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This PhD-Prepared Nurse Managed a Night Shift Side Hustle Despite It Being Frowned Upon

September 25, 2023 by Jill Hoffman Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Jacqueline Nikpour, who holds a PhD in nursing from Duke University and is currently a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania. Jackie side hustled with occasional nursing per diem jobs to supplement her stipend during grad school, but her side job also conferred unexpected benefits to her dissertation and career progression overall. Jackie details how she managed her schedule to fit in her research and writing, night shift job, and personal life. Jackie and Emily also discuss how finances are a barrier for many people to even pursue a PhD, how one-size-fits-all prohibitions against side hustling hurts the PhD workforce, and how Jackie advocates for the grad students she works with now.

Links mentioned in the Episode

  • AMA on the PhD Home-Buying Process (Free Live Q&A)
  • Host a PF for PhDs Seminar at Your Institution
  • Emily’s E-mail Address
  • PF for PhDs Subscribe to Mailing List
  • PF for PhDs Podcast Hub
  • Dr. Jacqueline Nikpour’s Twitter
PhD-Prepared Nurse Managed a Night Shift Side Hustle Despite It Being Frowned Upon

Teaser

00:00 Jackie N: You don’t just exist in academia as a, as a person and have nothing outside of it. Like we are fully complex, complicated, messy humans. And we sort of are the total package that we are. And so I think just creating a little bit more flexibility in place because every student, every discipline is so vastly different.

Introduction

00:28 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others.

00:58 Emily: This is Season 16, Episode 2, and today my guest is Dr. Jacqueline Nikpour, who holds a PhD in nursing from Duke University and is currently a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania. Jackie side hustled with occasional nursing per diem jobs to supplement her stipend during grad school, but her side job also conferred unexpected benefits to her dissertation and career progression overall. Jackie details how she managed her schedule to fit in her research and writing, night shift job, and personal life. Jackie and I also discuss how finances are a barrier for many people to even pursue a PhD, how one-size-fits-all prohibitions against side hustling hurts the PhD workforce, and how Jackie advocates for the grad students she works with now.

1:46 Emily: I’d like to take this opportunity to invite you to the next Ask Me Anything on mortgages and being a first-time homebuyer with Sam Hogan, which will be this Thursday, September 28, 2023 at 8:30 PM ET / 5:30 PM PT. Sam is a mortgage originator specializing in early-career PhDs, an advertiser with Personal Finance for PhDs, and my brother. If you are considering or embarking on the home-buying process and have a question about any aspect of it, please join us! That goes double if you have fellowship income, which can throw a wrench in the mortgage approval process. Register for the September session or any upcoming one at PFforPhDs.com/mortgage/.

2:35 Emily: You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s16e2/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Jackie Nikpour.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

02:51 Emily: I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Jackie Nikpour she is a PhD prepared nurse, currently doing a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania. And our topic today is side hustling, especially as a graduate student. So Jackie, I’m really pleased that you decided to join me on the podcast today to talk about this topic and will you please introduce yourself to the audience a little bit further?

03:13 Jackie N: Sure. Thanks so much for having me, Emily. So, like you said, I’m currently finishing up my postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania. I’m a nurse by training, so started my career as a registered nurse in pediatrics, medicine, behavioral health, and then went into grad school, finished my Ph.D., and now working at the Center for Health Outcomes and Policy Research at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. A lot of folks know that as the center that does all of the research on nurse staffing ratios and how that impacts patients.

03:51 Emily: And you shared with me just before we started that you are currently interviewing for a faculty position, so you are pursuing the academic faculty route.

03:58 Jackie N: Correct. I really want to stay in the research realm. Scholarship is sort of my bread and butter. And so teaching is something that I enjoy and I want to do. But my my focus is more tenure track.

Working Before Pursuing a PhD

04:13 Emily: And can you give me an idea of how long you worked as a nurse before you pursued your Ph.D.?

04:18 Jackie N: Yeah. So I would say everyone, every nurse who participates has a little bit of a different story. So I say I’m a kind of nontraditional person, but I don’t think there really is a traditional PhD prepared nurse anymore if there ever even was to begin with. So I kind of always knew from my undergraduate nursing school research experiences that I wanted to be on the research side. And I knew from both my personal life as a caregiver for a chronically ill parent and as a nurse later on, caring for kids from all over the world at Children’s Hospital, Philadelphia, but also kids from Philadelphia who oftentimes were from low income neighborhoods and might not have always had the resources to to stay healthy. I kind of knew that that as a nurse, I was often a Band-Aid for a very broken health care system. So I worked full time for a year and then pursued. I went directly from a B.S. to a PhD or a Bachelor of Science in nursing to a program. I don’t have a master’s degree at some point, and I get one that’s, again, that sounds a little bit atypical, but it’s becoming more and more common. These are more obviously research degrees, whereas a master’s in nursing is much more clinically oriented for the most part, so it’s seen as less of a requirement. So worked full time for a year, went into my PhD program and then we’ll talk about this a little bit later on. But about halfway through, started working as a nurse again in a per diem.

Transitioning From Nurse to PhD Student

05:59 Emily: Yeah. So the reason I wanted to kind of ask for this is because I wanted to know your motivation for taking side, hustling very seriously while you were in your PhD program. And I wonder if it was because you had experienced an income decrease coming into graduate school. It sounds like maybe you did, but it wasn’t like you had, you know, been multi multi year has grown accustomed that lifestyle. You were still kind of in a student kind of mindset, is that right?

06:20 Jackie N: Definitely. But it still was a hit. You know, I worked full time. I worked for a very well-renowned hospital, which is great in terms of the experiences I got. But also I think because of the name of certain well known hospitals, the pay isn’t quite as high. And so I was also long distance with my now husband before we were married at the time. So. So that was a hard kind of financial thing, traveling back and forth from Philadelphia to Atlanta. And I, you know, left that position, moved and went to making probably about half of the income that I was. But I prepared for that. I worked really hard to save up a lot of money as much as I could before I left. I tried really hard not to take as many vacation days as I had available so that they could all get paid out and say I was leaving all things that were a little bit tough but I knew were temporary and would help kind of set me up for success knowing I was going into a PhD program that would not offer the same kind of income support

Doctoral Institution and Stipend

07:30 Emily: And so where did you do your Ph.D. and how much was your stipend when you started?

07:35 Jackie N: I did my PhD at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. And when I started out, Oh gosh, I have to think back, when I started my stipend was in the 35 to 40000 range. I can’t remember specifics, but it was relatively decent. Actually a big reason that I went there was lots of reasons that I pick my program, but it was helpful that Durham, North Carolina, did not have the same high cost of living as major cities like Philadelphia or Atlanta or other places that I was looking at. So that was a cost. You know, that was a driver for me. And as I’m sure it is, and what is for a lot of people. So that kind of went into my my decision making and leading up to starting with the PhD program, I definitely plan out the financial. It’s very uncertain what my outlook was going to look like.

Why Start a Side Hustle?

08:32 Emily: Okay. So it sounds like you prepared really well in that year that you had working to do to set yourself up again for starting the program and you said you started side hustling about halfway through. So what was the reason for it? Was it financial or were there other other factors?

08:45 Jackie N: Yeah. So I would say that there’s a couple of things. One of the, I guess both challenges and opportunities that I had was I was part of a national scholarship program that fully funded my tuition, have some funding for expenses like conference travel, provided extra mentorship, things like that. And in exchange for that, I completed my Ph.D. program in three years, actually, I did mine in two years and seven months, which is very chaotic. But it was good and was not crazy in the nursing field. I would say most people do their PhD between three and five years, a little bit more, a little bit less depending because you’re not in a lab, you’re not really working as an R.A. or TA as much as maybe in a STEM or humanities type of field by job. But all that to say that once I got through the first half of my program, which was very class oriented and I was, you know, really hunkering down during the semester and focusing on coursework, once I got through that and I was no more focused on my dissertation, I had a little bit more flexibility. I think I wanted more clinical experience because again, I’d only had about one year of full time clinical work and I had a really good friend who I was living with at the time and she is very passionate about the adolescents with severe eating disorders population and turned out there was a facility about 10 minutes from my apartment that she started working at and they were really actively hiring folks was right before COVID hit and I decided, okay, you know, if I can do this per diem and sort of make my own schedule so that I’m still, you know, obviously prioritizing my Ph.D. and finishing my dissertation, this might be a nice way to make some extra income. And further my clinical training, which even though I’m focused on the research side, I think having clinical experience to some degree have helped shape your way of thinking. So all of those things kind of came together and supported me in doing that. Then I say it was right before COVID because after I got hired about three months later, COVID hit, everything was remote. So I wasn’t driving back and forth to campus anymore, which saved me some time. So I was doing my Ph.D. kind of discussion work from home and then just driving 10 minutes in and 10 minutes home the next morning because I work night shift sort of on a schedule that I was able to to choose. And you, you know, all of those things kind of coincided, too, to allow me to continue.

Side Hustle Schedule

11:36 Emily: So it sounds like you were really thinking about the side hustle as part of your career progression as well. Yeah, although to me, when you said you completed your PhD in two years and and nine months, it was a bit shocking to hear that you also fit in a major side hustling position once you started really working on a dissertation. So we’re going to talk more about that in a moment. So you mentioned, you know, what your side hustle was, why you decided to pursue it. Can I ask maybe this is a silly question, but working the overnight shift, were you sleeping overnight or were you then sleeping during the day or like how did that aspect of it work?

12:12 Jackie N: So I would really plan my schedule based on what I had going on. So like for example, Monday mornings I was always meeting with my statistician to do the actual, actual quantitative findings from my dissertation. So I wasn’t working Sunday nights because I knew I had to meet with her every morning at not every Monday. So I was planning out my schedule a few weeks in advance based on when I knew that I had a meeting scheduled, I would block off time to work on my dissertation on my calendar and really only picked those nights that I knew I could sleep in the next morning. So I would work 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., get home, sleep until about noon or 1 p.m. and then wake up and kind of go about the rest of my day. The days after night shift were a little bit tricky, so I tried to use those days to get done work that didn’t involve as much brainpower. If you will catch up on emails, Maybe if I had like a paper that I was a coauthor on and I just had to look over it and provide edits, I could do that. But those were not my, like super heavy intellectual working and writing my dissertation days. I sort of staggered those so that I wasn’t doing that. I really only worked probably 2 to 4 nights per month, maybe a little bit more in the summer. But it ended up being about one or two nights a week, if that, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on schedule.

13:49 Emily: What I like about what you said about how you set this up and what I think is applicable to other people who might not be taking on night shifts for their, you know, side hustle or maybe managing it at a different time is how you kind of you said a week or two in advance you would sort of like theme the days like on this day I’m going to be doing my heavy thinking dissertation work, really doing analytical stuff on this day. I know I’m going to be doing lighter work for your reason. It was because your sleep schedule was a little bit disrupted, but for other people there may be other reasons do that just because they maybe learned their own natural energy to the week when they’re going to work best and whatnot. And this is something that I have, I did not learn as a student, but I have only learned as an entrepreneur that like it’s really helpful, I think, to literally the podcast that I listen to, it calls this theme days. So like in my business, I have days when I’m more focused on clients and days and I’m more focused on content and days where I’m focused on business operations and so I find it really helpful not to just be like at any moment I could be doing any work and it’s all top priority, you know, like I know what the priority is for the day. So I really like that about the schedule that you developed.

14:49 Jackie N: I would say looking back, you know, I don’t think I intended to do that originally, but I do think that taking that role on really how my time management skills because I didn’t have a choice and and that was something that, you know, set me up for for success down the line. It not only allowed me to kind of think about how I would approach my week and set up days with, you know, priorities for the day and what that focus was going to be. But it also set me up to be in a better position when I was going for postdocs and even just life in general. One thing I did mention was that I was also planning a wedding at the time, so so that was a huge help for that. It was a huge thing that allowed me to help pay down my student loans during the student loan pause when there was no interest accruing. So it ended up being an incredibly valuable experience and in a lot of ways that maybe I didn’t anticipate when I started.

15:51 Emily: Yeah, is there anything else that you want to kind of add about that? People don’t like the word balance anymore, but the way you worked between your dissertation, work your side hustle, your life, everything else, anything else you want to add about that?

16:06 Jackie N: I would just say that I think it required a lot of intention. I am very lucky that I had a supportive partner, but even if you don’t have a romantic partner, you know, having people that you can ask for help when things get a little bit chaotic and knowing your own limits and knowing like, let’s say someone who is going to pick up a shift, if I knew it was a really busy week, say, you know, I can’t do this. So knowing to ask for help, knowing when you need to back off certain things. And I agree. I mean, the word balance, I think is hard because it’s never like a 50/50 balance of anything. It’s sometimes this is going to take the priority. You know, sometimes I need to be focusing on finishing this dissertation chapter. Sometimes it’s going to be summer and I keep focus a little bit more on making extra money for my wedding? Things like so priorities shift and just being mindful and aware of that. You go along. It’s for me something that I still do. You know, I’m not in a [??] role anymore.

17:12 Emily: And I love that so much. It’s just another way to like sort of broaden your horizons and, you know, get outside of the academic setting and academic bubble through your work and you’re also making money the same time. It doesn’t hurt.

17:23 Jackie N: Which was really, really valuable. And, and one thing that I wish was maybe a little bit more normalized in nursing programs. There’s a little bit of a hush hush kind of policy of you’re not supposed to be working because you’re supposed to be focusing on your dissertation. But stipends are low and often don’t meet the cost of living. And it’s a little bit untenable to expect graduate students who have a very applicable set of skills to not be using them in cases when they’re able to.

Commercial

18:01 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. Would you like to learn directly from me on a personal finance topic, such as taxes, goal-setting, investing, frugality, increasing income, or student loans, each tailored specifically for graduate students and postdocs? I offer seminars and workshops on these topics and more in a variety of formats, and I’m now booking for the 2023-2024 academic year. If you would like to bring my content to your institution, would you please recommend me as a speaker or facilitator to your university, graduate school, graduate student association, or postdoc office? My seminars are usually slated as professional development or personal wellness. Ask the potential host to go to PFforPhDs.com/speaking/ or simply email me at [email protected] to start the process. I really appreciate these recommendations, which are the best way for me to start a conversation with a potential host. The paid work I do with universities and institutions enables me to keep producing this podcast and all my other free resources. Thank you in advance if you decide to issue a recommendation! Now back to our interview.

Side Hustle Policies

19:22 Emily: Let’s talk about that a little bit more. So like, was there an official policy either for your scholarship or in your program regarding side hustling?

