s not individual.

Intro

00:19 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 nine, and today my guest is Mary Bugbee, a fourth-year PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Connecticut. Mary tells the story of the grad student union at UConn, from its inception in 2013 through the start of the second and current contract for which she served on the bargaining committee. She gives her insights from the bargaining table into how the university views graduate student labor and what graduate students at unionized and non-unionized universities can do to support higher pay and better benefits. Mary also shares how her personal finances have benefited from the strong union contract and her excellent financial advice for other early-career PhDs. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Mary Bugbee.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:13 Emily: I have joining me on the podcast today, Mary Bugbee. She is a graduate student at the University of Connecticut, and she has been very active within their graduate student union. So, we’re going to hear a lot more about how that works from Mary. So, please, Mary, take a moment to introduce yourself to us.

01:29 Mary: Hi, and thanks for having me on this podcast. I am very passionate about unionization and that’s what I’ll be talking about. So, my name is Mary Bugbee. I’m a fourth-year PhD student at the University of Connecticut in Anthropology. I’ve also served as the vice president for the graduate employee union, UAW Local 6950, and then served as the president. And during that time, I also served on our bargaining committee for our second contract.

UConn Grad Student Union: First Contract

01:59 Emily: Yeah. So, when you started graduate school, which it sounds like that was during the first contract, what was the status at that point? What was in your offer letter for your stipend and the benefits? What was that first contract including?

02:13 Mary: Okay, so I was really lucky. I came into a university that had a unionized workforce of graduate employees. So, my benefits were really good starting off. I started in the fall of 2016, which was the second year of the first contract that they ever had. I was funded fully, which means for 20 hours a week, split between research assistantship and teaching assistantship. And that was $22,000 about for my nine-month academic year stipend. So, the University of Connecticut, in the Storrs campus, it’s not typical to have 12-month funding. People are usually funded at nine months, and then some people get additional funding. I also had a really good health insurance package. I pay $200 a year, I have no deductible, and my copays are $15, $20, depending on where I go. And it’s awesome.

03:14 Emily: That does sound really good. And you came in as a master’s student, is that right?

03:18 Mary: Yeah, so I got my master’s on my way to the PhD, and the way our stipends are set up is there’s a beginner’s level, a master’s level, and then the PhD candidate level. So, if I had come in with a master’s degree, I would have been making more than $22K.

03:34 Emily: Okay. And was that all part of the contract as well? That sort of graduated stipend level?

03:38 Mary: I believe the graduated stipend level was something in place before the contract, but it was maintained with what they negotiated. Instead of just having the same amounts for like many years in a row, we got raises from year to year. So, that was where the improvement was. So, not just a raise when you get to the next level, but also just a raise each year to help keep up with the cost of living.

Summer Research Fellowship

04:03 Emily: Yeah. So, one more question kind of about what was going on when you came in. You mentioned that your offer didn’t include summer funding. So, for you in particular, did you end up getting summer funding some of the years? Or how has that worked out in the years you’ve been there?

04:16 Mary: Yeah, so my department, the Anthropology Department, has something called a summer research fellowship. It’s basically guaranteed for first and second-year students to do exploratory fieldwork or language training during the summer. So, I had that my first summer and my second summer, which helped a lot. It still only covered my costs in the field, so I had to have savings to pay certain bills when I left for the summer. And since I was in Mexico, I couldn’t work. I didn’t really have any income. So, it was really important that I was able to save during the year. I did have side gigs.

Summer Side Hustling and Housing

04:54 Emily: Okay. Yeah, I was just about to say. So, the $22,000 in that first year that you received over a nine-month period–was that basically just paying for your living expenses during that nine-month period and then you had to side hustle to do the summer self-funding or how did that end up working out?

05:09 Mary: So, I’ve always had a side hustle or two. At one point I had technically four, but I’d say I just had one extra side hustle that first year. I got some per diem hours working as an administrative assistant at a local hospital. It was something I had before I started graduate school. So, I was lucky. I would say the stipend alone was enough to pay my living expenses. I lived with my partner at the time, a one-bedroom apartment. We split rent, although he paid a higher percentage of the rent. Had I lived with just a regular roommate and had a two-bedroom apartment. I think things would have been a lot tighter, because Connecticut is an expensive state. But, I never had a month where I was broke, and I was always able to put a little bit of money away. I’d say I earned maybe a hundred to 200 extra dollars a month with my side hustle.

Was Side Hustling Allowed Under the Union Contract?

06:04 Emily: Okay. I’m always very curious when people talk about side hustles. Is side hustling officially allowed under that first union contract? Or is it something that’s not really addressed?

06:14 Mary: So, the union contract has nothing about whether or not we can have outside employment. The graduate school at UConn actually governs that. And officially, you’re not allowed to work beyond the 20 hours a week in your offer letter. However, with advisor approval, you can. It really depends on your program and your advisor. I’m very fortunate to have a program and an advisor who has been completely okay with me having side hustles as long as I was meeting the academic criteria and progress goals. But some people at the University of Connecticut do not have the same luxury, and their advisors or their programs will give them crap about it if they find out. So, it’s really dependent on where you are in the university.

07:06 Emily: Yeah, that’s unfortunate. I definitely come down on the side of, if you’re doing what’s expected of you in your role as a graduate student, your advisor or whoever should not care what you’re doing outside of that, whether it’s a side hustle, whether it’s other stuff in your personal life. Especially when you’re being paid a stipend, like you were just saying, that’s like maybe adequate, sort of. Really, if you’re going to be making the choice between, “Okay I’m going to side hustle a little bit or I’m going to experience a bunch of financial stress,” and that can affect your work too. Thanks for adding that detail. So, how did you first get involved with the union and what was your role? I mean, you already mentioned a little bit what your roles were, but what were you actually doing?

Mary’s Role in the Grad Student Union

07:42 Mary: So, my research area is actually health policy. And I know a lot about health insurance. So, when I knew the contract was going to be reopened for bargaining–that was in 2017–I decided to get more involved. I wanted to be part of the bargaining committee and help with issues around health insurance. And then from there, I became super involved. I ended up becoming the vice president as well as a member of the bargaining committee. And from there, I’ve just been actively involved ever since. I did resign from the presidency this past May. So, I was the president for the past academic year, but I really need to focus on my research now. So, I’ve moved on and now I’m just a rank and file member and a volunteer. So, that feels good.

