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Income

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

February 10, 2020 by Meryem Ok

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

Links Mentioned in the Episode

  • PhD Stipends Database
  • Before Admission Season Starts, Determine what Standard Offer in Your Field Is
  • @frankies.cupcakes (Instagram)
  • https://frankies-cupcakes.com/ (Website)
  • https://www.facebook.com/frankies.cupcakes.yum/ (Facebook)
  • Personal Finance for PhDs: Podcast Hub
  • Personal Finance for PhDs: Subscribe to Mailing List

Teaser

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

Intro

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

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Level of Pay Variation at UW-Madison

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is a Project Assistant?

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

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

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

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

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

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

06:52 Emily: But in reality…

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

RA-ing Does Not Always = Dissertation Work

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

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

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

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

Perspective on Assistantship Tiers

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

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

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

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

Determine the Standard Offer in Your Field Ahead of Time

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

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

A Deep Dive into Frankie’s Side Hustles

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

Tutoring for the Department of Athletics

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

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

Self-Employment: Frankie’s Cupcakes

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

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

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

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

Arbitrage via Poshmark

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

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

GRE Tutoring and College Application Assistance

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

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

Commercial

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

Prioritizing Valuable Side Hustles

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

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

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

Managing Work-Life Balance

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

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

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

Benefits of Therapy in Graduate School

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

Best Financial Advice for Early-Career PhDs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Know Your Worth, and Advocate for Yourself

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

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

Ask for Help: Get to Know Your Administrative Staff

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

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

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

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

Outtro

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

How Winning Fellowships Forced This Grad Student to Take Out Student Loans

January 6, 2020 by Lourdes Bobbio

In this episode, Emily interviews Dessie Clark, a doctoral candidate in Community Sustainability at Michigan State University. In 2018, Dessie received a few small fellowships for conference travel and a couple months of stipend income. In 2019, the financial aid office told her she had been “over-awarded” and had to pay the travel fellowship money back. Dessie took out student loans to pay that bill and then set up a payment plan with the IRS when she couldn’t pay the additional tax due on the fellowships. Dessie shares the steps she takes now when receiving fellowships so that she does not become over-awarded and how to prepare for tax time as a fellowship recipient.

Links Mentioned in This Episode

  • Find Dessie Clark on Twitter and on her website
  • Personal Finance for PhDs: Tax Hub
  • Personal Finance for PhDs: Podcast Hub
  • Personal Finance for PhDs: Subscribe to the mailing list
  • The Complete Guide to Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients
  • Workshop: Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients

over-awarded fellowship grad student

Teaser

00:00 Dessie: Outside of academia, people wouldn’t hesitate to ask questions about their paycheck, right? And so we need to kind of be thinking about it the same way. If something was different on your paycheck, you would ask why or what’s going on and how you need to deal with it. So just not being afraid to try and talk to people about what’s going on with you so you don’t get in a bind.

Introduction

00:22 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season five episode one and today my guest is Dessie Clark, a doctoral candidate and community sustainability at Michigan State University. In 2018, Dessie received several thousand dollars in fellowship income for travel awards and a couple months of stipend income. In 2019, she received a bill from the university for the amount of the travel awards. Apparently, she had become overawarded, a term that was totally new to me., Dessie he took out student loans to pay back the university, and to add insult to injury, faced a higher tax bill that season as well. Dessie relays what she had learned on how to avoid becoming over awarded and her advice for all graduate students receiving stipends. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dessie Clark.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:19 Emily: I have joining me on the podcast today Dessie Clark, who is a graduate student and is going to be telling us about being awarded fellowships as a graduate student and some of the unexpected downsides that can come with being awarded fellowships, which is of course a wonderful thing, but in Dessie’s case they caused a few other complications. Dessie, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today and will you please tell us a little bit about yourself?

01:45 Dessie: My name is Dessie Clark and I am a doctoral candidate in community sustainability at Michigan State University. I actually got my master’s degree at Vanderbilt University in community development and action. And then I moved to Michigan to finish out my PhD.

02:01 Emily: Great. And how long have you been at Michigan State?

02:04 Dessie: I have been at Michigan State for four years.

02:09 Emily: Okay. So I won’t ask you when you’re finishing, but I’ll just say soon, you’re finishing soon.

02:13 Dessie: Yeah, hopefully this year, maybe next year, maybe, you know, whenever.

Funding During the PhD:

02:16 Emily: Yeah. So can you tell us a bit how your funding has worked since you’ve been doing your PhD?

02:22 Dessie: I’ve mostly been funded as a research assistant, so that provides coverage for tuition and then a stipend to live on. There have been a couple of summers where I’ve taught as an instructor, but for the most part it’s been RAs. And then there have been some brief moments in time where fellowships have also come into play, which is what I wanted to talk about today.

02:43 Emily: Yeah. Please elaborate about that. When did you win fellowships and maybe what amounts were they, those kinds of details?

02:52 Dessie: I think one of the things that’s important is that I didn’t necessarily know that I was getting fellowships. How this came into play for me was I had friends that had gotten fellowships and they had talked about how they were unaware of the tax implications. So I knew when I was going to apply for fellowships or asked for them that there would be tax implications there. But for me, I was actually receiving fellowships in the form of travel awards. So there were multiple times where I applied to go to conferences, and when I was awarded that travel money, I wasn’t aware that they were fellowships. So I’ve won I guess, fellowships of several thousand dollars for travel. Then there was a brief time where, I needed to change labs and so fellowships were used to fund me in my transition.

03:40 Emily: Okay. So definitely for the travel awards, we’re only talking about thousand, few thousand dollars here and there. Seemingly a relatively small amount of money, right? And then when you were switching labs, was it a semester’s worth of funding or how long was that?

03:54 Dessie: It was still relatively small. It was a couple of thousand dollars, but all of these fellowships awards actually happened in the same semester, so by the end it ended up being like $7,000 or $8,000.

04:07 Emily: Oh, okay. When they hit all at once, it really does add up in that case. Okay. So yeah, you didn’t really know that that was what you were receiving. So what happened? You get this money and it’s all good, right?

04:19 Dessie: Right. So I get this money and I’m really excited, I can afford to go to these conferences, I’m able to switch labs. But one of the things that I didn’t know is that they were fellowships, so I was kind of surprised two-fold. The first thing that happened that let me know that something wasn’t going quite right was that — this was in the fall of 2018 — so when I was going to start school in spring 2019, I got a bill from the university that said, “you owe us money, you’ve been over awarded.” I had no idea what that meant, but what I understand now is that every student has a cap on what they’re allowed to receive for education-related expenses. They had decided that this amount of money that I had received for travel had thrown me over that, so I needed to pay back university. That was kind of the first thing I noticed.

Fellowship Cap and Being Over-awarded

05:05 Emily: Let me pause there, because this term over awarded is new to me as well. What are you paying back to the university?

05:16 Dessie: What they were charging me ended up being the sum total of those travel award costs. There’s something that you can do to kind of help with this. Like I said, every student has a cap for how much money they’re allowed to receive, but one of the things that your department can do is they can write a letter saying, “This travel money is necessary for this person’s education. This is advancing their education or contributing in some way and this money is going towards that. It’s nothing extra. It’s not something we can go shopping on. This is money for the students’ education.” I didn’t know that that was something that could be done or needed to be done, so it wasn’t done in my case. I got this bill and it happened to be for the exact amount that I had received for travel awards. I found out through talking to financial aid that basically those things have been passed through as fellowships and because of how they were categorized, I got more money from the university than I was allowed to and so I needed to pay it back.

06:12 Emily: So it sounds like your stipend had been paid by your RA position and this supplemental fellowship, but those were kind of evening out to be what you’re allowed to be paid. And then these travel awards were over and above that and they were like, you’re not allowed to receive this money. This is literally the first time I’ve heard of this. I don’t know if maybe this is unique to your university or your department or maybe in all these cases, other people write these letters, their advisors write these letters that you’re talking about. I’m not sure how that works out, but this is really the first time I’m hearing about this, so it’s definitely raising like some major red flags for me.

06:46 Dessie: Yes. So from my understanding, and this is just what I’ve been told, this kind of cap exists for every student that is at a university, but I don’t know if it’s just how my university chose to handle it, or if this is happening a lot more than people know about, but basically what happened was I was over whatever that cap is. So it became a huge issue because now I’m sitting here before I can start school being told that I was thousands of dollars.

07:15 Emily: Right, exactly. So what did you do?

07:19 Dessie: What I did was what I didn’t want to do, I took out student loans and they subtract it from that.

07:24 Emily: So you took out student loans to pay the university for money that you had won that you used go to conferences. This Is bananas. This situation makes no sense. I’m really glad that you volunteered to come on the podcast to talk about this because the situation I’ve heard in the past for other students is that maybe they have a fellowship coming from the university or maybe they have an RA position or TA, something like that. Then they win a fellowship that’ll pay like their stipend. And a lot of students think, “I am in the money now.” They think getting that fellowship on top of the existing funding for their RA position or whatever it was. That is almost universally not the case. It is possible that you may end up being paid more than you were going to in the first place, but it’s not going to be double what your stipend was to begin with. And so there’s plenty of people who are caught by surprise by “what I just won funding, what do you mean you just take away my other funding?” No, that’s definitely how that works everywhere. There may be some room for negotiation and so forth, but that’s how the standard situation works. But I’m really glad to hear about your situation as well. So you know, now that you have been through the whole thing, what could have been done on your behalf and wasn’t. I don’t know. This is something that I’ve never heard of, of a student having a proactively ask for, so of course you wouldn’t have known, but I guess in the future, anyone listening who receives extra fellowships in some manner, make sure that you’re not going to run into any kind of cap, or whatever exceptions need to be made are going to be made on your behalf. Is that your advice?

Proactive Steps to Avoid Getting Over-awarded

08:54 Dessie: Yes, that is definitely my advice. I think something else too that really ties into this, that I experienced, is I got another fellowship for travel in spring and of course this time I was like, “hi, can you please write this letter and send it to financial aid? “And they were able to do that. But I came upon a situation this summer where there was something the university was going to pay for and they weren’t able to pay for it the way that they want it to. I had gone to my college and I said, I need help figuring out how this thing is going to get paid for, but it can’t be a fellowship because I’m scared I’m going to get over awarded again and I’m going to owe it. My college was really great at hearing that concern and trying to work with me on it, but what ended up happening in the meantime is that the graduate school at my university granted it as a fellowship anyway. One of the things that I think is a kind of a broader issue is that when we’re getting loans or we’re getting grants, we have to accept them and there’s usually some paperwork that we have to go through promising whatever and making sure we fully understand the impacts, but I was awarded a fellowship without my permission basically. I think that the school has figured it out, so that way I won’t be over awarded and this won’t impact me, but I also think that’s why I said at the beginning, it’s really important to know how things are being classified and categorized on your behalf because maybe something is a fix, but then all of a sudden six months down the road you’re being asked to pay it back. I think keeping an eye on that is really important.

