Personal Finance for PhDs

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Career Transitions

How a Freelancing Career Can Take You from Academia to Affluence

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In this episode, Emily interviews Courtney Danyel of Academia to Affluence. Courtney became a successful freelance writer after leaving her PhD program in anthropology and moving to one of her field sites. She now teaches other academics how to launch freelancing careers through her course, Endless Freelance Income. In this interview, Courtney gives us her #1 piece of advice for new freelancers, which all academics need to take to heart! She also outlines the simple steps it takes to get your freelance career off the ground. Courtney’s location-independent business has enabled her to earn a very nice income on very part-time work, which will be attractive to academics looking to freelance for a side or main income.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

academic freelancer

Teaser

00:00 Courtney: I actually do not work full time. I work maybe 15 or 20 hours a week. But I actually still earn a full-time income because I get paid well.

Introduction

00:16 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 17, and today my guest is Courtney Danyel of Academia to Affluence. Courtney became a successful freelance writer after leaving her PhD program in anthropology and moving to one of her field sites, but it wasn’t all smooth sailing. She now teaches other academics how to launch freelance careers through her course, Endless Freelance Income. In this interview, Courtney gives us her best advice for new freelancers, which all academics need to take to heart. She also outlines the simple steps it takes to get your freelance career off the ground. Courtney’s location-independent business has enabled her to earn a very nice income on a very part-time schedule, which I know is attractive to academics looking to freelance for a side income or main income. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Courtney Danyel of Academia to Affluence.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:17 Emily: I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today Courtney Danyel of Academia to Affluence. And I just want to tell you, in one second, how Courtney and I first met online, which is that I saw a post that she wrote a few months back on Jobs on Toast, and I saw her business name, Academia to Affluence, and I was like, this is going to be a good fit. I need to talk with Courtney. So, Courtney, will you please tell us a little bit more about yourself and why your business name is what it is and what you’re up to?

01:47 Courtney: Okay. Yes. So sure. My name is Courtney Danyel. I am an anthropologist by training, but I actually wear quite a few different hats. I’m a freelance business writer also. I’ve been doing that for the past seven years. And as an anthropologist, I’ve worked in Africa in the Central African Republic and Ethiopia. And I actually currently live in one of my field sites, which is Ethiopia. I’ve lived here since I started freelancing seven years ago. And another thing that I started doing late last year was I started mentoring other academics and other people with an academic background to help them transition into freelancing and actually have created an online course for that purpose.

Top Advice for an Academic to Start Freelancing

02:30 Emily: Yeah. So the course name is Endless Freelance Income. I’m actually affiliate for Courtney’s course. I had an opportunity to check it out, you know, before this interview, I think it’s fabulous. And if you want to find out more about that on my end, you can go to pfforphds.com/freelance and find out more about Courtney’s course. And I actually have a couple of bonuses for people in my audience who want to sign up for her course. So, first, you know, right up front, we’re going to get some insights from this course. And then we’ll learn a little bit more about Courtney’s background and her personal story that got her to this point. So, Courtney, your absolute top advice for an academic looking to start freelancing, what is it?

03:10 Courtney: My number one piece of advice for academics who want to start freelancing is to command high pay from day one. That’s because that’s a major mistake that I made when I first started freelancing. I had finished my master’s and I had done part of my PhD and I ended up dropping out of my PhD and decided to switch to freelancing. And as far as I was concerned, I thought I was starting from zero because I was doing freelance writing and I’m writing about topics that aren’t related to my academic discipline. And so, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” And that’s basically what I thought about myself. And so for that reason, I didn’t think that I deserved very high pay. And then I took a lot of jobs that didn’t pay very well at all.

03:57 Courtney: Actually, for the first year and a half or so that I freelanced I was not paid well at all. And then one day I was doing some research for an article that I was writing. I did a lot of ghostwriting back then, which is you write content for other people and it’s published under their name. And I was doing some research for an article that I was ghostwriting for a client. And I Googled something and I clicked on an article that was on forbes.com and I looked at it and it looked familiar. And then I realized that it was written by me. And after I realized that, I started doing some more Googling and I found that my content, stuff that I had written for my clients, had been published on Forbes, Vice, Business Insider, entrepreneur.com and like all these different top business publications. So, that’s what made me realize that, wow, I guess I am a really good writer in other niches besides just anthropology. And I do deserve to be paid well for the work that I do. And after that, I raised my rates, tripled them really, and basically never looked back.

05:05 Emily: I think that this advice is, one, good advice just for everybody, but two, something that academics or post-academics really need to hear, because we are kind of conditioned during graduate school to undervalue ourselves. And it takes really a lot of mental work–and for you a year and a half of actually working in your new field–to undo that conditioning, that mindset that’s been instilled in us. So, I think that it’s something that this audience really, really needs to hear. And I have found as I’ve been involved in academic entrepreneurship spaces, this is one of the top pieces of advice that we pass to one another, which is just raise your rates, raise your rates, raise your rates. I mean, we’re so conditioned. Yeah. We’re so conditioned not only to undervalue our time, undervalue our work, but also think that service is something that you have to do for your job, which I guess in academia, yes, you do have to, but outside of that, no, you should be paid for the value that you bring.

Courtney’s Course Covers Base Pay in Different Freelance Fields

06:09 Emily: So, anyway, it’s a wonderful, wonderful piece of advice. So, actually one thing I wanted to mention is, something I liked in your course is that you speak, of course your experience is in writing, but in the course, you cover a lot more than that, right? Freelancing is a lot more than just freelance writing. And so you talk about base pay rates that you can kind of expect in different fields. Right? I thought that was really that you just got the research jump-started a little bit for the people in the course.

06:40 Courtney: Yeah. You know, for me, I’m basically almost a hundred percent at this point, just a writer, but I actually have a lot of experience freelancing in other areas also, including doing editing and data science and different things. Because you can dip your nib in a lot of different freelance niches. And I also wanted to make the course really open to people who have different skill sets from what I have. Not everybody’s an anthropologist. They have different things, different skills that they bring from academia that they can earn good money from in freelancing also. And so, the course actually introduces several different popular niches, including writing and editing, translation, data science, consulting, sales, and marketing. So, you can kind of discover which one is the best fit for your current skills.

07:30 Emily: Yeah. I mean one of the fields you just mentioned, consulting, is always one that’s very attractive to me when I find other PhDs or graduate students who are consulting. One, because it’s a very broad in flexible kind of terms. So, a lot of people can be consultants in different ways, but also because it tends to command a nice high pay rate if you’re consulting in an area of expertise. I mean, you mentioned earlier that when you went into freelance writing, you were kind of moving away from anthropology. You were writing more about business. But you know, many other people who might be listening to this, they want to double down in their field of expertise. Right? And that’s how they can command those really high pay rates that you mentioned earlier.

08:07 Courtney: Absolutely.

Get Noticed as a Freelancer

08:07 Emily: Okay. So, let’s say you’ve convinced people, people are in your course, they’re going to go down this freelance route, whether it’s writing, consulting, some other field. What’s the best way for them to get started kind of hanging their shingle and letting people know I’m a freelancer now, you can hire me?

08:27 Courtney: Yeah. So, I think the first and most important thing is to build a website. Which, surprisingly to me, I know a lot of people in academia who were like, “Wow, you have your own website. That’s so cool. I wish I could do that.” And I’m like, “Well, you can. You can set up a website in one day. It’s not very difficult.” Yeah. So, building a website is the first and most important thing you can do to make yourself look like a professional freelancer. And that is another thing I discuss in my course. I take you through step by step, how to buy your domain hosting and set everything up, and what the important information you should put on your freelance website to make yourself look like a professional. So, that’s the first step.

09:02 Courtney: And then the next thing that you should do is use networking and cold pitching to get clients. Because there are a lot of freelance websites out there that you can get on where you can apply for jobs and stuff. And I’m not kicking that. I think that’s great also. And I do recommend that you do that, but you won’t get really high-paying clients from those kinds of gigs. You want to first start with networking. And even if you don’t have anybody, you can’t get any clients through your personal network. That’s fine. You can do it through cold pitching. And for me personally, over the years, the clients that I’ve had that have earned me hundreds of thousands of dollars are always the ones that I got through cold pitching. So, that’s what I recommend.

09:43 Emily: Yeah. You know, I actually went through a similar process. I don’t, I guess, identify as a freelancer, I identify as a business owner. But I went through a similar process when I started my business, which is how do I let people know that I’m available for speaking engagements and the other work that I was doing? And so I went through several years as I was building my network where I was cold emailing people. So, I know I don’t really love to be on the receiving end of most cold emails. And so I don’t love to send them either, but honestly, that was the necessary step in the overall process. So, I did a few years of a lot of cold emailing, built up my network, got some responses from that. And now I have basically stopped that. I kind of only do warm-emailing or cultivating my existing network at this point. So, I like that I’ve moved past that, but I feel like it was a really, really necessary start to the whole thing. My business would not have gotten off the ground if I hadn’t just been reaching out to people and trying to start establishing that network. So, it’s not necessarily pleasant, but it is necessary.

10:46 Courtney: It is necessary. And I always found it intimidating in the beginning, especially because you can send 50 emails and not get a response on a single one of them. That’s just the reality of cold pitching. But once you get that one gig and then it earns you a bunch of money, and then it’s like, “Oh, totally worth it.” And you feel motivated to do it more. And so, it can be intimidating. But that’s another thing that for the people who sign up for my course is that they have email support from me. And so, I will help them out with any questions they have. So, if they want to start cold emailing, but they’re not really sure where to start or what to say, they can ask me about that and I’ll give guidance based on the experience that I’ve had over the years.

How Freelancing Enhanced Courtney’s Life

11:28 Emily: That’s actually really nice. Because I know one of the sort of major challenges when you’re starting a business or starting a side income, like freelancing could be at first, is not really having colleagues who you can talk with about the work that you’re doing. And so, that’s just a really great sort of addition, in addition to the excellent content in your course, is also to be able to have interactions with you to get that support, again, as you’re building your network of your peers who are also freelancing or doing other kinds of work like that. So, I find that really valuable. I’ve been part of a couple of communities and I love just, you know, some people process things by talking to other people and they want some outside input, and you’re providing that. So, that’s super valuable. Now that we’ve gotten those excellent nuggets of advice from you, let’s talk a little bit about you and your story. I know you gave a quick overview at the start of the interview as to how you got into this, but why don’t you dive into a little bit more detail about what freelancing has done for you?

12:30 Courtney: Yeah, so, I flew through my bachelor’s degree and flew through my master’s holding my breath. I did that all really young and then I was starting my PhD. By the time I started my PhD, I was completely burnt out. It was just, I don’t need to explain how difficult academia is to anybody who’s listening to this podcast, but yeah, it was just too much for me and I needed a break. And the thing that I always loved about anthropology, the one thing that I love the most about it was being able to do field work. But field work was something that I was only ever able to do, if I was lucky, one or two months out of the year. And the rest of the year was spent in a windowless office doing research and data entry and stuff like that.

13:17 Courtney: And so, I wanted to just have the field work experience without the office experience. I just wanted to do something different. And so I was like, “Okay, I’m going to move to my field site. I love it there. I think it’s great. And I want to go live there. How can I do that? I don’t know.” And so, I actually ended up talking to my mom about it, who she actually works online. And she’s like, “Well, why don’t you start freelance writing? You don’t need to earn a lot of money in order to earn a living, especially if you’re in Africa. So, just give it a go.” And so, that’s what I did. I dropped out of my PhD program. I sold my car, used that to buy a plane ticket, and I left and I started freelancing here in Ethiopia and I’ve actually been here ever since.

13:59 Courtney: So, that has enhanced my life a lot because I get 12 months of sunshine, which is really important to me. And I love the environment and I love the culture and learning languages. And so that location-independence was really, really valuable to me for my mental health and just my personal happiness. And then the other thing that is always important is money. So, I earn very, very good money as a freelancer. I didn’t the first year and a half, as I mentioned before, but once I figured out that I was worth it, I started demanding it and asking for it. And I got it. And I continued to get it every time I raised my rates. People say, yes, somebody says yes. You know? And so, that’s really important, especially compared to academia, unfortunately. After the first two years of freelancing, I started earning more money than my former PhD advisor earns. And they’re a tenured professor. So, that’s something.

Location Independence and High Pay Rates

14:58 Emily: Yeah. I want to explore each of those points a little bit more because they’re both super attractive. The first one, the location-independence, you explained how that played out in your life. It enables you to move to the place that you want to live at one of your field sites and have sort of your whole life feel a little bit more like what you enjoyed the most about your academic experience. And of course, if someone else wants to do that and wants to make freelancing the way they make it happen, that’s awesome. I can think of some other benefits, which is, as you know, academic careers and PhD careers, you don’t have a lot of control over where you live, especially if you’re in academia. But even if you’re just a highly specialized professional, there are certain industries that are concentrated in certain cities, and so forth.

15:44 Emily: So, there may be reasons related to your PhD why you want to stay in a certain place, and this freelancing can follow you wherever you go. Side note, I as a, what’s called a trailing spouse–so we live where we live because my husband’s job is here and we anticipate moving because my husband may be changing jobs from time to time and he’s highly specialized–I get to take my business wherever I go. So, I don’t have to start over in a new job every time I might need to move. So, that’s a real, real benefit that I see that location-independence. And then of course on the money side, because this is a personal finance podcast. So, commanding the high pay rates, getting paid very well for your time.

16:26 Emily: Not just for people like you who are doing this full time, but as a side hustle. If that’s the way this starts, or that’s the way you want to keep this as you move forward in your freelancing career, as well as your academic or PhD-type career. It’s really nice when you can make a good amount of money for not that much time invested. As a PhD student, for example, you might be able to work, I don’t know, two hours a week, five hours a week, some pretty small number, but still get a really, really nice amount of money out of that small, small side hustle. And when you compare that, when you’re thinking about hourly rates to the other kinds of work that some PhDs do, or some people do when they’re still in graduate school or PhD training, it’s really nice, right?

17:10 Emily: To not have to work so many hours and also to have maybe a more like stimulating type of work, intellectually that is, yet something that is different probably from what you’re doing as your main day to day job, if this is still a side hustle. I think that’s really attractive in terms of having balance in your life. It’s awesome that you’ve been able to command these high pay rates and put together this full-time career, making a very nice income from Africa, from where you wanted to live. And I definitely want others to consider following your tracks.

17:44 Courtney: You were saying that this is like a full-time job for me, which it kind of is. But a lot of other people who listen to your podcast are people who are in academia to stay and they would like to have some additional stream of income to add on top of that. So, one point that I would like to make is that I actually do not work full-time. I work maybe 15 or 20 hours a week. But I actually still earn a full-time income because I get paid well. And this is something that I choose for my personal life because I have three foster kids and I homeschool them. And between that, and being a mom and, keeping my yard clean, I work 15, 20 hours a week on freelancing and that’s about it. And so you could do this as a part-time gig and still earn a lot of money. It doesn’t have to become like your full career. You don’t need to invest a hundred percent of your time in it. I don’t even invest a hundred percent of my time and I don’t even have another source of income. So, that’s something.

18:41 Emily: Yeah. Thank you so much for adding that. That’s awesome that you’re earning this like great, full-time income from part-time work. I actually also work part-time as well. I work about 25 hours a week and I’m quite happy with that balance actually. So, I really like that you added that point because the whole working 40 hours a week thing is so job-centric. That’s what our culture has decided–well, really not just 40, much more than 40 hours a week–is like the proper amount of time to be working. And once you start your own business, once you strike out on your own, all the rules are out the window, right? You can define what you want your work life to look like completely. And that goes both location and time and amount of money as we talked about earlier. So, I’m so glad that you added that. Thank you.

Endless Freelance Income: What to Expect

19:28 Emily: Let’s say someone is super excited about what we’ve been talking about. They want to start down their freelancing career in whatever field that might be in, and they want to sign up for your course, which again, they can do through pfforphds.com/freelance. And you can get the couple of bonuses that I created there. So, what can someone expect to find when they start your course?

19:49 Courtney: Okay. Well, first I guess I’ll explain who the course is for specifically. After I started freelancing, even in the first year or two I started freelancing, I got emails from people that I know. From people in my former cohort, professors that I know, people in grad school who heard, “Hey, I heard that you left academia and started freelancing. And I’d like to do something similar. Can you give me some advice?” And so, I’ve been giving advice to people for years. I get emails several, 10 or 15 times a year, I get an email from somebody, or I get a referral from somebody who’s in academia and they want to make the switch, or they want to add on to an additional stream of income through freelancing. And so, after years of basically kind of helping people just as like a side project, I decided to create a course to basically do what I was already doing, but do it in a more organized and formal way to help people.