08:33 Emily: Yeah. But still doing outreach like this podcast.

08:36 Mary: Yes.

History of the UConn Grad Student Union

08:37 Emily: Okay. So, can you tell me a bit more about maybe the history of the union? When did it first come into place, and how did that work?

08:45 Mary: Yeah. So, from what I understand, there were multiple attempts at unionizing at the University of Connecticut over the years, but it culminated in 2013 when the university decided to just unilaterally change the health plan that the GAs were on to a higher deductible and just a more limited coverage network. So, not only was it more expensive, but it disrupted care for people. There were people who had to switch therapists or primary care physicians because they were no longer in-network. And that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. People realized that, without having a collective bargaining agreement, without having a union, the university could do that sort of thing at will, and they didn’t like being in that vulnerable situation. And on top of that, they were increasing student fees every semester. Wages were stagnant, the workload was becoming an issue. So, there were a lot of factors, but I’d say it was the health insurance. That was the last straw.

Health Insurance as a Common Catalyst for Unionization

09:46 Emily: That’s actually a little bit similar to the story that I heard out of the University of Missouri where–I think this was as a result of the passage of the Affordable Care Act–the university decided to stop offering health insurance or stop making it an included benefit. And so that again, as you were just saying was–and they did this like the day before the start of the coverage period. So, people literally we’re going to be without insurance the next day and finding out–I mean, that’s an extreme scenario. And so that again, as you were just saying, that was the catalyst there for a unionization movement. And I don’t know how quickly they got that into place, but yeah, please continue on with what was happening at UConn.

10:27 Mary: Yeah. So, from there there was a lot of organizing and these were mostly volunteers–or all volunteers at that stage–of people, graduate students who just decided that they needed a union. So, they got buy-in from other groups on campus, including faculty, the Graduate Student Senate. By November, December, 2013, they had selected United Auto Workers for their parent union. I think they had talked with a few others, but they decided UAW was probably their best bet. They have a really good track record in higher education.

11:00 Emily: As I understand, UAW does most, or virtually all, of the grad student unions, is that right?

UConn Breaks Higher Ed Record for Fastest Card Drive

11:07 Mary: I think there are a few AFL grad employee unions, but yeah, UAW I’d say might have the monopoly in higher education graduate employees and postdocs. So, from there, we had the card drive in February 2014 and we actually broke a record at UConn for fastest card drive in higher education organizing history. By early March, over 50% of graduate assistants had said, “Yes, we want a union. And yes, we want to be a member of this union.” By April it was recognized by the university and certified with the state labor board. Bargaining kind of got off on a bad foot. That June, the university decided they didn’t want to do summer bargaining. But they ended up bargaining from August, 2014 to April, 2015, and the first contract was in place by July 1st, 2015. And it was a three-year contract.

12:07 Emily: I see. So, really the initial phase of, “We want to get this in place, let’s get the buy-in.” That happened relatively quickly. But then the bargaining–I’m learning about this for the first time–the bargaining took quite a bit of time.

Bargaining: A Long, Arduous Process

12:19 Mary: Yeah. So, the process of bargaining can be very frustrating. The first contract is always going to take longer because you have to write everything from scratch. So, I was on the bargaining committee for the second contract. So, if you’re a member of the executive board you’re automatically on the bargaining committee. But there are also elections for district representatives so that there’s representation across the graduate assistant community. And then usually there’s a survey that’s done prior to bargaining, or there always is in our case, to elicit what people’s priorities are–to see what matters most to them. And then that’s used to define the bargaining goals. And the membership ratifies that and then bargaining can begin with the university. So, we started the second contract October, 2017 and we bargained until April, 2018. And it was a long, arduous process.

13:18 Emily: So, can you give me some examples of points that people brought up to you during the survey process that they wanted to have on the table for bargaining? Maybe some that ended up in the final contract and some that didn’t.

Issues: Health/Vision Insurance, Parking, Student Fees

13:29 Mary: Yeah, so everyone has always wanted vision insurance. We haven’t gotten that in either of our contracts, unfortunately. But you know, a lot of us wear glasses and contacts, so that gets brought up a lot. Health insurance–people want to keep the health insurance we had. People want wages. Parking is a big issue at UConn. It’s very frustrating. You have to pay to park and then you might pay for a permit and you still won’t be able to find a spot at certain times of day. I understand this is probably a problem at a lot of universities, but it always comes up with our members. But yeah, the student fees are another issue because each semester before we start, before we’ve gotten our first paycheck, we have to pay fees. And my understanding is that before the union was in place, fees were close to a thousand dollars a semester. Now they’re like $600, $700, and that’s with the university increasing fees during that time. So, we’ve kept it pretty low. So, the financial stuff is always big, but there’s other stuff too. And sexual harassment and discrimination protections, those are very important to our members as well.

Active Membership is the Key to a Bargaining Committee

14:41 Emily: I see. So, can you tell me a little bit more about how the bargaining committee works? You just said it was a six-month process. It’s arduous. What are some details there?

14:49 Mary: So you have the team–the negotiating team–and for us, our lead negotiator was an international rep from the UAW because none of us really have experience in bargaining. So, that’s one of the reasons you go with a parent union, because they have all those resources for you. So, he was the lead negotiator. We would try to meet as often as we could. The university wasn’t great about giving us a lot of time. We even met over breaks. Sessions could be from like two hours to four hours, and by the end, like all day sessions. We signed the tentative agreement at two in the morning. So, that’s the actual, active bargaining at the table. What’s most important for people to know about the bargaining process is that you need an active membership. You need to have collective power behind the bargaining team. So, our organizing committee all year long was organizing direct actions, was doing member outreach to educate them about the bargaining process and the trials and tribulations at the table. People would write op-eds for the campus newspaper or other news outlets. So, we were constantly putting pressure on the university from behind the scenes of the actual bargaining table. And that is the reason why we’ve gotten strong contracts both times. It’s because we have really active members who put so much time and energy into securing really good contracts.

Ways to Be an Active Member (Beyond Striking)

16:22 Emily: What does it mean to be an active member? You just mentioned writing op-eds. Did it come to really visible action, like strikes, or anything like that? Or maybe there are some intermediate steps.