10:15 Emily: Yeah. I mean, it sounds like you were taking the proactive steps the second time around that you knew to take, and yet, as you just said, they can just push these things through into your student account and there’s no process around it. It’s totally on their end and they have control over it. But I guess, did it just end up being that they just took it back like, “Oh, we gave it to you, now we’re going to take it back and award you the money in some other way?”

10:40 Dessie: They ended up just doing what I was talking about before and doing the right amount of paperwork to explain why this is an educational expense and all of that. I think it was handled because they knew that there were some extra steps that needed to be taken. But I think another thing too is you asked me how I found out about all this. Like so many other students at tax time, it really became a “you owe this money.” I think too, it’s easy for us to just think like, well this was only, you know, $1,000 here or $1,000 there. But it really adds up. And for most graduate students, we’re not in a super comfortable financial place. So even a surprise tax of a couple of hundred dollars can really set you back.

11:20 Emily: Yeah, and sometimes I think it’s easy to forget the academic year and the calendar year don’t line up, right? So you could be receiving fellowships maybe in two different academic years, but if they fall in the same calendar year, then it’s all going to add up at that year-end tax return.

Commercial

11:40 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. Tax season is upon us and while no one loves this time of year, it’s particularly difficult for post-bac fellows, funded grad students, and postdoc fellows. Even professional tax preparers are often thrown for a loop by our unique tax situation. And don’t get me started on tax software. I provide tons of support at this time of year for PhD trainees preparing their tax returns. From free articles and videos, to paid at-your-own-pace workshops, to live seminars and webinars for universities and research institutes. The best place to go to check out all of this material is pfforphds.com/tax that’s P F F O R P H D dot com slash T A X. Don’t struggle through tax season on your own. Visit my website for the exact information you need in the most efficient form available. Now back to the interview.

Tax Consequences of Being Over-awarded

12:44 Emily: Okay, not only did you, you know — Hey, you received award funding. Awesome. Got that. Oh no, you have to pay it back to the school. Ridiculous. You have to take out student loans, do that. So essentially, with some middlemen, you were just taking out student loans to go to conferences, which is probably not a decision, it sounds like, you would have made, had you known that was going to be outcome. On top of that, travel and research is not a qualified education expense for making fellowships tax free. So you end up with this tax bill on top of all the other stuff that’s happening. How did that play out?

13:19 Dessie: I think one of the things that I knew when I was changing labs is that I knew that a portion of that fellowship money, I knew it was untaxed* and I was gonna need it. So I was able to put that aside. What surprised me is when I sat down with my accountant and she put two and two together, that all these other things had been categorized as fellowships, the amount I had set aside to pay taxes on was not nearly the amount of money that I needed. That was obviously a huge strain. I’m lucky enough that I have a partner who works, but we did end up having to go on a payment plan to the IRS because I just couldn’t afford to come out of pocket the amount that I owed.

[* By ‘untaxed,’ Dessie is referring to the fact that income tax was not withheld for her on this portion of her income, not necessarily that it is tax-free.]

13:57 Emily: At the point when you were working with your tax preparer, at what point in tax season was that? Were you getting ready to file and you found out that, “Oh wait, I’m going to owe more than I had set aside?”

14:08 Dessie: It was right at the end. There was no fixing it. I getting ready to file taxes and she’s like, this is not looking good, and it was what it was at that point.

14:18 Emily: Not all the listeners may know, but some people might hear, maybe from their parents or something, about filing extensions. So they get another, I don’t know, six months or something to file your tax return. You do not get an extension on actually the tax that you owe. You only get the extension on the return. So if you’re finding out in March or April that you owe a tax bill and you’re not prepared to pay it, as you said, graduate students typically live without much margin in their lives. If you find that you owe a tax but you’re not prepared to pay it, really probably the best thing to do is what you did, which is to go on a payment plan with the IRS. A lot of people would say, “Oh my gosh, the IRS, I’m so afraid I don’t want to talk to them. I don’t want to deal with them,” but actually that’s the worst step you can take, is not to talk to them. Did the payment plan work out okay? Did it end up being all right that you could pay a little bit over time?

15:06 Dessie: I’m still on it to this day. I owed a chunk and there’s only so much I could put towards it per month. So yeah, it has worked out. I’m making my payments so I haven’t gotten in trouble with the IRS, but it isn’t a new bill now every month that I have to pay. I think too, just thinking about this calendar year and the implications for next tax season, I think now I’m just very closely watching anything financially that comes through the school just to make sure I don’t get into this situation again. I know now there are ways that your department or your college can help you, and making sure that these expenses are processed the way they should be as true education expenses and not as extra in your life. And just keeping an eye on that. I think especially as I get into the fall, I will definitely be following up with my administrators and saying, “Hey, just want to make sure I see this here. Was there something that went with this to make sure that I’m not getting a bill for being over-awarded again, or I’m not having any more tax implications than I already know I will have.”

Saving Money for Taxes When Your Fellowships Do Not Have Tax Withheld

16:08 Emily: Right. At this point, now that you’re so aware and you’re so proactive about everything, are you filing quarterly estimated tax or does your additional tax due not rise to that level of necessity?

16:22 Dessie: It doesn’t rise to that level, but I am always putting stuff aside. Even when there are things that should be categorized in a way that I won’t have to worry about that, I’m still always just taking a certain percentage and putting it aside, because I think in my situation, the worst case scenario is to have what happened this year and be totally surprised and unprepared, because that’s exactly what happened.

16:42 Emily: Can you tell the listeners a little bit about your system for setting money aside? Because maybe they want to know, mechanically, how you do that.

16:48 Dessie: Yeah. I am not an accountant so I don’t have this down to any kind of science. It’s just kind of what I’ve found has worked for me. So anytime that I get any kind of award through the school, whether it be for travel or whatever else, it could be research money, I always take about 30% of that and I put it in a savings account. And that seems to be kind of a pretty safe estimate of you definitely won’t need to pay more than that, and so I think that’s been my system now. Even when I make requests for money, I always keep that in mind, because I think something that I’ve watched other students go through is they ask for exactly what they need, forgetting about that tax buffer. And so you might end up short or paying back necessary money later.

17:33 Emily: Yeah, good idea. I do think 30% is a very good margin, probably more than you’ll need, but better to be on the safe side than on the sorry side, as you definitely found out. Do you have like a separate savings account that you use for that or something?

17:46 Dessie: Yes, I have a savings account that I just don’t touch. I kind of joke with my partner, that it’s like the savings account that you don’t use as a savings account. There is no level of emergency that could make me touch that money. I pretend it’s not there because for all intents and purposes, it’s not mine. It’s the government’s, and I don’t want to end up in a situation. I mean it’s August, right? And I’m still on a payment plan for this past year’s taxes. I don’t want to have to do that again.

18:12 Emily: Yeah, I do the exact same thing. When I was in graduate school, some years…Well, I guess it wasn’t in graduate school, but it was when I did my postbac, taxes weren’t being withheld. I had to pay quarterly estimated tax at that time. I started doing the exact same thing. I set up a separate savings account, I have it nicknamed tax, put money in there as I get money to come in, withdraw from it as I was paying quarterly estimated tax. But I wanted to say that I do the exact same thing as you, which is that I don’t think about that tax savings account as being my money. Right now, when I’m self employed, I also have the responsibility of paying quarterly estimated tax. And so I actually calculate my, or our family’s net worth every month, on the first of the month, and so I calculate two numbers, which is one my technical net worth, which includes the tax money in it, and then what I label as my true net worth, which subtracts that tax savings account balance out. And I say, “Nope, I don’t even think of it as being mine right now because, as you said, I know I just have to hand it over to the IRS in a few months.” I don’t want to think of it as accessible at all, in the meantime. So yeah, thanks for sharing about that.

Final Words of Advice

19:16 Emily: Is there any other final advice around the situation that you would want to tell someone else so they don’t get into the same kind of problems that you did?

19:24 Dessie: Yeah, just kind of recapping what I said. So I think, of course, the conversation that fellowships are untaxed* is just a broader conversation we need to be having in general because I don’t think a lot of people know that. But again, just monitoring how things are being processed for you and if they’re technically being categorized as a fellowship. Then, I think that for the most part students are pretty safe. I don’t want to create mass panic as far as this cap goes. If you’re just talking about you just have an RA or you know, just the little student loans or you just have a TA. I think where you start to get near this cap is when you’re doing a lot of research awards and travel awards and teaching where it’s on top of what you’re already getting. I think for students that might have multiple things going on, like I clearly had, making sure you’re having a conversation and knowing where that line is so that way you don’t cross it because the way that they balance their books is you’re not going to know until you’re far down the road and the money is already spent. It’s going to be the next semester. So just keeping an eye on that and honestly just reaching out and asking your financial aid office and saying “I know that there’s a certain amount of aid that we’re allowed to get. What is my number?” So you can kind of monitor it yourself because I really think that for most people, you’re better off saying, “No, I’m not going to take that award this semester. No, I’m not going to get this or do this now” and waiting, so you don’t cross that line and end up having the money need to be paid back.

[* By ‘untaxed,’ Dessie is referring to the fact that income tax was not withheld for her on this portion of her income, not necessarily that it is tax-free.]

20:44 Emily: Yeah. Or just be aware, as you were saying earlier, that these letters or whatever can be written so that the money goes on top. So it sounds like, at least your university, your department, it wouldn’t be like, oh, your advisor just wants to pay you more or someone wants to just like give you a fellowship. You’re going to run into problems with that. It has to be something that’s justifiable under their system for raising their cap on an exception basis to allow that award to go through.

21:10 Dessie: Right, and I think too, just noting that the people that work in financial aid may not be as familiar with why research money or why conference money is an educational expense. So things that you might see and go through and you think, “Oh yeah, that’s totally an expense for my education. Anyone would see that?” No, you might have to justify it and they might need, you know, justification from your department on why this is important for your education.

21:32 Emily: Yeah. And I will just add that financial aid professionals and so forth, they’re not going to touch this tax issue with you. They’re going tell you to go away if you try to ask them tax questions. But in the area of how much you’re supposed to be awarded and what the education expenses are, they are the experts in that area. So you can definitely go to them with those kinds of questions. Just don’t ask them, “what’s my tax bill going to be?” They’re not going to answer that. But, yeah, among that subject matter, they are the best people to go to, I think. It sounds like you’ve developed a little bit of a working relationship with those people.

22:04 Emily: Dessie, thank you so much for giving this interview and sharing the story. I think it’s really unfortunate how it worked out and also just that you were saying that you didn’t catch all of this until the following calendar year or the following semester, naturally. That’s how these things work. Of course you wouldn’t, but because it happened so late, it sounds like the proper paperwork couldn’t have been pushed through in the past. I just want to ask the concluding question that I ask of all my guests, which is what is your best financial advice for another graduate student or early career PhD?

22:34 Dessie: I think asking questions. I think that early and often you should ask questions about the money that you’re getting, where it’s coming from, how it’s classified, and just always not being afraid to shoot financial aid and message and say “Hey, this has come through. Is there anything I need to do with this?” Because I think everyone, us included, but also the financial aid folks would rather be proactive about dealing with a problem rather than getting the early spring email, which was “what is happening, I can’t pay you a couple of thousand dollars.” I think just always asking questions and not being scared to ask about how these things impact you. Outside of academia, people wouldn’t hesitate to ask questions about their paycheck, right? And so we need to kind of be thinking about the same way. If something was different on your paycheck, you would ask why or what’s going on and how you need to deal with it. So just not being afraid to try and talk to people about what’s going on with you so you don’t get in a bind.