Ch. 1: Intro to Freelance, Ch. 2: Identify Your Valuable Skills

20:47 Courtney: So, that’s what I created this course for. It’s called Endless Freelance Income, how to turn your liberal arts degree into an endless freelance income. However, even if your background is in science or any of the STEM areas, it can also be relevant to you. So, the course at the very beginning, it just introduces you to the online freelance world. So, if you don’t know the first thing about it, don’t worry. I will explain it to you in the course. That’s the first chapter. And then the next chapter, which I think is probably the most valuable one for people, is helping you identify what your most valuable and profitable skills are, from academia, that you can translate into freelance income. Through the mentoring there, I also kind of help people–people tend to overlook their skills. They think, “Oh, I guess I can write,” or like, “I guess I can do some data analysis, but I don’t have a degree in that. So, I’m not qualified to do that.” So, kind of just help people break that down. Imposter syndrome follows you outside of academia. I learned that the hard way. And so, just kind of help people to understand, no, these are valuable skills and you can utilize them.

22:08 Emily: What I liked about that portion of your course, what I noticed there is that you have worksheets in here, right? So, it’s not just like, I’m just reading all this material. It’s a very engaging format, right? So, you’re giving people some little tools they can use to do things like brainstorm about their own skillsets, which I totally agree with what you said. We tend to discount our own skills or our own areas of expertise unless we have a degree in it. That’s very important to us in academics that we have a degree in XYZ. But I know, personally, like my field is now personal finance and I don’t have a degree in personal finance and that’s okay. I’m still confident at this point that I am an expert in this area because of my long experience. But I think that for people who aren’t quite there yet, it is a little difficult of a hurdle to overcome. So, your course definitely helps with that.

22:55 Courtney: Yeah. And you know, same story for me, I’m an anthropologist, but I write in marketing topics, marketing and entrepreneurship. And I am an expert because I became one. And that’s it. And so, you can do it, too. That’s basically what the course helps you to figure out. So, once you’ve kind of broken down and pulled your skills out, then the next chapter teaches you about several different major freelance niches that you can get into. And I already mentioned before, there’s writing, editing translation, administrative support, design and creative, customer service, consulting, data science analysis, and sales and marketing are the ones that I go through. So, those are the main ones. And then it walks you through how you can look at your current skills and line them up with what each of these niches demand, or what they need.

How to Look Professional as a Freelancer

23:46 Courtney: And then it also helps you think about which one’s most interesting to you too. Because it’s not just about your skills, it’s also about what you want to do, right? And then you can choose your niche. And then after that, the course goes through how to make yourself look professional as a freelancer. One thing that I discovered when I left academia is that I needed to tone down my CV. What’s professional in academia and what’s professional in the online business world are very different. And so I kind of teach people how to make yourself look professional online as opposed to professional as a 10-page CV, or something like that. So, that’s the next step. And then the next thing after that is teaching you how to research your niche so that you can figure out what the going rates are in your niche, the going rates for somebody with your skill level, and just kind of also to weed through the riffraff.

24:47 Courtney: Because a lot of people out there, you know, they say $10 an hour or something like that. Yeah. You don’t need to pay attention to those people. So, to figure out how much you should be charging in the beginning. And then after that, the course takes you through step by step how to create your website, which I mentioned before. And then it walks you through what you need to do to land your first client. And that is the course in a nutshell, as it is right now. I plan to add onto it. Like I said before, I think cold pitching is important. So, one thing I plan to add on to it in the future is more information about walking people through how to set up a cold pitching scheme. And so, that’s something I plan to add onto it in the future. And the good news is that if you have access to the course, you buy it now, you’ll have access to all that future material as it comes up.

Bonus Content from Emily

25:34 Emily: That sounds awesome. As I said earlier, I read through the course prior to this interview, and it really breaks things down and simplifies them and doesn’t make it seem so intimidating to start down this path of freelancing. You really don’t over complexify anything. It’s very simple steps to follow, to get started. So, I wanted to mention for my audience, if you choose to buy Courtney’s course through my affiliate link again, pfforphds.com/freelance, I’ve created a couple of extra bonuses for you. So, one that everyone will receive who buys through my link is a free video training on how to budget with an irregular income, right? So, like I’m really confident, you go through Courtney’s course, you’re committed to this. Like you’re going to be starting down that path of having freelance income.

26:18 Emily: And you know, that’s a really great thing, but it can also pose some budgeting challenges. So, I’ve created a training that you’ll get for free when you buy the course on how to manage that. Like manage your finances when you have a side income stream that’s irregular, maybe growing into a full-sized income stream over time. So, it’ll help you with that. And then for the first five people who buy the course, so not everyone, but just the first five, I’m going to offer a free 20-minute financial coaching session. So, what I think will be really great about this is if you schedule this for maybe like two months out from when you start taking the course, it’ll be a nice little accountability point to meet with me at that time and say, “Okay, Emily, here’s the income stream. I’ve established it. I got my first invoice over here. I’ve gotten paid for the first time.” And so we can talk more about what you want to do with that money. How it’s going to help you reach your goals. How it’s going to fit into your budget. Do you want to be paying debt? Do you want to be investing it? So, we can talk about all that kind of stuff. So, that’s how I recommend you use that bonus if you’re one of the first five to sign up is schedule it a little ways out. So you actually have that income stream established by the time we meet together. And I’ll certainly be asking you, have you been implementing everything from the course? So again, pfforphds.com/freelance is where you can sign up and of course link through to find out more about the course from Courtney.

Best Financial Advice for Early-Career Academics

27:38 Emily: So, Courtney, we’ve come to the end of the interview. Thank you so much for what you’ve shared with the audience today. I think it’s been excellent advice and thank you for telling us more about Endless Freelance Income. So, final question that I ask all my guests is what is your best financial advice for another early career academic or maybe recovering academic like you?

28:00 Courtney: My best advice would be don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Something my dad told me when I was 17 years old and I didn’t know what it meant at the time, but now I do. So, even if you’ve got your dream job, even if you’ve gotten that research position or that tenure track job or whatever, you never know what’s going to happen in the future. That’s something we’ve learned this year in 2020, I think. And so, having an additional stream of income is really valuable. And I know that’s what Emily talks about all the time on her blog. And the thing about freelancing is that there’s no risk in starting and giving it a try. And you can just work on it in your spare time and you can build it up over time in whatever time you have. And if you don’t have time to work on it, you don’t have time to work on it. And it doesn’t hurt you to work on this and build up this extra stream of income. You don’t have to be like me where you leave your job and leave your country and change your whole career. I think that all academics should be doing something on the side, some kind of freelancing, blogging, something. So, that’s my advice.

29:06 Emily: Yeah. I totally agree. You know, not all the eggs in one basket can apply it to a lot of different areas, but certainly when it comes to your income, having a job or even being in graduate school means you’re dependent on another institution to decide to continue to give you work. But the advantage of freelancing is that you spread that around to a lot of different clients and it’s much less risk. Yeah, one client drops off, no big deal. You can supplement that by hustling up a few new clients. But if your employer decides they don’t want to work with you anymore, that’s kind of a devastating like life thing. So, excellent, excellent advice. What I also like about what you said is that if you do the work, for instance, by going through your course. If you do the work to establish yourself as a freelancer, and you devote even something like an hour a week to it, like I mentioned earlier. As long as that income stream is established and in a field like freelancing, it’s something that you can decide to turn up or turn down as you need in your own life.

30:00 Emily: So, for example, if you have an unfunded summer, you know, some people–again, you mentioned 2020–some people in 2020 have late in the game discovered that they don’t have summer funding in the way that they thought they would. Yes. Their funding will pick up again in the fall. It’s not like they’re going to drop out of graduate school and get a full-time job or whatever. But for a few months, the income that they thought was secure is not there. So, once the situation is upon you, it’s very difficult to scramble and kind of fix it. But if you’ve already established that one hour per week freelancing job, then that’s something you can ramp up or ramp down as your life allows, as your money situation requires. So, I just think that’s a real advantage to establishing yourself. Even if you’re not going to do it, like you just said, 15 hours a week to make the equivalent of a full-time income. So, great, great advice. Courtney, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. It was a real pleasure to talk with you again.

30:54 Courtney: Thanks so much, Emily. Thank you.

Outtro

30:55 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. Pfforphds.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. There, you can find links to all the episode show notes and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, please consider joining my mailing list for my behind the scenes commentary about each episode. Register at pfforphds.com/subscribe. See you in the next episode! And remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is Stages of Awakening by Podington Bear from the free music archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

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

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

Links Mentioned in the Episode

PhD negotiation

Teaser

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

Introduction

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

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

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

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

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

What is Your Udemy Site?

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

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

Abby’s Dissertation: Women in STEM + Negotiation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Role of Mindset in Negotiation 

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

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

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

How Can PhDs Overcome a Scarcity Mindset when Negotiating?

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

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

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

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

Focus on Thriving, Not Just Surviving

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

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

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

Big-Picture Negotiation Items Besides Salary

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

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

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

Is Everything Open for Negotiation?

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

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

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

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

Commercial

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

How Employee Training Benefits the Employer

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

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

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

Negotiation in Academia vs. Industry

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

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

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

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

Virtual Campus Visits

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

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

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

Misconceptions Around Negotiation

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

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

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

Negotiation Can Happen Over Time

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

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

Where Can People Find You?

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

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

Best Financial Advice for an Early-Career PhD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outtro

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

How Work Experience Outside Academia Can Bolster Your Academic and Non-Academic Career

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Gillian Hayes, the Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Dean of the Graduate Division at UC Irvine. Throughout her career as a computer scientist, Gillian has moved back and forth between roles in academia and industry; she argues that the division between the two is more porous than is commonly perceived inside academia and should become even more so for PhDs. Gillian consulted and completed internships as a PhD student and engaged in an even broader range of side hustles as a faculty member. We discuss the real and perceived barriers to side work that PhD trainees encounter in other disciplines. We conclude with why PhD trainees should consider non-academic careers and how to prepare for them.

Links Mentioned

non academic work experience

Teaser

00:00 Gillian: They’re not linear. People take all kinds of curving paths and I would very much like to see the university and academia in general, be a sort of lifelong learning and scholarship partner to people, for moments when they’re both in and out of where we are. Academia will always be here. Go do interesting things, come back. Let’s reconnect. And let’s find ways that we can make those boundaries a little bit more porous.

Introduction

00:32 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 six and today my guest is Dr. Gillian Hayes, the Vice Provost for Graduate Studies and Dean of the Graduate Division at UC Irvine. Throughout her career as a computer scientist, Gillian has moved back and forth between roles in academia and industry. She argues that the division between the two is more porous than is commonly perceived inside academia and should become even more so for PhDs. Gillian consulted and completed internships as a PhD student and engaged in an even broader range of side work as a faculty member, and we discussed the real and perceived barriers to side work that PhD trainees encounter in other disciplines. Don’t miss a minute of this fascinating conversation recorded in February, 2020. Without further ado. Here’s my interview with Dr. Gillian Hayes.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:31 Emily: I have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Gillian Hayes, who is a Vice Provost and Dean at the University of California at Irvine. We’re going to be discussing side hustling and career development, both what Gillian has done in her own professional development and how she works with students on the same subject. It’s really pleasure to have you on today, Gillian. Will you please introduce yourself a little bit further to our audience?

01:55 Gillian: Sure. Thanks so much, Emily. I’m so glad to be able to be with you all today. I think you’re doing a wonderful service for our students. Just some quick background on me. My training is actually as a computer scientist. Both my undergraduate and PhD work was in computer science. I have a lot of background in working in industry and other places that I’m sure we’re going to talk about later. And the bulk of my research is actually focused on how do we help people who may not be included in the tech world, normally — so kids, underrepresented groups, elderly individuals — how do we help them get involved in the design process and really make responsible, ethical technologies. Here at UCI, since September, I have taken on the role of Vice Provost of Grad Education and Dean of the Graduate Division, which is a very long, convoluted way of saying that I get to be in charge of all the grad students here on campus and help them be as successful as they can be.

02:54 Emily: Yeah. So one big component of that is not only academic success, but success in their future careers. Obviously it reflects very well on your university and program if people go on to have careers success.

Career Path: Grad School to Faculty

03:06 Emily: Let’s start talking a little bit more about your own personal journey. Can you talk us through the work experience that you had prior to graduate school, if any, and then the side hustling that you did during graduate school?

03:18 Gillian: Yeah, absolutely. I should confess, I’m the child of two academics. Both have doctorates, were professors, so I understood academia in a way that I think, it’s important to contextualize the kind of privilege that comes with that. I think I always knew I wanted to go do a doctorate at some point, but beyond that, I was deeply confused when I finished undergraduate and I didn’t know what to do. And I did like all people who don’t know what to do and I went and worked for Deloitte, and sort of got the basic training of how do you be a consultant? How do you be a professional out in the world? I then worked for another company called Avanade, which was a spin-off of Accenture and Microsoft at the time, and just spent a lot of time learning the basics of being a professional before I went back to grad school. Then, while I was in grad school, I also continued to work. I’ve sort of, throughout my career, had this one foot in academia, one foot in industry kind of life. I worked for both Intel and IBM in internships. I also had a side gig driving the golf cart that serves people beer at a wonderful golf course in Georgia called Chateau Alon, which is probably my favorite job that I had in grad school. And then did some additional consulting for a company called Roundarch. So that was sort of all what I was doing while I was in grad school and before grad school, and I think they were all great experiences and can’t recommend it all enough.

Side Hustling During Grad School

04:44 Emily: Yeah. Let’s take a pause there because I think you were in not only a unique position because of your familial upbringing, but also because of your field, computer science, which is so highly employable with just a bachelor’s. Maybe the most of any academic field of any of my guests. So you got some great jobs right after undergrad, and then also continued to side hustle in graduate school. Now I’ve noticed — this is anecdotal, you can tell me if this has been in your observation as well — that computer science is the field that is maybe tied with engineering, but most likely to allow internships and encourage internships and other kinds of consulting and side work during graduate school. So there’s a very big, in my opinion, cultural difference between computer science and perhaps engineering, and then like the biological sciences, the humanities. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?

05:37 Gillian: Yeah. I think that’s a great observation, Emily, and it’s actually something I didn’t even realize was unique until I became a professor because I just thought, well, of course that’s what you would do. You go off to industry. It’s very much encouraged. It’s very much a part of the culture. There are industrial research labs, which I think is a piece that helps alot. So when you talk about interning as a PhD student in computer science or information science or other related fields, you’re typically going to a company that’s going to allow you, and in fact, encourage you to publish the work that you do while you’re there. And so not only are you making lots of money, typically more money in the summer, then you’ll make throughout the entire rest of the year, working at the university, but you’re also doing it in a way that advances your career and helps you publish and helps you build a network with researchers outside of the Academy. And I do think that you’re right, that’s quite unique, although growing a little bit more in other fields, but certainly not to the extent that you see in computing.

06:35 Emily: Yeah. And I don’t mean at all to set this up, like this can only happen inside computer science and never happens elsewhere. I just think that, yeah, in other disciplines, we need to take a page out of what’s going on inside computer science and engineering. And maybe it’s not formal internships, like maybe the structure isn’t quite there yet inside academia to allow for that. Like you said, maybe there aren’t publishing opportunities outside of academia in other fields, the way there possibly is in computer science, but I just think that people in other disciplines, it helps to open your mind a little bit to what’s possible in terms of internships or, you also mentioned consulting, like, can you elaborate a little bit more about that? These kinds of things that are potentially possible, even for people in other fields, if they seek out the opportunities. It might not be presented to them in the way that it is inside computer science, but doesn’t mean it’s not there.

07:21 Gillian: Yeah, I think that’s a great point. What I typically hear from faculty who are worried about their students interning, and this is true by the way, within computer science as well. There are some faculty who don’t like their students to intern, although it’s much more rare than other disciplines. But what I typically hear is, “well, how are they going to get their work done? How are they going to finish their dissertation?” All of those kinds of things. What I have seen in my career, and I’m actually trying to collect the data right now to do a study on this at UCI, to see if we can see if my anecdotal experience holds out across more people, is that actually, not interning or interning it doesn’t slow you down or speed you at particularly much. I did three internships at anywhere from three to five months while I was in graduate school and still finished in five years and did not have a master’s going in. And that’s not to say that I’m somehow special or so fast and so wonderful. But actually what I think is happening is you give your brain a little break from the dissertation and it’s amazing how much more quickly you can actually work on it.