16:32 Mary: Yeah, so, we never had a strike. Connecticut is a no-strike state, which doesn’t necessarily mean people wouldn’t strike, but we’ve never had to do that. I’d say being an active member is doing what you can with the time you have. And for graduate students, even the smallest thing can be a big ask. So, it was very inspiring to see people turn out for our big direct action at the end. We had a sit-in at the student union. We had three simultaneous sit-ins. We had some people at the student union chanting, then we had people in the Office of Institutional Equity because sexual harassment was a major theme in bargaining, and then we had people who went to the president’s office. Prior to that, we’d had a big sit-in in her office building a day she was offering office hours. So, like big, public, noisy, direct actions that called attention–not just to people at the university but people outside the university–to what was happening. And some of those people I had never seen at a membership meeting before. They weren’t regularly involved, but they turned out that day, and that was awesome.

Commercial

17:47 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.

Sit-ins Demonstrate Collective Power

18:51 Emily: So, how does something big and visible like a sit-in translate to the bargaining table? Are the people from the opposite side coming in, they’re saying, “Okay, okay, we see, we see”? What’s actually happening?

Mary (19:03): They see the collective power that we have. They see, “Wow, this group of GAs, they do really important work at this university. And if they were to ever not do that work, that would be a big deal.” So, even though we haven’t had a strike, I think that’s always on the back of the mind of the employer, because we do the day-to-day research, the day-to-day teaching. There are 2,200 of us at the university. The university wouldn’t be able to do what they had to do without us, so they have to listen to us. And when they see how much we care and how we’re able to band together in those crucial moments, then they take us seriously.

Changes from the 1st to the 2nd Contract

19:47 Emily: What were some of the changes from the first contract to the second contract that you worked on? Or, was it more about, like, maintaining the really good health insurance that was in place initially?

19:57 Mary: So, I can’t think of anything that we had to give away. But yeah, we wanted to maintain the health plan, and we also wanted raises. So, Connecticut is in a huge budget crisis right now, but we were still able to secure 2% raises year to year. The first contract, it was 3% raises.

20:18 Emily: So, that 2%, it’s basically the cost of living raise. Every year, you get another 2%. Is that right?

20:23 Mary: Yes.

20:23 Emily: During the length of that contract?

Hold On to Your Fundamental Rights

20:25 Mary: Mhm. And we fought tooth and nail to maintain a grievance procedure for sexual harassment and discrimination. The university tried to take that away from us. They tried to use it as a bargaining chip for economic items, which was to me just like completely despicable because that is a problem at UConn, as it is anywhere in higher education.

20:50 Mary: So, we fought tooth and nail to make sure that we still had an avenue of recourse in our collective bargaining agreement in cases of sexual harassment and discrimination. I think that might’ve been our biggest fight at the table. We also tried to get a full fee waiver. That’s what we try every time. We didn’t get that, but we did get an increase in our fee waiver. So, that was helpful. And we secured a relief payment for a new fee that went into place this year for a very beautiful multimillion-dollar student recreation facility they just built, and it’s $200 a semester. So, we get that money back in our first paycheck of the semester.

21:31 Emily: Okay. So, it’s still a fee that you pay, but then you get the money back. And that’s for the length of this contract.

21:37 Mary: Yeah. And the reason it was structured that way was because of how it was financed in bonds. They couldn’t legally give us a waiver. So, that was our work-around.

Union Fees Are Minimal and Worth It

21:46 Emily: Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, it’s good, I guess, to hear about all the different little levers that can be put in different ways. Although, as you said, some levers you don’t want to allow. I’m wondering, what is the fee for the union members? And then, are you totally confident that, based on, for instance, just the lowering of fees or not increase of fees, has that paid back immediately?

22:12 Mary: Oh, definitely. So, people pay 1.095% in dues, and it’s just taken out in paychecks. So, when I was at 75% funding one year, it came out to be like, I think around $10 a paycheck for me. I think for people making the highest amount you can make, it’s around $15 a paycheck. But you get that all back in your fee waiver, and your raises make up for it as well. So, for me, it’s a no-brainer. The union has been instrumental in making sure that I have a decent living wage. So, the least I can do is pay my union dues.

22:52 Emily: Gotcha.

22:52 Mary: And it takes resources to run a union, so that money is needed. You might have to go to arbitration, which costs money. We pay dues to the international UAW who provides us with resources like our lead negotiator during bargaining. And yeah, we also have to pay staff to handle grievances. So, it does take resources to have a strong union.

Remaining Insights About the Bargaining Table

23:18 Emily: Mhm. And are there any other insights that you want to share with the audience about what it’s like to be at the bargaining table? Or, what they might want to know if they are union members but maybe not active in the leadership at the union in their university, or maybe their university doesn’t have a union? Anything else you’d like to share from your unique position?

23:36 Mary: Yeah, so it can be a bleak place at the bargaining table because you come to learn that the university really only cares about its bottom line. And it was very upsetting for me to see them try to use, like, our right to have a grievance procedure for a sexual harassment case as a bargaining chip for economic items. It was very disillusioning, but it was also so inspiring to see what we were able to do as a collective. So, for people who don’t have time to contribute, like signing a card, that’s enough. That’s all what some people can manage. Like sign a card, pay your dues. Whatever little thing you can do helps your union. So, the bargaining is nothing without a strong membership.

What About Postdocs and Non-Employees?

24:24 Emily: Yeah, that’s good to hear that this work is not done by a few individuals who decide to volunteer a great deal of their time, but rather it’s those people, yes, plus they need to have the backing of at least a little bit of effort from a great number of the other workers. What I always wonder about with unions is, like they cover employees of the university–graduate assistants, TAs, RAs. What about the students and the postdocs who are fellowship recipients, who are not technically employees–or, at least for a period of time, they aren’t employees? Are they still benefiting from the negotiation that happens with the union?

25:01 Mary: Yes, absolutely. So, even though they can’t be classified as employees–some postdocs can, which I’ll get into in a second–they can’t be covered by collective bargaining agreement. But some of the things we’ve gained at the table, like our health insurance, that health insurance package is now available to those postdocs and to graduate students on fellowships.

Health Insurance, Not Fee Waivers, Benefit Non-Unionized

25:25 Mary: It’s subsidized a little differently, but it’s still pretty affordable. And I think there are a lot of studies that show when you have unionized employees at a workplace, the non-unionized employees can benefit as well. So, I’d say the health insurance is the big way that it’s benefited those folks.