23:28 Emily: Yeah, absolutely. And like you said earlier, you don’t have to accept a fellowship. It can just be pushed through. And likewise for some other people, they might not even really be aware of how they’re being paid. They’re just kind of receiving a paycheck and they don’t really know is it from an assistantship. I mean they would know if they were teaching your class, right? They know if it says teaching assistantship, but is it a fellowship, is it an RA, I don’t know. The roles, like what you actually do for each of those things, are pretty much the same. So you might not even be aware until you get a W2 at tax time or don’t get a W2 at tax time, what happened in the previous year. Then, if any adjustments need to have made, then it’s too late, right? Then the tax year has already ended. So totally want to underline that advice — know why you’re being paid, know what kind of tax forms you’re going to receive.

24:10 Emily: I just want to add in a final note for the listeners, if there’s anyone listening who is receiving a fellowship, even a small award, like what Dessie’s been talking about during this interview, you should look into whether or not you need to file quarterly estimated tax. I’m going to link in the show notes my massive article on quarterly estimated tax. And I also have a workshop on that that’s linked from that article. So I’ll link to both those things in the show notes. Please note that the deadlines for quarterly estimate tax are in mid April, mid June, mid September and mid January of every year, usually the 15th of the month or the business day following. So keep those deadlines in mind. If you are receiving a fellowship, you might not have to pay quarterly, but at least you need to investigate and figure out whether or not it’s your responsibility, or whether like what Dessie’s doing, you can just set the money aside and leave it until the end of the year and pay it all at once with your annual tax return.

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25:01 Emily: Thank you again Dessie for coming on and giving this interview and giving this word of warning to all the other graduate students listening.

25:08 Dessie: Thank you for having me.

Outtro

25:10 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPphDs.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. There, you can find links to all the episode show notes and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, here are four ways you can help it grow. One, subscribe to the podcast and rate and review it on Apple podcast, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. Two, share an episode you found particularly valuable on social media or with your PhD peers. Three, recommend me as a speaker to your university or association. My seminars covered the personal finance topics PhDs are most interested in, like investing, debt repayment, and taxes. Four, subscribe to my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/subscribe. Through that list, you’ll keep up with all the new content and special opportunities for Personal Finance for PhDs. See you in the next episode, and remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is Stages of Awakening by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Lourdes Bobbio.

How Effective Presentations Advance Your Career and Improve Your Finances

December 23, 2019 by Lourdes Bobbio

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Echo Rivera, a PhD in community psychology and founder of Creative Research Communications. Echo is an expert in effective presentation, and she teaches these skills to other academics and researchers. Emily and Echo discuss the various ways effective presenting can improve an early-career PhD’s finances, such as through career advancement and networking in person and online. Effective presentation design can even help you feel more confident and move past a fear of public speaking, as it did for Echo.

Links Mentioned in This Episode

  • Creative Research Communications
  • Find Dr. Echo Rivera on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube
  • Personal Finance for PhDs: Sign up for personal finance coaching
  • Personal Finance for PhDs: Wealthy PhD group program sign-up
  • Personal Finance for PhDs: Podcast Hub
  • Personal Finance for PhDs: Subscribe to the mailing list

effective presenting PhDs

Teaser

00:00 Echo: Try to invest in yourself as soon as you can. Especially for something like effective communication skills, effective presentation skills, the earlier you can get in on some type of professional development, it’s going to pay off more in the long run.

Introduction

00:21 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season 4, episode 19 and today my guest is Dr. Echo Rivera, a PhD in community psychology and expert in effective presentation design. During graduate school, Echo began teaching herself effective presentation design to help her move past her own anxiety around public speaking. Through her business, Creative Research Communications, she teaches academics and researchers how to present effectively. We discuss the various ways effective presenting can improve your career prospects and financial bottom line. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Echo Rivera.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:05 Emily: Joining me on the podcast today is Dr. Echo Rivera, and I’m so pleased to have Echo on. We’ve been in each other’s circles for a number of years now, but this is actually the first time that we’re talking together live. I’m really excited to have a conversation with her about what she does and how it can improve early career PhDEs finances. So Echo, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

01:26 Echo: Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here.

01:29 Emily: Awesome. So please tell us a little bit more about yourself.

01:33 Echo: Yeah, so just real briefly, I have a PhD in community psychology from Michigan State University and immediately after finishing my PhD, I got a job as a research associate at a nonprofit research and evaluation center and that’s in Denver, Colorado. I worked there for three years and then quit so that I could pursue my own business full time. That’s called Creative Research Communications and I’ve been doing that for about one and a half years. That’s the nutshell.

02:09 Emily: So one and a half years full time, but you started this sometime before you left your job?

02:14 Echo: Yeah, it was the side hustle. Something I worked on on the weekends or when I got home after work.

02:20 Emily: Yeah, we talk plenty about side hustling on this podcast. Echo and I met through the self employed PhD community originally, which now is part of Beyond the Professoriate run by Jen Polk and Maren Wood. If any of you are self employed in your side hustle or your full time thing, or interested in that, that’s a great community to join to have more conversations with me and people like Echo and others who are pursuing the same kind of thing, so definitely want to plug that.

More About Creative Research Communications

02:48 Emily: All right. So awesome. You’re now self-employed. Tell us a little bit more about what your business is, like what do you actually do?

02:56 Echo: Yeah, so I help academics and researchers and scientists and basically people in this higher education world, I help them communicate their work more effectively and creatively. So that’s mostly through slide presentations, like PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides, stuff like that, because it’s just a great place to start for a lot of people, but it also includes things like comics and infographics and visual abstracts and just things that are beyond a standard conference presentation or publication. Today I’ll be focusing on presentations, but a lot of it’s about creativity.

03:36 Emily: Gotcha. What inspired you to go into this line of work?

03:40 Echo: In undergrad I was really torn between going into graphic design for my major or psychology for my major. I had already transferred universities and it was already going to take me five years to get my bachelor’s degree and it would have taken even longer if I switched my major to graphic design. So I basically just went with psychology and I enjoyed research. My degree is in research, not clinical psychology, so I just kind of went with it. But I never really left that graphic design world. I took classes, I learned on my own, and in grad school, I just kind of started merging those together, using graphic design for things like participant recruitment flyers and toolkits, presentations, obviously. I did comics for a blog. It just kind of always was merged for me, and I really loved it, so I made it my business.

04:37 Emily: Yeah. Well, it is kind of a leap from applying your talents and doing something for your own work, to teaching others how to do it or doing it for other people. Now which one do you do or is it both?

04:49 Echo: It’s both. I do design presentation slides or comics or things like that for others. I also train people to do it and I have sort of different options, like an online course or one-on-one sort of more mentoring style. I try to help everybody where they’re at, and what their available time and resources look like. So I offer that that wide range.

05:13 Emily: Gotcha. Very, very exciting. I had another interview recently in season three with Dr. Gaius Augustus who told a similar story, I’m sure you know Gaius, of how he also was an artist and a scientist and over time has found a way to combine both of those two passions. So yeah, really cool that we’re having another episode around that same idea.

Effective Presenting and Finances

05:35 Emily: But Echo, why are you here on a personal finance podcast talking about effective presenting? How can the skills that you teach people, if people are able to present more effectively, how can that actually affect their bottom line?

05:52 Echo: I’m so excited to talk about this, especially because I haven’t really talked about this on my blog, yet, so this is kind of the first time I’m really out there telling people this, but I need to, because effective presenting it can help you in some pretty obvious ways, but also some more indirect ways that you might not have thought about. The things I want to talk about today are how effective presenting can help you with the obvious thing, which is a job talk. Pretty important. And some of the less obvious things, like networking and promotions, once you have a job.

Situation #1: Job Talks

06:29 Emily: Excellent. Yeah, let’s get started with the obvious one. If you are finishing up your PhD, finishing up a postdoc, finishing up a job, you’re looking for something new. Pretty common. If you’re going to another research position, certainly within academia, but also outside of academia that you’re going to have to give a job talk or research talk in some capacity. So you’re presenting your past work, maybe you’re even presenting a proposal for future work at that particular institution. That’s kind of the context of what we mean by a job talk. So what can people do when they’re preparing for a job talk to make it killer? And why would it matter if they did a great presenting job with that? How would that actually affect whether or not they get the position?

07:10 Echo: Yeah, yeah. Let’s talk about all of that. So why does this matter? I’ll start there. The reason why this matters is because once you get to that point, once you’re invited for an interview, the job talk is probably one of the most important things. I have even a couple of quotes for you. Karen Kelsey, from The Professor Is In, who is amazing and if you don’t know about her website definitely check it out. In one of her webinars about job talks, she had a quote, this is sort of like a loose quote, but she said “you cannot bomb the job talk and still get the job.” She just came right out and she just said it. You’re not going to get an offer if you bomb the job talk. That’s how important it is. And even Rick Reis, I might be saying his name wrong, from Stanford, he’s called Tomorrow’s Professor, he said the job talk is, quote: “Perhaps the single most important thing you’ll do during an academic interview.” So you know that’s a lot of pressure. I mean a lot rides on this job talk and —

08:22 Emily: I just want to jump in there, because it’s a little bit almost counterintuitive to think that it would matter that much, right? If you can’t do this one thing, you are disqualified from this new position. Because maybe giving presentations is not going to be a huge part of that actual job. Maybe doing the research is what it is or maybe it’s teaching, which is a little bit different from a presentation kind of scenario. The one-on-one interviewing that you do over the course of the interview visit, all that stuff matters as well. And maybe why is the job talk important in particular? I mean, we’re not asking why, we’re just saying it is really, really important. It’s a little bit counterintuitive because maybe you’re not thinking that that’s a huge part of what you do. I mean, what percentage of your time do you actually spend presenting, as like a researcher or an academic? It’s pretty small ,yet a lot rides on those singular moments, right?

09:17 Echo: Yeah, absolutely. And I think part of it is…I don’t know how it was 10, 15 years ago, but we all know how much more competitive the job market is now. It’s an ultra competitive situation and it is one way where you can set yourself apart from other people who are also there or doing a job talk. So that is one reason I think it’s so important. But I’m sure it’s a complex combination of reasons too.

09:50 Emily: That was the obvious thing, right? You’ve got to nail the job talk, of course, and the skills that you teach are going to help the candidate do that. Outside of the job talk scenario, what are some other ways and other scenarios where effective presenting can really help your finances?