19:32 Jackie N: Yes and no. It was a little bit of an honor system in general, I would say, at least in most research intensive programs. I don’t know about teaching or other programs. It’s a little bit kind of hush hush like you’re not supposed to outwardly say that you’re working clinically. You know, I never told my advisor until after I finished my dissertation. Now that she wouldn’t have been understanding, but just that I didn’t want to put myself in a position where I was potentially not being seen in a very positive light. And that’s that was hard. You know, I wanted to grow my skills and I got a lot out of that, like I said, influenced my career and my and my research. For my scholarship program. And we came in, they had told us, you know, you’re not supposed to work more than 20 hours a week, and 20 hours meaning in addition to your your your scholarship and your your studies. But a lot of times people were just not either following that or some universities will require their students, their students, to to pay for 25 hours a week during the semester. And then it becomes a conflict between the scholarship and the school. And you’re kind of caught in the middle. And that’s a really hard position to be in to. The other thing is that if you are, so that was the scholarship that I was a part of, that was through a private foundation called the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. It’s a very large health care foundation. I was not funded as a PhD student through NIH, National Institutes of Health. As a postdoc I am. NIH training grants that fund PhD students and postdocs have a limit that you are not allowed to work more than 10 hours per week outside of your funded scholarship work. And that’s, in my opinion, a little bit outdated because NIH also sets limits on what you are able to be paid annually. And so it was like, okay, you’re telling me this is how much money I’m going to be making and I can’t work more than this amount outside of this. So what am I supposed to do if I’m not meeting ends meet? Like it’s just is a little, and there’s ways I think to to kind of I don’t want to say get around it, but like for example, I was a co-investigator on a study and ended up doing the the brunt of the actual work in terms of we did qualitative interviews. I led a lot of the quantitative analysis and we ended up with an extra, I think like $500 on the grant. And it was just used to sort of compensate me for the additional labor that I took on. So that’s not like a quote getting around it like that. It’s perfectly legal, if you will, but there’s other situations in which that’s not a tenable way to exist as a PhD student or as a postdoc. And so I think that’s a big structural barrier that a lot of people are kind of calling on NIH to address.

23:13 Emily: What would you put forth as like your preferred policy? Like, would there not be a number, like a ceiling on outside work or like, Well, because we all like, I think everybody is in agreement that the Ph.D. work, the dissertation needs to be the number one priority. And the person, whether as a position or as a postdoc like, you know, be making progress towards whatever your goals are and whether it’s side hustling that has gotten in the way of that or whether it’s something else has gotten in the way of that, like the student or postdoc and the supervisor need to make sure that that person is still on track. So what should what should the language be?

23:47 Jackie N: That’s a good question. And I don’t know if I have a specific this is what it should be instead of this, but I do think that it should not be a one size fits all case because this is the case across all NIH, NIH has 27 institutes and centers and these students and all of those kind of areas of research look very, very different. And nursing is a great example, right? If we’re told you can’t work more than 10 hours a week outside of your scholarship postdoc work, well, nursing shifts are typically 12 hours in line. So you’re telling me I can’t pick up a 12 hour shift on a Saturday or Sunday when I’m working 40 hours Monday through Friday? Like that’s it just wasn’t designed with that in mind because it was designed to be a one size fits all case. So I think it’s about maybe tailoring some of these things for each discipline or each university or I think what I’m seeing just more broadly and a lot of college programs is mentor mentee sort of informal kind of contracts where each party, each mentor mentee kind of shares what that relationship is going to be like and what each person’s responsibilities are and creates an opportunity to come up with an individualized plan for your development as a scholar. And when those are in place, I think that does open the door to more conversations like, Hey, listen, advisor, I really need to make extra money. Not only, you know, because my stipend is as low as a student, but what about people who have kids or what are people who have aging parents or other kind of life things going on that that they need to be able to support, you know, those sorts of things I think need to be addressed because that’s what you’re bringing to the table, right? You don’t just exist in academia as a, as a person and have nothing outside of it. Like we are fully complex, complicated, messy humans. And we sort of are the total package that we are. And so I think just creating a little bit more flexibility in place because every student, every discipline is so vastly different.

Structural Barriers in Academia

26:13 Emily: Yeah, I’m starting to, as I’ve put more and more of my own focus on advocacy and not just on like the personal of personal finance. I’m seeing the finances of PhDs as a workforce development issue. And you kind of brought this up earlier, like who gets to do a Ph.D.? Who gets to the completion point of a Ph.D.? And the finances can play into this in terms of what populations even are able to pursue that. So can you talk a little bit more about that?

26:40 Jackie N: Absolutely. I think there are so many structural barriers that limit even who is able to get in the door in academia. And I have colleagues who are in the very position where they’re low income, have family in a different state or in some cases in a different country, oftentimes are trying to send money back home to support their low income families. Maybe not may not be able to afford a car, especially in a place like where I was in Durham. I had friends who they couldn’t afford to purchase a vehicle, which was hard because it’s a very car dependent place. You know, there wasn’t a ton of public transportation available. And so that impacts even the time it takes you to get to class and how long you you have to study and get stuff done maybe in the morning before classes or how long it takes to get home. And that’s just the timing takes away from other things that you could be doing, including your dissertation or assignments. Are there is the caregiver aspect that we just talked about. There’s so many things, plus the fact that, you know, this is a very low wage job because that’s what it is. It’s a full time job. You know, you’re still a student, but it’s work. And and there’s just so many people who I think we lose out on in all disciplines because they are not able to turn their lives upend their lives to complete the demands of a program. And there’s no resources in place to support so many of them.

Advocacy in Academia

28:29 Emily: So the side hustling could help, Right? Side hustling is a bit of a Band-Aid. Like ideally NIH, everybody else would just pay people enough that at least most situations you wouldn’t need a side hustle. Now, in your case, we just talked about side hustling had other advantages besides the financial and that’s awesome. So can you tell me, is there anything you’d like to add about how you advocate now for other PhD prepared nurses around being able to side hustle so they should they so choose.

28:55 Jackie N: Absolutely. I think, you know, I’m still in a postdoc role, but I do have students who I sort of informally mentor and like, for example, I work on on one project that is a clinical pathway. We support patients who are insured by Medicaid in discharging home from hospital, make sure they get the support resources they need so that they’re not readmitted. We have grad students who work on our data collection, who run our weekly case conference meetings, who do a lot of that labor. And I’m always, you know, encouraging them and watching them make sure you’re keeping track of your hours, make sure that you are submitting for all of the time that you are eligible to be paid, because we want you to get as much money as you as you are entitled to right like you’re signed on for 10 hours a week. Like make sure that you’re actually submitting those 10 hours per week. I am. I work a lot with trying to make sure that, let’s say when we hire doctoral students, research assistant, what is the maximum amount that we’re able to pay? And let’s pay them off because first of all, that’s grant money that needs to be spent anyway, number one. Number two, I know what it’s like to be in the position. I was in it very recently myself and so I would say a lot of that advocacy that I’m doing is just within my own kind of world and those students that I work with. But it’s also showed me a lot about the kind of mentor that I want to be, Let’s say when I have my own PhD student advisees. I want to make sure that I’m creating a culture where I know what my students needs are and they need to work to support that and support their families, then I’m going to work with them to make that happen. No matter what we need to do, we’re going to get it done. I think myself and a lot of other folks, anytime there’s like an NIH open comment period about how we support career postdoctoral trainees who are funded through NIH, I really make an effort to to comment on those sort of open forums and give examples of here’s what let’s say raising the stipend for each, let’s say first year, second year, third year each has its own kind of stipend, years of experience. Raising those that could help support so many things that actually contribute to better scholarship because you’re not spending ten, 20 hours a week doing this other work. So that’s part of it. I will also say that, you know, this was not my case, but I know folks who were in student unions as students, I will say in one case in a major cities like New York and L.A., where cost of living is super high, it’s actually a little bit of a disadvantage if you want to get an NIH doctoral funding award because the stipends for that would be lower than what you would get as a stipend just by being a physician at the university. And so that’s a barrier because getting those awards sets you up to be competitive for postdocs and faculty candidates. And so that’s creating space to dismantle some of those structural barriers that prevent people from even entering academia in the first place and then developing the best science that they can.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

32:23 Emily: Love it, Jackie. I think we need to leave it there. The hour has flown, so I want to ask you the last question that I ask. Of all my guests, which is what is your best financial advice for another early career? It could be something that we’ve touched on in the interview already, or it could be something completely new.

32:39 Jackie N: I would say the best advice that I can give to anyone financially going to a PhD program is just to plan as much as you can for the years ahead. You know, you’re in a PhD program, you’re already going to be, you know, I think I don’t think there’s been a PhD student who’s never been stressed out. So you’re already going to be stressed out about figuring out your dissertation, finishing your coursework, getting all the things that you need to to to get your degree. You know, you don’t want to be stressed about finances, too. I think when I first entered my PhD program, I was so I need to know exactly what my dissertation question is going to be because I’m on this three year track and I don’t know what I’m going to do, how I’m going to have enough time. I wish I hadn’t been so focused on that and I had, you know, more so narrowed my focus. I mean I did to some extent, but just planning out and budgeting. Okay, what realistically is my income going to be? How can I save up as much as I can and prepare to not have this be a stressor when I’m in the midst of everything else? And that also includes knowing, you know, sorry, but that also includes knowing about what life is with taxes as a PhD student, because it’s very, very different than I expected. So just knowing what to expect, I think, again, your your website and your your content and your podcast is a great way to support incoming PhD students. So just the preparation involved is what I would say.

34:14 Emily: Well, Jackie, I love that advice. It’s been so wonderful to talk with you and thank you so much for volunteering to come on the podcast.

34:20 Jackie N: Of course. Thank you for having me.

Outtro

34:27 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! Nothing you hear on this podcast should be taken as financial, tax, or legal advice for any individual. The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by Dr. Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Dr. Jill Hoffman.

University-Level Policy Ideas to Improve the Financial Lives of Graduate Students and Postdocs

August 14, 2023 by Jill Hoffman 5 Comments

In this episode, Emily shares the microinterviews she recorded at two higher education conferences this past summer. The conference attendees, virtually all of whom work at universities and most of whom have PhDs themselves, responded to this prompt: “What policy at your current university or one you worked at or attended in the past would you change to improve the financial lives of the PhD students and/or postdocs?” Listen through the episode for numerous ideas for policy change to advocate for at your university.

Links mentioned in the Episode

  • Graduate Career Consortium (GCC) Annual Meeting
  • Higher Education Financial Wellness Alliance (HEFWA) Summit
  • Host a PF for PhDs Seminar at Your Institution
  • Dr. Katy Peplin, Thrive PhD
  • Emily’s E-mail Address
  • PF for PhDs Subscribe to Mailing List
  • PF for PhDs Podcast Hub
University-Level Policy Ideas to Improve the Financial Lives of Graduate Students and Postdocs

Teaser

00:00 Michael D: And the reproduction of knowledge requires financial security. And when you’re in a situation where you’re not getting paid a living wage, it’s very, very difficult to achieve that financial security. So for me, that’s definitely the major policy change that I would love graduate programs across the country to adopt.

Introduction

00:19 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others.

00:50 Emily: This is Season 15, Episode 5, and today I’m sharing the microinterviews I recorded at two higher education conferences this past summer. The conference attendees, virtually all of whom work at universities and most of whom have PhDs themselves, responded to this prompt: “What policy at your current university or one you worked at or attended in the past would you change to improve the financial lives of the PhD students and/or postdocs?” Listen through the episode for numerous ideas for policy change to advocate for at your university. The two conferences I attended were the Graduate Career Consortium Annual Meeting or GCC and the Higher Education Financial Wellness Alliance Summit or HEFWA Summit. GCC is primarily attended by university staff members working with PhD students and postdocs in career and professional development. The HEFWA Summit is attended by university staff members working in financial wellness and financial aid across undergraduate and graduate populations. These two conferences were excellent networking opportunities for me on top of the built-in professional development. However, there are plenty of universities who were not represented at these conferences.

02:10 Emily: Would you please consider recommending my financial education seminars and workshops at your university? My most popularly requested events for the upcoming academic year are How to Survive and Thrive Financially in Graduate School or Your Postdoc, How to Not Hate Your Fellowship During Tax Season, and Up-Level Your Cash Flow as a Graduate Student or Postdoc. Please direct an appropriate potential host within your graduate school, postdoc office, grad student association, etc. to PFforPhDs.com/financial-education/ where they can learn more. Thank you in advance!

02:53 Emily: You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s15e5/. Without further ado, here are the microinterviews recorded at GCC and the HEFWA Summit.

What policy at your current university or one you worked at or attended in the past would you change to improve the financial lives of the PhD students and/or postdocs?

Understanding Financial Priorities of International Students: Karin Lawton-Dunn, Iowa State University

03:11 Karin L-D: Okay. So I’m Karin Lawton-Dunn and I’m at Iowa State University. And what policy would you change when you’re current or former university campus to improve financial life for graduate students or postdocs? Since I work primarily with international students, I think I would try to change the understanding of faculty and staff of all of the different priorities that international students have with their money, and so that, you know, they really will go without food, without meals, so that they’re able to send some money home to their families that are also in need and struggling with food and housing. And I think that we need to be understanding of that and not punishing them for doing that.

Fee Exemption: Laura Farrell-Wortman, University of Arizona Cancer Center

03:53 Laura F-W: I’m Laura Farrell-Wortman. I’m the assistant director for academic programs with the University of Arizona Cancer Center. So I think that the policy that I would change would be to exempt PhD students from required fees, because I think that it really is, you know, important revenue generation for the university. But it does feel a little bit like kind of like the company store right where you are getting the money for working there, but that you’re turning right around and giving the money back to the university so it doesn’t feel like it’s a really sustainable system. And I would I would be interested to see what kind of revenue generation they’re actually getting from the PhD students and whether or not that could be found in an alternative means.

Postdoc Stipends and Benefits: Kaylee Steen, University of Michigan Medical School

04:41 Kaylee S: My name is Kaylee Steen. I work at the University of Michigan Medical School, and my advice for changing a policy at our institution that we’re actually implementing is ensuring that all postdocs at least make the minimum NIH stipend for their years of experience at the university. I think is really key. And another policy that we have not implemented would be that postdocs receive the same retirement benefits as are the rest of our staff, with the 2 to 1 matching.

Postdoc Benefits: Chris Smith, Virginia Tech

05:19 Chris S: My name’s Chris Smith. I manage the Office of Post-Doc Affairs at Virginia Tech. And one policy I’d like to see change really across the landscape is treating postdocs more like employees with employee benefits, especially retirement matching. Some institutions do that. We are one of them, but a lot of them don’t. And I think it’s important for them to kind of set them up for success.

Postdoc Training and Benefits: Weiwei Xu, Tulane School of Medicine

05:40 WeiWei X: My name is Weiwei Xu. I’m the academic and career advisor for a biomedical sciences graduate program within the Tulane School of Medicine. I think we can actually provide postdocs with more training programs as well as social benefits and retirement benefits so that they feel more supported by the school and by their training programs.

Cost of Living Adjustments: Beth Hunsaker, University of Utah

06:05 Beth H: My name is Beth Hunsaker with the University of Utah’s Financial Wellness Center. I’m the associate director, and the policy that I would want to see changed is to have cost of living adjustments, how much it costs to have rent. When that’s over half of what their stipend is and they’re not able to go and work somewhere else does doesn’t work for their families.

Consistent Funding and Transparency: Chris Hamm, University at Buffalo

06:28 Chris H: My name is Chris Hamm from the University at Buffalo. And the first prompt it was asking about what policy would you change in your current or previous campus approved financial life for grad students? And for me, just working with graduate students, noticing the opportunities for GA TA and RA positions, we do have, you know, minimum amount of financing for those positions that are agreed upon. But I think it’s not consistent across the board for each of different departments. And also true, since it’s a larger university, it’s very siloed as far as what information’s available to graduate students. So I think being able to have that be a little bit more transparent, giving them the opportunity to be more competitive, get themselves these positions and also make them aware of it, because a lot of times it’s only specifically in departments and I think it’s a really great opportunity because that’s something that I did when I was in grad school as well to help fund my education and get my experiences.