25:44 Emily: I would imagine fees too? Or, is there a different fee structure for fellows versus employees?

25:50 Mary: So, they don’t get the fee waivers we get because they’re not employees.

25:55 Emily: So, it’s not like the fees have been lowered. It’s just, the fees are high, but you get a waiver for a certain amount of it. Is that how that works?

26:02 Mary: Yeah, exactly. And we always stand in solidarity with grad students when fees are being raised overall because we are in principle against any of that for anyone at UConn. But currently, unfortunately, they still have high student fees.

26:19 Emily: I see. But yeah, the health insurance seems like a big one. Especially what you described earlier, it seems amazing not having a deductible.

26:25 Mary: Yeah.

Unionization Effects on Personal Finance

26:25 Emily: That sort of leads into our second to last question here, which is how has being at a place that has a strong union affected your finances personally?

26:34 Mary: So far, I’ve accrued no debt in grad school. I’ve been able to live on what I’ve made, plus my side hustles, in addition to my TA work. So, I wouldn’t say I’m ever truly comfortable financially, but I do not feel financially vulnerable. I save. That’s why I have side hustles, so I can keep saving, and I don’t have to worry about a medical emergency. For me, that’s a really big thing because I have a chronic illness that’s in remission. It’s been in remission for a long time, but it can rear its ugly head at any moment.

27:12 Mary: And if I don’t have good health insurance, I could go into medical debt in like a week. Or medical bankruptcy, practically. So, I mean, the union is like the reason I went to the University of Connecticut, because I knew the health insurance would cover me in a worst-case scenario. So yeah, I’d say I haven’t been completely comfortable. I definitely took a pay cut from what I was doing before graduate school. But what I’m making allows me to live a decent lifestyle and to put money away.

Pro Tip: Look into Health Insurance Prior to Enrolling

27:45 Emily: I want to follow up on just that point about the health insurance, because I’m curious. So, when you were applying to graduate school and you received a few offer letters, how did you evaluate the health insurance that was being offered to you at that stage prior to actually enrolling?

27:58 Mary: So, I actually didn’t apply to that many graduate schools, and this was the only anthropology program I applied to. So, when I got the offer, I just took it. But I’m from Connecticut, so I knew about the unionization efforts, and I knew to look online and see about the health insurance. So, I don’t think it was mentioned in my offer letter, the health insurance, but the collective bargaining agreement was cited. So yeah, I didn’t really have to do a lot of comparison in the selection process.

28:29 Emily: That’s good to hear though that you were able to just find the information about the health insurance online. Because I know, not necessarily universities, but just in general with private health insurance, sometimes it’s really difficult to figure out what your benefits are, even once you’re actually enrolled in it. So, to do that as a step prior to actually being enrolled, it’s impressive. So, it’s good that they had that transparency that you were able to find the information that you needed right away. Yeah. So, that’s really good to hear. I mean, I’m happy for you, right? That you have a degree of stability and of course not having to take out debt at this stage is awesome.

Best Financial Advice for Early-Career PhDs

29:00 Emily: And so, final question, a standard one that I ask all my guests, is what is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD? And it could be related to something that we’ve talked about today or it could be something completely else.

29:13 Mary: So, individually speaking, this goes back to something you said earlier. I personally like to have side hustles and I think saving is really important. I prefer to have money in the bank and be a little bit more stressed out in terms of my schedule than to have more free time–well, “free time”–and no financial safety net whatsoever. So for me, I think that’s one of the reasons I haven’t had major issues financially in grad school. It’s because I do work on the side. And also, live within your means. But if you can’t–if you can’t balance a budget–don’t be so hard on yourself, because the economic model of universities is exploitative. We’re cheap labor. A lot of us aren’t going to get tenure-track jobs. It’s designed this way for a reason. The problem is structural. Sometimes it’s not individual, so don’t be so hard on yourself if you can’t make ends meet on your stipend. And also, that’s why you should be involved in your union if you have one. And if you don’t, definitely, definitely get involved in a unionization effort. Because even if it fails, it still lays the groundwork for future efforts. For me, it’s the most important thing for my finances in grad school–has been the union.

30:35 Emily: Well, there’s nothing I can add to that. Thank you so much for that statement and for this interview. It’s been wonderful talking with you.

30:41 Mary: Thank you for having me.

Outtro

30:43 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 shownotes creation by Meryem Ok.

Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: Choose a PhD Program That Will Support Your Personal and Professional Development

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This episode comprises seven audio clips from PhDs and PhD students who are advocates for PhD students’ professional and personal development. They each answer the prompt: “What aspects of a PhD program – beyond academics and research – should a prospective graduate student consider when deciding among offers of admission and why? How should they investigate and evaluate the strength of a program in this area?” The contributors are Dr. Emily Roberts of Personal Finance for PhDs on finances, Mr. Kevin Bird on unionization and advocacy, Dr. Emily Myers on unionization and advocacy, Dr. Jen Polk of Beyond the Professoriate on career development, Dr. Katy Peplin of Thrive PhD on mental health, Ms. Susanna Harris of PhD Balance on mental health, and Dr. Katie Wedemeyer-Strombel on work-life balance. Please share this episode with all the prospective PhD students in your life!

Links Mentioned in This Episode

PhD personal professional development

Introduction

00:05 Emily R.: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season five, episode two and today I have a very special episode for you. I have invited six other PhD advocates to contribute their voices to this episode and you’ll hear from myself and each one of them in turn. The questions I’ve asked each of these contributors to answer are: what aspect of a PhD program, beyond academics and research should a prospective graduate student consider when deciding among offers of admission, and why? How should they investigate and evaluate the strength of a program in this area?

00:45 Emily R.: If you’ve already matriculated into or completed a PhD program, you probably appreciate what an important topic this is. Will you take a minute to please share this episode with prospective PhD students in your sphere of influence? Please tweet your thoughts on the episode using the hashtag #PhDfactors. In this episode, we’re going to hear from me, Dr. Emily Roberts of Personal Finance for PhDs on finances, Mr. Kevin Byrd on unionization and advocacy, Dr. Emily Myers on unionization and advocacy, Dr. Jen Polk of beyond the professoriate on career development, Dr. Katie Pepin of thrive PhD on mental health, Ms. Susanna Harris of PhD balance on mental health and Dr. Katie Wedemeyer-Strombel on work life balance. Without further ado, let’s hear from our contributors.