08:25 Gillian: When I see students, and I do have them here, who they can’t intern, they can’t go away for whatever reason, perhaps they have family obligations or other things, and they’re not going to just move to the Bay area for the summer, things like that. Those students they’re not any faster. They really aren’t. And what I see them doing is churning a little bit, and really thinking through their dissertation almost too much. So I would encourage people in any field to seek out those consulting opportunities, even if it’s just do something for a few hours a week, write copy for somebody. Do some beautiful graphic design, if you’re an artist. Do some statistics. I mean, the amazing thing is how much people out in industry need consultants to just do basic statistical analyses, which most of our students in both the behavioral and physical sciences are very skilled in doing. Give your brain that break away from the dissertation and I actually think it speeds you up.

09:25 Emily: Yeah, I actually really agree. I did not intern or anything where the long monotony of the six years I spent in graduate school was not broken up by periods of fresh, different work in any way. That is one of my semi regrets of that time. I want to throw another like possibility in here, not just internships, not just consulting, but something that may be a little bit more palatable to academics, which is a fellowship. Doing a professional fellowship is also sometimes possible and may be something that your advisor is more likely to look favorably upon than some of these other kinds of work. For example, after I finished graduate school, I did a three month science policy fellowship at the National Academies in DC. That fellowship is available to current graduate students, as well as recently graduated PhDs. That’s just another kind of thing you can consider. I had a previous interview, which I’ll link in the show notes with Vicky Johnson from Pro fellow. She runs a database where you can look for these kinds of opportunities for professional fellowships, as well as fellowships that might fund you. Go check that out if you’re looking for something, something else to do that’s going to give you this wider network, this different kinds of experience to stimulate your brain in a different way than just the research you’ve been doing.

10:37 Emily: Okay, so very exciting what you were able to do, what other students could potentially be able to do. Can you say a few more words about how these opportunities for side hustling and interning that you took in graduate school, built your career and set you up for your post PhD job or jobs?

10:54 Gillian: Absolutely. They’re really essential and are a big part of my career story. One of my mentors at Intel actually wound up being on my thesis committee in the end and has continued to be a really wonderful mentor to me throughout my time. Lots of other interns — one of the things that’s great about interning is you meet a bunch of other people who are PhD students at other universities, or sometimes undergraduate or master’s students as well, and they become a part of your professional network. Often companies really roll out the red carpet for interns over the summer. And so you’re going to these fun events and you really get to know a lot of other people. That becomes a really essential part of who you are 20 years later, and I look back now and people that I met as part of an internship that aren’t in my field, that I never would have met otherwise, are some of my good friends now and they’re also professional colleagues.

11:51 Gillian: The other thing I would say though, is it’s not just the industry or the research internships or the fellowships or the kinds of things we’ve been talking about. I sort of joked earlier that my favorite job in grad school was driving the beer cart at the golf course. And I think sometimes we can tend to look down on those kinds of jobs or feel like, well, the only reason you’re doing that is to make a little extra money because we don’t pay grad students enough. Sure. Those things are probably all true, but it’s also the case that I drove around in the most beautiful setting you can imagine and brought all of my books and journal articles with me and parked on the side and read. And again, just got a head break. Just got out of my home, got out of my lab, all of those places. Meet interesting people. You never know who you might get to know and think about in these places. So whatever this sort of side hustle is, I think it’s really good for your brain and for your mental health and for your network.

Side Hustling Post-Grad School

12:49 Emily: So in the jobs that you’ve had after your PhD, have you continued to work on the side and still develop and maintain those networks? Or have you been an academic and solely focused on that?

12:02 Gillian: I am apparently not able to focus on one thing at a time ever. I think that’s okay in academia, actually. It’s part of what makes life so interesting. But no, I’ve absolutely continued to do variety of side hustles. So one of the things is, I took a break. As soon as I got my shiny, new assistant professor job, I went and went back to Roundarch and worked as a consultant again, and just really got to…I always talk about it as cleaning my brain. I was in the slog of writing this dissertation and it’s so painful. You finally get it over the line, and back then we had to measure the margins and do all of this painful stuff, and turned it in and went and got to fly around and talk to people about building websites for a while. That felt really good.

13:53 Gillian: Then I remembered why I left consulting in the first place, because I got kind of bored with it, and got to start my assistant professor position. That cycle has been really important throughout my career. I’ve continued to do consulting on the side, in terms of both technology-related consulting and user experience, and so on. But also because of my research in the autism space, I’ve been able to consult with a lot of folks in K-12 and in special education and help shape where the state of California is going in terms of our care and support of people with autism and related conditions. That’s been valuable both in terms of feeding my research and really understanding what’s out there practically, but also in terms of feeding my own ability to exercise different parts of my brain.

14:40 Gillian: I would also say, academics, they won’t always refer to it as a side hustle — we like to be very pure — but writing books is basically the ultimate side hustle, as far as I’m concerned. We get judged on it because it’s part of the tenure and promotion process. But if you write the right book, that generates all kinds of interesting things — speaking opportunities, consulting opportunities, other things that I think can continue to be important no matter what field that you’re in.

15:11 Gillian: I took it a little further than most in terms of side hustling, which is I started out doing a little bit of consulting for a couple of founders that I knew well from a startup and wound up running the entire company. That’s probably more than most people will do, but I did spend a couple of years as a CEO. What I’ll say there is sometimes your side hustle becomes your main gig for a little while. I took some leave from the university so that I could do that. And I would say to people, if that happens, go for it. You can take a leave of absence. So often people think, “Oh, I can’t get off the grad student treadmill” or “I can’t get off the tenure treadmill” or whatever. You can take a leave of absence for a couple of years and academia will always be here. It’s obviously not for everyone, but I really value the time that I had being able to run a small company and watching them now at a distance under someone else’s leadership and continuing to excel is so pleasurable for me.

16:10 Emily: I’m really glad that you brought up there can be these blurred lines between what is your job as an academic and what is stuff you do on the side, because all of it can be related to your area of expertise and just expressed in different ways.

Commercial

16:28 Emily: Hey, social distancers, Emily here. I hope you’re doing okay. It took a few weeks, but I think I have my bearings about me in my new normal. There is a lot of uncertainty and fear right now about our public and personal health and our economy. I would like to help you feel more secure in your personal finances and plan and prepare for whatever financial future may come. You can schedule a free 15 minute call with me at PFforPhDs.com/coaching to determine if financial coaching with me is right for you at this time, I hope you will reach out, if only to speak with someone new for a few minutes. Take care. Now back to our interview.

How Side Hustles Are Viewed in Academia

17:14 Emily: Can you talk to me about structurally, how this has worked for you? You just mentioned you’ve taken official sounds like full time leaves of absence from your job, but do you have, for instance, like an 80% position or have you at some points to allow time for these side things or have you always been kind of a hundred percent at the job and just pursued these outside of…I don’t know, how does this work, time management wise and also official position wise?

17:42 Gillian: Yeah. So official position wise, it really depends as a grad student, it’s fairly easy to sort of zoom in and of things. I did, what’s called an off cycle internship one year and was away for fall semester. Just a matter of filing some paperwork with the university to allow me to do that. That allowed me to be at my internship for five months instead of just sort of the normal three of the summer, which was really, really valuable. It also allowed me a lot of access to people who get a little maxed out in the summertime because there’s so many interns around. I would definitely recommend thinking about being creative with those kinds of things.

18:19 Gillian: Many universities, even if you’re a full time, faculty member have consulting allowances. You can maybe consult X number of hours per year and the university’s not bothered by it. If you do more than that, then they’ll typically want you to take some sort of reduced time or leave of absence, things like that. I would encourage people to really find out what the rules are at their different universities. It may be highly variable. Then the final thing is, my mother always says to me, if you don’t ask, you know, what the answer is. I really tried to take that to heart, and when I was starting working at AVIAA, I was aware that I was also running a master’s program that I was quite attached to, and I didn’t want to let that go. I sort of sat down and tried to think about, okay, if I keep running the master’s program, teach this little bit that will go with that, and I keep supervising the PhD students I have, because you don’t let your PhD students drift, even if you go off to do something else, what does that kind of look like time-wise? I went to my Dean and my department chair and said, I’d like to take a reduced workload. So basically these are the things I’m going to do and not going to do anything else. What does that look like percentage wise? And I’ve talked to a lot of different people who’ve done this. Anywhere from they’re employed at the university 5% time to maybe they’re employed 50%, 80%. You sort of get to different levels and whatever you think is appropriate. My Dean and my Chair looked at that and said, “yeah, that seems about right, we’re good with that,” so I was able to take reduce time, but not a full leave away.

20:02 Gillian: I would just say to people, you never know if you don’t explore it. So think about it and investigate it because you may well be able to do these things, partially. I also was always very upfront with our board of directors and with the founders of the company that I was still going to be doing XYZ things affiliated with the university. And they were good with that. From all of their perspectives, the idea that I would maintain a connection with this wonderful place of scholarship that would potentially bring us excellent new hires and other kinds of people was great. On the surface of it, and before I made those requests, lots of people said to me, “Oh, you can’t do this or you can’t do that,” but I thought, well, maybe. Let’s just ask and find out. So I would encourage people to ask.

20:47 Emily: Yeah, I’m so glad you brought this up and I want to take kind of a grad student or postdoc, spin on that question. Because what I hear a lot from especially graduate students is “I’m not allowed to have a side job or a side income,” and either that’s because of the terms of the assistantship that they have, or the terms of the fellowship that they’ve accepted, or it’s just something cultural that they’ve absorbed, or maybe their advisor said something more explicitly, but I think there’s a range of like, what’s actually permitted, either legally or contractually. And of course, for international students, that’s a whole other discussion of what the visa allows, which is nothing except for like official OPT kind of stuff. But for citizens or residents in the US, can you just talk around this a little bit of is it worth asking, even if you think the answer is going to be no, look at your contract, or what?

21:44 Gillian: I think it’s always worth asking. And I’ll answer that in a couple of ways. One of them is, and I saw some really interesting research, I’ll try to dig it up and send you the link if I can find it. But essentially, if you ask grad students, what do they think their advisor wants of them? They’ll essentially say to get an R1 tenure track position, to have this like life of the mind, to be a mini version of their adviser. And then if you ask the advisors, what do they want of their students, broadly, in a very generic, hypothetical, meta kind of way, they’ll say the same. But if you ask the faculty, think about your last X number of students — I forget what it is, two, three, four, whatever — who’ve graduated with you. What do you think you want for them? Suddenly you start to see industry jobs, government jobs, community colleges, other kinds of two and four year opportunities. Not these sort of tenure track PhD granting institution kinds of jobs. And it’s because we’re sort of inculturated in a broad way to think, yes, we want to create more little faculty that look just like us. But if you think about specific students, you often recognize, well, actually their passion and their strengths lie elsewhere.

23:02 Gillian: It’s that disconnect that I think many of the students are feeling. They know that their advisor, in a broad sense wants this thing, but maybe it’s not for them. If they really open up that conversation, I think most faculty really do want to support them and be open to that. I think it’s always worth asking. Also, the truth is, if you’ve got one of those few faculty that just aren’t interested and aren’t going to want to support you, no matter what, for me, I would want to know that because maybe I need to find a different person to work with, or maybe they stay my primary supervisor, but I find some additional mentorship on the side that can help me get to the places I need to go and that I want to go. I think it’s always worth asking.

23:46 Gillian: The other thing I would say is you can interpret contracts in all kinds of ways, and I’m not an employment lawyer, but what I can say is even if officially our ruling, as the University of California, is that people don’t have jobs outside, we don’t own your life. If I worked at Google or I worked at Deloitte again, or I worked wherever, they don’t get to tell me that I can’t go out on a Saturday morning and be a barista, if I want to. It’s the same here. We don’t own your personal time and your free time. So if it’s not disrupting your job here as a grad student researcher or your job here as a TA, I don’t see that we have a whole lot of standing to tell you that you can’t do it.

24:30 Emily: I’m really glad to have your perspective on, because I think this is something that students…I’ll call it a limiting belief. Like it’s a limiting belief that students have. I can’t, I’m not allowed to have a side job, have a side income. And I, like you, think it’s more important to examine this spirit of that rule or that cultural norm, because really the point is you want to be making progress on your dissertation. You want to put really good energy towards that on a consistent basis. And yeah, your advisor, or you, probably don’t want to be leaving at 5:00 PM every day to go to your second job as a whatever. But there’s so many jobs that you can have now in the internet age that you can do on your own schedule. That’s flexible. It’s not going to interfere with your work. As we talked about earlier, that will give you different kinds of energy and different kinds of stimulation that you aren’t getting through your primary position. I do like to think about the spirit of this. Like, is it interfering with your work? Does are advisor even really need to know about it, if they would never find out naturally. Now for these professional development opportunities, and especially something like interning, obviously you need to involve your advisor, potentially some other people in that conversation, but for a side gig, that’s a few hours a week, maybe they don’t need to know, if it doesn’t interfere.

25:44 Gillian: And you know, you never know. It’s not just that they don’t necessarily interfere, but they can also be argumentative in ways that you could never expect. Actually here’s a great example. I went to grad school with a woman who was a quilter on the side, made absolutely beautiful quilts. And I think sometimes she sold them, but just gorgeous. It takes a lot of time to be a quilter, but it didn’t interfere with her work. In the end, she actually developed this really incredible piece of software that helps teach children geometry, using quilting as a metaphor because of this thing she was doing on the side. Now, if someone had told her stop quilting, it takes up too much time, then she never would have done what she did for her dissertation.

26:29 Emily: Yeah, it is so, so beneficial to have these other areas of your life to give you not only balance, but to help you think about your work in different ways, and just to be like a whole person. You can still be a whole person during your PhD training, while on the tenure track, it’s all encouraged.

Non-Academic Careers

26:44 Emily: So let’s pivot a little bit to talking about non-academic careers. You’ve obviously had an academic career, as well as nonacademic aspects of your career. How can students who, as we were talking about earlier are statistically unlikely to end up in a tenure track position, even if they want to keep their hat in the ring for that sort of thing, how can they simultaneously prepare for a career outside of academia?

27:10 Gillian: Yeah, that’s a great question. The first thing I’ll say is, I think we need an educated workforce and an educated society, and the idea of having loads and loads of people with PhDs that work in places that are not universities is really appealing to me. I think it’s good for the world. I just want to sort of admit to my positionality there. But what I’ll tell you is I know a lot of CEOs of both big and small companies. I know a lot of executive leaders and they come to me and they ask me, where can they find people who can quickly digest an enormous amount of information, write up interesting, analytical thoughts about that. Talk about it with other people, teach it to them, explain it to them and figure out what we do next. And I’m like, that’s someone with a PhD. They’re looking all over business for people with those skills. It’s exactly what we teach, no matter what your field. It’s absolutely the case that the market needs it.

28:10 Gillian: Now we have some work to do to translate and help people understand and help people be marketable and all of those things, but that kind of work and the kind of critical thinking skills that people develop doing a doctorate is absolutely what the highest levels of leadership in the corporate world need desperately. Obviously also in government and nonprofits and other places like that. What I would say to people is just be thinking all the time about how do I translate what I do into something that other people can understand. And I spend a lot of time with people who want to translate an academic CV into a more typical resume, just helping doing that translation work. I would encourage people to seek out people like myself, who’ve had these different kinds of careers. I’m happy for podcast listeners, you can feel free to reach out to me. I might not respond right away, but I’m happy to look at things, and just figure out how do you explain yourself out into the world? That’s the first thing I would say.

29:12 Emily: I actually want to jump in there and plug a colleague of mine, Beyond the Professoriate, Jen Polk and Maren Wood’s business. This is the kind of space that you can join and learn these types of skills, see examples of how other people have made exits from academia into other interesting careers, and have community with other people who are going through the same process. Beyond Prof is one of the places where you can do that.

29:37 Gillian: Absolutely. I direct people to Beyond Prof all the time. That’s actually a better resource than me. They will respond to you more quickly. Definitely check those out. The other thing I would say is, and I’m going to pick on you a tiny bit, Emily, is even using that phrasing of exiting the university, right? One of the things that I sort of bounce up and down on a lot around here is the language of alt-ac, and post-ac, and academic exits, and these kinds of things. I don’t want to take away from people’s feelings. If that’s a helpful way for people to express what they’re going through, then by all means, go ahead, but we don’t have that same language for undergraduates who finish an undergraduate degree. We don’t have that same language for lawyers who finish a JD or medical doctors who finish an MD or any of these other folks.