Situation #2: Networking

10:08 Echo: Networking is one of the ones that might surprise people, because it is a little more indirect. This is something that will help just about everyone. I know we were just talking about a job talk and an academic interview, which mostly applies to academic jobs, but in terms of nonacademic jobs, as well as academic jobs, your network is crucial. It’s crucial for getting opportunities, whether it’s for publications or projects or grants or jobs even — your network is really crucial at pretty much any stage of your career. So how do you network? There’s a lot of tips out there, there’s a lot of suggestions, and one way is through presentations. So how? If you think about it, conferences are actually an excellent opportunity for increasing your network, which I think a lot of people already know. I don’t think that’s new and surprising. What people might not think about is that if you have a visually engaging, effective presentation, one that is organized, one that is easy to follow, that people understand that doesn’t feel overwhelming, isn’t just all text, isn’t just bullet points, it doesn’t have word clouds, doesn’t have all the data, it’s an organized narrative — people will be more likely to come up to you and talk to you after your presentation and you’re going to stand out more. If you think about it, one hard part about networking is just making that introduction. When you want to meet someone new but you’re nervous, you don’t know how to break the ice, you don’t know what to say — if you have a presentation, you’ve given that to people. People can now come up to you and they know what they want to say — “your presentation was great, your slides were great, I loved your presentation” — and it breaks the ice and people have already connected with you because you presentation was great. It speeds all that up along and encourages ways to build your network.

12:17 Emily: I totally, totally agree with you. Obviously as someone who presents as part of my living, I agree with you that it’s, it’s a wonderful way to start networking. Another thing, a little bit to take a step back from maybe an individual presentation that you give, if you as a researcher, as a PhD, increase your confidence around presenting because you’ve learned how to create effective visuals, you’ve done some practicing of your actual delivery of presentation, wouldn’t you be more likely to put your name in to do this sort of thing more and more and more, if you build up your skills and you feel competent. It’s kind of a stereotype, but public speaking is people’s number one fear, right? It’s like the worst, most intimidating thing that you would possibly do. Many, many people think that. So instead of shrinking back from those opportunities, if you have confidence around that, especially if you’ve been trained in some capacity, then you can again, put yourself out there, put yourself forward, and be increasing your network, because you’re just having more and more of those opportunities, where maybe you wouldn’t, if you weren’t feeling so confident about it.

13:23 Echo: Absolutely. I’m really glad that you actually brought that up because I’ve really started all of this — my own personal training for effective presenting, because I was terrified of public speaking. I was scared. I was nervous. I would throw up before a presentation. I was really high on that anxiety scale. I started doing visual presentations and storytelling and academic presentations almost as a way to distract from myself and help myself just get up on the stage hoping people would look at my slides and not mean. Then, just over time people would compliment me and I would be surprised and not believe them at first, but then, over time, it really did build up my confidence and now I love it. Now I love public speaking and giving presentations because I know people are going to engage with it. It’s going to resonate with them, they’re going to be able to understand it and it goes really well.

14:23 Emily: Yeah, and this ties into the job talk part of it as well. If you’re feeling confident about giving that job talk, you’re going to come off that much better in the interview. Something I’ve also seen, and this is sort of regarding networking as well, in the past few years since I’ve been giving presentations at universities, I see people pull out their phones or their iPads and take photos of my screen. I’m assuming it’s usually for their own like future reference or something like that. But if you, and I’m not saying I do, but if one has really beautiful visuals up on that screen, that’s a sharing opportunity, in terms of social media. We’ve all seen, if you follow a conference on Twitter, people are posting images of slides from presentations and so forth, so if you have a particularly beautiful, engaging, clear, as you were saying earlier, slide, that’s something that could even expand that network beyond the people in the room.

15:18 Echo: That’s such a great idea. Yeah, that is so true. I definitely see people sharing slides from conferences they’re at all the time on Twitter and the ones that get a lot of engagement and excitement are definitely the ones I would say are more well-designed compared to the ones that are all text, small text, bullet points, that kind of thing.

15:38 Emily: Yeah. The text ones might be getting some photos in the room because they’re like, “Oh, I can’t read all of this and the amount of time it’s going to be up, I need this for future reference”, but the shareable ones are definitely going to be the more beautiful and clear ones.

Commercial

15:53 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. As a listener of this podcast, every week you hear strategies that another PhD has used to improve their financial picture. But listening and learning does not automatically translate into action in your own financial life. If you are ready to change how you think about and handle your money, but need some help getting started, I can be of service. There are two main ways you can work with me to create and implement a financial plan tailored for you. First, I offer one-on-one financial coaching, either as a single session or a series, as you make changes over the long term. You can find out more at PFforPhDs.com/coaching. Second, I offer a group program called The Wealthy PhD that is part coaching, part course, and part community. You can find out more and join the wait list for the next time I open the program at PFforPhDs.com/wealthyPhD. I believe it’s possible to succeed with your finances at every stage of PhD training and throughout your career. Let’s figure out together how to make that happen for you. Now, back to the interview.

Situation #3: Promotions

17:07 Emily: Okay, so what was the third way that effective presenting can affect one’s bottom line?

17:13 Echo: The other way was promotions. This works for academic context, but also nonacademic context. A lot of people think that, okay, so presentations are great for a job talk, itt helps me get the job, but once I have it, now it’s time to worry about tenure. And that is all about publications and that’s not a good time to learn how to present effectively. And yes, publications are important. I’m not trying to diminish that at all, but I think people don’t realize how presentations can help with the other part of the tenure package. So for example, I just had a student in one of my online courses, she’s an assistant professor. She just did her third year review letter, which she called, a mini tenure package and she wrote in there in her section about teaching effectiveness, she talked about the professional development that she took, how it helped her teach her undergrads and how she was evidenced based principles that she learned in my course for learning and memory and that kind of thing. And she had quotes from her student evaluations and her students even said things like “the PowerPoints were the best part of the class” — is a loose quote. But it was something like that where they said PowerPoint slides were the best part of this course. And so it can help you in that area. It can help you with maybe the broader impact, if you have to talk about that. It can help you with those other areas if you just frame it that way.

18:49 Emily: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this all again goes back to effective communication of which presenting and visuals and all of that are components of that. But just effective communication in general, of course that’s going to help you maintain the job you have, get promotions at the job that you’re in, not just in a new job scenario. Yeah. Great point. And again, I actually want to go back to the confidence aspect that we were talking about earlier because I’m thinking, okay, we’ve been talking a lot about landing a job, keeping a job, and that’s career-related, which is obviously within the scope of personal finance. But I’m also thinking about like negotiations. I don’t know if you’d necessarily be using visuals in a in a negotiation session with your potential supervisor or boss, or your existing one, b,ut again around the confidence, if you’re just building up your confidence in talking in front of people, in presenting a case to other people, that is an enormous asset to have with you when you go into a negotiation situation.

19:53 Echo: Yeah, and I would actually agree with that. Part of effective presenting, a lot of people are thinking probably about design, about typography and text and text size and colors and that kind of thing, which is definitely part of it. The other part is also the story-boarding, which is just the word I use to describe organizing your content, what order are you going to say things, what are you going to say, what level of detail. And learning that for presentations is a great place to start, but then it starts helping you just to make good arguments in other areas. I’ve heard this from my students that it even helped with things like grant applications because you learn how to set up your argument and maybe it’s not an argument, but you still learn how to hook the audience from the first thing that you say. So yeah, if you want to negotiate for a promotion or a raise, you’ll have more skills to do that in a more narrative, storytelling kind of way. A lot of academics were trained to do fact, fact, fact, like just a list of facts, just a data dump. And that’s not an effective way to communicate. That wouldn’t be an effective way to communicate for a promotion, probably. You would want to start with more of an engaging opening, so to speak.

21:23 Emily: Yeah. I’m really seeing how, I mean, we started talking about effective presenting, but how these skills that you’re talking about are permeating so many different areas of professional life.

21:35 Emily: Okay, I think we’ve made a good case. People care about the skill set, they want to get better at it. Really quickly, what are some tips that you have for people to do a better job in this area that they could implement right away?

Presentation Tips You Can Implement Today

21:52 Echo: Yeah. I think there’s some things that you’ve heard before so I won’t spend too much time on them. I’ll just reinforce them a little bit. Less text. Yes, even academics want less text on your slides and you want to use bigger font sizes. A lot of people they have too small font sizes. The other thing that I wanted to mention, because a lot of people feel like the problem is PowerPoint, and that they have to spend a lot of money on a fancy program like Prezi, or they have to take a lot of time to learn a new program. I have good news and the good news is that you don’t need to do that. PowerPoint is actually fantastic. You can absolutely make visually engaging presentations with PowerPoint or with Keynote. So if you’re an Apple user, Keynote is great as well. Google Slides is okay. It has fewer features, and most people have PowerPoint anyway. So PowerPoint is great. You can totally use PowerPoint.

22:53 Emily: Yeah. So it turns out the tool was not the problem, it’s our usage of the tool.

22:59 Echo: Exactly. And the other thing I wanted to mention was habits. You probably also know that you should be practicing your presentation and that you should be starting your presentation earlier than say, on the plane ride to the conference. I know —

23:16 Emily: You don’t say?

23:17 Echo: I know it happens, I’ve done it, so I totally get it, I’ve totally been there. But if you start earlier, it doesn’t have to be a lot of time, but if you start earlier and give yourself time in between revisions, you’ll be surprised at how much better your presentations turn out, because I think a lot of presentations are ineffective because people are cramming in it at the last second.

23:40 Emily: Yeah, it’s just something that hasn’t been thought through well yet.

23:44 Echo: Yeah, exactly.

Final Words of Advice

23:46 Emily: The final question that I like to ask everyone who comes on the podcast is what is your best financial advice for another early career PhD? And that could be related to what we’ve been talking about today or it could be something totally different.

24:00 Echo: Yeah, I think, partly related to what we’re talking about is try to invest in yourself as soon as you can. Especially for something like effective communication skills, effective presentation skills, the earlier you can get in on some type of professional development, it’s going to pay off more in the long run. For example, if you learn it now, then you’re going to have those skills when it comes time to make your job talk presentation, you’re teaching demo. You’ll already know how to make good slides for that and a good presentation from start to finis,h rather than trying to do all of that at the last second. And the earlier you learn it, the sooner your presentations will be better and more effective, and then you can sort of continue to improve on that over time. That’s sort of a tip I wanted to share.

24:53 Emily: Yeah, totally, totally agree. And the thing is, the listener might be thinking, especially if they’re still in training, “I am investing in myself right now, I’m taking this huge pay cut to like be in grad school or be doing a postdoc, that is investing in myself.” But the unfortunate reality, as we mentioned earlier, is that a lot of essential skills for the workplace, and even for the job you have right now, are not being taught by universities or by advisers or by departments. Maybe they are in some pockets, I don’t want to say that’s a universal thing. Maybe you at your university have a course on public speaking. Maybe there’s something available to you, that’s awesome if you can take advantage of that. But probably most places it’s not available, or it’s not really a good time investment, maybe you have to put way too much time into it than what would be effective for you. So I totally agree that it’s oftentimes very necessary to go outside the university environment to pick up these skills. And the earlier you do it, of course, as you said, the more and more you can deploy those skills over the years and hone them and continue to develop them.

Find Dr. Echo Rivera Online

25:58 Emily: Speaking of which, Echo, how do people get them to get you to teach them some of these skills that we’ve been talking about?