Finances with Dr. Emily Roberts

01:43 Emily R.: Naturally, my contribution to this episode revolves around your finances, specifically how to evaluate whether you will be sufficiently supported by the stipend or salary provided by the program. You may or may not end up using this factor when you choose your PhD program, but either way you should go into graduate school well aware of the financial realities. When I was applying to PhD programs, I didn’t pay much attention to the stipends in the offer letters. I naively trusted that every program I was accepted to would support me financially to a reasonable degree. The PhD program I picked based on only the research opportunities and location actually did pay a decent stipend, but that was blind luck on my part. I know now that graduate students often do experience a great degree of financial stress and ill effects. Approximately 50% of PhD students take out student loans, prior to graduation and many also accumulate credit card and other types of consumer debt. Some PhD students qualify for snap benefits and a few experience food insecurity. Think about the difference it would make to your mental health alone to attend a graduate program with a stipend that allows for a comfortable standard of living versus a program where you have to pinch every penny, side hustle like mad, and still be in the red every month. Do you think you will be able to perform well academically if you’re experiencing chronic financial stress?

03:08 Emily R.: There are long-term financial effects to think about as well. If you currently have student loans, will your stipend allow you to start to repay them? If they are un-subsidized, they will accrue interest all through your graduate school deferment period and you’ll have an even larger balance to tackle post-PhD. What if you were able to start investing with your stipend? If you’ve never played around with a compound interest calculator, pause this episode and spend a few minutes doing so now. With reasonable assumptions, investing $250 per month throughout only five years of graduate school can turn into nearly $1 million in your retirement years. That’s $1 million of wealth in retirement that would not exist if you accepted a stipend that didn’t afford you that ability to save.

03:56 Emily R.: Are you sufficiently motivated to pay attention to the stipends in your offer letters? Good. I’m going to tell you how to evaluate the single most important factor in your funding package. The number that I want you to find in each of your offer letters is your stipend or salary net of fees. Some of your offer letters might state this number clearly and some might obfuscate it. To compare apples to apples across all your offers, you need to know how much money is actually going to end up in your bank account after your tuition, insurance premiums, and all fees have been paid. If your offer letter doesn’t make it clear to you what financial obligations you will have to pay to the university from your stipend, it’s worth a follow-up email to clarify.

04:39 Emily R.: Next, we need to put this net stipend number in the context of the local cost of living for the university. I like to use the MIT living wage database for this. The living wage is basically the amount of money it takes to pay for basic living expenses like housing and food in that local area. It doesn’t include discretionary expenses like travel or putting money toward financial goals. Go to livingwage.mit.edu and click on the state and county of the university you’re considering scroll until you see the amount of money that constitutes a living wage, including income taxes for a single person. If you have a child, or someone else who depends on your income, you may need to scan over to the amounts for larger family sizes. Take the living wage number you found and compare it to the stipend after all education related expenses have been paid. Ideally, your stipend will be higher than the local living wage. Personally, I felt I was able to live comfortably during grad school and save a good amount of money and my stipend was about one third higher than the local living wage. The number that represents your stipend, net of fees divided by the local living wage is the number that you can compare across all of your offer letters.

05:54 Emily R.: Now, what should you do with this information? My advice, which you can take or leave, is to eliminate from consideration all of the PhD programs that will pay you less than the local living wage. If you choose to go to a program that pays you poorly, steel yourself for the likelihood that you will take out student loans or consumer debt during your PhD or have to devote a lot of time to side hustling. You may decide that this is worthwhile, but at least now you’ll go in with your eyes open. If you have two or more offers that are above the local living wage, if you like, you can continue to factor in financial considerations as you make your decision. In fact, I’ve made a list of a dozen additional factors you should evaluate before committing to a PhD program. The stipend divided by the local living wage actually just scratches the surface. You can download the PDF of the full list by going to pfforphds.com/offerletter and signing up for my mailing list.

Further reading: 10 Ways to Combat Financial Fragility Beyond Grad School

Unionization and Advocacy with Mr. Kevin Bird

07:00 Kevin: Hi, my name is Kevin Byrd. I’m a PhD candidate in the department of horticulture at Michigan State University and I’m also the current president of the graduate employees union in Michigan State and I’ll be covering how and why to take graduate unions into account for your graduate school decision. Graduate unions are important to consider because I think they’re central to a safe, secure, and equitable experience in graduate school. If you have a graduate union, it means there’s a system in place to combat harassment, discrimination, overwork, and other workplace mistreatments, independent from these university institutions. It also means there’s more power to pushing universities to provide living wages, comprehensive health insurance to all graduate assistants and to keep university fees low. When we were looking at other universities at Michigan State for our last contract campaign, we found a pretty stark pattern that the highest stipends in terms of cost of living were held by unionize universities and the lowest by non-unionized. In fact the only universities that had stipends less than half the cost of living were non-unionized universities.

08:03 Kevin: Additionally, through collective bargaining, there is something that holds institutions to their word and maintains benefits and services graduate assistants are entitled to receive. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Missouri, there was a moment when graduate assistants lost their health insurance with two days notice. Without a binding collective bargaining agreement, these students were largely left powerless to get back the benefits they were promised upon signing. Meanwhile, at Michigan State after several contract campaigns, we have some of the most comprehensive health care on campus with low deductibles and low co-pays, even after the university tried to reduce those benefits in the last contract cycle. It’s this sort of stability and progress that unions help maintain and build upon year after year. Hopefully the benefits of unions are at least partially clear right now and we can move on to how to evaluate unions at universities that you’re looking at.

08:52 Kevin: One of the first things to look at is whether the university is public, private, public universities are governed by state labor law, while private universities are governed by federal labor law. Given the latest ruling by the national labor review board, most private university unions are fighting for a struggle to be recognized by universities, whereas many state labor laws allow for graduate students to be unionized. Knowing whether university is public or private is one of the easiest ways to figure out if there is an established union or if there is a union currently fighting for recognition. Right now at Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and Loyola, all private universities, there are unions but they are not officially recognized by the university and they have not been able to participate in collective bargaining.

09:33 Kevin: The next move would be some internet sleuthing to look at the website of the union at the university you’re looking at first see if they have their last collective bargaining agreement posted. This would tell you the benefits that graduate assistants currently have with the university, especially important things like the minimum stipend the university can pay you, the pay increases every year, and the current health insurance plan the graduate students currently enjoy.