30:30 Gillian: One of the things that I think is important in culture change, and we need to do this internally at the university, for sure, but also I’d like to do it everywhere is to say careers, they’re not linear. People take all kinds of curving paths and I would very much like to see the university and academia in general be a sort of lifelong learning and scholarship partner to people for moments when they’re both in and out of where we are. Now, I recognize I’m in a place of privilege. This is a much easier thing to do in my field than in others. That is what it is. But I think we need to start with changing some of our language and some of our culture around this notion of, if you don’t get that tenure track job or get that right postdoc right after you’ve finished, that the world is ending for you. No, academia will always be here. Go do interesting things, come back, let’s reconnect, and let’s find ways that we can make those boundaries a little bit more porous.

31:28 Emily: Yeah. I really appreciate that. I totally agree with you. I’ll just leave it at that.

31:34 Emily: Sort of along those lines, what about de-stigmatizing these nonacademic careers? You’ve just mentioned language changes, but are there any other ways that people inside and outside academia cannot be looking down on non-academic careers as the consolation prize for not getting a tenure track position, which for the record is definitely not how I feel about them.

31:59 Gillian: Yeah. Well, you know, I will tell you, again, this is a case where being in computing or engineering is a bit easier. My students go off and make two to three times what I will ever make, and more if they get the right stock options, and money goes a long way for de-stigmatizing all kinds of things. That’s one thing to just kind of know, but I think that’s also true in other fields. There’s lots of ways in which you can have a very healthy, productive, happy, and financially successful career outside of the Academy, and that’s an important thing for people to recognize, and to say that you’re not selling out or failing or any of these other things, if you choose to take that kind of path.

32:43 Gillian: The other piece, I think is academics, faculty tend to the people who’ve been really successful in a very particular model of existing. We’re really good at school, the way school was built. The same is true, by the way in K-12. People who become K-12 teachers are often people who were really good at school, and so it’s very hard to reform a system that’s run by people who are really good at that system. We sort of self select for this reinforcing behavior. Some of it is us taking good, long, hard looks at ourselves. And you start to see this, I think, in the undergraduate and master’s curricular reforms that we’re starting to see, where people are recognizing, hey, maybe Sage on the Stage isn’t the best way to teach. And maybe we should be thinking about active learning. Or in the graduate curriculum for master’s students, maybe we should be thinking about modular learning. That you can do pieces of it now and another piece in a couple of years and so on, and put together a collection of experiences that make the right professional degree for you.

33:50 Gillian: I think that gives me hope that if we’re starting to make reforms in K-12, and we’re making reforms in undergrad, we’re making reforms in our professional degrees, it’s only to some degree a matter of time until we can make some reforms in the PhD world and help people to understand that there are different ways to complete a doctorate, and there are different ways to have a career afterwards. It does take activity. It does take bringing back. We have an alumni speaker series here that we bring back people who did their PhDs here, who have exciting, really cool careers, running science museums, or doing policy or running a startup. And we need to show off more of those success stories too.

34:29 Emily: Yeah, I do see, as I visit universities and speak there for the financial stuff, I’m often included in their conversations around this sort of thing. Well, Emily, you’re in entrepreneurship, how do we encourage our students to consider this path as well? And they show me what they’re already doing. It’s percolating. The idea is there. It’s popping up different places. I don’t know how much it still needs to be included actually in the standard path to doctorate rather than just some side extra thing you might engage in. That would be really great.

Best Financial Advice for PhDs

35:01 Emily: Gillian, I love the ideas you’ve presented in this interview. Thank you so much for giving it. I’m just going to conclude with a question that I ask of all of my guests, which is what is your best financial advice for another early career PhD? Could be related to something we’ve talked about today, or it could be something entirely other,

35:19 Gillian: That is a great question, and I thought this was your hardest question, by the way, that I really had to think about. But I think the first thing I would say is get through whatever you’re going through as fast as you can. You will never recover financially from being out of the workforce for however many years it takes you to do a PhD, even if you are the fastest PhD student in the world. The faster you can go time to degree, get done. I always say the only good dissertation is a done dissertation. Get into the workforce as quickly as you can. And the same thing is true for tenure, or for becoming a full professor, for becoming whatever. Yes, these things take time, but just get through them and don’t worry about making it perfect. Each of these things in academia, it’s a pass/fail exam, so pass and move on to the next thing. That’s the first thing I would say.

36:15 Gillian: The second is make sure your summers are paid. Whether you’re a junior faculty member or a PhD student or whatever, that’s a quarter of your year. And I’m always amazed at how many people take it completely unpaid. There are a variety of ways to get it paid. Whether it’s summer teaching, writing grants, internships, consulting, any of these side hustles we’ve been talking about, but the idea that you would lose a quarter of your income at a very young age, when people are in grad school, postdoc-ing, or as assistant professors, those are your prime earning years, and you’re setting yourself up for the future. So figure out a way to get your summers paid. You work for 12 months, so you should get paid for 12 months, is my general thing.

37:00 Gillian: Then the last thing I would say is be mindful of what free labor you give away. Academia is just chock-full, and I know you’ve talked about this on your podcast before, of free labor. We review for free. We give talks for free. We write for free. And that’s okay. That’s a certain amount of the culture and we should be doing certain things voluntarily, but some things you really should start thinking about getting paid for. And you just need to think about that before you decide, am I going to give up however many hours of my time to this? Well, your time is really, really valuable, so treat it like it’s really valuable.

37:36 Emily: I think it goes back to a point you made earlier, which is just asking. If you’re being asked to do some special thing, like speaking, for example, if you were going to agree to do it for free, like you were just talking about why not just ask, Hey, what can you give me an exchange? Pay, expense reimbursement, some other thing of value to you. Just inquire and know that you’re worthwhile. This goes to imposter syndrome as well. Within academia, we tend to feel that we’re not special. Our skills are not that valuable. Everyone else has the same skills and the same knowledge. That is definitely not true, first of all, even inside academia, but definitely, definitely outside, you will be seen as a unique, special thing, as you were talking about earlier, with your PhD and the skills and knowledge that come along with it.

38:19 Gillian: Absolutely. And every time I say to people, whatever number you’re thinking in your head that you’re worth to give that talk or to consult on that project, double it, and you might be close to the number that’s actually what you’re worth.

38:32 Emily: Yeah. Great, great advice again. The worst they’re going to say is no, or maybe they’ll try to negotiate you down, but if you were going to do it for free or little anyway, hey, that’s not too bad. Gillian, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. I really, really enjoyed this conversation.

38:47 Gillian: Thank you, Emily. I did as well, and I look forward to hearing many more wonderful podcasts from you in the future.

38:52 Emily: Oh, thank you so much.

Outtro

38:55 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.

The Financial Hurdles of Moving to the US as a Postdoc

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Louise Lassalle, a postdoc at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in Berkeley, CA. Louise recounts the hurdles in the process of her move from France to the US for her postdoc. We discuss short-term hurdles; e.g., being approved for a rental, establishing credit, and the cost of moving; medium-term hurdles; e.g., choosing a health insurance plan, adjusting to the cost of living, and paying tax; and long-term hurdles, e.g., the cost of applying for a green card. This episode will give international graduate students and postdocs preparing for a move to the US a preview of what is to come and what pitfalls to watch out for.

Links Mentioned

international postdoc US

Teaser

00:00 Louise: Don’t just accept a job offer because you love the science. We are all passionate about it, we just want to do science. But where you live is also important, and if you have to worry too much about the financial then you won’t have as much time to do actual science.

Introduction

00:24 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season six, episode three and today my guest is Dr. Louise Lassalle, a postdoc at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in Berkeley, California. Louise recounts the hurdles in the process of her move from France to the U S for her post-doc. We discuss short-term hurdles like being approved for a rental, establishing credit, and the cost of moving; medium term hurdles like choosing a health insurance plan, adjusting to the cost of living and paying tax; and long-term hurdles like the cost of applying for a green card. This episode will give international graduate students, postdocs and workers preparing for a move to the US a preview of what is to come and what pitfalls to watch out for. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Louise Lassalle.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:21 Emily: I am delighted how joining me today on the podcast, Dr. Louise Lassalle, and we are going to be discussing the particular financial challenges that come with coming to the US for part of your training. So, Louise, thank you so much for joining me and will you please tell me and the audience a little bit more about yourself?

01:40 Louise: Sure. Thank you for having me. I got my PhD in France, in Grenoble and after that I was looking for postdoc and I think I was looking in all Europe and also in the US and I got a postdoc in San Francisco in Berkeley, more precisely. When I came for my post-doc was my first time in the US. I went to the US neither for vacation or for conferences and I’ve been there for three years now and I’m still the same job, so I’m still on my post-doc.

Initial Financial Challenges with an International Move

02:23 Emily: All right. Yeah. Great to hear. So let’s start back when you first arrived, maybe even before you arrived in the US but when you were applying for your job, getting your job offer — were there any challenges associated with being an international post-doc associated with that stage of things?

Before the Move

02:41 Louise: I think the first thing is even before you come, you already start with a visa application. You already start with paperwork and try to understand what’s going on. I think that’s the visa application was the main thing to understand, make sure you do everything right and I think that’s the main thing.

03:06 Emily: One question to that is that — the visa application, is that something that you’re able to do totally on your own or do you need to consult with a lawyer or something?

03:15 Louise: In the US, most of the post-docs will be on G-1 because it’s the easiest way to get a post-doc. A G-1 is supposed to be for a change and visitor, but university use it for that proposal too. So basically you employer will provide you with a form for DS-2019, and the process is quite easy on G-1s. Now that I know other processes, I realized that G-1 wasn’t that difficult, but as a first timer you don’t know. So you don’t need a lawyer. It’s quite a straightforward.

03:54 Emily: Okay. Yeah. Great. And I think you mentioned to me earlier that one of your difficulties at that stage of things was understanding the salary offer that you received and putting it in context, having never lived in Berkeley before.

04:11 Louise: Yeah. So first I was very excited to get a post-doc in Berkeley and the topic was super interesting for me, so I was already in the mood that I will accept whatsoever. And also the salary was basically twice what I was doing before, but of course it doesn’t work this way because the rent is not the same as it was. The rent would be like three times and all the costs of living are different. So that is my first advice is make sure you know what the cost of living is before. I’m not sure would have been able to negotiate my salary whatsoever. It’s very hard when I just have like a Skype interview with my PI at this point. But perhaps negotiate your starting time, if the flight is too expensive, then say, “okay, can I start like one month later?”, or something like that.

05:12 Emily: Yeah. Actually, so a year or so I launched this project, PostDocSalaries.com and that’s a database of self reported salary and benefit information. And one of the questions I included in that survey is did you negotiate something about your package or not? And I was surprised actually that about, if I remember correctly, it was about a quarter or a third of the people who responded said, yes, they did negotiate, successfully that is. I thought that was actually pretty high. So it’s definitely something that people don’t necessarily know to do, but it’s sort of one of those, well you may as well try, like you might not be successful, but why not try. But I would be interested in knowing if international postdocs have less leverage maybe than domestic ones in going into that negotiation process. I’m not sure.

06:01 Emily: So you decided you were going to accept whatever offer came your way because you’re excited about the topic and so forth. And so did you try before you actually moved to figure out what the cost of living was going to be or were you just kind of like, “Okay, it is what it is, I’m going.”

06:15 Louise: It was a little of both. I think I still started to check on Craigslist to see the rent, but I was still very optimistic about that and I can go little more on how to get to housing after that. So no, I didn’t really look at it more carefully and it was more like, “Let’s go, let’s do it.”

06:42 Emily: Okay. And so did you arrange for housing before you moved or upon your move?

06:47 Louise: So in this also, I was a little too optimistic. I did a book an Airbnb for one week before and it wasn’t enough at all. I should have booked it, I will advise at least two weeks or even one month. Also because, at least for me, where I live is kind of important. You want to make sure you’re making a great choice and I won’t advise anyone to rent something, apart from Airbnb, from outside. You need to see before you sign anything or you send money. I would really advise to go to an Airbnb, even if you spend a little more money at the beginning, and then find something that really fits your needs. And also you don’t know your neighbors, you don’t know the public transport, or if you want to get a car, if you can do it.

07:40 Emily: Yeah, there is a lot. I mean I agree with you. It’s very difficult to rent something sight unseen. You’re taking a big risk there. And so it’s kind of cool actually that there has been this rise in short term rental options so that you can do something for a couple of weeks or a month without having to sign a lease, but just going into a short term rental situation so that you can do all that research on the ground. It sounded like you needed a little bit more time than what you gave yourself. Did you end up extending that Airbnb or moving to a different one or how did you work that out?

08:09 Louise: I moved to another one but I got a very cheap one and it wasn’t great. And then I rushed to rent an apartment and it wasn’t a good one, because what you see in Airbnb is not what you will get. I can expand more on that later on, but you are not actually competing at exactly the same levels as other people, so in general you go to the more expensive or the apartment that kind of no one wants.

Financial To-Do List When You Land

08:37 Emily: Yeah. So what’s the next thing that you would like to address? When you have your flight coming into San Francisco or wherever you flew into, what were the financial challenges that you were facing right away?

08:50 Louise: I think this is for everyone moving somewhere else, you need quite a lot of money to just first book your flight. Since you need your visa and you don’t know when your visa will come up, then you book your flight like two weeks in advance. And for example, I booked my flight and I arrived mid July. It was a more expensive flight I ever booked, and this, I think I could have perhaps negotiated more, or ask for an increase in my relocation fee because of that.

09:28 Louise: To rent, all of this, I think opening a bank account was actually one of the easiest things I’ve ever done. It Is very, very easy, and what helps a lot is to have the letter of employment with you, and that helps also for the renting part. In general, when you go to the city, everyone knows the big universities that are close by and they like to rent, especially if you’re not the students, you are post-doc, because they know that an employee will pay their rent on time and is not going anywhere. This kind of helps as kind of a reference.

10:06 Emily: I actually am curious about how you paid for things like until you had that bank account opened. Did you have a credit card from your home that worked here or how did that work?

10:17 Louise: Yeah, so you can pay with your credit card. Actually in France we don’t have credit cards and our card is both debit and credit. But the equity we can get on it is generally smaller. But you can pay outside. I think we use, I think the cheapest way is to use wise transfer, but this also takes a few days, so sometimes it’s a little harder. I have to say think that with a credit card I was good because after one week I sent some money over and it was okay.

10:55 Emily: Yeah. It sounds like opening a bank account was probably one of the very first things you did right? Like day two or something.

11:02 Louise: And as I say, it was super easy. Some people say that they ask for, for example, security numbers. They don’t or at least the one I went to it was okay.

11:15 Emily: Gotcha. And what about getting like ID here? Is that another thing you did right away?

11:21 Louise: So right away what you need to do is get your social security number, for sure. This was also another paperwork, but I think it was — generally the university will provide you with some guidance on that. Then what you can do, I mean, the only ID you can get here is a driver license, and I got mine actually a few months after I got here because I didn’t need a car. It was more so I didn’t have to bring my passport everywhere. I think a drivers license is great because it’s kind of an ID and, and then you can keep your passport safe.

11:58 Emily: Gotcha. Yeah. Was there anything else that you discovered in those first few weeks here, especially as you’re arranging for housing? Anything that you wish you had known maybe before you moved or that would have made things easier?

12:14 Louise: So I didn’t expect it will be so hard to get an apartment. First, a lot of people ask for reference and they ask for credit score, and if you’ve never lived in the US you don’t have a credit score. And you have your letter of employment, but technically you didn’t start it yet, so you don’t have that previous salary and sometime also when, if you move up as a couple, you just have one salary. So in general, when they do the list and it’s hard to get at the top of the list, because there’s always someone that’s making more than you, or has better credentials.

13:00 Emily: I would imagine just the housing market also in the Bay Area, broadly, is a very difficult place. Lots of competition. So you may have had among the hardest times that you might have in any city around the US. So how did that end up working out?

13:18 Louise: So I rented something very fast and it wasn’t the best apartment ever, and I moved out this apartment after six months. Also, for example, the rental lease, the rule around that is very different from France and it’s much, much harder on the people that are actually renting the apartment than on the owner, and for me was a surprise to sign a lease. I say that I will have to stay there, whatever happened, even if I get a new job for one year, or I will have to elect to pay for it.