26:06 Echo: Yeah, so I hope that I’ve excited people about learning presentation design and how to be an effective presenter because I have tons of stuff on my website. I have free courses, I have tons of blog posts, I have some download-ables in my blog posts, I have a YouTube channel. All of that you can find at echorivera.com so it’s just my name, Echo Rivera dot com. I’m also really active on social media. I’m on Twitter and Instagram and my handles are @echoechoR. Find me on social media, check out my website. I’d love to connect and I’m just kind of curious what people thought of this podcast and if they learned something new or just want to chat, so don’t hesitate to reach out.

26:59 Emily: Yeah, absolutely. When this episode comes out, I’ll be tweeting a bunch of times that week and tagging Echo and certainly reply to any of those and tell us like what you thought about this. Maybe this is a surprising thing for us to talk be talking about on a personal finance podcast, but as you can see, it plays into your finances in so many different ways and these skill sets are so essential. Echo, thank you so much for, for being my guest today.

27:24 Echo: Thanks so much for having me.

Outtro

27:26 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPphDs.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. There, you can find links to all the episode show notes and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, here are four ways you can help it grow. One, subscribe to the podcast and rate and review it on Apple podcast, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. Two, share an episode you found particularly valuable on social media or with your PhD peers. Three, recommend me as a speaker to your university or association. My seminars covered the personal finance topics PhDs are most interested in, like investing, debt repayment, and taxes. Four, subscribe to my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/subscribe. Through that list, you’ll keep up with all the new content and special opportunities for Personal Finance for PhDs. See you in the next episode, and remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is Stages of Awakening by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Lourdes Bobbio.

This PhD Compares Her Experiences at a Unionized University and a Non-Unionized University

November 18, 2019 by Meryem Ok

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Carly Overfelt. Carly received a master’s from Purdue University, which does not have a graduate student union, and a PhD from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which has a longstanding graduate student union. Carly compares and contrasts her experiences as a graduate student worker at her two alma maters; she received higher pay and benefits at UMass. She shares the history of the graduate student union at UMass and the nature of her work within the union’s bargaining unit. At the end of the interview, we address the core questions around graduate student unions: Does the university view graduate students primarily as students or primarily as workers? Are graduate students paid well enough for their assistantship work to allow them to pursue their other job of completing their dissertation?

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grad student union experience

Teaser

00:00 Carly: A lot of union work and bargaining is holding onto as much of what you already had as you can because unions are not as powerful as they used to be. And so, usually, when you’re bargaining, you’re trying to mitigate something disastrous that the management is doing. They’re usually slashing something, and you are using your collective power to mitigate that as much as possible.

Introduction

00:27 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season four, episode 14, and today my guest is Dr. Carly Overfelt. Carly received a masters from Purdue University, which does not have a graduate student union, and a PhD from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which has a longstanding graduate student union. Carly compares and contrasts her experiences as a graduate student worker at her two alma maters. She shares the history of the graduate student union at UMass and the nature of her work within the union’s bargaining unit. At the end of the interview, we get to the heart of the question around graduate student unions: Does your university support you in your dual roles as student and worker, or does one eclipse the other? Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Carly Overfelt.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:24 Emily: I am delighted to have on the podcast with me today Dr. Carly Overfelt, and she is here to talk to us about being at two different universities during graduate school, one that didn’t have a union and one that did and the differences between those two experiences. So, Carly, thank you so much for joining me today, and will you please tell us a little bit more about yourself?

01:44 Carly: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I’m Carly, and I started my graduate school journey at Purdue University where I did a master’s degree in linguistics and then a master’s degree in English. That took me about three and a half years, and then I started a PhD at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. I finished my PhD in the spring of 2017. My interests were in linguistics and literature. I got interested in supporting linguistic diversity through my teaching. So, the position I have right now is at a small liberal arts college in Minnesota, and I’m kind of an adviser/tutor/instructor for our international students and domestic multilingual students. Yeah, it’s a great job.

Finances while at a Non-Unionized University

02:33 Emily: Very interesting. Yeah. Glad to hear that you’re enjoying that. So, let’s go back to your days at Purdue as a master’s student. So, what was the financial lay of the land at this non-unionized university?

02:48 Carly: Right. So, you know, since I had never been to a unionized university yet, I didn’t really have a comparison point, but I remember, you know, just like so many graduate students- broke all time, you know, my rent was almost 50% of my pay. Which I think is going to sound familiar to a lot of folks. That was the start of my expertise in the side hustle. In addition to teaching a few times a week and having meetings with students in office hours, I was also tutoring three nights a week for about $20 an hour cash. And so, I ended up spending so much of my time during the week on my side hustle that it was really hard for me to perform as well in my courses as I wanted to and to do the research that is necessary to do well. Right. So that was pretty tough.

03:42 Emily: Yeah. So it sounds like, were you a TA for the entirety of your time there? That was how you received your stipend?

03:50 Carly: I was. I was teaching a communications class for international graduate students, and the whole time I was there, I was teaching for that program. And sometimes there was a summer version of that that I could teach.

04:06 Emily: Yeah, it’s a little bit surprising to me, just given that Purdue is in a low cost of living area. I mean, we’re already hearing like, okay, you move from Purdue to UMass Amherst. I’d imagine there’s a big cost of living difference there. But even in Purdue, your stipend was only about twice what your rent was or maybe not even that much it sounds like.

04:24 Carly: Right, right. That’s right. And we did have health insurance benefits. Some of that came out of our paycheck, and they were fine. They weren’t as good as what I had through my parents before I started graduate school. But it was like, it was okay.

04:38 Emily: How about dental and vision?

04:41 Carly: Dental and vision was a little bit extra. And they would take that out of your paycheck as well. Some other things I want to note–and these were differences I didn’t notice as much until later–but we did not get paid through the holiday months. So, it was kind of several weeks that we were not getting paid. And we also had hefty fees through our program in the fall semester. And sometimes we would start getting bills for those before we had gotten a full paycheck through our teaching associateships. So, that was pretty tough.

05:16 Emily: Okay. So, you’re saying that your stipend was not a 12-month stipend, but it stopped over winter break and then what about the summer?

05:23 Carly: Right. So, it stopped over winter break, and it didn’t continue for the summer unless you were lucky enough to have a summer class assigned to you, and then it would pick up again in, say, like June.

05:36 Emily: And also, of course, the very common problem of paying fees one time per year or one time per semester. And it’s a real hit to the budget. That’s a really hard thing to cash flow on a grad student stipend. Yeah. OK. So not such a pretty picture.

05:51 Carly: No. Pretty tough.

05:52 Emily: Anything else you want to add to that?

05:54 Carly: No, I think that’s about it. That pretty much covers it.

Finances while at a Unionized University

05:57 Emily: Okay. And then when you moved on to UMass Amherst, you started realizing things didn’t have to be the way they were.

06:05 Carly: Right.

06:06 Emily: So, what was it like there?

06:09 Carly: I was very excited when I heard that they were unionized because I, you know, grew up in kind of a union household. My dad and stepdad both were kind of hardcore union. So, I was like, “Oh yeah, let’s do this!” But I didn’t realize how much it was going to change my financial picture until just like kind of living it. So, a few major differences right away. We were paid a lot more. Maybe not twice as much, but it was at least a 30% increase over–maybe 40% over–what I was being paid before. And that’s just wages, not talking about benefits. So that was noticeable. The fees were smaller, but also it was written into our contract that you could have that spread throughout and taken out of your paycheck, and we were paid through the holidays.

06:58 Emily: I really love the benefit of actually paying something with each paycheck. Because like, I mean fees–it kind of depends. They may be a reality or not, but just if you know what they are and they’re going to come at regular intervals, they are a lot easier to deal with. So, love that. And you said you were paid through holidays, and what about summer?

07:17 Carly: In the summer, it was kind of similar where if you were lucky enough to have a summer class assignment, which in my department was extremely rare, then you could be paid through the summers. So, I still had to, you know, work my side hustle skills, but at least I only had to do that in the summer. Sometimes I would do my side hustles during the week to just sort of help myself with the cushion for the summer. But to put that in perspective, I would do maybe one four-hour, you know, side gig shift per week to sort of just keep my relationship with that employer, and then work during the summer more hours for that kind of side hustle. So I actually was able to spend time on research and writing and conferences. I think I went to one conference the whole time I was at Purdue in terms of presenting, and then that switched to actually having the time to work towards that. And I was going to maybe two conferences per year when I was in my PhD program because I had time to do it. It was great.

What about Travel Funding and TA-ships?

08:20 Emily: Actually, I’m glad you brought up conference travel because that’s kind of another benefit that may or may not be in place. So it sounds like, because you weren’t side hustling so much, you had more time to go to conferences. Was there additional funding available for that sort of thing, or were you paying for that out of your own pocket?

08:34 Carly: I was usually paying for that out of my own pocket. There was a little bit more funding in that department, but it wasn’t part of the union contract bargaining. I think it was just a department that had different maybe funding priorities, you know, just generally for their graduate students. I don’t think I’m remembering this incorrectly, I think that was something that was just department-specific.

08:58 Emily: Gotcha. And were you also a TA throughout your PhD? Like that was your position every term?

09:05 Carly: I was. I was a TA, first teaching for the writing program, and then teaching for the English department, and getting my stipend through that and benefits which were very good and actually better than the benefits I have in my full-time alt-ac job right now.

09:24 Emily: What do you mean by that? What makes them better?

09:27 Carly: So, the deductible and coinsurance strategies that we usually get through our employer benefits. You know, when you lose the power of sort of negotiating for that and it just sort of gets handed to you from on high, it doesn’t take long to start seeing the differences in what are you going to pay in copay, what types of services are covered, and that kind of thing.

Paid Leave and Other Union Benefits at UMass Amherst

09:51 Emily: Gotcha. Let’s see, you talked about leave over the holidays, but–was built in the contract and maybe in contrast to when you were at Purdue–any like other kinds of paid leave? Or maybe you didn’t access this but you know about it, like maybe parental leave or short term disability leave, anything like that?

10:12 Carly: Yeah, there were different leaves that were available. There was even vacation in our contract. Of course, no one ever took it because you’re teaching, right? So, it was pretty rare for anyone to actually, you know, do that. But if you were savvy enough about your union contract, you kind of notice those things. Or if you were sort of touching base with your union reps enough to sort of learn about some of the more specific–because a lot of times, and this makes sense, a lot of times residents were thinking about the pay. That’s really the main thing that they’re concerned about. But there are sort of these other things that you learn about that you have those benefits. If you’re sort of plugged into the union a little bit more and reading their emails and doing all that–it takes a lot of time though. Right?

10:56 Carly: And you know, grad students are always very busy. So, you know, no shame for people who didn’t know about some of those details. But if you were plugged into it, there were different things. Some things that, you know, were negotiated in the contract were, like, paid parking. So, if you just want to park on campus as a grad student employee, everyone knows that can be very expensive. But the union had actually negotiated certain rates for graduate student employees to lower those costs. So, another benefit was, one of the bargaining years that I was there, the bargaining team negotiated access to all-gender restrooms where you’re working. So, in these huge campuses, right? You know, it’s not the same experience for everyone in every department, every building. And that’s something that you should be able to use the restroom and feel comfortable and safe. And that’s something that was actually written into the contract. So, that was a huge one.