Postdoc Benefits: Alexandra Schnoes, Science Communication Lab

07:22 Alexandra S: Hi, I’m Alexandra Schnoes. I am the director for professional development at the Science Communication Lab. One of the things that I think about a lot is, is how postdocs at different institutions are often under these weird sort of employment categories. They’re often in different employment categories at the same institution. They often don’t have access to things, even though they’re considered employees are also considered trainees. So they also often don’t have access to things like sometimes even health care. But potentially child care support or retirement accounts. And and all of these things are ridiculous. These are these are people with Ph.Ds who are acting as professionals and and they should be able to be treated like you know, the employees that they actually are, as opposed to some weird, crazy, you know, none of the above, which means they get none of the benefits and all of the work of being a postdoc sometimes for years on end, doing amazing work, making the university home. But then they’ve sacrificed finances, potentially health care, retirement accounts, the ability to have children, all of this, all of these are things that policies could actually help address.

Child Care: Kathryn Sawyer Vidrine, University of Notre Dame

08:57 Kathryn SV: So this is Kathryn Sawyer Vidrine from Notre Dame and if I were to change one policy to make life easier on graduate students and post-docs, it would be to provide childcare for children under two years old because there is almost none in our area. 

Postdoc Benefits: Peter Myers, Washington University in Saint Louis

09:16 Peter M: My name is Peter Myers. I’m at Washington University in Saint Louis. The one policy that I would change for postdocs would be to make them all employees of the university.

Wages/Stipends: Elizabeth Eikmann, Washington University in Saint Louis

09:30 Elizabeth E: My name is Elizabeth Eikmann. I am the program coordinator for Postdoctoral Community Engagement at Washington University in Saint Louis, and I was a graduate student at Saint Louis University. And if I could change one policy for my former university’s campus to improve the financial life of the grad students there, it would be immediate graduate assistantship raises. The wages currently are not even living wage wages. Graduate assistants there are paid only nine months out of the year instead of 12. So not only implementing a raise but also instituting a year round salary, which also includes year round access to health insurance, which is not currently a policy there on campus.

Retirement Benefits: Maggie Nettesheim Hoffmann, Humanities Without Walls Consortium

10:24 Maggie NH: My name is Maggie Nettesheim Hoffmann. I’m the associate director of Career diversity for the Humanities Without Walls Consortium. Which is a grant for a Mellon funded, grant funded project at space at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. But I am located at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. So I think the policy advice that I would give and more systemically across, you know, higher education across the nation would be to recommend to universities that you consider one of the benefits for graduate students enrolled in your schools to give them access to starting their own 403b plans while they’re working on their master’s degrees or their PhDs, and making that a real benefit of, you know, if you’re at a public university that has you know, that regard, students are organized, making that a part of your union contract negotiations, aiming at private institutions, right? I mean, it’s not a heavy cost to the institution at all just to give them a framework or structure to start investing into those for all three plants. So that would be one of the policies that I would advocate as a shift in our higher ed, higher education ecosphere. Yeah.

Financial Education: Brady Krien, University of Iowa

11:32 Brady K: So my name is Brady Krien and I work at the University of Iowa, and the policy that I would change on our campus is to actually give us greater latitude to provide resources and information about finances for graduate students, and particularly related to the tax implications of fellowships that they win and how they need to prepare in advance to deal with those.

Financial Education: Yazzmynn Martinez, University of Colorado, Boulder

11:58 Yazzmynn M: Hi, everyone. My name is Yazzmynn Martinez. I am a events education and emergency response coordinator at the University of Colorado Boulder. I work at the Basic Needs center and one policy that I would change about the university campus to improve the financial life of our graduate and postdoc students is to provide a more formal education on basic needs in general so that can include how to get housing before they start college and also how to like budget with groceries and other expenses. And I would also advocate to increase the stipend just because oftentimes that’s not even enough for students to cover their living expenses.

Transparency: Katy Peplin, Thrive PhD

12:45 Katy P: Hi, I’m Katy Peplin from Thrive PHD. You can find me at thrive dash PhD dot com. I work with graduate students all around the world on being a scholar and a human. What policy would be useful. I think that the biggest policy that universities can put in place is transparency. I know so many students who have been caught in between different policies where they weren’t aware that certain things applied to them when they actually did or they lost out on money because things were well communicated. And I know that it’s extra work for universities to make some of those things transparent. But the more information that’s readily and easily accessible, the less grad students have to depend on their departments or their advisors who might not be well informed to let them. Know about opportunities. So transparency.

Commercial

13:31 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. Would you like to learn directly from me on a personal finance topic, such as taxes, goal-setting, investing, frugality, increasing income, or student loans, each tailored specifically for graduate students and postdocs? I offer seminars and workshops on these topics and more in a variety of formats, and I’m now booking for the 2023-2024 academic year. If you would like to bring my content to your institution, would you please recommend me as a speaker or facilitator to your university, graduate school, graduate student association, or postdoc office? My seminars are usually slated as professional development or personal wellness. Ask the potential host to go to PFforPhDs.com/speaking/ or simply email me at [email protected] to start the process. I really appreciate these recommendations, which are the best way for me to start a conversation with a potential host. The paid work I do with universities and institutions enables me to keep producing this podcast and all my other free resources. Thank you in advance if you decide to issue a recommendation! Now back to our interview.

Wages/Stipends: Sasha Goldman, Boston University

15:38 Sasha G: I am Sasha Goldman. I am the director of PCE resources at Boston University. And if I could change a policy on my current university campus to improve the financial life of the graduate students and postdocs, I would give everyone 12 months of funding and everyone more money.

Fellowship Payment: Joseph Gonzales, University of Miami

15:56 Joseph G: My name is Joseph Gonzales and I’m the senior director in the Office of Science and Assistance at the University of Miami. And the policy that I would change and this isn’t specifically related to my current campus. It’s based on my experience at different campuses. It’s how people pay like to pay fellowships, and especially when there’s a research component to it, they tend not to use the employment side of it where it would be there would be tax withholdings, because I believe sometimes faculty think that it’s a way to sidestep tax. The tax requirement when they don’t realize that it’s actually basically pushing it down the line for the student to deal with later and sometimes that often students don’t realize that there is a tax liability too, that comes with their financial aid. And by the time they’ve found out they haven’t saved money for that liability. So puts them in this financial crunch, sort of once their taxes are had been filed or they don’t claim it, and then it just gets pushed further down the line. So I would like faculty and universities in general to have said you’re trying to help other people. I don’t know if it’s more of a process that is that are aligned because it changes from one university to the other and how these are handled.

Wages/Stipends: Alex Embree, University of Missouri

17:39 Alex E: My name is Alex Embree. I’m the program manager at the Office for Financial Success for the University of Missouri. And the policy that I would want to have changed is that graduate student payment is in accordance with the value that they bring to the university when they are operating in a teaching capacity or grant. They need to be paid accordingly.

Time to Degree Transparency: Robbie Pearson, Southern Methodist University

18:03 Robbie P: My name is Robbie Pearson, and I’m the director of graduate and postdoctoral graduate career development and post-doc affairs at SMU in Dallas, Texas. And in terms of policies that I would be interested in revising around graduate education to improve the financial life of grad students and postdocs, I’m really interested in time to degree. I would like to see more transparency around how long it takes to earn a doctoral degree, and I’d like to see policies and initiatives around making sure that that’s a reasonable amount of time. Right. So in some fields it could take eight, nine, ten years to earn a doctoral degree or longer. And, you know, there’s some case that that’s important for the intellectual development of the scholar and for the research that they’re contributing to. But I also want to balance that against the reality that graduate students should be thinking of their time in grad student in grad school as an investment, not only into the intellectual development and into their field, but also into their financial futures. So getting them into the workforce in a reasonable amount of time is a really good thing. From my perspective.

Financial Education and Wages/Stipends: Stevie Eberle, Stanford University School of Medicine

19:03 Steve E: Stevie Eberle, executive director and assistant dean of biosecurity at Stanford University School of Medicine. So what policy would you change in your current or former university campus to improve the financial life of graduate students and postdocs? I would. We have an entry level class that all incoming graduate students have to take. And then there is a kind of an intro group that postdocs attend. And I really do wish we had financial training and planning built into the trainings, especially in the Bay Area because it’s so expensive and you you can’t quite understand it until you’re there. So I really would like somebody who can very directly explain the market and directly explain how to navigate it and have the resources to develop that. That being said, I think it is the administration’s responsibility to also help build better structures for that which we are working on, I will say. So we have subsidized housing in that type of thing, but subsidized housing is still very expensive. So I would like to have better pay, better caps, better minimum salaries and better coaching for faculty on how to treat something else. And often treat students and postdocs as more respectfully and more like adults and give them better tools for negotiation. Because I do think sometimes faculty just don’t know that. Sometimes they do, and that’s the problem, but sometimes they don’t. So I’d like to do better education on equitable offers and help better develop those kind of baseline expectations for parents and for this.

Cost Transparency: Derek Attig, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

20:57 Derek A: I’m Derek Attig. I work in the Graduate college at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. And I’d like to see it be consistent that tuition and fees and the total cost of graduate education is completely transparent to people before they apply and when they’re making the decision to attend so they can understand the costs and weigh that against outcomes they hope to achieve.

Wages/Stipends: Michael Dedmon, National Endowment for Financial Education

21:25 Michael D: My name is Michael Dedmon. I’m the research director at the National Endowment for Financial Education and a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Syracuse University. I can definitely say for me that the single policy change that I would love for my graduate program, which is still sort of considering to adopt, is to raise wages and raise stipends for for graduate students. My department recently unionized, even though I’m an advanced graduate student and no longer in the bargaining unit. It’s something that’s very, very close to my heart that I think is very important. It’s beneficial for universities in terms of recruitment and retention. It reduces time to degree. It reduces attrition. We all know the benefits of it, in addition to the fact that the work that the students put in is what makes the universities work. They’re teaching students, they’re producing research, they’re publishing papers. It’s a beneficial situation for everybody. And the reproduction of knowledge requires financial security. And when you’re in a situation where you’re not getting paid a living wage, it’s very, very difficult to achieve that financial security. So for me, that’s definitely the major policy change that I would love graduate programs across the country to adopt.

Wages/Stipends: Byron Kerr, Texas State University

22:30 Byron K: Hi, I’m Dr. Byron Kerr with Financial aid and scholarships at Texas State University, and I received my Ph.D. from Florida State University in Tallahassee and what I would like to see changed on college campuses is back in the day. At any rate, my stipend check for my for my Ph.D. always came in a month after the payment deadline. So I always generated a $100 late fee every single semester. So I was always costing me money to be employed.

Housing: Anna Sheufelt, Duke University

22:58 Anna S: My name is Anna Sheufelt I work at Duke University, overseeing the educational programing and outreach for the Office of Student Loans and Personal Finance. A policy change that I would love to see come to. My campus is guaranteed housing for our international masters and graduate students. These are folks who have some of the largest complexities going on in their lives and also some of the greatest financial constraints with the international student status.

Wages/Stipends and Tuition: Annie Maxfield, University of Texas at Austin

23:28 Annie M: My name is Annie Maxfield. And I am at UT Austin in Texas. Career engagement and I would say the biggest financial policy problem is that tuition has continually become higher and higher over the years. Yet graduates students stipends are not increasing at that rate. And so we know the university is taking in more funds. However, the distribution of those funds is inequitable in terms of how graduate student labor is actually compensated.

Child Care: Phil Schuman, Indiana University

24:03 Phil S: So my name is Phil Schuman. I’m from Indiana University. One thing I do expect to see for a lot of grad students throughout higher ed is more access to child care and whether or not that’s temporary or permanent or whatever. But just the ability for grad students to be able to focus on their studies, their academics when they have child, if you have childcare issues come up, just because we’ve seen a lot of childcare and daycare cost issues and closing on campus. But I think it’s one thing, it’s a huge barrier that could potentially prevent grad students from getting over that hurdle. 

Fellowship Transparency and Experiential Learning for International Students: Sonali Majumdar, Princeton University

24:34 Sonali M:  Yeah. Hi, everyone. I am Sonali Majumdar and Assistant Dean for Professional Development in the Grad Futures program of the Graduate School of Princeton University. And I just wanted to talk a little bit about what kind of inclusive policies university campuses could have to support their international graduate students. And most of population on their financial wellness. And there are two things that come to mind. One is transparency on what kind of research fellowships are open to international graduate students and postdocs. And a lot of the universities do have research, Discovery Fellowship. Discovery databases like David Hopkins has a public dashboard that like lists all sorts of fellowships at the Graduate and closed off level by citizenship accessibility as well. And the other thing is experiential learning. What can we do to make experiential learning more accessible to international population? One pathway that does work is our internships and our fellowships that are funded by the institution that the students are working on, and that relates to work policies of how much academic hours on top of academic hours are. Students are available to work at university offices or other units on internships. And so there is definitely some interesting new programs that are helping out in this arena. And I hope more universities would eventually think about accessibility for their international population. On experiential learning. Thank you.

Financial Education: Matt Hertenstein, DePaul University

26:05 Matt H: Hi, my name is Matt Hertenstein, a college professor at DePaul University, received my Ph.D. at U.C. Berkeley in 2000. It may have changed since I graduated, but the policy I would change was to actually teach some financial literacy advice and financial wellness to Ph.Ds and make that a priority during orientation and make sure that people actually knew that that was available to help them.

Health Insurance: Alex Yen, Boston University

26:33 Alex Y: Hi, my name is Alex Yen I am a postdoc at Boston University in the Professional Development and Postdoctoral Affairs office. The policy that I would change or wish could change is that I hope that more universities will allow graduate students who take time off to keep their student health insurance during that time off. So that way they can take care of their mental health while they are recovering or taking some time away.

Outtro

27:14 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by Dr. Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Dr. Jill Hoffman.

The Motivation and Strategy Behind Biology PhD Stipends

May 15, 2023 by Meryem Ok 1 Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Shelly Gaynor, a fifth-year PhD candidate in botany at the University of Florida. After learning of the possibility of a stipend decrease in her department last year, Shelly dedicated herself to raising the stipend in her department at UF. She and a partner even launched an app to collect stipend information from other biology departments around the US. Shelly shares everything she’s learned about the factors that influence how stipends are set and her advice for other stipend advocates. The interview concludes with a round-up of all the stipend and benefits advances Shelly has witnessed in her department, through her union’s negotiations, and at other institutions.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

  • Shelly Gaynor (Twitter)
  • Shelly Gaynor’s Website
  • Biology PhD Stipends
  • PF for PhDs Office Hours
  • PF for PhDs Ask Me Anything on the PhD Home-Buying Process
  • PF for PhDs S14E10 Show Notes
  • PhD Stipends
  • PF for PhDs Season 15
  • Emily’s E-mail
  • PF for PhDs Subscribe to Mailing List (Access Advice Document)
  • PF for PhDs Podcast Hub (Show Notes)
Image for S14E10: The Motivation and Strategy Behind Biology PhD Stipends

Teaser

00:00 Shelly: I think that the conversation has to focus on how competitive the stipend is. I think that is a focus of admins, at least here at UF. That is a big focus, is, you know, they want to compare themselves to other institutions and they want to look good. So, I think that comparison’s really important.