09:54 Kevin: Next, would be the current campaigns the union’s currently working on. What sort of things need to be addressed in the university? What’s the union doing to address them? And what does progress look like over the last few years? All of these things will help you get a landscape of what issues are facing a campus and how a union is working to address them and how successful they’ve been in the past. Additionally, you can look at media presence to see how the news covered the last bargaining cycle that a union undertook. Did they have to shut down streets with a march? Did the hold rallies? What sort of actions were they able to take that eventually led to the progress that they got in their latest contract? These things in particular can tell you how well organized a union is and how they can use their power to make changes on progress for graduate assistance.

10:34 Kevin: You can also look for other benefits that unions provide to their members. At Michigan State, we have something called the solidarity grant where members can apply to the union in times of financial need and receive a couple of hundred dollars or a thousand dollars to address major crises that have occurred in their life, from a flat tire to burst pipes. One final thing to consider is whether the university website talks about the union on it. This could be an indication of labor relations between the union and the university. It’s probably best to be at a university that acknowledges and at least recognizes the union and works to distribute information about contract benefits to prospective and current students.

11:07 Kevin: All these things considered, I would personally recommend prioritizing universities with strong unions in your decision. A graduate degree can take many years and the political and economic landscape can change rapidly. An established union is capable of increasing and maintaining current benefits, while also fighting off rash decisions by university administrations. If you’re committing to live somewhere for five years and you’re embarking on an ambitious academic project, it’s good to have someone on your side fighting for your benefits and maintaining a quality of life that you deserve while you’re working on this degree. While these conditions may exist anywhere, I think they’re much more likely to occur in universities with strong graduate unions.

Unionization and Advocacy with Dr. Emily Myers

11:50 Emily M.: Hi, my name is Dr. Emily Myers. I, very recently, as of last week, have a PhD in pharmacology from the University of Washington, here in Seattle. I am also an executive board member with UAW 4121, which is the union that represents about 6,000 postdocs and academic student employees, like teaching and research assistants, here at the University of Washington. I am going to give some insights into what I wish I had known when I was looking for a PhD program, and how important unions can be for your graduate student experience beyond stipends and student fees, which unions have also won major victories for graduate students.

12:31 Emily M.: So I chose my program for my science interests and because I loved Seattle, but I really didn’t have the depth of knowledge about how institutions work that I do now that I’m on the other side of my PhD. I was fortunate that I chose a university where the graduate students had been unionized and had been building power since 2001 and we had stronger workplace protections than most other schools, because academia is a strict hierarchy, with power dynamics that do not favor trainees, like grad students. In tandem with these power structures are institutional structures, where harassment and discrimination are widespread. In fact, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine put out a report last year showing that women in science face rates of harassment second only to the military, and that this was for white women, and so fails to capture any sort of intersecting identities. And it’s important to understand that harassment and discrimination are about power, and who has power, and who maintains access to that power. Unions are a fundamental way to change power structures, through bottom up grassroots organizing, and gives graduate students and other trainees more of a voice in their workplace. As union members, we have access to third party neutral arbitration, which is the only scenario where the university does not have final control over the outcome of a harassment claim. This is a huge step in rebalancing power and that’s one of the top things that grad students at Harvard are on strike over and are fighting for right now.

14:07 Emily M.: In addition, unions can be a phenomenal source of community in graduate school, because graduate school can be extremely isolating. And so finding folks outside of your discipline is huge and the unions can also offer resources that are not dependent on university approval, which can be critical for international students on visas. And I think that enthusiasm and recognition for the need to change these power structures is reflected in how we are seeing a huge spike in graduate students and postdocs forming unions across the country at all kinds of schools.

14:43 Emily M.: So to give an example of this, towards the end of my time as a PhD student, I made a complaint about a professor in my department who notorious for making sexual jokes for harassing young women and saying racist things. And the university investigated and said while they believed us, but it wasn’t bad enough, meaning it didn’t cross the legal definition of harassment, and so the university was not liable and would not take further action. And it was through working with my union, we were able to get this professor removed from supervision of grad students, even after the university failed to take action. So I am not sure that without my union community and allies, I would have felt safe enough to say anything in the first place, let alone get results from speaking out about harassment.

15:32 Emily M.: As always, I hope anyone listening here won’t face harassment and discrimination in their time as a graduate student or in general. But I also strongly encourage anyone who comes from a marginalized background or is concerned about their future work environments to consider the status of a graduate student union in their decisions about choosing a program. So you can find out if a university has a union by either asking current graduate students. Or universities typically will have a labor relations office and you can check their webpage to see what workers are unionized on campus and you’ll want to look for a name and local number. Like for example, UAW 4121 is United Auto Workers four one two one. Because student senates and associations are not the same thing. And you can always reach out to current graduate unions like mine at UAW4121.org for more resources or resources or information. Or for example, if you’re in California, it would be UAW2865.org. And with that I just want to say congratulations on your PhD programs and good luck.

Career Development with Dr. Jennifer Polk

16:50 Jennifer: My name is Jennifer Polk and I’m co-founder of Beyond The Professoriate. I earned my PhD in history from the University of Toronto and now work full-time helping graduate students and doctoral degree holders build awesome careers. It’s crucial to actively attend to your career while pursuing a PhD. This might seem counterintuitive. After all, isn’t the PhD itself the thing that will help your career? While that may occasionally be true, it’s only true if you build into your experience activities and accomplishments that matter to employers, both within and beyond academia. That building is usually something you need to do for yourself. You can’t rely on your advisor or graduate program to do it for you.

17:44 Jennifer: Most PhD students live on minimal stipends and it’s common for folks to take additional paid work, if they’re able, to pay their way. An awful lot of folks have significant student loans too, of course, and if you’re a regular listener of this podcast, you know all this very well. All of that is to say that you might need a decent paying job pretty quickly once you graduate. Since it could take months to find work, even for the most successful among us, you’ll need to put in the groundwork over the years of your PhD to build experiences, gain skills, and cultivate a professional network that spans a variety of fields. That’s so you’ll be in a good position to get hired when it’s time to start applying for jobs. Ideally, your advisor will be supportive of your career no matter where it takes you. A good match with your primary advisor is incredibly important. That’s true beyond career concerns, of course. Advisors have a lot of influence over your experience, much more than you might expect, and there are academic studies that show this. I’m not just making it up.