13:55 Emily: So the terms were a little bit unfamiliar to you, in terms of it was much more favorable to the owner, the landlord than it was to the tenant. Is that what you’re saying?

14:05 Louise: Yeah.

14:05 Emily: So what would be more typical in France?

14:08 Louise: So in France, in general, the lease is to protect the renter and also owner. So the lease will be a [inaudible] lease. That means that the owner cannot push you away or they need a big reason for doing that, but you can leave. You have to let your landlord know three months in advance and you can go down to one month if it’s a very hot market or if you get a new job or you move for professional reasons. So I think it’s much more close to what the reality here is, that sometimes you just need to move because you get a new job.

14:46 Emily: Yeah, I know the lease that I signed for my current apartment in Seattle, the terms to break the lease were much more stringent, much higher costs than I had signed in the past. So this is definitely one of those local things, right? It can vary from place to place and obviously individual owner or leasing company, like that. But yeah, I think maybe in higher cost of living cities, the owners have a little bit more power and anyway, the terms can be quite high for breaking a lease early.

15:15 Emily: Anything else regarding some of those first financial challenges that you encountered right away when you arrived here?

15:24 Louise: One thing, it is not directly financial, but you have one month, at least in my lab, you have one month to sign up for your healthcare insurance. The postdocs here have great healthcare insurance also because we have a union, so it was negotiated. We pay very low. You still have two ways, like HMO, PPO is covered differently. And so I think it’s not specific to internationals, because what I understand is even for an American it is a complete mess and so I don’t think it’s very specific, but perhaps for international, it had another layer of things you have to take care of and can be very stressful. And I will say especially for people with family, to understand that with kids that you go much more often to the doctor to understand how it works.

16:19 Emily: Yeah, I can imagine that can be a huge challenge because the US healthcare system is really, really challenging for everyone, and especially if you’re coming from somewhere that makes it a lot easier and you’re not familiar with all the weird stuff that happens here, I can see how that could be super challenging. Was your HR department helpful for you in making that kind of decision about which kind of healthcare plan to take? Did they guide you in any way?

16:42 Louise: Yeah, we had some presentation. The problem here is that I think I remember not getting anything. I think I got how it works perhaps one year after, when I was actually explaining to other people and I asked them to sit down and I think it’s just very confusing. Even me when I tried to explain it again to new postdoc, I also get confused at some point., but they try to help you out.

17:10 Emily: Okay.

Commercial

17:13 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. I bet you and your peers are hungry for financial information right now, especially if it’s tailored for your unique PhD experience. I offer seminars, webinars, and workshops on personal finance for early career PhDs that can be billed as professional development or personal wellness programming. My events cover a wide range of personal finance topics, or take a deep dive into the financial topics that matter most to PhDs, like taxes, investing, career transitions, and frugality. If you’re interested in having me speak to your group, or recommending me to a potential host, you can find more information and ways to contact me at PFforPhDs.com/speaking. We can absolutely find a way to get this great content to you and your peers even while social distancing. Now back to our interview.

Mid-Term Financial Challenges of an International Move

18:13 Emily: So let’s move to sort of more midterm challenges. You’ve been here for a few months, what were the next sort of set of financial challenges or questions that you had?

18:25 Louise: I think you feel like you are getting a bunch of money, but of course, when you remove the rent and then half is gone, and as the cost of living tends to be also a little higher, so I think you also need to adapt to that and adapt your way of living. Also what you will do in your country that will cost you nothing that here is expensive. For example, the food. You have to rethink and you have to come up with new things because there’s no way I can eat the same way I eat in France, it is way too expensive. I mean this is a small adjustments, but it is and adjustment. For me, and this is personal, but I have a hard time to understand the credit card system. And it scared me at first, that they say, yeah, you have $1,000 and you can spend it. I’m like, but I don’t have it really. I mean, yes, you have it, but not really. Andwhen I should do my reimbursement and how I should reimburse so my credit score actually goes higher. This also was a little confusing for me.

19:38 Emily: I do not think you’re at all alone about that, because even for people who grow up here, if you’ve never been explicitly sat down and taught how a credit score works or read about it for yourself, there’s a lot of misconceptions floating around about it. Like, for instance, some people believe that if you carry a balance on a credit card, it improves your credit score. In fact, the opposite is true. It’ll probably dinging you in some ways. So yeah, understanding that system can be really difficult. Did you start off with a secured credit card? Was that the first kind you got or were you able to qualify for like a normal credit card?

20:14 Louise: I think a normal. So what I heard from some friends is sometimes the bank actually asks them to put a deposit and they get from this deposit and I don’t know why my bank just give me one and they didn’t ask for anything. And even my husband that was, so we were teo on my salary, and my husband got a credit card like this. So yeah, no we didn’t. I think we get the normal one right away.

20:42 Emily: Yeah. I don’t know why that would be either. The path that I also know is the same thing. Secured card. You put down a deposit, then that’s the amount of money you have available to you. So it’s kind of the same as a debit card, but it helps you build credit. It’s something that mostly people only have to use for a few months, maybe six months or something, before they can then move on to the regular credit system. I don’t know why you would be able to jump right into that one either, but glad you didn’t have to take that first step. And how do you feel about credit now? Now that you’re three years in, are you more comfortable with that? Do you use it at all?

21:13 Louise: Oh yeah. I noticed some people have different credit cards and all from a specific supermarket or brand or whatever. And I just, I didn’t go into it. I feel more safe to just have one. And even this, I use it carefully. But yeah. This is this more personal but once you get it, it’s okay.

21:44 Emily: It sounded like you moved in July, three years ago. How about when it came to tax time that following year? How did you work through that?

21:58 Louise: Okay, so first I’m a post-doc employee, so I have a W-2 form, so it’s quite easy. It’s much, much easier than people on fellowship. So you just have to do it once. And I find actually the first year, it’s not so confusing. We had a presentation here to the lab from the tax people, they help us go through and we can send her an email with our specifics, because since also I wasn’t in the US before, so I was no resident for everything, and it was kind of okay. I think the second year I became a resident for California, but not resident for federal, and it makes it a little more difficult. And this year actually my husband got paid, but as self-employed and that for this one was very difficult to figure out how to declare that. The taxes are hard, but it’s also once a year and everyone has to go through it. We invite people to try to find people from the same country because you can have some country has this treaty that you’re exempt from federal taxes, and some country you still need to pay your taxes back then. Some you don’t. This was quite, it was a boost of my salary and helped a lot in the beginning. That’s a big one for federal taxes.

23:34 Emily: And so is that what the tax treaty with France says? Is that what applied to you, that in the first year you moved here you didn’t have to pay federal tax, but starting in the second year you did, is that right?

23:44 Louise: It’s two years.

23:44 Emily: Oh two years.

23:44 Louise: Yeah, it’s two years day to date. And then the fact that I didn’t have to pay in France is because French tax says that you just pay what you earn in France. It is not related to your citizenship like in a US or in Germany.

24:02 Emily: Gotcha. Yeah, I think the US is very unusual. There’s only a couple of countries that tax their citizens no matter where they live, but yeah, US does that, warning.

Additional Advice for PhDs Planning an International Move

24:13 Emily: Anything else? Any other financial challenges you came upon or things that you want to pass on to other people, bits of knowledge, as you were getting acclimated to the US.

24:22 Louise: Yeah, I just think getting used to that you will spend much more cash and you have to be careful with that. Also, you get a little excited. You want to travel, you want to visit, and it can get a little too much. Every time you go on conference you will spend at least $1000 to $2000 and in general you will get reimbursed but after that, so even with credit card and all of this, get prepared for that too and kind of put it on your budget. If you know you will go to a conference, you should have at least $2000 to make sure you cover the cost. This is for everyone, but that’s true that for an international sometimes you already spent so much on getting there and then you need to rebuild your funds.

25:13 Emily: Yeah, I totally agree. You were just mentioning traveling and I guess something that we think about here is that, you know, in France, our perception is that you guys get a lot of vacation time and we get very little vacation time in comparison. How has that been for you?

25:28 Louise: First that’s true. But as I mentioned before, we have a union, we negotiate five weeks vacation. So it’s actually quite good. And we have also some sick leave that we can take from here to here. Five days is the minimum you will get in France, for example. Generally when you work for a university in France, you get more like 10 or 12, weeks per year. So it’s not that far away and I think it’s helped a lot also. Also if we talk about vacation, this is also a burden on the international. It’s like every time you need to renew your visa, you don’t know how long it will take. So in general, in most countries in Europe are okay, but you never know because they can go on back processes and then you don’t know. But people from India or China, it could take like one month, one month and a half, and then you just use all your vacation for that or you just don’t come back.

26:37 Emily: Yeah, that’s really, really challenging. Just the uncertainty around that, I agree.

Long-Term Planning for Permanent Residency

26:42 Emily: So I understand that you are applying for permanent residency, or are looking into it. What’s that process been like?

26:49 Louise: Okay. Actually I got it.

26:52 Emily: Oh yeah. Great. Congratulations!

26:54 Louise: I got it a few weeks ago. The process for the green card — you will need to pay basically two entities. You will need to pay the US government, and it will be I think $2000 to $3000, also depending if you apply as a couple or not. The big thing, the big part of it is to pay a lawyer, and I won’t to go into details, but you may need lawyers. A lot of people go with lawyers because if you need to make your case, even if you get a green card because you are a scientist, there is a lot of legal stuff going into it, and it’s not a straight out science, like you would write a paper. You can get become eligible by just getting married with an American. Your employer can also ask for a green card for you, and you can petition. That’s what I did. And as a scientist you can kind of easily make your case and you can go for one of the easiest ones, national interest. So that’s like US economy needs you, basically. Then there’s the whole process to get people to refer you. Technically, your lawyer will write a reference letter that you will send to them and they will sign it. And then it’s a lot of bunch of paperwork, that you need to put and translate stuff. In general, preparing all of this will take between three to six months, I would say. And then generally this is used both for eligibility and to adjust your status. Eligibility, you will know around six months. Adjustment of status, it depends a lot on where you come from. It can be from one year to 10 or more.

28:40 Emily: Wow. Yeah, that sounds quite the ordeal. And do you mind sharing, how much did you ultimately spend on the lawyer part of it?

28:48 Louise: For the lawyer, I paid for the eligibility part and I paid $5,000 and I think that is roughly what you will pay. There are cheaper ones, but…I did much more math for this one, I wanted to be more prepared. If you look at the postdoc salary, anything else you can get, in general, is much highe,, and that’s th problem. With my G-1 I cannot get a job in industry or nonprofit or anywhere else. And also I cannot have a side job. I just can work for my employer at my university. This, or me, was also why I wanted ,a green card so I can start and perhaps have a side business, if I wanted to.

29:39 Emily: And why did you decide to go that route instead of maybe finding a next employer and going to the H1B route?

29:49 Louise: Because I wanted to do a career move. I wanted to go out of science and go more applied initiative positions in university or nonprofits. To still work with scientists, but more on the kind of development on the science communication part. And for this one, then my skill as a scientist, I will use part of them, but not the specific one, not the technical one. My employer won’t be able to say, because that’s what they do when they ask for your H1B for you, they basically say no American can do it. I was applying for jobs that they can’t say that, so that’s why. And I think even if you can get a n H1B, the H1B for industry, you can just apply once a year and it is a lottery, so even your employer doesn’t know if you will get it. Then I think you have the O-1 that you can apply to, but it is also, I think, depending on the employer, so you do get less freedom on your part. Actually a lot of people that want to stay here a little longer, if they can, the go for a green card because that’s what gives you the most freedom and also peace of mind. Because now if I lose my job now I need to leave the country within a month. So I think a green card also gives you some freedom around this.

31:12 Emily: Yeah. Well, I’m glad that you have completed that process, so you have that peace of mind now. That’s great to hear. Is there anything else that we haven’t covered yet? Some piece of advice you’d want to give to another international student or postdoc moving to the US for the first time?

Final Words of Advice

31:26 Louise: Yeah, so for sure I will say, do your homework, as good as you did when you choose your position, or you look for a job. When you look for a job, you will perhaps do informal interviews, you will do networking, and try to know what is the job about and do you want to go this way? And I think it’s great to do exactly the same when you move to another country, or another city. Do informal interviews. Be aware, because, so I did one, but someone who lived here I think five years ago and so the renting market just completely changed. The rent doubled. So of course what he was saying, he wasn’t what was happening right now. Do some informal interview, too. See if the environment fits you and fits your needs, because this can also be one point. And do the math, too. And be aware that getting an apartment for the first time will be much harder than you think you will be, so take your time for that.

32:34 Emily: Yeah, I agree. And actually I have a resource. I made a webinar and template spreadsheet earlier this summer, so I’ll link that from the show notes that are all about how to budget at a distance. So how to figure out what is that cost of living where you’re moving to. This could be within the US, if you’re coming from another US city, or coming from outside the country, it’s going to work either way. So what are some like resources you can look to, to figure out what does that cost of living going to be, especially the housing, because that’s the really big rock in the middle of your expenses is figuring that out. And so that’ll really help you kind of know, how is that salary offer? Is it going to be sufficient? And certainly for graduate students it is a question mark, whether or not it’s going to be enough to live on, depending on the city and depending on the program. If that sounds good to you, please go check out that resource in the show notes.

33:19 Emily: So Louise, last question before we wrap up. What is your best financial advice for another postdoc or another early career PhD?

33:29 Louise: Really look into it. Don’t just accept a job offer because you love the science. We are all passionate about it. We just want to do science, but where you live is also important, and if you have to worry too much about the financial part, then you won’t have as much time to do the actual science. And especially if you move in with a partner or if you are moving with your family, then you have even more. That is my advice.

34:04 Emily: Oh, excellent. I totally co-sign all of that. Great, great advice. And Louise, thank you so much for this interview and for joining me today.

34:10 Louise: Thank you.

Outtro

34:14 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.

This PhD Entrepreneur Advocates for Universal Basic Income (Part 1)

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Jim Pugh, the founder of ShareProgress and co-host of the Basic Income Podcast. Jim earned a PhD in computer science and subsequently worked for the Democratic National Convention and other progressive groups. He always aspired to start a business, and his post-PhD work experience inspired him to found ShareProgress, a software product and consulting service. Jim describes the evolution of his business, which now brings him sufficient income to support him in San Francisco in exchange for about 5 hours of work per week. Jim’s observations of changes in technology and the workforce while building his business and newfound time freedom drew him to investigating universal basic income.

Links Mentioned in This Episode

PhD entrepreneur basic income

Teaser

00:00 Jim: As you’re doing something, you’ll see many other, adjacent great things to do as well, but that can so easily be a distraction from actually figuring out, “Alright, what is the core of this successful business going to look like?” And if you let yourself be pulled in that direction, it can really detract from your chance of building something big.

Introduction

00:25 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 one, and today my guest is Dr. Jim Pugh, the founder of ShareProgress and cohost of The Basic Income Podcast. Jim’s doctoral work in computer science and his experience working for the Democratic National Convention inspired him to start ShareProgress seven years ago. In this first half of our interview, we discuss the growth and evolution of his business, which now brings him sufficient income to support him in San Francisco in exchange for about five hours of work per week. Jim’s observations while building his business and newfound time-freedom drew him to investigating universal basic income. Without further ado, here’s the first part of my interview with Dr. Jim Pugh.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:15 Emily: I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Jim Pugh. It’s a really special episode for me because Jim and I know each other in real life. He is the older brother of a dear friend of mine and my husband’s from college. And we actually had lunch a couple months ago when we were visiting and had gotten into this really interesting conversation about what Jim’s up to these days, the activism that he does. And it was just really exciting and I could see there was a definite PhD angle there, not just because Jim himself has a PhD but also because what he works on has implications for PhDs. So, we will get into all of that in just a few minutes. So, Jim, will you please take a moment and introduce yourself a little bit further to the listeners?

01:53 Jim: Yeah. Well Emily, thanks for having me on the podcast. My background brings together a few different areas. My academic background is in the sciences. I did my undergraduate and doctorate in computer science, specifically robotics, my doctorate. And following that, ended up getting involved in the political world. And so, I spent some time working on the 2008 Obama campaigns, spent a few years in D.C. after continuing political work out there. And then about six, seven years back decided to take honestly experiences on both those fronts to start my own company called ShareProgress, working primarily with political and nonprofit organizations, providing them with tools and other technical support. And then just in the last few years, I started to delve really in on the activism side of things myself and helped to start an organization that does a lot of work around universal basic income doing both advocacy around that topic and also some policy development work in that field.