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, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others. This is Season 14, Episode 10, and today my guest is Shelly Gaynor, a fifth-year PhD candidate in botany at the University of Florida. After learning of the possibility of a stipend decrease last year, Shelly dedicated herself to raising the stipend in her department at UF. She and a partner even launched an app to collect stipend information from other biology departments around the U.S. Shelly shares everything she’s learned about the factors that influence how stipends are set and her advice for other stipend advocates. The interview concludes with a round-up of all the stipend and benefits advances Shelly has witnessed in her department, through her union’s negotiations, and at other institutions.

01:40 Emily: There are some free recurring opportunities to meet with me that I’d like you to be aware of. First, my Office Hours are back! I set aside 30 minutes once per month to chat with up to 4 early-career PhDs about whatever money-related questions or topics you’d like to bring up. I’ve set the dates for these sessions through August 2023. Register for any of them at PFforPhDs.com/officehours/. Second, through at least September 2023, I’m hosting a monthly Ask Me Anything on mortgages and being a first-time homebuyer with Sam Hogan. Sam is a mortgage originator specializing in early-career PhDs, an advertiser with Personal Finance for PhDs, and my brother. If you are considering or embarking on the home-buying process and have a question about any aspect of it, please join us! Register for the next session at PFforPhDs.com/mortgage/. I hope to see you in one of these calls in the coming months! You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s14e10/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Shelly Gaynor.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

03:07 Emily: It’s really a special day on the podcast because today I get to interview Shelly Gaynor, a fifth-year PhD candidate in botany at the University of Florida. You may recognize Shelly’s name because she is one of the people behind an advocacy campaign and research campaign around raising stipends in her department and across the field of biology. And that’s gotten a lot of attention in the past year. So, Shelly, thank you so much for agreeing to come on the podcast. I’m really looking forward to speaking with you today! Will you please introduce yourself a little bit further for the audience?

03:40 Shelly: Well, thanks for having me! I study evolutionary biology of flowering plants here at UF and hopefully will be done in about a year.

03:49 Emily: Yeah, that’s great. So, regarding the project that I just mentioned, is there a name? How should we refer to the project?

03:56 Shelly: We call it Biology PhD Stipends.

Biology PhD Stipends

03:59 Emily: Okay. Biology PhD Stipends. So, what motivated you to start to advocate around raising stipends in your own department, which ultimately led to Biology PhD Stipends?

04:11 Shelly: So, I started advocating more formally during my fourth year of grad school. I was starting to plan out my timeline and figure out when I was going to finish my PhD, and it became very obvious that I really should take six years. We had always planned for me to take six years, but I hoped not to because I really didn’t plan for the cost of living to increase so much in Gainesville. Every year, it seemed that rent went up about a hundred dollars, but the cost of living increased even more as we moved through the pandemic. And, you know, friends everywhere were struggling, not just here, but it was very noticeable here that people were starting to struggle to afford to live. So, at first I put together a document with about four other students that outlined what the current salary meant in Gainesville, what was the take-home after taxes, tuition, fees, and health insurance, and how far did that money actually go in Gainesville.

05:05 Shelly: And the conclusion was that it doesn’t cover the average cost. Students are expected to be rent burdened and spend more than 30% of their income on rent, and they could also be health burdened and spend more than 7.5% of their income on health costs due to our really high out-of-pocket maximum. At the same time as we put together this document and distributed it through our department, at the college level, there were discussions about how to deal with the decreasing teaching assistants’ budget. And they had decided that a group of faculty were the ones who had to decide how to decrease this budget, how to deal with those decreases. And one of my dissertation committee members was a part of that committee, and he let me know about discussions regarding cutting the graduate teaching assistant pay and standardizing it across the college. And this is when I started to collect data.

06:05 Emily: That’s a bit shocking. What was the reason behind the overall budget decreasing? Is that enrollment decreasing or something further than that?

06:14 Shelly: I think it had to do, based on the documents that I’ve read, with just general flow of money, there was a line that used to go into OPS budget, which is what the teaching assistants come from, and that had been diverted elsewhere. So, they had to deal with this ongoing decrease, and the provost gave them funds for a few years to help them cover this change, but the decrease was still coming because that revenue flow wasn’t supposed to be there originally. And they just had to start to account for that.

06:48 Emily: It’s not that I don’t appreciate the budgetary strains that I think universities and schools and departments and so forth are dealing with, but it seems to me that making the budget balance seems to be too often placed on the shoulders of the graduate students and it becomes their responsibility. And the effects on them are real <laugh>. They don’t eat as much or they don’t get the type of food that they want. They don’t live in safe housing, et cetera, et cetera. Instead of being a more, I don’t know, academic exercise <laugh> to cut it elsewhere. I think it’s so unfortunate that the budget is balanced on the backs of teaching assistants, for example. Okay. So, you heard that this was a possibility of there’s not even less work to go around, it’s just the same amount of work and potentially for less pay. You started doing the research route, the actual cost of living, what the stipends were.

07:50 Shelly: And there is a happy ending to at least that part is that they did not cut, you know, graduate TA stipends. That was not the end result.

07:58 Emily: So, what happened? What did they do?

08:01 Shelly: They did allocate differently and they cut the overall amount of TA lines rather than individuals’ pay.

08:07 Emily: Okay. So, the work was just distributed among fewer people, but those people were not paid less than they were before. Is that right?

08:16 Shelly: Yes.

08:17 Emily: Okay.

08:17 Shelly: From my understanding.

Building an Argument

08:19 Emily: So, when you started collecting this information and to make this argument for not just maintaining but increasing the stipends, what elements were you looking at to include in this argument?

08:31 Shelly: So, since we put together that document about, you know, how does the pay go in Gainesville, how far does that go? I focused on what would convince those who weren’t swayed by student conditions, what would the admins want to see? And I talked to a ton of faculty and leaders at my institution, but mostly others. And what I learned from that was, you know, you need to know who controls the budget and you need to focus on the importance of hierarchy. So, there are different budget systems at universities, and from my understanding, at the University of Florida, the budget is determined by our provost and our board of trustees. Now, to get to that provost and board of trustees, the faculty members need to convince the department chair to then go to the college and the dean who then can go to the provost and board of trustees.

09:22 Shelly: So, that was part one, is that, you know, it’s a hierarchy that people need to be talking up the list so that everyone cares and is pushing for this agenda item. Now, the second part is that benchmarking is really important. At the college level, and at the university level, the main administration offices should be doing benchmarking. And what I mean by that is two parts. So first we have internal benchmarking, which is just assessing the current status of students. For example, within our department, we found we have 19 different pay rates for the same work. So, are TA positions are at 19 different rates. We also looked into the yield rate, which is the percent of students who accept our offer to come to our program. And we found that in three years, we went from 80% to about 55%. The next step is external benchmarking, and that’s pure institution comparisons, and that is what my database was made for.

10:25 Emily: So, the internal and the external benchmarking, you targeted these as areas that you could, I guess, assist with or bring your own data to. But were the administrators and you know, this hierarchy, people in this chain of command, they were already doing this, right? Or were you bringing different data to them? How were you supplementing the process that they were already engaged in?

10:49 Shelly: So, supposedly they were doing benchmarking and they have presented data at the board of trustees meetings, but it doesn’t match my data. And even if I cherry-pick my data, I can’t find a way to make it match. And one of the reasons is because they’re combining med programs with college of liberal arts and science programs and calling that biology. So yes, we do look a lot better when you take the students who are funded by the med school versus colleges that only fund based on liberal arts and graduate TA ships.

11:22 Emily: So, in your mind, they weren’t really comparing apples to apples, they were conflating a couple of different groups together?

11:28 Shelly: Exactly.

11:29 Emily: Okay. So, the process that you were engaged in was, you were thinking, presenting higher quality data than the ones that they were using in their discussions to hopefully go up this chain to the decision makers. Is that right?

11:42 Shelly: Kind of. I also wanted the data to be accessible at the faculty level. So, when we talked to other faculty, they would ask me, you know, what about the other institutions? Like, that was actually a conversation that we already started having. So, it made sense to collect our own data so that we had something to show.

11:59 Emily: Gotcha. So, it seems like the conception of Biology PhD Stipends was to be able to compare, do this external benchmarking from the University of Florida, but also many other universities would be able to use this data as well to do this external benchmarking. And you mentioned my database, PhD Stipends, which is self-reported and a starting point I would say, but you approached things a little bit differently with Biology PhD Stipends. So, can you explain to us how you were collecting this data?

12:33 Shelly: We should rewind a bit. So, originally I just made a plot of 40 or so departments and realized they didn’t meet the living wage. And once I tweeted that and got a lot of feedback from other departments, that’s when we made it public. The reason why it’s different than PhD Stipends and not self-reported is because admin don’t always want to believe that data. And so we got a ton of pushback saying, well, you know, these are self-reported, they’re probably less, they probably account for taxes already and fees, and that’s not, you know, what we’re looking at. So, we don’t trust this data. Bye. You know, they would push it away. So, my goal was to have something that an admin couldn’t push away, couldn’t discredit, to do as much due diligence as possible. We even have an option on our website to only look at nine-month salaries versus 12-month, even though those nine-month agreements are the only money you’re getting for the whole year. We still allow those divisions so that if that’s where the pushback comes from, you can already see the data that way.

Phases of Data Collection

13:44 Emily: Okay. So, I guess I’m asking maybe two phases. So first phase, when you were collecting data and you created this chart that then later got more attention, where did that data come from?

13:55 Shelly: So, part of that data came from my undergrad institution and from faculty members there who had collected internal or external benchmarking measurements for their own efforts. And the rest of it came from searching the internet or there was this one Google sheet with a couple links in it for EEB stipends. So ecology and evolutionary biology stipends. And I worked from there. So, I just started searching biology PhD stipends to see if I could find reported stipends online.

14:26 Emily: Okay. So, this is what departments themselves say about what they’re paying their students, is that right?

14:31 Shelly: Yes.

14:32 Emily: It’s interesting that, and I understand it, but that the administrators didn’t want to trust the self-reported data in PhD Stipends, for example. But I don’t trust what they put on their websites. You know, you have to get both sides of the story. Right? Okay. But you went with the self-reported in terms of the administrative self-reporting side of things for that initial set of 40 schools. And then you said you tweeted, it got lots of attention as <laugh> I’m sure anyone would be interested. And then how did you expand the data from there?

15:01 Shelly: I started talking with faculty members at a lot of different institutions as a student rep for the Botanical Society of America. And that gave me a lot of connections within my field. And so I knew faculty members at lots of different institutions and I made a Google form and had different faculty members test it out to see if they could report data accurately and if it made sense. And I, in some cases, sent it to two people at one university to see if they would report the same thing. And then we made the shiny app. Part of the reason it was a shiny app which is just a version of R, it’s an interactive R-based plot, that you can put on a website was because my significant other had just launched another shiny app. So it was like, okay, I’m going to learn how to make a shiny app with this data to make it accessible. So, we made the Google form, we put up the shiny app, and we went from there.

15:57 Emily: I guess I’m still wondering a little bit about this data collection process. It doesn’t seem too dissimilar actually from what we’re doing at PhD Stipends, but you mentioned like internally within, I can’t remember if it was your department, you said there were like 19 different pay rates. So how, if you approach a faculty member at a different department, at a different university and say, what are you paying your graduate students? How do they know which pay rate they’re supposed to choose?

16:20 Shelly: So we asked for the minimum, what is your lowest paid PhD student in your department at this time? Not in the incoming class, but in the class that still exists. Who is your lowest paid? What is that rate? And that’s what we’re looking for. We make that very clear on our Google form. And that’s why I sent it to many faculty members was, Hey, does this make sense? Do you know what you’re reporting? Yeah. And the cool thing is that a lot of faculty or a lot of different departments have been reported more than once. So we can go through, compare the wages, figure out what’s going on, and a lot of times it’s the same, which I think is really important to see.

16:59 Emily: Do you get back zeros? Are they reporting that there are unfunded students or is that something that you explicitly exclude?

17:08 Shelly: So, if you don’t have an appointment, a 0.5 FTE, then no, we’re not including you. It’s only if you have a work appointment. In biology, it’s very rare to enroll in a program and not have an associated research assistantship or teaching assistantship. And if that’s the case, run, like don’t be part of that program

17:33 Emily: Yeah. In that field for sure. And then I’m also wondering about people who are not employees, but who rather are paid from what I call awarded income or fellowship income. I’m assuming they’re not included in this survey?

17:47 Shelly: No, they are not.

Commercial

17:51 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude! We’re doing something special for Season 15 of this podcast, and as a loyal listener, I know you’re going to want to be involved. Season 15 will be a chance to share your financial experiences, even if you don’t want to give a full-episode interview or want to remain anonymous. We’re going to publish compilation episodes around certain themes, and each episode will feature at least a half-dozen different contributors. The contributions can be audio clips or written text that I will read aloud for the episode. If you are interested in contributing, check out PFforPhDs.com/season15/. That’s the digits 1 5. On that page, you’ll find a list of the proposed themes and how many volunteers I’ve identified for each episode. Your next step is to email me at [email protected] to let me know which episode you’d like to contribute to or if you have another idea for the list. Once I’m confident that we have enough contributions for an episode to be created, I’ll give the volunteers specific prompts and directions to create their submissions. I hope you will choose to participate in this unique season! I can’t do it without you, so please get in touch! Now back to the interview.

Reallocating Funds for TAs

19:14 Emily: So, what happened as the database gained traction?

19:18 Shelly: Okay, so nothing happened here at UF Biology in response to the database gaining traction. Eventually, maybe seven months later, I ended up presenting at faculty meeting and our faculty signed a letter saying they wanted to increase salaries, but then they had voted against every option to increase salaries at the department level. Within a department, there are many ways other institutions have been able to successfully increase TA salaries. It might not be by a lot, but things that other institutions have done include converting faculty hire lines into teaching assistantship salaries. Many have reevaluated the teaching assignments and decreased their TA needs to then reallocate funds. Many admit fewer students. One cool one was fundraising to top up students, which is kind of fun to see. And then another that’s more controversial is that programs have required principal investigators to cover summer pay.

20:21 Emily: Okay. So, all of these options were sort of in the mix. Maybe this could happen, but specifically none of them were agreed to.

20:29 Shelly: Yeah, not so far. We’ll see over time how that changes. I hope that they you know, look at the TA allocations. I think that’s something in the works, but it just hasn’t started yet.

20:42 Emily: So, that’s what was happening at UF. Have you seen other reactions or other effects at other institutions?

20:50 Shelly: Yes, and so I think that’s the more positive side. I’ve seen about 50 salary increases in biology departments across the country this year. We’ve had a lot of users on our site, about 12,000 unique users and a lot of submissions and corrections. It’s always good to hear that it’s been helpful in discussions in other departments and successful in some cases.

21:16 Emily: Yeah, that’s awesome. And you’ve had people like directly attribute like, Hey, we use this data to make this argument. Yeah. That’s amazing. Well, thank you so much for doing this work, and I’m so glad it has had some positive effects for some other people not necessarily at your institution.

Behind-the-Scenes Factors for Administrators

21:32 Emily: Okay. We touched on this a little bit earlier but let’s expand. So, what have you learned about the behind-the-scenes factors that administrators are weighing when they set stipends? And in learning that, do you have any advice for people at other institutions who are advocating for stipend increases?