11:53 Emily: Yeah, that’s super interesting. Yeah, interesting that we get down to that level of sort of granular detail, right? Like you were saying, it’s not just the pay. There are all these benefits and other working conditions that can be brought to the table. And like you were saying, I think something that is useful to think about is that when you have a union in place, it sort of brings all the disparate parts of the different departments–for example, like graduate students in different schools and different departments at the university–it brings them to the same like playing field and gets them all the same benefits. And it’s not like there’s going to be this level of pay and benefits over here and this over here. Is that correct?

Departmental Differences in Pay Rates and Raises

12:35 Carly: There was still some difference in pay. So, for example, I worked for the writing program my first few years and we had the lowest hourly pay. It was still way better than what I was getting at Purdue. I think it was something like $22 an hour when I started at UMass, but there was a minimum wage on campus for graduate student work, and we were making that minimum wage. So, if you’re coming from a different department that’s more well-resourced or you know, maybe use this recruiting tool, then you may get paid more. My husband was in the linguistics department and he got paid more than me, and I just was always annoyed about that.

13:15 Emily: So, the union helped establish the minimum wage across the university, which your department said, “Yup, that’s what we pay.” Did the union also negotiate the pay rates at other departments? Or is that just the department saying, “Okay, we see the minimum, but we’re going to be paying more than that?”

13:33 Carly: I think that that’s what other departments would do. I can’t speak specifically to that, but I think that that’s how the disparities–and you know, when I say disparity, it was pretty minimal. It wasn’t a huge difference among the departments–but there was a difference. So that was sometimes annoying to me. But yeah, when they would negotiate raises, it was like a general raise. And so, how that might work out in particular departments might vary.

Additional Experiences with the Union

13:59 Emily: I see. So, aside from just being a student at the university, did you have experience with the union as not just a student?

14:10 Carly: I did. You know, I was already sort of interested in unions and so I was a steward at first, which means that you maybe come with someone to a meeting with their supervisor that they think might be a little bit tricky, and you come and you’re sort of a support person for them. And then I was in the leadership for the graduate student bargaining unit part of our union, because we were part of a–and some people who don’t know, there’s usually a much bigger organization like the United Auto Workers was ours. And then the graduate students at UMass were one shop as they say, one workplace, in that. So, I was in the leadership of that. And then I kind of just kept getting more involved and I volunteered on the joint council, which is where all of the shops, the workplaces, kind of have representation. And then eventually I was on the executive board as the secretary and that’s where you have like the president of the union and this would be over the entire union for us. It was UAW 2322. And so we had, I think there at the end about like 3000 members. So, there was a lot of opportunity to be involved and to meet different people. And so that was an interesting perspective.

15:21 Emily: Yeah. What an interesting opportunity for, maybe not work experience, but volunteer experience that is very professional as part of your graduate experience. Like, yeah.

15:33 Carly: Yeah. I have used a lot of that experience in, you know, my work even now working on committees with people who have extremely different backgrounds than myself. Just collaborating towards a common goal. Most of everything that I did was volunteer-based, but something that people don’t know sometimes is that, if your graduate students are unionized, sometimes there are paid positions within that shop, so to speak. That is a fellowship or assistantship that comes with the pay and benefits, you know, that we’re talking about. So, sometimes people would step into one of those roles out of their teaching fellowship and do one of those leadership roles for a year and then step back into the funding stream of their department, which was really great to have that kind of opportunity.

16:20 Emily: Yeah, that’s kind of some more jobs to go around. I guess.

16:23 Carly: That’s right.

Commercial

16:27 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. As a listener of this podcast, every week you hear strategies that another PhD has used to improve their financial picture. But listening and learning does not automatically translate into action in your own financial life. If you are ready to change how you think about and handle your money but need some help getting started, I can be of service. There are two main ways you can work with me to create and implement a financial plan tailored for you. First, I offer one-on-one financial coaching, either as a single session or a series as you make changes over the long-term. You can find out more at pfforphds.com/coaching. Second, I offer a group program called The Wealthy PhD that is part-coaching, part-course, and part-community. You can find out more and join the waitlist for the next time I open the program at pfforphds.com/wealthyPhD. I believe it’s possible to succeed with your finances at every stage of PhD training and throughout your career. Let’s figure out together how to make that happen for you. Now, back to the interview.

History of the UMass Amherst Union

17:41 Emily: So, you kind of talked about what your experience was again as a student at UMass. When was the union at UMass Amherst established?

17:50 Carly: This was established in the 1990s, so by the time I was there, it was a really longstanding, well-established union, sometimes even seen as a model for organizing in other places. Around the time I was there, the University of Connecticut organized as well. And so, yeah, there wasn’t a lot of memory of what that was like at first, although I think it was kind of tense, and I believe that the students did go on strike to help create that union. When I was there, when we would bargain every maybe two or three years–I think that’s right–it could get a little bit tense with the relationship in terms of like the bargaining team and the administration. But other than that, usually it was pretty calm. A lot of people didn’t know that we were unionized, which was kind of interesting and a little discouraging. If you’re involved in the union, you’re like, “Hey, you know, this is like this really great thing that’s happening here.” But yeah, so it was interesting.

18:52 Emily: So, while you were in graduate school, it sounds like since there were contracts being renegotiated every two or three years, did you see any changes year over year to those contracts?

19:06 Carly: For sure. So, we always would bargain–I’m now using the word “we” to just being “we the union,” I wasn’t on the bargaining team–but we always negotiated for higher wages. So, it was usually between a 2-3% raise. I’d want people to know that when you’re talking about one and 2%, you’re usually just keeping up with the cost of living. So, we get excited when it’s 2-3%, right? And you’re just getting a little bit higher than that.

19:33 Emily: Is that 2-3% over the two-to-three-year period or is that every year within that period?

19:40 Carly: Yeah, so because it was usually stepped up. So, maybe it would be 1% for the first year and then 2% for the second year, or something like that. And so, you would see gains over cost of living, I guess, is the important point. You know, one thing that people don’t think about sometimes is that if you’re not getting a raise that at least equals cost of living, your employer is paying you less money for the same work. And that’s one of the benefits of the union experience. You start to think in those terms a little bit, which everyone benefits when they’re kind of thinking about that for themselves. I guess the major point I want to make is that it was over the cost of living.

How About Changes in Fees?

20:21 Emily: Yeah. How about the fees? Because I mean, you said already that the fees were at least set up so that you could pay them with each paycheck. But something I’ve seen at other universities is, not only is the pay stagnant, but the fees are increased. The out-of-pocket fees are increasing. Did you see any changes to that fee structure while you were there?

20:43 Carly: I think our fee structure stayed about the same. I don’t remember any major changes with the fees. So, that’s not one thing, but maybe a different example of a gain would be the health insurance difference. So actually, and this is sort of a larger context and other union leaders that you interview can probably corroborate this, but a lot of union work and bargaining is holding onto as much of what you already had as you can because unions are not as powerful as they used to be. And so, usually when you’re bargaining, you’re trying to mitigate something disastrous that the management is doing. They’re usually slashing something and you are using your collective power to mitigate that as much as possible. That’s going to sound really cynical to some folks, but when we’re talking about the benefits side of things, it just is true.

21:33 Carly: So, for example, the insurance turned into kind of a co-insurance the first year I started. So, I don’t remember what it was exactly the year before I started, but I remember that they upped it to like a $5,000 deductible, which was a huge difference from before. And the union over time and a lot of effort was able to cut that to $2,500. That’s half. Right? Still wasn’t as good as it was before, but with the rising costs of health insurance and just unions just being what they are in the U.S. right now, that was what they were kind of able to do. You wouldn’t feel that difference if you don’t have like a major accident or a chronic illness, but for people who are experiencing that, it was a major difference for them.

Any Downsides or Tradeoffs with the Union?

22:20 Emily: Yeah. I appreciate you making the point about it’s not necessarily about seeing gains, like while again just a beneficiary of the contract, but rather you don’t know behind the scenes what is being pushed back against, you know, what changes might have been had there not been some bargaining power there on behalf of the student workers. Were there any downsides or tradeoffs you would say for the union being in place at UMass Amherst?

22:50 Carly: Right. So really the major thing is that you’re going to pay union dues, and depending on what state you live in, that might look different. So when I was at UMass, it was 2% which is something like two hours worth of labor, I think is the way that they figure that. And so there was the option to be an agency fee payer and now we’re kind of getting into the legislation around union membership and that kind of thing. And if you didn’t want to pay the 2%, and you could be an agency fee payer and pay 1.7% because of the laws in effect in Massachusetts at that time. Somewhere like Indiana, you could get away with paying zero, but you’re still covered because you’re in the bargaining unit. You still get all those benefits, anything that they bargain you get. If something terrible happens in your workplace, like you’re sexually harassed, the union is behind you 100% and they do all of the things that they would do for anyone else.

23:48 Carly: But then you’re either not paying the dues, somewhere like Indiana, or you’re paying a smaller amount. And so at UMass Amherst it was 1.7 or 2%. You’d be surprised how many people chose the 1.7. And I understand that because people are thinking, I want as much of my paycheck as possible. But you know, from my perspective it’s like, “Pay the 2% and be a voting member.” That’s kind of changing. There are some changes with legislation around that. I’m actually not sure how long Massachusetts will be able to do that. I think they’re about to go to a system where they can’t require that 1.7% anymore. But so, right. Paying dues. Something that people think about is a potential trade-off would be maybe the attitudes on campus around the union. Do we have an adversarial kind of relationship with the university? And that kind of thing.

24:40 Carly: And not really, I mean, if you’re on the bargaining committee, it could get kind of tense with the administration during that time, as I said before. But being part of the union or being a union member from my experience, didn’t make like my advisor feel differently about me. It didn’t make me seem like a troublemaker, you know. It was just, it was kind of normal because the union had been there so long. If I had been there during like the initial fight, I guess you could say it might be different.

Other Union Groups on Campus

25:09 Emily: Yeah, I can definitely see how that could be the case. But with a union in place for decades, it’s just kind of part of the landscape now. Were there any other union groups on campus? Like adjuncts or faculty or postdocs or staff members, anything like that?

25:23 Carly: Yes. So the postdocs were in the same union with us. They were a different shop, but within the same union. And they were you know, maybe like less active because they were usually on campus for maybe one or two years. The faculty were also unionized, but they were in a different union. The staff were unionized and they were in a different union. And then also I think Massachusetts at that time had legislation where any contract work that they did on campus, like construction, etc., they had to hire union workers or at least there were some incentives to doing that. So, If we marched around with signs about something like the co-insurance issue, we had support from all different directions. And sometimes we would have events and actions, you know, together. But I remember specifically one time marching across campus with a sign and the guys over here on the forklift doing whatever they’re doing construction-wise, like kind of honking and supporting us. So, it was kind of a cool way of being part of a community on your campus as well.