What Role Did Your PhD Have in Starting Your Business?

02:58 Emily: Yeah. Super, super exciting. Thank you. Clearly, you have a lot of skills and a lot of interesting experiences that you’ve brought to bear on these most recent endeavors. So, kind of backing up slightly to the business that you started, ShareProgress. How did your PhD prepare you for ultimately starting that business? Obviously, you had some work experience after that point before you started it, but how did the PhD specifically prepare you? Or how did it not prepare you very well for that?

03:25 Jim: So, I would say the PhD itself wasn’t terribly relevant for starting that because I was really in a hard research area and was working on algorithms and models that didn’t have any clear path to monetization to turn it into a company. So, that I don’t think was terribly relevant. What was a bit more relevant is I was involved with, at the university I was working with, which is the Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland. They actually were making a pretty significant investment in cultivating entrepreneurship amongst their students, both undergraduate and graduate. And so there was a program on campus that was talking a lot about that. And so, I feel like there was some stuff I learned through experience with that going through events, and they had various activities that they would organize. And so, I felt like that it was informative in some ways, but it really was very much focused on taking the sort of research you do through your doctoral degree, through your academic work afterwards and turning that into a company. And my company that I ended up starting really didn’t resemble that much at all because that was much more informed by the political work I’d done and seeing what the needs were in that space. So, there were there aspects around “what does it look like to go through that process?” that I would say generally provided me with some guidance. But as far as the specifics, really not much at all.

Jim’s Entrepreneurship Journey

05:02 Emily: Did you have in your mind at that time that you did want to pursue entrepreneurship?

05:08 Jim: I did. That was something from I think pretty early on in college I realized was an area I was quite interested in. And when I was graduating from undergraduate, actually, I kind of had in my head either go to grad school or do a startup. I didn’t have an idea for a startup, so I said, “Well I guess it’s grad school.” But it definitely was something that I had been thinking about for awhile.

05:34 Emily: And did you initially, when you were getting involved during your PhD program with this training program for entrepreneurship, were you thinking about the possibility that you might turn your PhD work into a company? Or were you already like, “No, that’s definitely not going to happen, but this is just like for future reference?”

05:50 Jim: More the latter. Maybe there were a few moments where I considered something that was closely connected, but in general, that wasn’t where I saw opportunity. I more generally was thinking about, “Oh, I want to do something at some point. And this is an area that interests me and is just an area that’ll be helpful to know more about.”

Relevant Technical Skills Gained During PhD

06:10 Emily: Gotcha. And what about, I guess I could say, your technical chops. Did you use those in your business, or were you always hiring out for that? And then also is that something you got from your PhD, or do you think your undergraduate education was sufficient in that area?

06:23 Jim: I think there definitely was some of that from my PhD. Obviously, as an undergrad I had done a lot in that space, but I think that some of the specific technical skills and areas of expertise–and I think also just generally understanding different technological ecosystems–some of that did come through in my PhD. When I was starting my company, I very much structured it to not have put myself in the role of that technical person because I was interested in really taking on the CEO mantle in the more traditional sense. So, I had hired out for a developer to actually build out our software platform from the get-go. That said, I was being involved in various ways with the technical stuff throughout, and at different points definitely got more engaged on that front. And so, having that background definitely proved to be important and a valuable asset. And honestly, I mean I think those of us who are deeply into tech, and particularly doing software development and whatnot, we think of tech in a pretty extreme way as compared to the population in general. And so, just knowing how to work with various technical systems out there, I know it’s a leap for a lot of people not committed to that space. And so, certainly my background had equipped me well to be able to handle that sort of thing.

07:50 Emily: Yeah, I kind of see this as being a common sort of value of the PhD. You sort of prove yourself in an area, you can work very deeply, you can master something completely. And then after that, a lot of people do take a step back and allow other people to do that kind of work and do more of the management. And that’s kind of the PI model. Right? So, that sort of does apply, in a way, to what you did after. But it sounds like the actual work experience that you had after your PhD with the Obama campaign and so forth, that was what gave you the idea–right?–for what your company would ultimately be. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Inspiration While Working for the Democratic National Convention

08:19 Jim: Yeah, so the work I was doing, to some degree on the campaign, but in particular when I was out in D.C., I was working for the Democratic National Committee at that point, and we were actually running, effectively, the continuation of the Obama campaign. It was called Organizing for America at that point. And so, my role, I was the director of digital analytics and also web development for the program. And so, it was really paying attention to/digging in on what was actually happening under the hood with all of our digital presence, our social media, our email lists, our website, and so on. And so, I got a chance to see what’s possible, what’s not, what works well, what doesn’t. And one of the observations I had was that so much of our ability to do anything, whether that was raise money, whether it was to try calls to Congress, whether it was to get people turning out in their local communities for events, it depended on us having a wide reach.

09:19 Jim: And that reach, to a large degree, came from us intentionally doing outreach to get people involved. Whether that was big publicity efforts, whether it was paid acquisition online. But then the third category being people bringing in their friends. And actually during that time period, that was really crucial for us that so much of the new people we had coming in, it wasn’t from anything we were doing in particular, it was because our existing supporters were recruiting people they knew to get involved in a campaign and whatever the moment was. And it was an area that there really had not been much investment in as far as figuring out, “Alright, well how do we facilitate, and how do we amplify this?” So, that was really the motivation for my company, which was, “Let’s build some software tools that make this more effective and easier to do.”

How to Gain a Wide-Reaching Audience

10:10 Jim: And so, basically we had a plug and play solution where organizations, as they were doing this sort of advocacy work, they could be encouraging their supporters to be reaching out to their friends through various digital social channels. So, social media, Facebook, Twitter, but also just getting people to email folks they knew and say, “Hey, I’m involved in this really important thing. Will you be involved as well?” And that’s proved very, very effective at bringing in new people, particularly in high-energy moments. And then we allowed organizations to track the analytics on what was happening there. And so they really understood what was going on and actually allowed them to do controlled testing around what sort of messaging they could give to their supporters that made them more convincing, basically, to people they knew. So, when their supporters post on Facebook they could have a couple of different headlines, a couple of different thumbnail images and the system would be able to measure, “Okay, well how effective are those different pieces of content at getting their friends to say, ‘Oh, I’m interested,’ and click through it and get involved.”

Evolution of ShareProgress

11:16 Emily: Yeah. Super scientific approach to that. Right? I’m sure your background helped with that, the design of it. Okay, so that’s around the product that you created. I think you said when you introduced yourself that this was maybe six, seven years ago that you started the company. Two years ago, you transitioned more to doing this advocacy around universal basic income. So, I’m curious about how your role within the company, and in particular the time that you put into it, evolved over that, five-ish-year period.

11:44 Jim: Yeah. So, at the start, the software that I just described, the plan was for that to be the company. That was what we were going to do. I realized relatively early on about six months in that the growth that we were seeing from that wasn’t going to allow us to sustain. And in exploring different investment strategies, the type of company I was looking to build, which very much had a social mission, wasn’t looking to make as much money as possible, as quickly as possible if that compromising that, wasn’t actually a great target for traditional investment routes with startups. And so, what I decided to do was to couple on with that a consulting arm where we would actually work with the same sorts of organizations that we were providing the software to, but a system with either data analysis work or some sort of web design development work, which is similar to what I had been doing out in D.C. prior to that.

12:42 Jim: And so, that actually ended up being the bulk of what the company did for most of its existence. We were able to find clients there. I was able to scale up our staff with that sort of work. And so, while we were doing the software, we were continuing to grow the consulting side of the company. And so, our peak was I think early 2017 we were nine people and most on the consulting side. But it was around that time I had realized–I had known pretty early on, I didn’t really want to start a consulting company. That seemed like where the path to profitability was. But around that time, my interests had started to shift to more of the advocacy work around universal basic income. And we went through some tough periods as far as expectations around business and profits and not matching reality. So, we had to do some downsizing. And so, at that point I actually decided, “This isn’t where I want to be investing my time and effort for the future. So, let’s just ramp down the consultant product company.” And at that point, our software was making enough money that I could support a much smaller staff. And so, over the course of 2017 I went through a process around that. That ended with, at the end of the year, I was having more of a skeleton crew and requiring not very much of my time in order to just keep our software running, or the clients that we had there.

Consulting as a Stage of Growth

14:20 Emily: So, I’m curious, with the evolution of adding the consulting aspect and then winding it down, are you happy that you did that, or do you think that you should have just stuck with the software product kind of throughout that whole time and come to this point where you are now maybe a little bit sooner?

14:36 Jim: Well, it honestly wasn’t an option to do exactly that because we did need the consulting early on in order to make payroll. So, it took a while for us to build up enough of a client base and the software where that was an option at all.

14:49 Emily: So, it’s a stage of growth, then.

14:51 Jim: It was a stage of growth. Whether or not I would have invested as much as I did in that, I think looking at it solely from a business perspective, I think that was probably a mistake. I think that it would have been a better approach to say, “Let’s keep focused on the software. Let’s do this as much as we need to, but let’s not really invest in growing that as the company.” Because I think that in most cases, when you’re trying to do more than one thing, you’re not going to do either of them as well. And so, that would have been the better business decision. As far as from a personal perspective, I think I certainly learned a lot through the whole process. So, I wouldn’t say it was a bad decision from that. It certainly was stressful at times, but I think that it’s hard for me to make a valuative judgment on it.

San Francisco Venture Capital (VC) Environment

15:40 Emily: Sure. I want to say for the context, for the listeners, that you live in San Francisco right now, and you mentioned living in D.C. before that. Did you start the company when you were living in San Francisco?

15:50 Jim: Yes, that’s right.

15:51 Emily: So, you’re in a very different environment than probably most of the listeners who are maybe still on academic campuses, you know, spread throughout the U.S. and other places. So, anyway, I just want to say that because you probably had a lot of exposure just from your environment in things like how to approach for VC funding, whether that’s actually a good idea for your business. You decided that the values that they’re going for are not exactly the values that you were going for. And so it wasn’t a good match there. This is actually something I’ve heard about quite a bit that people elect not to go the VC funding route for various, I guess, “vision” reasons.

16:23 Jim: Well, I should clarify that I did attempt to raise funds for the company with already knowing that there would be certain people I wouldn’t accept money from, certain types of investment that I wouldn’t be comfortable with. But, I was hoping to be able to do it in some capacity and was not successful at it. So, that was part of it. Maybe had I met the right people, those things could have looked differently. But I will say, both prior to that and since then, having observed the dynamics in that space, I see how that would be a challenge for many, many people who are attempting to do something similar. But it wasn’t as though I was equipped to know upfront, “Oh, there’s no way this is going to work.” It was very much a learning experience for me.

Current Role in the Business

17:11 Emily: Yeah, that sounds really great, actually. And you’re still living in San Francisco, so you’re still exposed to all of that stuff. But I’m curious about this decision that you said around two years ago, you wanted to focus more on the UBI stuff and you restructured the business. And now, how much time do you spend working on the business now, maybe per week or per month? And what is your role in it now, exactly?

17:32 Jim: Yeah. Well, I’m still CEO of the business, but to be honest, it probably averages about five hours a week at this point because we want to keep running, we want to keep our clients happy there. The idea is really to have it be maintaining the service rather than doing new things. And so, that just doesn’t require that much work. So, I have an employee who is, basically, like any sort of support we need to provide, is dealing with that, keeping an eye on things, and then myself overseeing things. And that allows us to keep going with that.

18:06 Emily: And to ask kind of a more pointed financial question, but you are supporting yourself entirely off of your business income for which you’re only putting in about five hours a week at this point?

18:16 Jim: That’s right, yes.

Financial Independence and Early Retirement (FIRE) Movement

18:17 Emily: Wonderful. Wonderful set up for you. So, we’ll talk about this a little bit more in the upcoming UBI conversation. But the reason I was kind of interested in your story and sharing it on the podcast is because there’s this big movement in the personal finance community called the FIRE movement, Financial Independence and Early Retirement. In season three, I released a pair of interviews with someone on that subject. And your story, while the FIRE community might not call you financially independent by their definition, a lot of what they’re going for, financial freedom, you have bought for yourself with your business, right? So, there’s a lot of overlap there between the goals of the FIRE movement and what you’ve done for yourself. So, I was really interested in having you on the podcast for that reason.

Business Advice for Early-Career PhDs

18:59 Emily: So, okay, now that we’re going to transition to sort of the universal basic income aspect of our conversation, I kind of wanted to wrap up the aspect of our conversation about the business by just asking if you had to give some advice, if another early-career PhD asked you advice around starting a business, what would you tell that person now?

Advice #1: Talk to People

19:20 Jim: I think just go and talk to a lot of people who’ve been through the process because I think part of the challenge is it does look very different in different situations. And that was something I struggled with early is thinking, “Okay, well, there’s going to be standards around this. And so did a bunch of Googling online for like, “Okay, what is the standard, whether it’s around the equity or whether it’s around other aspects of the business.” And I found some stuff but not as much as I expected. And so, I think that, if you can just talk to a lot of people who have gone through the process, you get a sense of the diversity of ways that can work. And so I think it can give you a better idea as to what the trajectories may seem to be. That was something I know I struggle a lot with, and I think may have delayed me deciding to start a business, is that it just felt too amorphous and scary. Alright, what does it look to get something like this off the ground? And in hindsight, it’s such a simpler process than so much of the work I had done before, but I think that there is that opacity and then those unknowns that make it difficult. I feel like I was not unique in having that perspective.

Advice #2: Find Your Focus

20:33 Jim: And then I think focus is another big thing that I continually struggle with frankly, but I see many, many people struggle with. There’s many great things to do and, as you’re doing something, you’ll see many other, adjacent great things to do as well, but that can so easily be a distraction from actually figuring out, “Alright, what is the core of this successful business going to look like?” And if you let yourself be pulled in that direction, it can really detract from your chance of building something big.

Commercial

21:07 Emily: Emily here, for a brief interlude. I bet you and your peers are hungry for financial information right now, especially if it’s tailored for your unique PhD experience. I offer seminars, webinars, and workshops on personal finance for early-career PhDs that can be billed as professional development or personal wellness programming. My events cover a wide range of personal finance topics or take a deep dive into the financial topics that matter most to PhDs like taxes, investing, career transitions, and frugality. If you’re interested in having me speak to your group or recommending me to a potential host, you can find more information and ways to contact me at pfforphds.com/speaking. We can absolutely find a way to get this great content to you and your peers even while social distancing. Now, back to our interview.

Should Entrepreneurs Move to San Francisco?

22:06 Emily: I’m trying to think about for someone who is, let’s say still affiliated with the university, I would imagine there are some people to talk to there, networking, especially universities that have incubators or something from launching a business out of. But I asked you before about living in San Francisco, what do you think about moving to a place like San Francisco where you can just run into other people who are on a similar path? What do you think about that idea?

22:31 Jim: I mean, I think it’s a very double-edged sword because certainly the density of that happening is a significant asset for a lot of this sort of work. And it is so expensive here that if you’re looking to hire locally, you’re gonna be paying, sometimes easily two, three, four times as much as you’d be paying, not too far away. And so, I think it’s a question of balancing those sorts of things. I mean, I think there are ways, like either if you live somewhere not too far away, where you can go into the city and have those easy conversations in-person with folks, but still be in a place where it doesn’t cost you thousands and thousands of dollars every month to pay for your rent. That could be your compromise. Or, just take the occasional trip out here. Assuming you can afford whatever the travel costs are. And then I think there are other areas where you’re starting to see better density. I don’t really have a great sense for what it actually looks like yet. And I do think that there is a cultural component to why Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley because there’s kind of a pay-it-forward mentality, pretty broadly, where people who have done well are eager to help new people coming in, which I think has made a big difference. But yeah, you get both sides of it.

Advocacy for Universal Basic Income

23:54 Emily: I see. Okay. So, now that you pay for your life based on your business, which you only work in a few hours per week now, I’m curious about this transition that you made two years ago. I mean, you said it was kind of like you became more interested in universal basic income and that movement. You then structured your life so that you didn’t have to work so much. So, I guess the question is, how has your experience of having that business and having that source of income that requires only a very small amount of work at this point or small amount of time, how did that lead you into your advocacy for universal basic income?