21:50 Shelly: I think that the conversation has to focus on how competitive the stipend is. I think that is a focus of admins, at least here at UF. That is a big focus is, you know, they want to compare themselves to other institutions and they want to look good. So, I think that comparison’s really important. From that and from behind the scenes, I think the biggest thing I’ve learned is advocacy has to happen at every level. You need to be having conversations about pay with your faculty members, and they need to have those conversations with the chair. And the chair needs to be pushing. Everyone has to push for change to happen. And not only that, the money needs to come from somewhere. We just saw that with the UC system, that in some cases in response to this amazing bargaining agreement, departments are cutting the FTE to be able to afford the pay. So, identifying where the money can come from would also be something important to administrators.

22:55 Emily: So far, these levels that you mentioned, I suspect would’ve stopped at the university president, but how about going up to the state level or federal level? Have you given thought to advocacy at those levels yet?

23:08 Shelly: To an extent, yes. In Florida, our universities can submit funding requests in order to raise stipends. And so, Florida State University was actually able to do that. So, they got that from the state, but I haven’t thought about advocacy at that level because I’m in Florida. And I don’t think it would be successful at this time. They would rather have the war against academia than work with us. So, I don’t think that’s a conversation we’ll have here.

23:39 Emily: Yeah, I was thinking about it, because I live in California, when the UC strike was going on like that again, the responsibility for balancing the budget should not be on the backs of the graduate students. It needs to be at the state level, it needs to be at the federal level. And I agree it’s a much harder road to hoe in Florida than it is in some other states. So yes, thank you for those comments. So, I understand that you have a union at UF for graduate students. Is that just for TAs or is it for research assistants? How many people does it cover?

Graduate Assistants United 

24:10 Shelly: So, it is called Graduate Assistants United, and it covers teaching assistants. So, as a fellowship recipient right now, it doesn’t technically cover me.

24:20 Emily: Okay. And so what work is the union doing on campus, and how does your Biology PhD Stipends project fit into that?

24:31 Shelly: So, our union is currently bargaining, and in the past they have won tuition waivers, health insurance coverage, and some increases including about a thousand dollars increase to the minimum last year. Biology PhD students are paid more than the minimum. So my data really isn’t helpful for our union because they’re really focused on that minimum and bringing the minimum up.

24:56 Emily: Okay. So the union has made some strides, but your biology department already being above those minimums, it’s a little bit not so relevant. But is there anything else that you want to say about how your work can complement the union efforts?

25:11 Shelly: So, our union is still currently bargaining and they have made past wins, like I mentioned. One thing that makes it really hard in Florida is we’re a no-strike state. So, that puts a lot of burden on what advocacy can be done. As we’ve seen strikes have been, you know, really successful in unions across the country. And with that off the table, I think it’s really difficult to bargain here.

25:36 Emily: Yeah, as I’m learning more and more about this topic of unionization, and because I work nationally, that’s something I need to keep in mind. That not everything operates the same in every single state. It’s really kind of a heterogeneous map. So, then what is the current status of the minimum stipend in your college?

25:56 Shelly: So, at our university, it’s now $17,000, but in the biology department, we found out that our master’s students are actually paid $18,000 while our PhD students are at $20,500 as the minimum. So, this is the same minimum we started at when we started the biology stipends database, but new students who are incoming, there’s a slight win that for the next four years in their degree, the first four years of their degree, they’ll be paid $24,000. So that we see as a win, even if it doesn’t really help the rest of us. There was also an increase in the maximum research assistantships that our faculty were allowed to write into their grants, so that now has increased as well. One other, I would say exciting increase partially because my dissertation advisor was a part of this, our biodiversity institute was able to increase their nine-month fellowships to 30,000, which is a big win.

26:58 Emily: Yeah, I’m so pleased about those things. I’m a little bit surprised actually that the raises that were given didn’t apply to current graduate students and only incoming. Do you know any more about the reasoning behind that?

27:11 Shelly: That has to do with how the university allocates funds. So, in order to, you know, recruit good students, they have funds that are only earmarked for recruitment and incoming students, and those are only four-year fellowships. So, that’s what the funds come from and sadly, they cannot be applied to current students.

27:33 Emily: I guess this is the dangerous downside of using that external benchmarking specifically as a comparison in terms of recruiting other students, is that they can then use that logic of, well, we already have students enrolled, we don’t need to worry about them leaving, we’re just going to focus on recruiting that next class with this extra money. So, a little bit sorry to hear that, but good for them. And thank you again for doing the work that you do to at least benefit those incoming students and really your department overall, if not the older classes. Okay.

Advice for Prospective Students

28:05 Emily: So, what advice, you know, speaking of prospective graduate students and being recruited and so forth, what advice do you have for prospective graduate students in light of everything that you’ve learned through this process?

28:15 Shelly: Yeah, so I just had two undergrads I mentor apply to PhD programs. And one thing I kept telling them was, know your worth and ask for more, and actively discuss pay. Ask students in your potential lab and department how much they get paid now and what opportunities exist at their institution after you’re enrolled. Just because we know that these, you know, top-ups to get you there exist in those only last four years when our programs could last much longer. So, having those conversations as you interview at institutions is really important. I just think that we really have to open the door to conversations about pay and financial wellbeing during that recruitment process, make it not taboo, really just open that dialogue. So yeah, if your prospective, I definitely say talk about it.

29:07 Emily: That component of your answer was about gathering data, right? As a prospective graduate student, what are you being paid? And I would add onto that, of course, the qualitative, how does that feel, <laugh>, are you able to live well enough? Right? But you mentioned when you first started answering, ask for more. So what do you think about that process?

29:24 Shelly: So, I’ve never done it myself, but when I was applying to grad school, a current PhD student in my lab told me, you know, apply to multiple places and then tell them how much the other institution’s gonna pay you. He said he did it successfully, and that is the only time I’ve ever heard of that working. But, you know, if an institution really wants you, they’ll find more funds if you need, like, if they really truly do or at least I think they will.

29:51 Emily: Yeah, I fortunately in my line of work have come across many examples of people using that kind of strategy and also the strategy of, I won this external fellowship. If I bring it to your institution, you know, what are you going to do for me? Et cetera, et cetera. Those kinds of strategies, I mean, they’re not universally successful, but some people do have success with it. Your comment of if they really want you, then they’re going to find more money. I don’t know, I don’t know if that’s true, but I think they should at least respond to you very respectfully and understand why you’re asking for this and explain to you at the kind of the things that you’ve learned. Well, you know, our hands are tied in this way and we have to standardize this and this and this, but we do really want you. And you know, they, they may be able to find another way to make up for it that’s not financial, at least with verbal affirmation, we hope, alone. So yes, these strategies can be successful sometimes. Any other advice for prospective graduate students?

30:42 Shelly: I think on that same line read the fine line print, like if a fellowship is only gonna be four years, ask for the other for what’s left over to be covered. If you’re on a research assistantship that pays more than your teaching assistantship in the department and that research assistantship only asked x number of years, ask to see if there are funds available to make it equivalent. In some cases there won’t be, you’re completely correct, but if there is, it’s good to know about them going in and if there isn’t, it’s good to know about them going in.

31:16 Emily: And I just think this process of asking, even if you don’t get anything from it, which I certainly hope that people will, and I think they do sometimes. I think just the process of asking signals to the DGS or whoever is you’re asking that they can go up the chain as you were saying earlier, this is an issue that is important to the graduate students that we are recruiting. And even if they can’t do anything right then for that student who’s in front of them, it goes into, you know, the anecdotes and the data that they’re collecting to make those arguments for more fellowships or higher stipends or whatever the case it is going forward. So, even if you don’t see an immediate yes result, that doesn’t mean it’s not going to have a positive effect downstream. And really that’s kind of the lesson that we’ve seen from your work overall, right? Like there have been some, you know, gains here, gains there, marginal gains here, and it’s certainly helped a lot of other people quite a bit. So, like you never really know what the end result is going to be from that ask or from that data that you collect.

32:13 Shelly: Yeah, I definitely agree. Even having the conversations about if someone brings a fellowship, we should top them up is important and something that GRFPers who received that award while they’ve been here, have been having with the department here. So, I do think just asking can have a lot of impacts.

32:35 Emily: Yeah, I literally gave that advice to someone I was speaking to last night. A current first-year graduate student won the NSF GRFP, her stipend’s going to go up by $10K for those three years. And I said, just ask, just ask for that fifth year, sixth year, whatever it’s going to be at that 10K bonus or closer at least, and it really does no harm. Just ask.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

32:56 Emily: Well, Shelly, I so appreciate you coming on the podcast and sharing this information with us, and I really hope that the listeners will take some of these strategies and lessons that you’ve learned and certainly the database itself if they’re in your field, and use those for a positive effect on stipends at their own universities. And then to wrap up here, I want to ask you the question that I ask of all my guests, which is, what is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD? And that could be something that we’ve touched on already in this interview, or it could be something completely new.

33:26 Shelly: Yeah, so I went back and forth with my family about what makes sense, and one thing that I live by, save when you can and try to live within your means. And I know that’s a really hard thing to do when we’re talking about stipends not meeting the living wage. But as you move through your career, I think it’s important to keep that in mind.

33:49 Emily: I had an experience in my own life where, you know, sometimes the opportunity to earn money can be there and sometimes it cannot. And I just told myself, make hay while the sun shines <laugh>. when you have the chance, earn the money that you can, put away the money that you can because at some point that sun will stop shining. Whether that’s because of something, you know, decided for you by your university or other personal circumstances and it’s just such a peace of mind that you could have something to fall back on in those cases.

34:17 Shelly: Yeah, I definitely believe in a rainy day fund and having funds saved up.

34:23 Emily: Well, Shelly, thank you so much again for coming on the podcast and giving this interview. And for anybody wondering, you know, where to find all the great work that you’ve been doing and there’s been articles about your database and so forth, we’ll link all of that stuff from the show notes. So, thank you so much again for coming on and sharing your insights!

34:39 Shelly: No problem.

Outtro

34:45 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

Five Ways the Tax Code Disadvantages Fellowship Income

January 9, 2023 by Lourdes Bobbio 5 Comments

In this episode, Emily details five ways the federal income tax code disadvantages fellowship income, sometimes resulting in a higher tax rate and sometimes just causing a bit of a headache for fellows. Additionally, she covers two ways that the tax code advantages fellowship income and one more difference that has both pluses and minuses. This episode is for current fellows and future fellows as advance tax planning and action can mitigate some of these negative effects. At the end of the episode, Emily also shares how you can advocate for change at the federal level.

Links Mentioned in this Episode

 

  • Home-buying AMA with Same Hogan register here
  • PF for PhDs Tax Workshops
  • PF for PhDs Tax Center
  • PF for PhDs Subscribe to Mailing List (Access Advice Document)
  • PF for PhDs Podcast Hub (Show Notes)

 

Intro

Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance.

I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs.

This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others.

This is Season 14, Episode 1, and today is a solo episode for me on fellowships and federal income tax. Specifically, I am going to detail for you five ways the tax code disadvantages fellowship income, sometimes resulting in a higher tax rate and sometimes just causing a bit of a headache for fellows. Additionally, I’ll cover two ways that the tax code advantages fellowship income and one more difference that has both pluses and minuses. Keep listening to this episode if you are currently on fellowship or expect to be in the future. Advance tax planning and action can mitigate some of these negative effects. I will also tell you at the end of the episode how you can advocate for change at the federal level.

Speaking of the disadvantages of fellowship income, it’s unfortunately quite common for fellows to have a tough time getting a mortgage. Sometimes they will be preliminarily approved based on their income numbers alone, but once under contract on a home they are dropped by their lender because of their income type and documentation! However, there is one lender who works with PhDs and particularly fellows very regularly.

Sam Hogan is a mortgage originator specializing in grad students and PhDs, an advertiser with Personal Finance for PhDs, and my brother. Years ago, I told him about the issue I just outlined, and he set to work figuring out how to use fellowship income to qualify for a mortgage. While I won’t say it’s as straightforward as using W-2 income, Sam has a great success rate in presenting grad students and PhDs to the underwriters working with his employer, Movement Mortgage, and getting them approved for mortgages. Sam can readily tell you if your fellowship income is likely to be approved or not based on the specifics of your circumstances, and if not what options you still have.

I am hosting an Ask Me Anything with Sam today, Monday, January 9, 2023 at 5:30 PM PT. Come with any question you like about the home-buying process and we will do our best to help you. You can register for the AMA at PFforPhDs.com/mortgage/.

If you’re listening to this later on, you can still check that link for the next AMA date as we hold them periodically, or you can contact Sam directly at 540-478-5803 or [email protected] to discuss your situation.

I wish you all success with your homebuying aspirations in 2023 and following!

You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s14e1/.

Disclaimers

Disclaimer #1: This episode is going into production in early January 2023. I rely on IRS forms, instructions, and publications for this material, and at the time of this recording most of these documents have been updated for tax year 2022, but not all of them. In those cases I’m going off the 2021 material. If any content in this episode turns out to be inaccurate for tax year 2022, I will update the show notes page with the corrections, so I suggest visiting PFforPhDs.com/s14e1/ before relying on any of the information. For tax year 2023 and later, please visit PFforPhDs.com/tax/ for my most updated tax content.

Disclaimer #2: The target audience for this episode is postbacs, graduate students, and postdocs at US universities and institutes who are US citizens, permanent residents, or residents for tax purposes. Unless otherwise specified, when I say tax I mean federal income tax.

Disclaimer #3: The content in this episode is for educational purposes only and should not be considered advice for tax, legal, or financial purposes for any individual.

Without further ado, here’s my solo episode on how the tax code disadvantages fellowship income.

Motivation

You might be surprised by the topic of this episode, because striving to obtain funding via a fellowship is a super common if not universal practice in academia. Fellowships are seen as a superior form of funding because of their prestige and that they normally excuse the recipient from teaching responsibilities or similar. In many cases, winning a fellowship results in a raise as well.

I’m not making any kind of argument in this episode that you should stop applying for fellowships or reject a fellowship that you’ve won—doubly so if you will be making more money with the fellowship than without it.

What I am doing is:

  1. Pointing out the tax issues and pitfalls that can or might come with fellowship income. There are certain groups of people who are at risk of actually paying more in income tax with a fellowship, which are people under age 24, parents, and non-students. Even if you don’t end up paying more in income tax, there are certain complexities of fellowship income that you can prepare for or even avoid if you know about them. This is to help you with taking personal responsibility for your tax situation.
  2. Suggesting changes to the tax code that would resolve these disadvantages. This is to help our community know in what ways advocacy for our workforce is needed.

Outline

Here’s where we’re going with this episode. I’m going to define some terms and tell you what I am comparing the tax treatment of fellowship income to when I say that it is disadvantaged by the tax code. I have five points to cover on how the tax code disadvantages fellowship income. The first couple points apply to most fellows but don’t result in a higher tax rate when handled properly. The next couple of points are about when having fellowship income actually results in paying more income tax. The final point is about a tax benefit that is not available to fellows. Then we’re going to switch gears and discuss two ways the tax code advantages fellowship income and one difference that I see as having both pros and cons.

By the way, I am trying to keep this episode focused on how the tax code disadvantages and advantages fellowship income. I could do an entire other episode, and perhaps I will, on the ways universities disadvantage and advantage fellowship recipients through their policies. But for today, we’re sticking with the topic of the federal income tax code.

Terms

I have to establish some definitions of terms here at the start. The subject of this episode is fellowships, but academia doesn’t necessarily use that term exactly the same way the IRS does. Therefore, I have created my own framework to explain the two types of higher education income.