19:01 Jennifer: Beyond your advisor, ideally, your department and the graduate program specifically will actively create opportunities for you and your fellow students to gain professional experience and grow your networks. Maybe you can do an internship with the full support of your department or attend regular lunch and learn or other networking events that they organize. Pay attention to academic and nonacademic resources. The default in many academic disciplines is to privilege scholarly careers above all others. Avoid, please, avoid departments that give you that vibe. They are not living in reality and you very much will be.

19:46 Jennifer: The bottom line here is to make sure your advisor will treat you with respect always and support you doing what you need to do to build career-relevant experiences and skills for both academic and nonacademic careers. You can absolutely ask your prospective advisors pointed questions about what kinds of career support you can expect. This is your career, your life, and you want to make sure you’ll get the support and resources you need for success during and after your studies. Graduate school is hard enough without all this added stress.

20:21 Jennifer: As you’re exploring your options, learn about programming and other opportunities available to you via the institution’s career center or graduate school. Look, for example, for a robust series of workshops, for career consultants, you can make one on one appointments with. Maybe they focus specifically on graduate students, even just PhD students. That’s awesome. You can also investigate what’s being done at the association level, so to check on what your academic discipline is up to. For example, some of the larger scientific societies host regular webinars and program multiple career-related sessions during their annual meetings. That’s great. Do take a proactive approach before you accept an offer and enroll. This is not the time to be shy. If you don’t find a good fit, you might be better off not doing a PhD at all or not this year. Your bachelor’s or master’s degrees are absolutely good enough to help you create an awesome career and life for yourself. One filled with all the creativity, intellectual rigor and challenging problem solving that drew you to want to do a PhD in the first place.

21:36 Jennifer: Learn more about Beyond the Professoriate on our website beyondprof.com and you can find us on social media too. You can also follow me, Jen, on Twitter at @FromPhDtoLife. I’d love to see you there. Thank you.

Mental Health with Dr. Katy Peplin

21:58 Katy: Hello, my name is Dr. Katy Pepin and I am the founder and head coach of Thrive PhD. Thrive PhD is a community for graduate students. It’s also individual coaching, courses, a Twitter presence, and Instagram all at that handle. Why I care about this aspect, mental health, of PhD programs is because it was one of the things that was so hard for me when I was a grad student. I have been dealing with a brain that tends toward anxiety, that can have some depression issues. My diagnoses aren’t as important as the fact that I knew early on in my PhD program that if I didn’t take care of my brain, as well as my career and my publications, I wasn’t gonna make it through.

22:48 Katy: So some of the things that I think it’s important to consider when you’re looking at a PhD program are first of all, the resources that are available for your mental health, through the university and hopefully at no cost or little cost to you. Some questions to ask: are grad students allowed to be seen in the on-campus mental health facilities? Sometimes those are undergraduate student only, so that’s important to know. Whether or not the health insurance that you’ll be offered covers mental health services or medications? If so, is there a limit to how many sessions you can have per year or per semester? Do you have the ability to be seen by providers outside of that insurance network or are you limited to a handful of people inside of the area? All really good questions to ask for your insurance.

23:41 Katy: Secondly, it’s important to kind of ask some questions around the mental health culture in the department. Some of the sure sign tells for me are: one, do graduate students stay enrolled? Do they have a high dropout rate? Sometimes that can indicate a mental health climate problem. Do people openly and excitedly talk about their non-PhD, non-grad school lives in the program? Do they talk about how they go rock climbing? Is it encouraged to work out? Do people have the ability to flex their schedules based on how they’re feeling on any given day? Is the opportunity available for you to work remotely? And if people are struggling, do people feel comfortable asking for help around those areas?

24:29 Katy: It can be really difficult to find that out on a prospective visit or even from an email as you’re evaluating, as you’re not a student. But it can be very important to find ways to ask that question. So some of the questions that I have asked to get around the mental health climate without directly saying, does your faculty support or not support the idea of graduate students having robust mental health resources and support, are to ask things like, do people feel comfortable talking about their personal lives? Do any graduate students have different family structures? Do graduate students have kids? Is anybody a parent? Is anyone a caretaker? What kind of relationships do people have? And are those things supported? Another great question to ask are how are the boundaries around breaks? One of the sure fire tells of a department that has a kind of problematic culture around mental health is that students either don’t feel comfortable taking breaks or they only take them in between the semester when their grading is finished or when the university is otherwise shut down. So ask graduate students, you know, what are the PI’s policies around weekends and evening work? What are the policies if you need to go home unexpectedly or if you’re not from here? Is it flexible enough for you to work remotely if you need to? Are there opportunities for graduate students to tweak the conditions of their work in order to best support themselves?

26:02 Katy: It can be really hard to ask those questions and it definitely can be worrying to say, I want to know what these resources are in advance because some graduate students might feel like that makes them seem like they’re already a problem and they’re not even there. So I would embolden you and encourage you to ask as many questions as you feel comfortable, but know that there are always ways to build support around yourself, whether that is through what the university provides or supplementing it from an outside perspective or place. I’m wishing you a happy new year. And again, my name is Katy Paplin. I am the founder of thrive PhD. You can find me on Twitter or Instagram @ThrivePhD or thrive-phd.com

Mental Health with Ms. Susanna Harris

26:58 Susanna: Hi everyone. My name is Susanna Harris and I am a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. I am also the founder and CEO of the PhD Balance. PhD Balance is an online community dedicated to talking about those difficult challenges and problems we face while we’re in our graduate programs. I founded this group because we really wanted to make a space to talk about certain things like dealing with difficult advisers or understanding what to do after graduation, but most importantly we wanted to talk about the struggles that students have with their mental health and with dealing with mental illness throughout their programs. I really care about this because I myself have depression and anxiety and I realized that a lot of other people around me did as well, but we just didn’t talk about it.