24:34 Jim: So, I think there are a couple of different ways that I can answer that. So, as far as what first got me interested in universal basic income, a big part of it was the process of starting my company because I had certain expectations coming in around staffing related to operations, to payroll, to HR services, and expecting that, assuming things at all got off the ground pretty quickly, I would need to be hiring at least part-time help to assist with that. And what I found is that there were all these new online services that automated a lot of that. And so, from the beginning for payroll in the company, we use Gusto. It used to be called ZenPayroll, which you have to plug in the information to start with people’s where they live, their bank account transfer information, what the unemployment insurance rate is in the state. But then every twice a month you just say, “Okay, go,” and it pays them and files their taxes and that’s it. And costs not very much money to do it. And so, that being one example of how technology is allowing us, not just to replace jobs because I think you lose something when you describe it just that way, but is A) definitely changing the way that that work is being done, and B) and this is the thing that really stood out for me, is allowing much smaller groups of people to be able to do far, far more than was true before.

Small Business is the New “Big”

26:14 Jim: Because in the past, if you wanted to start a big company, or I shouldn’t say big, I should say a company that was going to generate a lot of income and wealth, kind of inherent to the process is you would need to involve a lot of other people. And it’s far less true now. You can have a team, I mean if you look at I think, what was it, the WhatsApp team, which is like half a dozen, a dozen people who then sell a company for multiple billions of dollars. Never in human history before could something like that happen. And so I think that was an A-ha moment for me and realizing that things are already starting to and will continue to look very differently than they have in the past and we need to stop assuming that the economic solutions that have been effective before are necessarily the right ones going forward.

27:06 Emily: So, it’s not necessarily just jobs are going away, but maybe some jobs are going away, some other jobs are popping up, the people that create the companies and the software and so forth. Are you also speaking about wealth concentration?

27:20 Jim: Yeah.

27:21 Emily: Gotcha.

Changing Mindset Around Universal Basic Income

27:22 Jim: Yeah. And I think for me, that was as much of a factor as jobs are not. I think we’re used to thinking about the jobs thing, so it’s more clear why that would be problematic if we had only a requirement that 10% of the people have a job. But I think that, particularly as I’ve worked on the issue more, that piece more clearly is a big issue that I think as our systems are structured now is really incompatible with having a fully-functioning society, I would say. Anyway, so that was kind of how I first started to think about UBI, universal basic income. And I don’t even remember where I first heard about the idea. I think I read maybe some piece about the referendum that Switzerland was pursuing.

28:18 Jim: It started back in 2013. But my initial reaction was, “This seems dumb, frankly.” I was like, “Oh, this seems like an oversimplification. Just thinking you can give people money and that will solve things. And then I started to look more into it and look at the research and understanding what are the actual, both economic and psychological ramifications when you do this. And it turns out it was incredibly positive that this is something where we have, at this point, a lot of evidence that unconditional cash–people take that and use it for whatever they actually need to use it for. And that, in fact, it confers a sense of agency to people that they might not otherwise have. And that in itself is hugely beneficial because it encourages people to think more longer term in terms of sensing more responsibility for a situation, all things that are actually very valuable in sending people out for their own longterm success.

29:15 Emily: I want to leave this for part two of this interview. Where we’ll be talking less about your personal story and more about, well, maybe what you’ve been learning over the last few years. We’re going to take a step back and define universal basic income because we haven’t done that yet. So, listeners, if the next part of this conversation sounds like it’s going to be really interesting to you, please tune in next week. For the second part of the interview, we’ll be talking a lot more about universal basic income with the expert, Dr. Jim Pugh.

Outtro

29:40 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. Pfforphds.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. There, you can find links to all the episode show notes and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, please consider joining my mailing list for my behind-the-scenes commentary about each episode. Register at pfforphds.com/subscribe. See you in the next episode! And remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is Stages of Awakening by Podington Bear from the free music archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

This Soon-to-Be PhD Is Facing Debt and Underemployment as He Goes on the Academic Job Market

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In this episode, Emily interviews Chad Frazier, a graduate student in history at Georgetown University who is about to complete his PhD and go on the academic job market. Chad’s career plans and personal finances have changed a lot during his PhD (and a master’s before that). When he received his stipend offer from Georgetown, he thought he had made it. But seven years later, the pay increases haven’t kept pace with housing prices in DC, and Chad has accumulated credit card debt. As he applies for faculty positions, Chad faces underemployment, and the grace period on his student loans from his undergrad and master’s degrees is quite limited. Chad argues that universities have a moral obligation to pay their grad students a living wage so that they can thrive academically. (Update: Chad successfully defended his PhD just prior to the publication of this episode!)

Links Mentioned in the Episode

PhD debt and underemployment

Teaser

00:00 Chad: I just spent the last 10 years at an institution, and I’m now actually financially worse off than I was when I started. At times that makes me really scared and angry. And that wasn’t something that I imagined it would be like when I would get to this point.

Introduction

00:21 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season four, episode 16, and today my guest is Chad Frazier, a rising eighth year PhD student in history at Georgetown. Chad and I discuss some really tough and even emotional issues in this interview including large student loan balances, credit card debt, underemployment, the difficult academic job market, and the feeling of being let down by your university. Chad shares quite openly the current state of his finances and career aspirations. We discuss what universities can do to alleviate financial stress among their grad students as well as what prospective grad students should think about when they look at a stipend offer letter. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Chad Frazier. You don’t want to miss this one.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:15 Emily: I am joined today on the podcast by Chad Frazier, who is currently a PhD student at Georgetown. And we’re going to be talking about the financial issues that arise, particularly as you’re getting close to the completion of a PhD. Right? You’re getting to to the end of graduate school, and what happens next and how do you handle that with your finances? It’s a really challenging situation for many, many, many PhDs. So Chad, I’m really delighted that you joined me today. And will you please tell the audience a little bit more about yourself?

01:46 Chad: Yeah, sure. First off, happy to be on the podcast, Emily. So just kind of a little background. I’m, like you said, just in the process of finishing up my PhD. I’m kind of planning to defend middle to late part of September. I focus on US history. Before that, I got my MA at Georgetown, which is the institution I’m currently at, BA at Dickinson. I guess those are kind of the broad highlights. I’ve been in the last couple of years, very active with the graduate union here at Georgetown. I’m part of the organizing committee and started getting more and more interested as part of that work in the last couple of years.

Evolution of Career Plans in Grad School

02:32 Emily: Yeah. Super interested here. Maybe not specifically about the unionization issues or your role in that, but just about your thinking around those issues as it relates to what we’re going to be talking about today. So, you’re almost done with your PhD. What are your current career plans, what you think you’ll be doing next, and also maybe how has that changed over the course of your degree?

02:54 Chad: Okay. Yeah. So when I started out the PhD, which would have been fall of 2012, the plan was generally that I was going to just tenure track, ideally at a liberal arts college. I was a peer writing tutor in undergrad and I really liked the experience of teaching. That said, I was kind of amenable to the idea of like maybe doing alternate career paths, kind of sidetracks, that led eventually to this final goal. But I can’t say that I really thought about them in any sort of depth. I think I figured, “Oh, I’ll just figure it out as I go.” So, like last year, I tried the academic job market for the first time, kind of a soft search. I didn’t get anything, which was not unexpected where I was with my dissertation. And then I’m going to try it again this year–be better, generally more competitive I think–and we’ll see what happens there. But over the course of the sort of last several years, I have just gotten more interested in other possible career paths. Because there are maybe some things about academia that I’m not always a fan of. And I think in particular, one would flag, like I mentioned, the unionization, maybe involvement with something to do with the labor movement, either as an organizer or researcher for a union. I’m also working with a professor here on building an online archive. So it looks at teachers in the labor movement. So it’s kind of up in the air.

When Does Your Graduate Student Position End?

04:18 Emily: Yeah. So it sounds like you’re getting other kinds of work experience. Right? Other kinds of, or not necessarily work, maybe it’s volunteer as well, but other kinds of experiences that’ll help you figure out what you want to do with your career and maybe you know, land, whatever that next job is. So you said you’re planning on going back on the job market again this fall. When does your position as a graduate student actually end or do you have an end date for that?

04:41 Chad: So I actually just put in paperwork with the graduate school. So the way this basically works is, I will defend, ideally late September. Once I do that, and generally, I am sure this is true for a lot of people, the assumption is that when you get in the room, you’re ready. Then there are revisions, which part of that is what your committee says, part of it is shaping it to the graduate school. And, as far as the university is concerned, when I’m in that mode, I’m still a student. And it’s just then once those are done, you file it with the graduate school, and then you apply to graduate, which for me the plan is to do that in December.

Plan for Income Until Graduation

05:24 Emily: And so as far as your income goes, in the meantime, do you have an assistantship that’ll still be ongoing, or what’s the plan for the income?

05:32 Chad: So the plan for the income by sort of Georgetown rules is basically after seventh year, which my seventh year technically concluded in May, I’m not eligible for any kind of assistantship, whether as a TA or an RA. So, the work I’ve been doing with the online archive is paid out of an Institute here at Georgetown called the Kalmanovitz Initiative. And I’m figuring out how many hours they will be able to pay me for that. But I’m also looking for sort of part time jobs. One of the advantages of being in DC is there’s a fair amount of work for research with journalists or stuff like that to kind of make enough money that I can make ends meet until I can have something more definite.

Are You Considered an Employee at Georgetown?

06:20 Emily: So, the position that you’ve had at Georgetown, not your assistantship, are you an employee technically or is that like an independent contractor position?

06:32 Chad: So, I’m an employee. It’s routed through sort of the student payroll office. It’s a little complicated just because the way the rules are here with PhD students, we have to estimate how many hours a week I plan to work and how many weeks. And then they are like, “Oh, this is his stipend.” And then that gets dispersed out in biweekly installments. They changed that recently. It used to be able to have been, oh, just hourly, as long as I didn’t exceed like some certain restraints, that would have been fine. Bureaucracy.

What is the State of Your Finances at this Point?

07:05 Emily: Yeah. So, it sounds like you have a part-time position that’ll be ongoing through Georgetown. And then on top of that you do need to work a bit more as well as actually finishing up your dissertation and doing the defense and all of that. So, it’s a lot going on at this juncture. It’s a time of transition and a challenging time. So, can you tell me a little bit more about the state of your finances at this point? It sounds like, well first of all, is that income that you anticipate making going to be enough to sort of keep your head above water or is that still a question mark?

07:43 Chad: So, the way it’s kind of shaping up is that income that I’m going to get from the job with KI, with Kalmanovitz Initiative, probably I’m hoping that’s enough to cover rent. And then the additional work–the idea is basically enough that I can feed myself and pay for Metro and sort of living expenses and hopefully get enough too that I can start paying down credit cards a bit more. Because I’m very cognizant of the fact that, six months after I graduate, the student loans are going to start coming due. And that’s going to drop like anvil from heaven, it feels like. So, I want to have hopefully something ready for that where I’m not getting hit from two sides.

History of Chad’s Student Loans

08:37 Emily: Yeah, totally. So, you’ve mentioned you have student loans. Do you want to share like the amount of that, or like which degree you accumulated them from?

08:47 Chad: Yeah, sure. So, I went to a private liberal arts school, Dickinson College, for my undergrad. And I got lucky. I got a pretty good financial aid package there that most of it consisted of scholarships and grants. And I only had to take out, I think, anywhere from 10 to 20,000 [dollars]. Most of the student debt I’ve accumulated was because of my master’s degree that I took before I started my PhD. And for that, I basically have to look through the records and that’s about 80 to 81,000 dollars. So that’s, yeah.

09:20 Emily: Yeah, that’s going to be a large minimum payment. Even if you go one of these income-driven routes, depending on what you’re doing the rest of the year, assuming you haven’t gotten like a full-time faculty position yet. Anyway, it’ll be a large payment, presumably. So, that sounds really, really tough, but it’s also pretty common as you might imagine. Okay, so you have the student loan debt from your earlier degrees, not from the PhD itself. And then you mentioned credit card debt. Do you want to share the amount of that, and how it was that you accumulated it?

Accumulation of Credit Card Debt

09:54 Chad: Yeah, because I’m not sure. I don’t think I can pull the dollar amount right off the top of my head. But it’s basically–so, a little background about how a PhD sort of works at Georgetown. I was admitted with a five-year package, which meant that for three years there was a service obligation, which I TA’d. Two years was non-service. And then basically, for year six through seven, the department was able to fund me kind of on a discretionary basis. I got a fellowship my sixth year where I got to teach my own class, and then I got a semester of non-service. And then this last year I was on service. And I got a decent enough job working kind of as an administrative assistant to a professor. But the big issue was, that fellowship when I was getting paid was only nine months out of the year, which is pretty common for humanities and social science students here at Georgetown.

10:55 Chad: And so that meant that like, I tried to set aside money so I could cover rent. I would basically always try to find an extra, some sort of job either during the semester where I could save up money or a job during the summer where I could kind of live off of that. Invariably, credit cards became the sort of go-to during the summer. And the usual MO is, in the summer months, pay them down during the year, and then in the summer months make minimum payments until–maybe a little extra if you can–you get back into the fall, and then start paying them down again. And that worked actually pretty well the first couple of years. It’s just in the last two, three years, cost of living has been going up in DC with rent. And also with like, you know, last summer I had three really close friends who got married, and I wanted to go to their weddings and I had to pay for that. And I went to a conference in November that I didn’t get reimbursed for that was on the West coast, which was expensive. And it’s been hard to sort of do that, pay it down this last year where, come June, they were all maxed out, and I just was boxed in.

12:15 Emily: Yeah. I think what you’re describing is super common for PhD students, for people in their twenties and thirties, generally. I mean the nine-month pay, of course, is fairly unique to our mode of work, depending on what kind of field you’re in. But yeah, I mean it sounds like you had the right idea, right? Save up during the year, so you’re cognizant of that in advance. You’re trying to plan for it in advance, save up during the year, live on that over the summer, plus you work a little bit. But it’s really hard to do that planning. It’s just a really, really challenging situation to be in. So yeah, it sounds like credit cards came into that for you as well as the whole irregular expenses thing, you know, going to people’s weddings. I also really value attending weddings.

13:00 Emily: I love being able to go, I always had to travel. It was a challenge, financially. And what you mentioned, of course, the conference thing. We all know inside academia that conferences either are not paid for at all for students, or the student has to pay upfront and then the reimbursements, and it’s months later. That can definitely get people into cycles of credit card debt as well. It’s a huge, widespread problem, I would say. So, I’m sure all of this sounds very relatable to the audience, and I’m really thankful to you for sort of bearing yourself this way and sharing this because it is a really difficult thing to talk about publicly. So, thank you so much for doing that. Is there any other debt that you’re dealing with at this point aside from the credit cards and student loans?

Any Other Debt Besides Credit Cards and Student Loans?

13:41 Chad: I think those are the two biggest sort of issues. Like, yeah, there’s nothing else really out there. I rent so I don’t have to worry about like a mortgage. I don’t like to drive. I don’t own a car. So, it’s public transit. So yeah, it’s pretty much just credit cards and student debt.

14:01 Emily: Yeah. And it sounds like, given that you don’t own a car–which is one of my very go-to suggestions for people trying to reduce their expenses–you live in an expensive city. That’s how it is. You pay a lot in rent. You don’t own a car. Rent’s been going up, presumably, as is almost always the case. Stipends do not keep up with rising rent costs and yeah, it’s just a really, really tough spot to be in. I’m curious actually what your thought process was about choosing–and maybe it’s not really like a conscious choice, but like you have been accumulating credit card debt over the past couple of years. You know, at first, you said you were in a cycle of, “Okay, I build it up and then I pay it down.” But as you said, the last couple years, it’s been more building up than paying down.

14:43 Chad: Yeah.

14:44 Emily: Why did you go that route instead of taking out additional student loan debt?

Why Credit Cards Over Additional Student Loans?

14:50 Chad: I think part of that was I was just being cognizant of the fact that I had a fair amount coming in from my master’s program in particular. I actually had this conversation with my mom a couple of times. Where she’s like, “Well you should just put in for FAFSA and try to get more. You should try to get another student loan or something.” And I was like, “But I’ve already got at least 80,000 perhaps up to a hundred thousand, and it sort of seemed like I would be mortgaging my future even more so than I did. In the early years of the program, kind of you brought up the whole idea of stipends not keeping up–throughout sort of my time here at Georgetown, usually the stipend has gone up in each year by about a thousand dollars, which in year one that meant I went from 22 to 23 thousand. That was like a 5% increase. And that I think helped keep ahead of a lot of stuff.