The most common way the word fellowship is used in academia is to describe an amount of money that is awarded to an individual, as IRS Publication 970 states, “to aid in the pursuit of study or research.” Usually these are awarded for merit via a competitive process, such as a unique application for a specific fellowship program or your application to a postbac, graduate, or postdoc program. I call this income ‘awarded income’ in my framework.

The other type of income in my framework is ‘employee income.’ This is payment for services such as teaching or research, and the postbac, grad student, or postdoc is an employee of the university or institute. Employee income is reported on a Form W-2 at tax time. It’s unusual for programs to use the word fellowship to describe employee income, but it does happen occasionally.

For the purposes of this episode, we are only discussing awarded income, which is to say fellowship income that is not reported on a Form W-2. I will continue to use the word fellowship throughout the episode, but please understand that we’re only discussing that particular variation of the term, which is the most common in academia. If you’re unsure whether your fellowship is awarded income or employee income, reference the type of tax form or forms you receive during tax season. More on that in a moment.

Income Tax Basics

Another point I need to get out of the way at the start here is to clarify that fellowship income is subject to income tax. There are nuances and special scenarios that we’ll get into later in the episode, but very generally speaking, your stipend or salary is going to be taxed at the same rate whether it is awarded income or employee income.

When I speak about fellowship income being disadvantaged by the tax code, what I am pointing out are the ways that fellowship income ends up being treated differently or ultimately taxed at a higher rate than how employee income is treated and taxed. Conversely, in some ways fellowship income has an advantage, and again that is relative to employee income. 

If you’ve heard that fellowship income is tax-free, that is either a false rumor, a misunderstanding, or a statement that requires a lot more caveats. Fellowship income used to be exempt from income tax, but that changed with the Tax Reform Act of 1986. I’ll tell you more about why these rumors and such persist throughout this episode, but for now just know that you should expect to pay income tax on your stipend or salary, unless your gross income for the year is quite low or you can take lots of deductions and/or credits. That is true whether your stipend or salary comes from a fellowship or an employee position. You can learn more about that in Season 2 Bonus Episode 1 of this podcast, which you can find at PFforPhDs.com/s2be1/.

Now we’ll get into the meat of this episode: my list of five tax-related disadvantages of receiving fellowship income, two advantages, and 1 neutral difference.

Disadvantages

Disadvantage #1: There is no single correct way that fellowship income is required to be reported to the postbac, grad student, or postdoc recipient. This is in contrast to employee income, which must be reported on a Form W-2.

Because there is no single correct way to report fellowship income, universities, institutes, and funding agencies take a variety of approaches. The most common form issued is a Form 1098-T, but sometimes Form 1099 is used, such as Form 1099-MISC, Form 1099-NEC, or Form 1099-G. Sometimes a courtesy letter is sent in lieu of an official tax form. Many organizations choose to not communicate at all with the fellowship recipient. When fellowship income goes unreported entirely, it contributes to the rumor mill that it is not taxable income.

These approaches can mislead fellows into not reporting their income, resulting in underpayment of tax, or misreporting it, which often results in overpayment of tax.

To put fellowship income on even footing with employee income, the IRS could require that a tax form be used to report fellowship income, whether one that currently exists or a new or adjusted one. This would greatly reduce the confusion among taxpayers and tax preparers about whether and how to account for this income on tax returns.

Disadvantage #2: The issuers of fellowships are not required to withhold income tax on behalf of the recipients, and they almost never take the responsibility to do so.

Employers virtually always withhold income tax on behalf of their employees. This is the situation that most Americans experience and are familiar with. Your employer sends in income tax payments on your behalf throughout the year, and then after you file your tax return, you receive a refund or owe some additional tax.

However, for fellowship income, the issuing organizations have no such withholding requirement. With very few exceptions, they leave paying income tax entirely up to the fellowship recipient, which is typically a very unfamiliar arrangement.

This lack of withholding also contributes to the rumors that fellowship income is not subject to income tax. I have even seen university administrators label fellowship income “tax-free.” What they mean is that it is not subject to income tax withholding; they are speaking from their own perspective. But when a fellow sees that label, they read it from their own perspective, and it is highly misleading.

By default, the IRS expects to receive income tax payments throughout the year. In the absence of employer withholding, the taxpayer is supposed to make quarterly payments through the estimated tax system, unless an exception applies to them.

This typically goes one of two ways: 1) The fellow learns about the estimated tax requirement close to the start of their fellowship, sets aside money for their future tax payments as their paychecks come in, and makes their estimated tax payments if required. This is the ideal and something I am constantly beating a drum about. 2) The fellow does not realize that they are responsible for their own income tax payments until they are hit with a large tax bill and possibly a penalty upon filing their tax return. This is at minimum extraordinarily unpleasant and in some cases dangerous to the financial, physical, or mental well-being of the fellow. I further discuss this scenario of a large, unexpected tax bill in the videos titled “Why Is My Fellowship Tax Bill So High?!” and “What to Do When Facing a Huge Fellowship Tax Bill,” which you can find on my YouTube channel, Personal Finance for PhDs.

A rare few universities and institutes do offer income tax withholding on fellowship income. My alma mater, Duke University, did so when I was a graduate student there. This relieves the fellow from calculating and making estimated tax payments and prevents large, unexpected tax bills.

To put fellowship income on even footing with employee income, the IRS could require that universities and institutes at least offer income tax withholding on fellowship income. To go along with the previous disadvantage, a specifically designed fellowship reporting form could explicitly list federal, state, and local income tax withheld.

Until such reform comes about, I recommend that fellows take my workshop, Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients, which you can find linked from PFforPhDs.com/tax/.

Disadvantage #3 and this is the big one: Fellowship income is not usually considered “earned income,” and without that designation many postbacs, grad students, and postdocs pay more in income tax than they would if it were considered earned income.

The term “earned income” is actually used all over the tax code and publications, and you have to be really careful because its definition can change depending on which benefit is being discussed. For example, for the purpose of calculating the standard deduction, taxable fellowship income is included in the definition of earned income. But for the Kiddie Tax, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, fellowship income is not considered earned income.

Let’s discuss each of these scenarios briefly in turn.

  1. The Kiddie Tax, which is a colloquial name, is when the unearned income, above a certain threshold, of a person under age 24 is taxed at their parents’ marginal tax rate. There’s a whole history behind the Kiddie Tax that I won’t go into now, but you can read my article about it linked from PFforPhDs.com/tax/. What is both perplexing and infuriating to me is that fellowship income is included in the definition of unearned income. So if you are a student under age 24 on fellowship, even if you are not claimed as a dependent on your parents’ tax return, you could be hit with the Kiddie Tax. I’m not saying you definitely will because there are calculations that go into this, but it can happen. If it does, your income is taxed at your parents’ marginal tax rate. If your parents have a low to moderate adjusted gross income, the Kiddie Tax either won’t apply or won’t increase your tax liability by much. But if your parents’ top marginal tax bracket is 22% or higher, your tax liability will be much higher than it would have been without the Kiddie Tax. And, again, it does not matter if you’re financially independent from your parents, this tax can still apply. Ugh!
  2. The Earned Income Tax Credit is a super valuable credit for people who are low-income, especially if they have children. For example, if you are single with one child and qualify for the credit, you’ll receive a benefit from the Earned Income Tax Credit if your income is below $43,492 in 2022. The lower your income is under that threshold, the more of the benefit you’ll receive, up to a maximum of, again for example, $3,733 for one child in 2022. This credit is refundable, which means that if it wipes out your entire tax liability, the IRS can end up paying you money. Again, just an incredibly valuable credit for low-income individuals and families, which you know many postbacs, grad students, and postdocs would be considered. However, as the name implies, your household has to have earned income during the calendar year to qualify, and fellowship income isn’t earned income. I will never forget a heartbreaking comment I received on my website years ago from a grad student who was married with two children and supporting the entire household on his grad student stipend. He was devastated when his tax return showed that because he switched onto fellowship and didn’t have any earned income for a calendar year, that his family lost out on thousands of dollars of a benefit they had received in prior years when he had employee grad student income. Can you imagine? Why would the IRS, Congress, we the people, exclude vulnerable families like that one from this benefit?
  3. The Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit is a tax credit that helps parents, among others, pay for daycare, preschool, after school care, etc. so that they can work or look for work. The benefit inversely scales with your income, like the Earned Income Tax Credit, but for example if you had one child in care and your income was low enough that you received the maximum benefit, this credit would reduce your tax liability by $1,050 in 2022. Pretty good benefit. However, here’s that catch again, you and your spouse if you’re married must both have earned income to qualify. There is an exception for students, so grad students will still qualify for the credit for all the months in which they are students, but postbacs and postdocs won’t. This issue was brought to my attention by a married couple with a baby, both postdocs on fellowship, who were taken aback that they weren’t able to claim this credit. And why? Does being on fellowship mean that they don’t need childcare? Or do they not deserve a similar carve-out to the one that students get?

I have to stop here because I’m getting really worked up about these issues. Pretty simple change here, IRS. Include fellowship income in the definitions of earned income everywhere. Or make exceptions for fellowship income in all of the above benefits and any other relevant ones.

I haven’t even covered how fellowship income relates to the definition of “support” for determining if someone is a dependent or subject to the Kiddie Tax, and I won’t take the time to illustrate it now. It’s a similar problem that the IRS could solve by saying that fellowship income counts as support… anyway. See my tax return workshops for further discussions of that rat’s nest. Let’s move on.

Commercial

Emily here for a brief interlude!

Tax season is about to start heating up, and the best place to go for information tailored to you as a grad student, postdoc, or postbac is PFforPhDs.com/tax/. From that page I have linked to all of my tax resources, many of which I have updated for tax year 2022.

On that page you will find free podcast episodes, videos, and articles on all kinds of tax topics relevant to PhDs. There are also opportunities to join the Personal Finance for PhDs mailing list to receive PDF summaries and spreadsheets that you can work with.

The absolute most comprehensive and highest quality resources, however, are my asynchronous tax workshops. I’m offering three tax return preparation workshops for tax year 2022, one for grad students who are US citizens or residents, one for postdocs who are US citizens or residents, and one for grad students and postdocs who are nonresidents. Those tax return preparation workshops are in addition to my estimated tax workshop for grad student, postdoc, and postbac fellows who are US citizens or residents.

My preferred method for enrolling you in one of these workshops is to find a sponsor at your university or institute. Typically that sponsor is a graduate school, graduate student association, postdoc office, postdoc association, or an individual school or department. I would very much appreciate you recommending one or more of these workshops to a potential sponsor. If that doesn’t work out, I do sell these workshops to individuals, but I think it’s always worth trying to get it into your hands for free or a subsidized cost.

Again, you can find all of these free and paid resources, including a page you can send to a potential workshop sponsor, linked from PFforPhDs.com/tax/.

Now back to my expert discourse.

Disadvantages Continued

Disadvantage #4: There is no mechanism for making fellowship money that pays your health insurance premium tax-free unless you are a student.

This disadvantage requires a bit of background.

Think of a regular employment situation, not related to academia. Unfortunately in the US, health insurance is tightly tied to your employer partly because of a tax benefit afforded to them. When your employer provides your health insurance plan, the cost of the premium is tax-deductible for both you and the employer. That means that you don’t pay income tax on the portion of your income that goes toward that particular purpose. It’s as if you earned less money than you actually did. This is accounted for automatically for you on your Form W-2. The income listed in Box 1 is your gross income less your pre-tax payroll deductions such as your health insurance premium. Easy peasy. If you’re self-employed, there is also a mechanism to deduct your health insurance premium.

But if you’re not employed or self-employed, the only way you can perhaps deduct your health insurance premiums is if you itemize your deductions. Even in that case you can only deduct the portion of your medical expenses that exceeds 7.5% of your adjusted gross income. If you are a relatively healthy single person who wouldn’t otherwise itemize your deductions, I doubt itemizing will help you overall. Most people in this situation effectively cannot deduct their health insurance premiums or at best can only deduct a portion of them.

I need to back up now and talk about the situation with health insurance provided by universities. If you receive your health insurance through your parents, the following is not relevant to you. If you’re an employee of the university and receive health insurance because of that status, that’s a normal straightforward deduction as I just discussed. Let’s set that aside and discuss what happens when fellowship or scholarship income pays your health insurance premium, either automatically before you receive your paycheck or out of your own pocket.

If you are a grad student, there is a mechanism to make that fellowship income tax-free. We’re actually going to discuss that in the upcoming section on the tax advantages of fellowship income. However, if you’re a postbac or postdoc, this mechanism isn’t available to you. There is no way that I know of, short of itemizing their deductions, for postbacs and postdocs to make the fellowship money that pays their health insurance premiums tax-free. And that sucks.

This conundrum has been highlighted by many postdocs and postdoc associations. If a university or institute pays postdoc employees and postdoc fellows the same amount, the postdoc fellows effectively receive a pay cut because they have to pay income tax on the portion of their fellowship income that pays their health insurance premiums while postdoc employees do not.

The general solution to this whole issue is universal healthcare, but even without going that far, Congress could change the tax code so that all health insurance premiums are tax-deductible even without having to itemize deductions. I don’t know, maybe that would have disastrous effects somehow. Another way to fix this would be to expand the benefit that students use to non-student trainees as well.

Disadvantage #5: Fellowship recipients cannot contribute to their university or institute’s 403(b) or 457 plans. These are employer-sponsored tax-advantaged retirement accounts, and they are only available to employees.

Similar to the health insurance situation, the tax code has incentivized saving and investing for retirement primarily through employer-sponsored plans. These plans are exclusively offered to employees. That goes for 401(k)s as well as 403(b)s and 457s.

Looking at the situation for postdocs again, it’s typical for postdoc employees to be able to contribute to the university or institute’s 403(b) or 457, albeit usually without a match. However, postdoc fellows do not enjoy this benefit. While the universities administer these plans, again this is a policy issue at the federal level that excludes non-employees. Side note: If you’re wondering why grad student employees don’t usually have access to their university’s 403(b)s or 457s, that is a university-level policy issue as far as I can tell.

Not exactly the same but as a related issue, there is a type of tax-advantaged retirement account that is available to everyone with “taxable compensation,” which is an Individual Retirement Arrangement or IRA. You do not have to be an employee to contribute to an IRA. Up until 2019, the definition of “taxable compensation” excluded fellowship income, but the SECURE Act changed that definition starting in 2020. Taxable fellowship income for graduate students and postdocs is now considered taxable compensation for the purpose of contributing to an IRA. We know from this example that change is possible when it comes to fellowship income and federal tax benefits. You can learn more about this issue in Season 4 Bonus Episode 1 of this podcast, which you can find at PFforPhDs.com/s4be1/.

I think the most accessible solution to this particular disadvantage is actually not to somehow extend the employee-only workplace-based retirement benefit to fellows but rather to increase the contribution limit for IRAs to solve this for everyone. The contribution limits in 2023 for someone under age 50 are $6,500 for an IRA and $22,500 for a 403(b), 457, or 401(k). Why should there be such a big advantage for employees?

Advantages

Alright, it’s time for a dose of positivity. There are two advantages to fellowship income that I have come across.