26:24 Emily: I’m really glad to get this picture of an established union for the graduate students and postdocs–or postdocs separately, different shop–but then also just pretty much most people on campus, right? Being part of one union or another. So it’s a very normalized part of the culture. So this is a very, I guess maybe could say like quiescent situation. Like, it’s just this is how things are at that university. So we may hear in other interviews I do in the next few months from some different situations where unionization is a newer concept or maybe only the graduate students are unionized, not other people.

26:56 Carly: Right.

Anything Else About Your Union Experience?

26:56 Emily: I don’t know. So it’s really interesting. I’m really glad to have your perspective there. So, anything else you want to add on this before we wrap up?

27:03 Carly: You know, I would say, just looking back on my time at Purdue, I remember that they made a change with our health insurance benefits once where suddenly like birth control was not going to be covered at all whatsoever. It didn’t matter what your doctor said, if you needed it to live, it doesn’t matter. Right. And I remember being really angry about that and not feeling like I could do anything. If that had happened at UMass Amherst, hell no. That would not have gone without a fight and it probably would have eventually gotten into the contract that that has to be covered. And it was covered. That kind of thing was covered through our insurance. So, you know, just looking back, you think a lot differently, and I feel really grateful that I was part of that and I was actually able to do research and writing, which is what you’re there to do. So, it was great.

27:48 Emily: Yeah. It sounds like your experience at Purdue, versus at UMass, that you were much more supported as like a well-rounded student, I guess you could say. Which is kind of a funny thing to say when we’re talking about unions because we’re really focused on employees, right? Like the important part is that you were an employee of the university and therefore were part of this bargaining unit and so forth. But what I’m thinking of is that you really were supported more as a whole student rather than at Purdue, it sounds like you were treated like you’re a TA. In terms of the relationship between the university and you, that’s what they cared about. You’re serving as a TA, that’s what you’re being paid for, et cetera. Maybe you had other types of relationships with other people there, but in terms of the administration, they saw you as a worker who was just there to perform some task.

Grad Students: When are you Working versus Studying?

28:41 Carly: I see your intuition, totally, but it’s almost the opposite. And let me kind of explain that. So, at Purdue, if there was pushback about something like pay, et cetera, the rationale that the university would give is this is your stipend, this isn’t wages. You’re a student and this is a stipend that you get. Because if they thought about us as workers, then they would have to reckon with what are we getting paid hourly, right? What does that calculate to? And that was some of the rationale against some agitation to unionize while I was there. Actually there was some movement towards that, which is a whole other story. But yeah, that was usually their argument if someone had to complain about something. At UMass, they saw us as workers more than at Purdue, and we benefited from that.

29:31 Carly: But sometimes there was still a little bit of that. If there was something that someone’s complaining about, if they could benefit by seeing you as a student for these purposes and as a worker for these purposes and they could work the system to sort of benefit in certain ways. And usually when we insisted on being seen as workers, that’s when we would usually do the best. So, it’s kind of interesting that you say that because it kind of gets us into the heart of that question is like, when are you working and when are you studying? And I would argue that you really have two jobs. One is the thing that you’re getting your pay and benefits for, and the other thing is your research and writing and thinking. And that’s also your job.

30:09 Carly: And so, if you’re at a place where you’re unionized, you can do both of those jobs. If you’re at a place that isn’t, you may find that you’re only doing one of your jobs because the rest of your time is your side hustle to try to kind of make up for the pace. So, that’s kind of a long-winded way of saying that you’re really hitting at the heart of the question, which is when are you a student? When are you a worker, and why does that matter? What are the implications for that?

30:31 Emily: I’m so glad that we got to that additional level of insight on this. I guess that I was thinking more so, and you brought this up too, is like that the university maybe in a nonunion situation sees that their graduate students are both employees and students, and they’re going to do whatever’s best for them in terms of, do I want to treat you more as a student? Do you want to treat you more as an employee? Well, we’re just going to do whatever is in our best interest. The dual relationship in that case can work against the student worker. Whereas, it sounds like what you’re saying, at least in the case when you have unionized in terms of your work, that is more protected, and then you as an individual can have that protected part of your compensation, your benefits and so forth, be able to enable you to do the other part of your job as you said, which is actually what you’re in grad school to do, like kind of scholarship and your own professional development. Does that sound right?

31:31 Carly: Yep, absolutely.

Financial Advice for Early-Career PhDs

31:32 Emily: Okay. I’m so glad we got there, and so last question as we wrap up, Carly, which is just what I like to ask everyone. What is your best financial advice for another early-career PhD?

31:43 Carly: I would say, and this is right from what we were just talking about, which is what you’re doing is work, and it’s labor. And don’t forget that, and think about what it’s worth. And when you’re doing things, think about how is that coming back to you in terms of hourly work. So, thinking about how much time you’re spending on different components of your teaching and your research and your writing, and how is that coming back to you and what’s it worth to you? Sometimes people say don’t do anything for free. Maybe sometimes, but like know what you gave away, right? Know what was the value of that. And it has really helped me think about like my career steps afterwards and thinking about what I’m worth and what I want. So yeah, what you’re doing is work. It is.

32:32 Emily: Well, thank you so much for this interview, Carly. I really enjoyed speaking with you about this really sort of topical and timely issue in getting your perspective from those two different institutions you’ve been part of. So thank you.

32:46 Carly: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Outtro

32:49 Emily: Well, listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. Pfforphds.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. There, you can find links to all the episode show notes and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, here are four ways you can help it grow. One, subscribe to the podcast and rate and review it on Apple podcast, Stitcher, or whatever platform you use. Two, share an episode you found particularly valuable on social media or with your PhD peers. Three, recommend me as a speaker to your university or association. My seminars cover the personal finance topics PhDs are most interested in like investing, debt repayment, and taxes. Four, subscribe to my mailing list at pfforphds.com/subscribe. Through that list, you’ll keep up with all the new content and special opportunities for Personal Finance for PhDs. See you in the next episode! And remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is Stages of Awakening by Podington Bear from the free music archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing and show notes creation by Meryem Ok.

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

September 30, 2019 by Lourdes Bobbio

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Mallory Smith, a staff scientist at a large public research university. Mallory learned to advocate for herself with respect to her income during graduate school. Her message to graduate students is that they are not merely students but professionals within their fields and should be treated as such, and the skill of being assertive but not aggressive is useful across a lifetime. Mallory and Emily discuss negotiation, where to find funds to pay for research and conference travel, and Mallory’s experience tutoring undergraduate physics students as a side hustle.

Links Mentioned in This Episode

  • Postdoc Salaries Database
  • PhD Stipends Database
  • Personal Finance for PhDs: Schedule a Seminar
  • Personal Finance for PhDs: Podcast Hub
  • Personal Finance for PhDs: Help Out
  • Find Dr. Mallory Smith on LinkedIn

PhD income negotiation

Teaser

00:00 Mallory: When you’re an undergrad student, you’re a student. When you’re a grad student, they still make you feel like you’re a student, but you have a degree and the work that you’re doing is furthering the objectives and benefiting the university and you really do deserve to be compensated for what you do.

Introduction

00:24 Emily: Welcome to the personal finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season four, episode seven, and today my guest is Dr. Mallory Smith, a staff scientist at a large public research university. Mallory has a message for graduate students. You deserve to get paid and asking to be financially compensated, doesn’t have to be gauche. We talked through several applications of this mindset from rectifying a lapse in pay to finding creative sources of travel funding, to negotiating a job offer. Mallory also shares her experience side hustling as a tutor for undergraduate students in physics. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Mallory Smith.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:15 Emily: Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Mallory Smith. Mallory came to me with several ideas that she wanted to speak about from her own personal life, all relating to income, so that’s what we’re going to cover today. Income as a PhD trainee. So Mallory, will you please introduce yourself to our audience a little bit further?

01:33 Mallory: Sure. I got my PhD in 2016, officially 2017. I was a postdoc for about two years and now I’m a staff scientist. I’m on the staff. We use the term staff scientists to say that you’re promoted and I haven’t been promoted, so I always add that disclaimer, it’s a new position for me. I went to a small state school for undergrad and to a larger, but not very large, private university for grad school, so that’s kind of definitely colored how I see income and what opportunities I’m able to talk about because it’s defined by what I’ve been exposed to.

A Message for Grad Students: Practice Self-Advocacy

02:20 Emily: Yeah, definitely. We’re looking for your personal angle on this here. So you came to me saying, I have a message, I have a message for PhD trainees. What is that message?

02:32 Mallory: So I have had a couple of experiences in grad school and a couple of friends in grad school. One particular story stands out. I have a friend whose professor was just absent-minded, and completely forgot to figure out summer funding for her. She kind of had assumed that he was on top of it and he completely wasn’t, so it got down to the last minute and it’s like, “Oh by the way, next week you’re not going to be paid anymore because I don’t have summer funding for you. Oh, well.” And she said, “Oh, okay.” The deadlines for everything had passed. And I’m like, “You need to tell the department,” because our department was really trying to make sure that they got some funding, somehow, for every single one of their students, whether it be a summer TA position or working something else out, and she didn’t want to ask because she was afraid that was passed all the deadlines and you know, I think she kind of felt like, “Oh, it was my responsibility have figured this out earlier,” or something like that.

03:48 Mallory: The thing is that when you’re an undergrad student, you’re a student. When you’re a grad student, they still make you feel like you’re a student, but you have a degree. And the work that you’re doing is furthering the objectives and benefiting the university. Whether you’re training and especially when you’re presenting at conferences and when you’re doing any TA positions or anything like that, you are furthering the objectives of the university and you are an employee of the university and you really do deserve to be compensated for what you do. That also is a piece that I think departments can use some help in, in realizing where their gaps are. Because if you don’t feel valued, you’re not going to be as productive or as enthusiastic about where you’re at.

04:46 Mallory: So for example, with that particular professor, he had grad students sporadically and I think the network of communication can get lost, the thread can get lost. If you are letting your department know to say, “Oh yeah, that professor, they have that problem, they’ve done this to four other grad students, we have a backup option for you.” Or the department doesn’t know this is going on and say, “Oh, okay, now I know”, and the department chair or the heads can look out maybe for future grad students and prevent that from happening.

05:23 Emily: I have so many things that I want to say about this topic as well. It’s such a strange relationship that graduate students have with their advisors and also with their departments and universities. And it varies so widely across different universities and across different departments and with different students in different advisors. During what you were saying just there that you’re an employee is only the case for some graduate students, right? So many, many graduate students are employees and should absolutely be empowered by what you just said, that they bring value to the university in one way or another. That’s why they’re being employed and if their employment should lapse by accident, of course that’s something that should be rectified. But anyway, it’s such a strange relationship between the trainee and the institution because, in some cases you’re treated more like a student or a trainee and in some cases, you’re treated more like an employee. And it usually seems that the university wants to do whatever is in their best interest — treat you as a student in one case, employee in another case whenever it benefits them and it’s a real shame, but it does fall to the student or to the trainee, in many cases, to push back against that and it shouldn’t be that way. Like in your example of this, the student’s advisor should have been looking out for her, should have been on top of things, but in that case, he wasn’t and so it did fall to her, unfortunately, but it did.