15:50 Chad: And then, more recently it’s like now that last year–the university introduced a wage freeze this year, but the year before it was like–that amounted about 3.5%. I don’t have terribly many expenses. I used to joke that I only allowed myself sort of three very basic luxuries, which was food, like going out to eat. Not that I go out anywhere very expensive. Booze. I like beer, but I like cheap beer. Weirdly enough. And then books. And those, even there, I’m like, “Oh, I won’t spend more than like 25 bucks.” So, it was like, “Oh, these are really small things.” And it’s not like I was going on trips to Europe or anything that expensive. So it was like, “Okay, the credit cards just seemed more manageable.”

16:48 Emily: It really seems like just mentioning those little luxuries that you allowed yourself–which again, like you just said, did not amount to a lot of money–it really illustrates for me how large a chunk of your income must be taken up by your necessary expenses. Because what you mentioned as discretionary expenses have not been outrageous by any means of course. So, it just for me really illustrates this like probably 60, 70, 80% of your income has probably been taken up by like your rent and your basic food and you know, basic transportation and all that kind of stuff, which is a really, really, really tough spot to be in. There’s a benchmark that I like to reference which is called the balanced money formula, which I don’t know if it was created, but it was definitely popularized by Elizabeth Warren and her daughter in their book from, it must be 10 plus years ago now, All Your Worth*.

[* This is an affiliate link. Thank you for supporting PF for PhDs!]

The Balanced Money Formula

17:43 Emily: And they introduce this concept of the balanced money formula. And in that, a person’s necessary expenses–so you know, stuff to keep you alive, housing, food, et cetera. Also, all the contracts that you are in, your insurance, that kind of stuff–that should amount to no more than 50% of your net income after-tax income. And that’s to live like a balanced life. On a sustainable basis, it shouldn’t be more than 50%. If you go above that, it’s like warning, warning, warning. This is not going to feel sustainable for you. It sounds like you’ve probably been in that warning zone your entire time you’ve been in graduate school most likely. And again, really, really common for graduate students, especially those who live in higher cost of living areas. So, that benchmark can feel really discouraging to people who have lower incomes. And it’s just kind of something that like, I don’t know, just you need to acknowledge. It’s going to feel really difficult to live on your stipend if you can’t fit your rent and your transportation and your food under that 50% figure. And is that something that’s worthwhile to attend the institution you want to attend and do the research and pursue our passions in our careers. It’s a tough spot to be in.

Commercial

18:59 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. As a listener of this podcast, every week you hear strategies that another PhD has used to improve their financial picture. But listening and learning does not automatically translate into action in your own financial life. If you are ready to change how you think about and handle your money but need some help getting started, I can be of service. There are two main ways you can work with me to create and implement a financial plan tailored for you. First, I offer one-on-one financial coaching, either as a single session or a series as you make changes over the longterm. You can find out more at pfforphds.com/coaching. Second, I offer a group program called The Wealthy PhD that is part-coaching, part-course, and part-community. You can find out more and join the waitlist for the next time I open the program at pfforphds.com/wealthyPhD. I believe it’s possible to succeed with your finances at every stage of PhD training and throughout your career. Let’s figure out together how to make that happen for you. Now, back to the interview.

Anything Else You Would Like to Share?

20:14 Emily: I wondered if you had any additional thoughts, feelings that you wanted to share regarding what we’ve been talking about. Your career transition upcoming, about the state of your finances right now. Anything you haven’t said so far?

20:28 Chad: I think in terms of sort of the way this has all been. Because again, I don’t come from money. My dad works as a supply manager at a college bookstore. My mom recently started working for Chick-fil-A. Like, working-class family. And there was even this weird stretch when I started the PhD in 2012, my dad who had gotten fired from his job like just after the financial crisis and just took the opportunity to go back to school himself, to finish first his undergrad degree. He could only find a job working part-time for a big-box retailer. And you know, there were moments where mom was calling me up and having to borrow little bits of money from me and then she’d pay them back to make their ends meet. And there was just this sort of sense of like, “Oh, I made it. I’m okay. Like this is not a lot, but it’s going to be kind of uphill, you know, all going up from here.”

21:35 Chad: And then now to be in this position where I kind of feel like at times I just spent the last 10 years at an institution, counting the same institution for both my MA and my PhD, and I’m now actually financially worse off than I was when I started. And I think at times that makes me really scared, and at times it really also bothers me–like now, my mom has to front me money for stuff like getting a new cell phone. Because my old one was four years old and couldn’t hold a charge for like a few hours–and angry. And that wasn’t something that I imagined it would be like when I would get to this point. I felt like it would be tough. There’d be an adjustment, but I didn’t think there would be quite this type of problem.

Supporting Family Members During Graduate School

22:27 Emily: Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that. Yeah, just thank you for sharing the point that you’ve gotten to here. I think that graduate students supporting their family members to a degree–and it could be their parents, it could be a sibling, it could be a dependent child–is something that is, in my opinion, not really talked about that much openly. But it happens a lot. And your degree of like, you know, maybe short term loans to your family that happened over what seems like a relatively short period of time is a more brief, just smaller kind of support that you were able to provide at that time, which is awesome. And other graduate students support their family members for a significant fraction of their stipend for years.

23:19 Emily: And maybe it’s remittances they’re sending to another country. It could be within the US. That situation happens all the time, too. And so, I’m glad to share your perspective on the podcast of thinking, “Okay, I made it into my PhD program. I’m no longer taking out student debt. I have an income. I’m making it. I’m living in DC. The future ahead of me is bright. I’m going to be a professor.” And then, you know, seven years later coming to this point, like, “I’m not so sure what my career is going to be. I have a lot of student loan debt. I have consumer debt. I don’t quite know how I’m going to be making it from month to month starting in just a few months.” So, really, really tough spot to be in. But again, I don’t think it’s that uncommon for PhD students. What has been your observation about how your situation maybe compares to some of your other peers?

How Does Your Situation Compare to That of Your Peers?

24:11 Chad: Actually, I think you’re right. In talking with my peers, there are a lot of similarities. Like you were talking about grads supporting other grads. I’ve got friends in my program, other departments that I’ve gotten familiar with thanks to my involvement with the union, where they’ve got families–or like one of my really best friends in my cohort was from the Philippines and throughout the program he was sending money home to Manila to help his family out. And yeah, it is very common. It’s just, the more jarring thing about it is that for me, on one hand with history, more and more of an awareness of like, “Okay, the job market has sort of changed. Higher ed: We’ve seen this sort of adjunctification of labor. Okay, we need to start thinking about alternative pathways or career diversity.” Different labels get used for different fields. But there really has never been this sort of awareness about the financial dimension. I think the only time it’s ever come up in conversations with faculty are like, “Oh, the stipend’s enough, right? You’re doing okay.” Or, “You’re not having to take out loans for this, are you?” And I’m like, “No, I’m living within my means. I’m fine.” And part of it is, this stuff is kind of new-ish. It’s not necessarily out of the blue, but it is new-ish. And for a lot of faculty, this is wasn’t their experience and isn’t their experience now. So yeah, those are kind of two broad impressions.

Universities Do Not See All of Our Financial Struggles

25:45 Emily: Yeah. I think what I’ve observed from maybe more of the university perspective is they track things like amount of student loan debt taken out. And so, if they don’t see a lot of, let’s say, PhD students taking out student loans–like you have consciously avoided student loans because of your existing level of debt–then they may not be aware of the hardships that people are undertaking outside of the university system, like racking up credit card debt or like borrowing money from other sorts of lenders or from family members or whatever it might be to again sort of keep their head above water. And also, the whole side hustling thing, which is super, super common. And I’m generally a fan of side hustling, especially when it advances your own career, like what you’ve been doing with your other position. Like that’s exposed you to a new area of work and maybe you’ll keep going in that area.

26:40 Emily: So, what can be really beneficial in a lot of ways, but it’s something that can be distracting from the degree, especially if a student has a lot of other responsibilities going on too, like they have a family or whatever. So, it’s not great if a student has to side hustle. It’s okay if they want to and they can balance it or whatever. But it’s not a good situation when they have to do it to just keep their heads above water. So, all of that can be very stressful. Of course, of course it’s stressful and can affect career decisions. And I think what you’ve been talking about–that we’re specifically talking about transitioning out of graduate school–the idea that your stipend is enough to make it on like a month to month basis is kind of one thing. But is it enough to actually bridge you until you get to the kind of job that you’re supposed to have as a PhD?

27:27 Emily: And we know as you were just mentioning from the academic job market that it can take multiple cycles of going through this before maybe you get a possession or maybe you don’t. And what are you doing in the meantime? Are you adjuncting? Like that’s not a really solid situation either. So, it’s not only a stipend needs to serve you in getting, you know, from month to month, but it also should be enough that you can actually transition into the next position, you know, and not have to take on let’s say a bunch of credit card debt or whatever it is in the transition. Like to have to move and to have to have a lapse in employment and all the expenses as you enter the job market. Anyway, that’s me going on for a while about that. So, these challenges are definitely common. What do you think are some solutions or better practices that either the universities could be doing or individuals could be doing or anybody else could be doing to kind of alleviate this situation?

Solutions for Universities and Individuals

28:21 Chad: Yeah. Well, I think universities kind of start from the top and work down. Because I very much do believe in sort of this idea of agency and personal responsibility. But you have an obligation to make the best of the cards that you’re dealt. But you’re also not the one dealing the cards. And I think universities really do have an obligation–for PhDs or master’s students who are working– to pay them sort of a living wage. And there are definitely forces that are nudging them in that direction. Whether it’s like Washington DC, which has passed a referendum that I think will eventually set the minimum wage to $15 an hour which has started leading new improvements for friends that I know or master’s students who work hourly. Graduate unionization, kind of nudging for upped stipends. Also just, there’s the competitive angle of this, you know, trying to get the best recruits. I know with Georgetown we want to get the best people and we’re competing against universities like, for example, Emory or Vanderbilt that actually pay better and are also in cheaper cities compared to Washington DC. So I think universities have an obligation there.

29:40 Chad: I also think sometimes with just like master’s students, it’s a thing that is kind of maybe a joke or a truism, at least with the people I’ve talked to here, that, “Oh, master’s students, your job is basically subsidizing the PhDs or you’re subsidizing the department,” so you have an incentive to bring in more people. And it’s not necessarily going to be a funded program. And you know, okay, I paid in my $80,000. So as a PhD, I don’t always feel bad when I go into the department supply closet and be like, “I need a notepad.” But part of the function of some master’s programs is to recruit people, like identify people that would be good in PhDs. And I don’t know, the sort of like treating folks as a revenue source in that way. It’s just deeply unsettling. And not that I necessarily have an answer to that, but I think universities thinking of alternative ways to handle that or to control sort of tuition is important.

Are Students Primarily Producers or Consumers?

30:38 Emily: What I’m thinking about when you’re saying this is whether the student is primarily a consumer of what the university produces or a producer of that work. And scholarship is part of what a university produces, right? As well as the teaching and everything. So, for undergraduates I guess we kind of accept that they are consumers of the university, and they or the government or whoever should be paying for them to get this lovely education. PhD students we generally see as producers. They’re either teaching and spreading their knowledge and mentoring people, or they’re producing scholarship that is worthwhile. Master’s students I feel like could fall in either category and maybe are viewed mostly as consumers, yet as you were just saying, especially if they’re going onto the PhD level and producing scholarship of their own, even at the master’s level, maybe they should be viewed more as like producers.

31:40 Emily: But anyway, all of this is so, so complicated. And I’m really glad that you brought up like the unionization movement and how that’s affecting this conversation, as well as the competition thing. Of course. I was just thinking that, if we are going to view PhD students as producers of work, it makes a lot of sense to pay people enough that they don’t have to feel stress. Because if what the university wants is a product out of a graduate student, whether it’s a class or whether it’s a paper or whatever, it makes sense to give them an environment where they can produce a good product. And paying them enough that they don’t have to side hustle and they don’t have to take out debt and they don’t have to feel stressed, and it’s not a cloud looming over them all the time. It makes sense to me in terms of producing the best product out of those people as possible. I don’t know what your thoughts are on that.

Quality Work Requires Quality Pay

32:30 Chad: No, I absolutely agree with it. And I think it’s interesting because for me when I first got involved with the unionization effort here at Georgetown–it’s really funny if like, someone had tried to talk to me and get me involved by talking about how low my pay was, that wouldn’t have worked. It would have just been like, “Well no I make enough. It’s not a lot, but I make enough to just get by, and I have a little extra if I want to go out to eat with friends, I can do it.” For me the issue was sort of more transparency about things like job listings and responsibilities. But kind of over the last two to three years, as I have gotten closer and closer to the sort of end, it’s now much more about sort of money and like the awareness that, like what you were talking about earlier, a stipend that just allows earning a living in a livable wage that kind of also gives people a cushion. I’ve been lucky. I haven’t had any sort of serious medical problems or family issues that would’ve required like a massive outlay at one time. But there are a lot of people that don’t have that privilege. So, that’s for me like the big part of the unionization effort. Now it’s just like, we want people to do good, so we should create conditions where they can do good. Like, can do the thing that they signed up to do, whether that’s research, whether that’s teaching.

34:04 Emily: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for that part of the discussion. I think we’ll just conclude the interview here by asking you what is your best financial advice for one of your peers? Maybe someone who’s anticipating the end of the PhD coming up fast.

Best Financial Advice for Your Peers

34:21 Chad: I think probably my best advice would maybe be more geared towards people earlier on, which is recognize that you’re going to change. When I started, I was 25 years old. $22,000 sounded like a lot of money. And like I said earlier, I felt like I kind of had made it. Recognizing that by about now I’m 31. I’ve had friends getting married and needs change. And seven years is a long time to be in one place. So, be aware of that, and when you’re starting out, make a plan kind of on that basis. You’ll hear some of the faculty here talk about, “You need to have like a 10-year plan for academic stuff.” Like when you’re going to publish and do all this sort of stuff. But I think also just the idea of having some sort of longterm financial plan, especially when you’re a graduate student and you’re dealing with pretty thin margins already.

Consider Long-Term Financial Goals and Changing Needs

35:17 Emily: Yeah. I totally agree and want to just underline what you said. To someone who’s in their early twenties or mid-twenties or something, that first stipend offer can seem great. Totally adequate. Fine. You’re looking at your rent, whatever it’s going to be fine. And then you get a few years down the line and your life changes and your career goals change and your responsibilities increase, often. I had another interview in season three with Scott Kennedy and he talked about getting married and having children during graduate school, which is not something that he had in his plan when he accepted that first offer letter. But it was, you know, over the years that he spent in graduate schools, something that came into his life. And so an amount of money that can seem workable at a younger age doesn’t necessarily seem so workable later. Not just because of the individual and your own life changes that you incur, but also as we were just talking about, because stipends don’t keep up generally with the cost of living and inflation, especially in these higher cost of living cities.

36:12 Emily: So, it could be that you’re actually falling behind in terms of an indexed amount of money as well as you yourself are getting older and having all these changes occur in your own life. So, it’s just an argument for prospective graduate students to be not accepting of something that seems “okay,” but really looking, as we were just saying, for competitive offers that will offer you well above the living wage for whatever area you’re moving to. Another thing which we didn’t discuss in detail, but tuition and fees–the responsibility that falls upon the graduate student for paying those–that can sometimes change. And universities who are facing funding shortfalls can change the package that you receive. So, hey, maybe your stipend doesn’t decrease or maybe your stipend goes up, as you were saying. Maybe it’s $1,000 a year, but maybe your fees are also going up by hundreds of dollars per year. That could easily be the case too.

37:04 Emily: And once you start in a program, you start feeling stuck and you’re invested, and there are sunk costs and so forth. And so, it’s just something to think about at the beginning to have more margin than you anticipate that you’re actually going to need because over five years, over seven years, whatever it is, a lot can change. So, Chad, thank you so much for this interview. It was really a pleasure to have you. Thank you for sharing so openly about your situation.

37:26 Chad: Yeah, thanks for having me. It was great talking with you.

Outtro

37:29 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. Pfforphds.com/podcast is the hub for the personal finance for PhDs podcast. There, you can find links to all the episode show notes and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, here are four ways you can help it grow. One, subscribe to the podcast and rate and review it on Apple podcast, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. Two, share an episode you found particularly valuable on social media or with your PhD peers. Three, recommend me as a speaker to your university or association. My seminars cover the personal finance topics PhDs are most interested in like investing, debt repayment, and taxes. Four, subscribe to my mailing list at pfforphds.com/subscribe. Through that list, you’ll keep up with all the new content and special opportunities for Personal Finance for PhDs. See you in the next episode! And remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the free music archive, and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.