Advantage #1: Students can make fellowship income tax-free by pairing it with qualified education expenses or QEEs. Basically, if your awarded income paid for a QEE, that amount of awarded income is tax-free. You essentially get to deduct the QEEs from your awarded income before you even report it on your tax return. This federal income tax benefit is found in Publication 970 Chapter 1, and I call it Tax-Free Scholarships and Fellowships or TFSF. Again, this benefit is only available to students.

How does this work differently for grad students with awarded vs. employee income for their stipends? This comes into play when you use your stipend to pay for an education expense rather than having it paid on your behalf via a scholarship or waiver.

Let’s take as a very simple example a grad student who has only two education expenses, tuition and a student health fee. The tuition is paid on their behalf by a scholarship, and they pay the student health fee out of pocket.

The scholarship that pays their tuition is awarded income, but it is made tax-free via TFSF because it pays for tuition, which is a QEE. So that awarded income doesn’t become part of the grad student’s taxable income.

The student health fee is a QEE under TFSF, so if the grad student’s stipend is from a fellowship, the student health fee makes that amount of fellowship income tax-free. It’s like taking a deduction. However, if the grad student’s stipend is employee income, no part of it can be made tax-free by the student health fee. Furthermore, student health fees are not qualified education expenses under the other two available higher education tax benefits, the Lifetime Learning Credit and the American Opportunity Tax Credit. So in this particular example, there is no tax benefit available to a grad student employee for their student health fee, whereas a grad student fellow can use the student health fee to reduce their taxable income.

That was a very simple and contrived scenario, but it turns out that this benefit can be uniquely applied, under specific circumstances, to lots of other common education expenses, such as textbooks, computers, software, and health insurance premiums.

If you are a grad student on fellowship, I highly recommend taking my tax workshop How to Complete Your Grad Student Tax Return (and Understand It, Too!) to understand TFSF and the other higher education tax benefits fully. This goes double if you did pay out of your fellowship stipend for the kinds of education expenses I just mentioned. You will learn under what circumstances you can use them to make your fellowship income tax-free and under what circumstances you cannot. Go to PFforPhDs.com/tax/ for the link to the workshop.

Advantage #2: Fellowship income is not considered taxable income in some states. For this advantage only we are leaving the realm of federal income tax. I won’t say too much about this except that I’ve run across it in two states, Pennsylvania and Alabama, and there may be others. But this is a truly fantastic benefit that puts fellowship income at a great advantage over employee income in those states.

Neutral Difference

Finally, we have a difference with fellowship income that has both pros and cons. For this one we’re also not discussing federal income tax but rather FICA tax, which pays into the Social Security and Medicare systems.

Fellowship income is not wages, so it is not subject to FICA tax. Postdoc and postbac fellows do not pay FICA tax, but postdoc and postbac employees do. Grad students by and large qualify for a FICA tax exemption, so they usually don’t pay it whether their stipends or salaries are fellowship or employee income.

When I was a grad student, I thought these exemptions were great. I was not interested in losing 7.65% of my paycheck toward a dubious far-future benefit. I still think keeping an extra 7.65% of your paycheck is super valuable for grad students, postbacs, and postdocs. However, now that I’m older and I’ve learned more about Social Security and Medicare, I think forgoing all those quarters of credits during grad school plus any postbac or postdoc fellowship years might be a little foolhardy. For example, if you become disabled as a young adult before paying into the system for the required number of quarters, you are at risk of not qualifying for the disability benefit. That’s a pretty remote possibility, but it’s scary that people could be left unprotected by this supposed last resort insurance plan because of these exemptions. And I really don’t think Social Security is going to disappear entirely. Ideally, I’d like to have both the money in my pocket and the insurance coverage, please and thank you.

At the beginning of this episode, I told you there were two purposes: First to help you with tax planning and second to direct your attention to issues about which you can advocate for change.

On that first point, the best place to go to learn more or take one of my tax workshops is PFforPhDs.com/tax/.

On the second point, I have three ideas for you if you would like to advocate for change to one of the federal tax policies I’ve mentioned:

  1. You can write to your representative in the House and/or your senators and ask your peers to do the same explaining how the tax law negatively affects your life and in what way it could change. The component of the SECURE Act that updated the definition of taxable compensation started as a bill called the Graduate Student Savings Act, which was sponsored by a bipartisan group of members of the House and Senate for several years before it was finally included in the SECURE Act.
  2. You can submit an explanation of your issue through the IRS’s Systemic Advocacy Management System. Just search for IRS SAMS and it will be the first result. The IRS will evaluate these issues and decide which to move forward with trying to correct.
  3. You can get involved with organizations that advocate for the workforce in your field or for PhD trainees generally, such as the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students and the National Postdoctoral Association. You can make them aware of these tax problems, if they aren’t already, and partner with them to advocate at the federal level.

It’s been lovely to have you with me for this wonky episode. One final time: I offer educational tax workshops both on preparing your annual tax return and calculating and paying estimated tax. I would really appreciate you recommending my workshops to a potential sponsor at your university. If that doesn’t work out, you can purchase the appropriate one for you as an individual. You can find the links to take either one of those actions at PFforPhDs.com/tax/.

Outro

Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode!

I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/.

Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/.

See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps!

The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC.

Podcast editing by Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

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

August 15, 2022 by Emily

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

Links Mentioned in this Episode

  • Alex Parry’s Twitter (@SafetyWorkHSTM)
  • PhDStipends.com
  • PF for PhDs Community
  • PF for PhDs: S12E7 Show Notes
  • Alex’s Tweet Comparing PhD Stipends
  • MIT Living Wage Calculator
  • IRS Form 1040-ES (Estimated Tax Worksheet)
  • PhD students face cash crisis with wages that don’t cover living costs (Nature article)
  • Ph.D. students demand wage increases amid rising cost of living (Science article)
  • PF for PhDs Quarterly Estimated Tax Workshop (Individual link)
  • PF for PhDs Quarterly Estimated Tax Workshop (Sponsor link)
  • PF for PhDs Register for Mailing List (Access Advice Document)
  • PF for PhDs Podcast Show Notes
S12E7 Image: This Grad Student Advocates for Higher Stipends Using Cost of Living Data

Teaser

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

Introduction

00:37 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and the founder of Personal Finance for PhDs. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others. This is Season 12, Episode 7, and today my guest is Alex Parry, a sixth-year graduate student at Johns Hopkins in the history of medicine. Alex is a strong advocate for increasing stipends, both in his department and at Hopkins broadly, and is deeply involved with the grad student unionization movement. Alex and some colleagues recently released the results of a study of stipends vs. the living wage for about a dozen peer institutions to Hopkins, and he explains in detail the methodology of the study and the patterns that they found, making a case for the urgency to increase stipends at virtually all U.S. universities. Alex and I discuss the benefits of this approach vs. how PhDStipends.com collects data. Alex shares a powerful concluding message on the need for collective action among graduate students.

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

Would You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

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

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

Teachers and Researchers United (TRU) History

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

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

How to Become an Officially-Recognized Union at a University

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

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

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

Winning an NLRB Election

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

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

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

Shift to Stipends Advocacy

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

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

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

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

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

Departmental Advocacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

TRU Study Comparing Stipends Across Institutions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Commercial

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

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

Resources for Comparing University Stipends

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stipend vs. Living Wage Patterns

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

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

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

Effect of Unionization on History of Stipends

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

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

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

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

Consideration of Non-Employee Stipends

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

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

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

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

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

Look-Back Formula for Voting

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

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

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

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

Best Practices for Advocacy

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

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

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

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

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

43:50 Emily: Alex, thank you so much for this incredible interview! It’s been wonderful to have you on. Glad to hear about all the wonderful work that you and your colleagues are doing. I’d like to finish up by asking you the question that I ask of all my guests, which is what is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD? And it could be something that we’ve already touched on in the interview, or it could be something completely new.

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

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

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

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

Outtro

45:42 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? I have collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

This Grad Student’s Side Business Pays Twice What Her Assistantship Does

June 6, 2022 by Meryem Ok 1 Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Natilie Williams, a PhD candidate in communication at the University of Missouri, keynote speaker, and author. Natilie established her business prior to starting her PhD and was up front about it with the director of graduate studies from the beginning, which has been to her benefit. At times, her business has brought in double or more what her assistantship pays, which has been vital for her financial health and security during graduate school. Natilie manages her time and schedule fastidiously using a planner to excel in her graduate program and business.

Links Mentioned in this Episode

  • PF for PhDs Subscribe to Mailing List
  • PF for PhDs Show Notes for S12E2
  • Innerview: Lessons in Leadership (Book by Natalie Williams)
  • PF for PhDs Seminars
  • Dr. Emily Roberts’ E-mail
  • Nat Will, Speak! (Website)
  • @NatWillSpeak (Instagram)
  • @NatWillSpeak (Twitter)
  • PF for PhDs Podcast Hub (Show Notes/Transcripts)
S12E2 image for This Grad Student's Side Business Pays Twice What Her Assistantship Does

Teaser

00:00 Natilie: I was able to, once you added in book sales, you added in speaking, yeah, I was able, at some point, I made maybe like two and a half times my assistantship, almost three, by being able to do these things and elevate my speaking career. Expand it, so not just speaking, but then also a book.

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, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others. This is Season 12, Episode 2, and today my guest is Natilie Williams, a PhD candidate in communication at the University of Missouri, keynote speaker, and author. Natilie established her business prior to starting her PhD and was upfront about it with the director of graduate studies from the beginning, which has benefitted her. At times, her business has brought in double or more what her assistantship pays, which has been vital for her financial health and security during graduate school. Don’t miss Natilie’s description of how she manages her time and schedule to excel in her graduate program and business.

01:35 Emily: I have a gift for you if you’re not yet subscribed to the Personal Finance for PhDs mailing list. At the end of every interview, I ask my guest to give their best financial advice for another early-career PhD. My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. The document is even organized by topic so you can easily see which type of advice is most popular. I invite you to join the mailing list to receive access to this document through PFforPhDs.com/advice/. I hope this quick, powerful resource will help you up-level your finances this summer! You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s12e2/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Natilie Williams.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

02:38 Emily: I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Natilie Williams. She is both a PhD student and a professional public speaker and author. And so I’m really excited to learn how she’s managing her business as well as her career as a graduate student. So Natilie, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for volunteering! And would you please tell the listeners a little bit more about yourself?

02:58 Natilie: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I’m super excited. I am a fourth-year doctoral candidate. I’ll actually graduate in just two months, so I’m very excited about that. So, I’ll graduate in two months. I am at the University of Missouri in Columbia, where I am finishing up my PhD in Communication with a focus in Identity and Diversity, and also maintain an assistantship there. I actually recently accepted a professor position in the Midwest. And so I’m really excited about that. And I also have the privilege and the honor to serve as a keynote speaker across the country on student leadership, collegiate success, and academic and professional development. And then that wasn’t enough for me. I also wrote and published a book called Innerview (I N N ER): Lessons in Leadership. And so, really excited about the book. And so, it looks at how we can use moments of reflection in order to enhance ourselves as leaders.

04:00 Emily: Wow. I can already tell, I wish we had another interview to do all these other topics on like, and actually hear from you and your, you know, the main topics that you speak about because that sounds absolutely fascinating. We’re going to keep it more focused on like you as a graduate student and having this business and how you’re doing both of those things at the same time. Hopefully get some good gold nuggets for the listeners who also have businesses that they want to run as well as being graduate students or PhDs. But congratulations on your faculty position! That’s really, really exciting. And yeah.

04:29 Natilie: Thank you.

Getting Into Public Speaking

04:29 Emily: So, that’s awesome. Let’s kind of back up a little bit. And how did you start speaking professionally? Did this come like before graduate school or since you started graduate school? How did you come to that?

04:40 Natilie: Absolutely. So I started speaking professionally about three months after I received my master’s degree. So I had a really mind-blowing experience. I did my master’s thesis on a TV show called A Different World, which was a spinoff of The Cosby show. And it was a very much so like a staple in like the Black community. Like that show ended May of 1993 and it is still talked about now. People still dress up as the characters for Halloween. And so I did my thesis on that show, and I got surprised by The Steve Harvey show with actually meeting the cast because they did a reunion. I talked about my thesis and it was just like this big national, even international thing.

05:20 Natilie: And so where I went for undergrad, Central Michigan University was like, “Hey, we have this freshman orientation leadership program and we want you to come and serve as a keynote speaker. And we want you to talk about your old leadership experience you had on campus as an undergrad. And we know that you just had that really cool experience with A Different World. Do you think you could tie that in as well?” And so, I did it. I keynoted in front of about 300 plus people. And at the end of that keynote, I had lines and lines and lines of students waiting to talk to me afterwards. And that was the moment where I realized it was more than just me being good at speaking, but it was truly a part of my purpose. And then I eventually learned, maybe months after that, the business side of speaking and was able to start it as a business and turn it into a very much so awesome, successful career path.

06:13 Emily: And so, I understand from our prior conversation that you had some years in the workforce between when you finished your master’s and when you started your PhD. So that’s kind of when you were learning, as you said, the business of speaking and growing that part of it. Is that right?

06:27 Natilie: Absolutely. So with the master’s, I was working for a corporate organization part-time and then once I graduated, they actually hired me on full-time. And when they hired me on full-time, I worked there for about two and a half years. So during the time where I started my speaking career, I was working in corporate and I was actually teaching as an adjunct at night because I was still living in the same town where I got my master’s degree from where I also had had an assistantship that paid for my master’s degree. And they were like, Hey, we know you’re still here in town. You did really good work when you were teaching for us. You want to come do it at night? And so I was really able to use my corporate job to fund my speaking career to start funding the business, right? The website, the photoshoot, different things of that nature. And I had my adjunct position as well as some extra savings. And it got to a point where I was working corporate where I was like, I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m not a fan of this position. And I actually realized that I’m a geek. I love to read and write. I want to go back to school and get a PhD and still maintain and enhance my speaking career.

Speaking in the Collegiate Circuit

07:34 Emily: That’s a great thing actually about sort of side hustling or having your own business generally. It can be on the side of different full-time things. You can have transitions in your career and take your business with you as you go through this transition. So that is awesome. And so, your niche about speaking, you said you’re on the collegiate circuit. So do you speak mostly to college students? And you mentioned leadership earlier, like what are kind of the general topics that you speak about? And did it come from that initial engagement or how have you, you know, expanded since then?

08:04 Natilie: So yeah, it’s come from the initial engagement. It’s also come from my own collegiate experience that has really propelled me as a leader and have taken advantage of opportunities and so, and networking. So like mentorship, relationship building, leadership despite trauma, Greek leadership, Black and multicultural Greek leadership, first-year experience. So how do you even plan out your college career? Whereas you can take over the campus, what are some resources and opportunities that you should take advantage of as a college student? So studying abroad, pre-professional programs, networking with professors, and things of that sort. So those include some of the speaking topics, professional development, preparing yourself for your career path. What can you do in college to prepare you for post-graduation? So those are some of the speaking topics. And it’s on the collegiate circuit as well, but I also am starting to do more stuff with high schools and middle schools as well, including like that social and emotional learning component to leadership. So, it’s starting to expand greatly.

Time Management as a Grad Student and Business Owner

09:12 Emily: That’s awesome! Now I want to hear about you as a graduate student, and also as a business owner. And since you started the business back when you had a full-time job and another part-time job, you probably took some lessons from that in terms of time management and so forth. But I’d love to hear about how you’re applying them now as a graduate student. Like, how are you managing your time and your energy to make sure that you’re doing both these things well?