27:48 Susanna: For this reason, I think it’s really important to look at graduate programs and understand how they will support students’ mental health. You can get a good idea of this based on what kind of resources they have, as in, can you go to campus health? How long does it take to get an appointment? What kind of treatments are covered and can you see a therapist outside of those treatment options? This might include how does the department respond to when there is a mental health crisis or when a student divulges to someone that they are struggling with some sort of mental illness. You can even understand what is the culture surrounding the discussion of mental illness. Does the department actively provide resources? Will the lab group that you’re joining be open and accepting of someone having a difficult time? Does the university provide mental health days or access to other kinds of literature? This is really important because although a lot of us, myself included, go into graduate school thinking we are prepared and we will somehow get through it faster and easier than the average, we have to remember that the average is made up of people just like us and I’ve quickly realized that the challenges I faced in the PhD were just as hard as people before me had said.

29:06 Susanna: So what are the best ways to go about seeing if your new program or your new lab will take care of your mental health, no matter what kind of challenges arise? The best way to do this is to just ask people directly. Say, “this is something that is commonly talked about. I know that others have expressed difficulties with dealing with their mental health. How does it work in where you are?” It’s better to ask things about how or what or when rather than just asking, “is the mental health culture good or is mental health supported?” You can ask things like what has happened in the past when someone has talked about these things or you can say, are you aware of what resources there are and can you show me where to find them? Even understanding if a faculty member or a lab member or department has or knows about these resources tells you a lot about how important this topic is to them.

29:57 Susanna: If you want to understand more about my perspective, you can find me on Instagram and Twitter at @SusannaLHarris and I would love for you to check out PhD Balance. We have a website that’s www.phdbalance.com or you can follow us on Twitter and Instagram to hear other people’s stories of dealing with these really hard challenges in graduate schools and sharing resources about how to get through a program. That’s at @PhD_balance. So thank you so much. Bye.

Work-Life Balance with Dr. Katie Wedemeyer-Strombel

30:39 Katie: Hi, I’m Dr. Katie Wedemeyer-Strombel and if you follow me on Twitter it will be no surprise that I’m here to talk about the importance of considering work-life balance when choosing a PhD program. This is a subject I’m passionate about because I chose a PhD program without considering things like departmental culture and the recreational opportunities in the area. Both of these ended up being a pretty bad fit for me and in hindsight I wish I would have more strongly considered the nonacademic factors as seriously as I considered the academic ones. As a PhD student, it’s very easy to lose yourself to your program, to your work, and it’s critical that you’re able to rest and recreate regularly in ways that fuel you. As I say frequently, rest is not just a reward for hard work, but a critical component to working hard. Making sure that the university you attend and the surrounding area can provide enough resources for your well-rounded life and interests is important.

31:33 Katie: When you become a PhD student, generally you will work for the university as a teaching or research assistant in addition to conducting your own research and while will take up a lot of your time and energy, it should not and does not have to be all that you are. You are allowed to be a whole person, not just a research robot and finding a departmental culture and location that fit your interests is important.

31:57 Katie: Let’s first talk about departmental culture. What do I mean by this? Let’s say for example, if you don’t drink alcohol but learn that a department you’re considering regularly encourages binge drinking as a reward for working hard, then perhaps that’s not a great fit for you. If it’s important for you to see your family for certain holidays, make sure that the department you’ll be joining encourages or at the very least does not reprimand students for taking time to spend with loved ones.

32:25 Katie: Now about location of the program. This is something, again, I mistakenly did not consider when choosing my program and it made falling into the bad habits of overwork and over-drinking too easy, as my usual hobbies and recreational activities were hard to come by in the area. For example, do you like to hike and camp? Then a university in a flat state with few nature exploration opportunities may not be a good fit. Do you enjoy seeing or performing in live theater? Google the area and make sure there’s an outlet for this nearby. Does seeing the ocean or other body of water help calm you down when you’re stressed out? If so, maybe only consider schools that have natural features that fit these needs.

33:04 Katie: So how can you look into the work life balance factors as a perspective student? Well, the best thing you can do is ask current students in the department, preferably over the phone or in person, questions about the local culture within the department and the recreational opportunities nearby. Preferably, you’ll be able to talk to this current students over the phone or in person, and I specifically recommend asking over the phone or in person so that the current students will feel more open to answering honestly, as they don’t have a written record of their answers. If you are unable to ask in person, say on a recruiting trip, you can email and ask for a quick phone call. In my experience as both the perspective student and the current student in this scenario, most folks are happy to chat and share their own experiences. Some questions that I recommend asking are: are current students able to comfortably take time to spend with loved ones? Can they travel for holidays? Are they encouraged or reprimanded for working reasonable hours and taking time away when needed? What do they do for fun that’s not related to their work? What do they like most about the location of their program? And what do they like most about the departmental culture that they’re in? If you’re a minority, I’d also recommend asking others who share similar backgrounds with you if they feel that their way of life feels welcomed and safe within their department and local culture. And one of the most important questions I think you can ask is if the current student would choose the same program again, knowing what they know now about it.

32:42 Katie: So now that you’ve talked with the current students about the departmental culture and the location of the university, what do you do with this information? Seriously consider their answers and allow those answers to help you decide between programs. If you get an off feeling from a program’s culture or worry that you won’t be able to do your favorite hobby, trust your gut and find a program that best suits your needs, both the academic and your personal work life balance needs. As my amazing advisor, Dr. Tarla Rai Peterson once told me, “We are all better off when we give ourselves permission to know one another as whole people.” Your PhD research is going to be important, but who you are as a person is even more important and I encourage you to consider your own personal needs in addition to your academic ones in choosing a program. For more on work life balance as a graduate student, you can read some articles I have in the Chronicle of Higher Education or follow me on Twitter at @krwedermeyer. Thanks for listening and best of luck as you choose your program.

Outtro

35:58 Emily R.: It’s Emily again as we close out this episode. I’d like to emphasize two themes I heard from the contributors. First, grad school is your real life. It’s not reasonable to try to ignore or suppress your personal life or what makes you happy and healthy for the five or so years you’ll spend in your PhD program. Choose a PhD program that enables you to live a full life and succeed academically. Second, you can find a good amount of information online, but nothing can replace personal real time conversations with current graduate students. The best time and place for those conversations, and your other observations, is during campus visits. I encourage you to attend as many of those as you possibly can and participate in them fully, asking all the questions the contributors suggested in this episode. You can follow up over the phone, as needed, as decision day approaches. I wish you all the best in choosing the PhD program that will foster both your professional and personal development. Please share this episode with all of the prospective PhD students in your life.

37:12 Emily R.: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPphDs.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 covered 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 Poddington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Lourdes Bobbio