09:35 Natilie: Absolutely. So I believe it’s time management and also time prioritization and time stewardship. And so figuring out what’s important right now and how much time do I need to allocate to it. But for me, coming in as a graduate student, working on a PhD was really new to me because I had never done that before of course. And so my first thing was, I need to understand what’s the lay of the land. How much time do I need to dedicate to this because it was in-person and it was full-time? And so for me, I really had to figure out what I didn’t know. And I looked to upperclassmen to see how much time are you all spending on readings and coursework? What’s the writing load like? And so I actually sort of, kind of, when I first started the doctoral program, I took very few speaking engagements that first semester, because I was like, I need to focus on this program.

10:31 Natilie: And once I learned that I could balance my coursework and my speaking career, it was all she wrote after that. So it would get to a point where I knew my schedule perfectly. I knew when I had to teach. I knew when I didn’t have to teach. I knew how long it would take me to get to the nearest airport. So I was about two hours from the nearest airport and it would be sometimes I would literally get done with class as a doctoral student. I would have my suitcase packed in my car. I would drive two hours to the airport. I would fly out to go speak. That same day, when I got done off the stage speaking, I would fly right back, finish work as a doctoral student, maybe teach that morning as my assistantship, and I would do it all over again. So I really learned my schedule perfectly. And I would do my papers sometimes on the airplane, do my class readings in the back of the Uber as I was going to my hotel to speak. I would sometimes get to my hotel the night before, so I could do my coursework. And so I really got the timing down perfectly, and I always keep a planner with me. So I knew due dates for assignments as an instructor, and due dates for assignments as a graduate student as well.

Schedule Flexibility

11:47 Emily: I’m not that familiar with like your field. So like, what is the nature of the research that you’re doing? Like is a lot of thinking and writing and reading? Or do you have to like, be certain places aside from like the teaching component? Like, do you have to be certain places at certain times? Like how flexible is your schedule, I guess?

12:02 Natilie: Very flexible schedule. So, as a doctoral student, I study communication. Specifically, I’m more of an interpersonal and family communication scholar. Specifically, I look at what’s called voluntary care relationships. And so those are relationships that have no biological tie, but because we say they’re family, they’re family. So your best friend that you consider your sister friend or your childhood nextdoor neighbor that you may have considered your cousin growing up because you all have known each other for the past 20 years. Godparents and things like that. And so I look at that, but specifically within the context of Black families and Black people and the validation process of those relationships, the impact of them, and the benefits. And so, I’m also a qualitative scholar. So I spend the time interviewing people and things of that sort. So that’s my research interest. And when you’re doing the interviews, you can, you know, do them over the phone and things like that. So, I had a lot of flexibility except for the fact that my coursework was in person. So I just, I knew how much time I had to drive to the airport right after class. I knew how much time I had to board the airplane. So I really just really got it down to a science.

13:16 Emily: That’s amazing. I don’t <laugh>, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten near that degree of specificity with like my time blocking practice. But it’s because I have much fewer, I think, constraints on my life, especially prior to becoming like a parent. Like once you have like that the parenthood stuff going on, I know it’s like a thing that’s said like, you know, mothers become like the most efficient workers you’ve ever seen because they have like, so limited time to like, do their work and then they have to do these other things. So like, but even that, like, I’m not to the degree that you just described, like time blocking. So I really like admire that. It sounds like an amazing skill to have.

Speaking Engagements During COVID

13:53 Emily: And how, like, during this time that you’ve been a PhD student, you know, you mentioned that you took very few speaking engagements at first when you were kind of getting the lay of the land. But then how has your business grown over the past few years? And I’m especially wondering how things have changed with COVID, because you just mentioned you were doing in person speaking. I assume that at least changed for some amount of time for a while. So how have things been going, you know, since starting your PhD?

14:15 Natilie: So as soon as I got the understanding of my schedule and the timing, I hopped right back on that road and it, I just, I knew if I had class, if I didn’t have to teach or my own classes on a Thursday or a Friday, I knew Wednesday night I could go fly out and come right back. And so I started to just be intentional about the different conferences I would present at, in front of students. But then also too, with the decision-makers present, understanding how many decision-makers will be present during that networking piece. And that networking piece, allowing decision-makers to meet me, sit in on my sessions, get to learn more about the learning objectives with my presentations, whether it was a workshop or a keynote, that really allowed me the opportunity to continuously to grow on the speaking circuit.

15:02 Natilie: And with the topics that I speak about, leadership and student leadership on the collegiate market, it’s not as many young black women doing what I’m doing. And so, I’m standing out, right? And I’m doing very well with speaking as far as the mechanics of it. And I was able to and still am able to get my name out there. And so that allowed me to grow my speaking engagements. And you also mentioned about COVID. Well, when COVID hit, I was in my mind, I first thought that this was literally the end of my speaking career. And I said, well, you know what? I had a great run. I did a great job. If that’s it, I went out with a bang. And I actually saw my business boom, shortly after. Like months after. And my mind was blown. I’m like, wait a minute. But I realized that these schools were like, we still need people to encourage our students.

15:53 Natilie: We still need people to give our students the how to. It’s now a virtual space. And so I was able to sometimes do two engagements in one day I could do one in California, one in Florida virtually and not have to leave and not have to also invest in travel expenses. And so, 2021 was probably one of my most profitable speaking years yet. And I think this year is probably on top to beat that. It’s definitely on top to beat that. And so, yeah, I was completely blown away by it, completely blown away. And once I finished coursework for my PhD, it was <laugh>, it was all she wrote. I was able to do a lot more. So I didn’t have to be in the classroom as a student. I just had to teach. And so I was able to have even more free time to get out there and to maximize my opportunities to get in front of my target audience.

16:47 Emily: Yeah. I’m so glad that your business has grown through COVID as well. I’ve observed the same thing. My client base has expanded. It’s so much easier to set up speaking engagements without having to do all the logistics of the travel. And you know, my schedule’s a lot more open, as you were saying, because the travel’s not there. So I’m free to accept engagements that are closer in time together than they used to be. And it’s been strange because I had the same reaction like, oh I can’t travel anymore. I’ve got to pivot. <Laugh> like, what else can I do in this business aside from speaking, because I’m clearly not going to make money from speaking anymore. No, that was not at all the case. Once people kind of got their bearings, the bookings started coming in again. So it’s really been like amazing and I’m so grateful, and grateful that it’s happened the same way for you.

17:27 Natilie: Thank you!

Commercial

17:30 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. Would you like to learn directly from me on a personal finance topic, such as goal-setting, investing, frugality, increasing income, or student loans, each tailored specifically for graduate students and postdocs? I offer seminars and workshops on these topics and more in a variety of formats, and I’m now booking for the 2022-2023 academic year. If you would like to bring my content to your institution, would you please recommend me as a speaker to your university, graduate school, graduate student association, or postdoc office? My seminars are usually slated as professional development or personal wellness. Ask the potential host to go to PFforPhDs.com/speaking/ or simply email me at [email protected] to start the process. I really appreciate these recommendations, which are the best way for me to start a conversation with a potential host. The paid work I do with universities and institutions enables me to keep producing this podcast and all my other free resources. Thank you in advance if you decide to issue a recommendation! Now back to our interview.

Business Income vs. Stipend

18:52 Emily: Let’s talk about money. So, you have an assistantship. I don’t know if you want to share how much you make through that. Feel free if you’re comfortable. But how does your, like the money that comes in through your business compare with like your stipend?

19:05 Natilie: Yeah, so with an assistantship so Hey, when I left corporate, I left corporate, I quit the job. I had saved up $15,000 over the timeframe that I had worked there. Especially when I knew I wanted to leave. I was like, well, I’m no fool. I need to, you know, I need to be able to live. And so I saved up $15,000 and then I got this assistantship. And this assistantship was paying me literally a third, one-third of what I made in corporate. And for me I’m like, I will figure it out. Like that’s one promise I’ve made to myself is that I will always be okay financially. Legally, financially, correct? And so yeah, so with the assistantship I was making like a third of what I made in corporate.

19:50 Natilie: And with speaking, I was able to, there were some times where I was literally making whatever my assistantship was, I could make double that with speaking. So I was literally making double my assistantship with speaking and still had my assistantship. And so for me that allowed me to realize like, okay, I can do both of these things well, and I’ve always been a saver and I knew that I would need, you know, I would need to live after I graduated. So I was able to prepare for life post-Graduation. And then also writing a book while I was in the doctoral program and releasing the book and also having book sales come in. So, I was able to, once you added in book sales, you added in speaking, yeah, I was able, at some point I made maybe like two and a half times my citizenship, almost three, by being able to do these things and elevate my speaking career. Expand it, so not just speaking, but then also a book. And so, yeah.

20:54 Emily: It sounds to me like, you know, going into your PhD program, it was never like a question that you would give up the speaking. Like, it’s part of your career now. But I’m just wondering like, had you come into graduate school and not had a side business, is your stipend even enough to live on? Like, are your peers living on it? Or do they all have like side stuff going on or taking out student loans or depending on family members? Or like what’s going on financially in your program, I guess?

Transparency with the Department

21:19 Natilie: Yeah. Most of them, they definitely, they hustle. When I say hustle, I don’t mean it in a bad way. But they’ll take another job. They’ll teach somewhere else. They will, some of them have maybe like a significant other, so they’re able like to split costs. But for the most part, we definitely, as part of our program, we look for other ways to bring in that additional income. And so for me, I came in as a speaker and I made sure that that was something I promised myself that I would not give up, but I wasn’t sure how the department was going to react or respond to it. Because I never wanted them to think that like I was not focused on the program. And I listened to one of your previous episodes where you were talking about that, where it’s frowned upon sometimes.

22:07 Natilie: And so, I came into the department and told the Director of Grad Studies for the department, like, Hey, I do speaking. And so there would be some Fridays where they would have, what’s called colloquium where like, it’s like a big research conversation. And I’m like, yo, I’ve got to go Denver to speak. I can’t make it to colloquium. And luckily the Director of Grad Studies was like, you know, I’m going to count you speaking as professional development since you already have your hand in your career. We’re not going to count it against you, that you aren’t at colloquium, right? Like you already have your hand in your career. We’re going to support that. And I was so happy that she was so generous because she could have been like, no, you need to be here. I can say for like some of the rest of the department more so like peers, I didn’t really let them know too much.

22:56 Natilie: I would just say like, oh, I have a leadership conference to go to. I didn’t mention to my peers that I was the keynote for the leadership conference. But once I saw that it was a comfortable space, I was able to let them know. And then once they saw that like I wrote a book and so they were like, oh, wait a minute, you really do this. Like you wrote a book like you are on a book tour, wait a minute. Like, you know, so once I felt comfortable, I didn’t mind sharing. But I had to be sure that it was a safe space because I was not going to allow anybody to sabotage this career that I had worked so hard for.

23:28 Emily: Yeah. I think this makes a ton of sense because when you have a business, a side business or whatever you might call it, that’s so like out there and public-facing, and especially it’s in higher ed <laugh> as well. Like, it’s something that’s probably impossible to conceal. Like sometimes with my podcast guests, they don’t want to let people know about it, and they can not let people know about it. They can do their side hustle on the weekends, in the evenings. It can be just a private thing. But I think it was really smart of you since you were already doing it when you came into graduate school just to be completely upfront and say, this is what’s happening. And I’m really glad too, that, you know, they worked with you on that. It also makes sense to me that what you’re doing is professional development enhancing your career. So, I’m really glad they gave you that, you know, a little bit of leeway on the attendance.

24:11 Natilie: It was difficult. Because it got to the point where like, I was so protective of my speaking career. Like I was not accepting my colleagues on social media because I didn’t want them to see that, like, you know, I’m speaking. Or if after class, as a student, I go hop on a flight to the airport and I post on social media that I’m on a flight and they’re like, oh, well, what is she doing there? Is she going to make it back in time to teach? And I would, but I never wanted people to question. I never wanted people even to have the opportunity to try and, you know, speak against or speak negatively or try to talk about what they didn’t have clarity on, you know, so. But now it’s all good.

Advice for Working on a Business in Grad School

24:47 Emily: Yeah. You proved yourself in your program and it came out that you were doing all of that with the business on the side, and being successful in both. So yeah, I’m really glad that you had that positive reaction. Is there anything else that you want to share with us about your business or your role as a graduate student before we wrap up?

25:03 Natilie: Absolutely. As a graduate student, if you come in with a business, you don’t necessarily have to lay it down by the wayside in order to focus on your doctoral studies. You can do both and you can do both well. I think it’s about coming into a department and figuring out how does this operate? And then also allowing yourself to have as much time as possible to work on your business and still be a person because doctoral programs are hard for no reason. But it’s possible to maintain both of those things. And if you are like, well, I’m a doctoral student and I want to start a business but I don’t know. Try and think about what skillset do you have that you can actually monetize, and that you can do it in a way in which you’ll have time to dedicate to it. Because you don’t want to start a business and you can’t serve your customers well. So I could not show up to my speaking engagements half-tired because I had a paper due last night that was 15, 20 pages, you know? So being able to still serve your customers in whatever capacity that you serve and try and figure out how you can monetize your skillset and do a ton of research, right? If you are interested in speaking, you can look up other speakers that may be doctoral students and figure out how did they do it. So, you never have to recreate the wheel.

How to Reach Natilie

26:22 Emily: How can the listeners find you if they want to learn more about your career or anything else?

26:27 Natilie: Absolutely. I would love for your listeners to follow me on social media and let me know that they found me from the podcast. And so, I can be found on Instagram @NatWillSpeak N A T W I L L S P E A K. And so that is @NatWillSpeak on Instagram, on Twitter, on Facebook. My website, www.natwillspeak.com. And I’m available if you know, they ever want just drop in and say, hi. And my book Innerview, I N N ER, Lessons in Leadership is available on my website, NatWillSpeak.com, and it’s also available on Amazon. And I really kind of lay out even more in the book of how I was able to start the speaking career and elevate it.

27:13 Emily: Yeah. Fascinating. I love that URL slash handle. Your name lent itself so well, that’s amazing.

27:18 Natilie: Thank you. <Laugh>.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

27:20 Emily: So, the question that I ask all of my interviewees before we wrap up is what is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD? And it could be something that we’ve already touched on in the interview, or it could be something completely new.

27:33 Natilie: Know what you have coming in financially, know what you have going out paying bills. And you can do that for as in a budget. Budget, your money, so, you know, again, what you have due every month, what you have coming in, and that will really allow you to take more ownership of your finances to say, Hey, I realized that I have $800 leftover every month. I’m doing pretty good. I can start saving or investing. Or it may make you realize I need $800 more a month. I don’t have enough. Do I need to pick up another position? Do I need to try and apply for a fellowship or a scholarship or outside grants or things of that nature? So, I think that me budgeting, learning to budget my money, I budget down to the dollar. Not to the cents, but to the dollar, and me doing that, I was able to take ownership of my finances and know at all times where I stood. And checking bank accounts daily, making sure that, you know, what’s what, did this bill get taken out? So just knowing where I always stood financially gave me the knowledge to make the best-informed decisions financially as a doctoral student.

28:38 Emily: Well, Natilie, it’s been such a pleasure to meet you and thank you so much for sharing your experience and everything with the listeners! Thanks for coming on!

28:45 Natilie: Thank you so much! Thank you!

Outtro

28:52 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? I have collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

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