06:59 Emily: I observed something similar actually when I was in graduate school. This happened to a postdoc that I knew that her pay just lapsed for several months. And she was an employee, so I don’t know, maybe she was switching positions or something. I’m not sure what happened actually. I think it had to do with being a visa issue because she was an international postdoc. But anyway, she went unpaid for several months while this was being sorted out by our, by her advisor and like you said with your friend, she was kind of OK with it. I was shocked and appalled when I found out that was happening, but she didn’t really want to rock the boat. And maybe that was because it had to do with visa stuff. I don’t know. But in any case, it did unfortunately fall to her. I’m sure this happens to a lot of different people, what should these students and postdocs do if they find themselves in this kind of situation where they’re kind of being taken advantage of, although maybe it’s unintentional, and it’s not necessarily malicious, but it’s just bad management?

08:07 Mallory: I think it’s departments and professors, people, they take the path of least resistance to getting the thing crossed off their list. I think when you’re a grad student, you have to start looking out for yourself to some degree. There should be better policies in place at a lot of universities to prevent a lot of this from happening but until we’re there, I think when you start, you have to know what your parameters space is. Your offer letter will tell you how many months of funding you’re guaranteed. I think, it’s been a while, I started grad school in 2010, so I think my offer letter said that I was employed 11 out of 12 months, but that it was nine months of like serious pay and then two months of summer pay to be covered by the professor. There was some language in there that you would know ahead of time. Also, if your professor is someone who’s not paying attention to deadlines and not being forthright in communicating things with you, you kind of have to take that on yourself to find out in March if you have summer funding because that leaves you not enough time to work something out.

09:40 Emily: Unfortunately, again, these advisors are very rarely trained in any kind of management. They’re often kind of flying blind and doing whatever they’ve done in the past and it’s really an unhealthy situation, something that really, really desperately needs reform within academia. Yet, this is the system that we’re working with right now and students and trainees do find themselves there. So in the case of your friend, in the case of my friend, how could they have phrased this request so that they’re likely to have it fulfilled but also not feeling whatever is holding them back from asking the first place? Maybe they didn’t want to feel pushy. Maybe they didn’t want to draw attention to the mistake of their supervisor. How could they have maybe tried to rectify this?

10:30 Mallory: If it’s hard to start that conversation, you know it’s intimidating to make an appointment with the department chair and say, “I’m lodging this formal complaint that I’m not getting paid and I’m angry.” That’s a very hard approach. That’s not what I would personally take. That’s definitely not one my friend would be comfortable with taking. So I’d say find someone that has a low barrier of entry to talk to. Departments have a lot of other people beyond the administration, the secretaries and other people who have been working with the department, sometimes for decades — they’re often in this position that they’re not someone directly responsible for your management as a grad student, but they know the department. You can sort of start to find the people who know the things in the department. In my graduate school, we had someone who was really looking out for graduate students and you could go very easily to her and say, “Hey, like I’m having this issue, how should I approach it?” and get some real feedback that wouldn’t be going all the way and lodging a complaint. Also, older grad students; if there’s an older grad student in your group with that professor, say, “This is happening to me did this happened to you, what do you think I should do?” and you can kind of get some tips on the least “causing the boat to rock” way of getting what you really deserve.

12:07 Emily: Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, in my department as well, when I was in graduate school, we had an excellent administrative assistant who was handling all the graduate student’s stuff. And she, as you were saying, was really an advocate for graduate students. I feel like I could have easily gone to her and said, “I’m having this problem. What do I do about it?” And maybe that is escalating it to the DGS and doing something formal and she would know, or maybe it’s as simple as, she’s just going to go have a conversation with someone and it’s going to be fixed, no problem. I don’t know how it could be resolved, but that person would know. Identifying your resources within the department, absolutely, I think that’s a great idea. Even if you don’t know how to do that, as you said, to ask an older student or someone else who’s sort of serving kind of as a mentor to you or that you look up to within the lab or within the department and they’re going to know who that person is to go to. So I think that’s an excellent way to approach it.

Self-Advocacy Post-Grad School

13:00 Emily: I can definitely see how this skill of advocating for yourself when necessary can apply to post PhD life. Isn’t this the purpose of being a student? We’re learning how to do thing. We’re gaining knowledge and gaining skills and so forth. And some of these soft skills, like speaking up when something isn’t right, are very valuable to learn within graduate school and can be used later. Do you have any thoughts about using this skill of self-advocacy post training phase?

13:34 Mallory: Typically PhD programs, in my experience, which is a narrow set field of physics, is narrowly defined, like here is the tuition that graduate students in this department get. That’s it. I didn’t know this ahead of time, but during graduate school, I learned there’s other ways to ask for money. The postdoc I applied for, it also had like a set salary — this is what we paid postdocs, that that’s it, but someone else I know actually asked for additional travel funding and they were able to give that to that person, so they had their own travel budget to go to whatever conferences they wanted to. They didn’t need approval or to worry about funding regulation, like it has to apply to the grant that’s paying for it. They could just pick a conference and go. That’s a type of perk that you can ask for.

14:38 Mallory: I think some postdocs do allow you to negotiate for salary. Then every job post-postdoc, maybe not every but most every job post-postdoc, is the negotiate-for-your-salary type of position. The graduate school I went to had a big business school and it was big on their undergrads being successful and so they had a lot of professional development events about how important it was to negotiate for your salary. They could just show you this graph that if you ask for an additional X thousand dollars in your salary now, the impact over your career is substantial because when you’re starting out, the next position you go to, the salary will be based off what you were paid previously.

15:36 Mallory: When I applied for my job, I had been, for years hearing, “You have to negotiate for your salary” and I’m like, “Oh God, they’re offering me such a great salary. I’m so happy with it, but like I feel like I have to negotiate.” So I went to one of my mentors, my boss, and I said, “Hey, I’m interested in negotiating.” And they were like, “Well, typically you have some skill that you can say, ‘Hey, I can bring this and you should pay me more because I’m bringing this skill’” I didn’t have anything like that but I actually ended up crafting this response letter to my offer and saying, “Oh, I just looked it up and I was wondering if a salary increase to this amount would be possible.” And they actually came back and said, well, not to that amount, but to a slightly lower amount that was still higher than what they had a base offered, and that felt really cool of course, but hopefully over the long run, that’s the type of impact that is meaningful, in terms of salary.

16:48 Mallory: When you go to negotiate for your salary, there are web sites like glassdoor.com and other places where you can find out the range of salaries that are possible for your position. Typically, there’s a lower end and a higher end, and they have a cap. They can’t pay you higher than this amount for this position. That’s it. You always want to ask to be in the top half of that bracket and they’ll put you somewhere, hopefully in the middle, but not the lowest part of that bracket in that negotiation. But just kind of note, I knew when I was asking that I was not asking for an exorbitant thing and also, I was intimidated because I knew everyone that I would be working with already. When you ask for money, you’re not asking from the people that you’re working with. You’re asking from the university and really from HR. You shouldn’t feel like, “Oh, I’m asking for some special treatment that I don’t deserve.” It’s really a linear, top down thing from the administration and just ask. We have this sort of negative connotation about asking about money and talking about money, but if you just simply ask and say, “Hey, I was wondering if this is possible” and you’re not being aggressive about it at all. that’s not, that’s not an aggressive question to ask.

18:22 Emily: I think you’re exactly right and I’m so glad that you shared the exact phrasing that you use because it’s one sentence, the way you phrased it. It’s so easy to throw that up there and if you didn’t have what you felt was justification like, “Oh, I’m bringing X, Y, Z skills to the table,” you can still ask, especially if it’s in line with whatever the ranges that you know are appropriate for that position. I think that’s a pretty standard thing is that you’re looking at taking a new position and you look up what people are paid and you have a range there and if your offer is coming in on the lower end of that range, just ask for, as you said, the higher end of that range and maybe they’ll meet somewhere in the middle.

19:01 Emily: My husband did the exact same thing when he negotiated his current industry position. He just said, “Hey, I looked up the salary range for this position in the city that I’ll be moving to and it looks like this is a fair number. Can you do that?” And they said, “No, but we’ll bring it up by a certain degree.” That was really successful and once you get over the mental hurdle of doing it, the actual phrasing of the one or two sentences is really not like that much. But as you said, it pays off so much every single year for the rest of your career going forward in the compounding of the raises that you’ll be getting. It’s the same way that compound interest works with investments or reverse ways with debt works exactly the same with your salary to the degree that your new salary is based off any previous salaries. I just love that you said that.

19:55 Emily: I also want to point out that negotiation is more rare but is possible at the postdoc and even the graduate student levels. I wanted to point the listeners to two websites I have that function similarly to Glassdoor, which are PostdocSalaries.com and PhDStipends.com and so there you can just go and look up what are postdocs or PhD students being paid at that university or in this field or what have you and get an idea of whether your offer is livable, whether it’s more or less than other people in the same city are making. You can even, especially as a postdoc, start using that as justification for negotiating your salary.  I actually do have a question within the survey in postdocsalaries.com did you negotiate your salary or benefits? And as you mentioned earlier, a lot of people forget about negotiating benefits. Maybe that salary number can’t move, but something else on the side can move. Because the thing is that when you take on an employee, like you said, the salary ranges are set above levels than just your advisor that you’re going to, it’s a few levels above that. The thing is that the cost of taking on an employee is actually much more than just the salary. They have to pay taxes for you, they have to pay benefits for you, and so asking for an increase in salary, you may be like, “Oh, I’m asking for a 5% or 10% increase in the salary,” but that’s not a 5% or 10% increase in the total package that they’re taking on, by hiring you, it really is a smaller number to them then it looks like to you. Keep that in mind when you’re going to negotiate.

21:33 Mallory: When you get a new job, you get this salary offer and it’s more than you’ve made before because if you’re coming from grad school, anything’s going to be, should be more than what you made as a grad student. When you get out of grad school, you have to calibrate yourself to not be like all blown away by that number because typically, they’re going to offer you the low end of the bracket. It’s more efficient for them.

Commercial

21:59 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. Through my business, I provide seminars and webinars on personal finance for graduate students, postdocs and other early career PhDs, for universities, institutes and conferences, associations, etc. I offer seminars that cover a wide range of personal finance topics and others that take a deep dive into the financial topics that matter most to PhDs like taxes, investing, career transitions and frugality. If you’re interested in having me speak to your group or recommending me to a potential host, but you can find more information and ways to contact me at PFforPhDs.com/speaking, that’s P F F O R P H D S.com/speaking. Now back to the interview.

Finding Sources of Travel Funding

22:48 Emily: You mentioned a little bit ago that a friend negotiated for some travel funding. What ways have you gone out and gotten extra funding? Or what ways have you seen other people do that?

23:08 Mallory: I know that for example, the American Physical Society often has a pot of money for helping grad students attend conferences. You can apply andI think the one that I knew about gave everybody who applied and they accepted $300 toward traveling to this conference. And it’s not much, but it helps cover some of the difference,

23:40 Emily: Especially if it’s something you are going to pay out of pocket anyway, that’s a big help

23:45 Mallory: The other thing is that departments sometimes are strapped for cash and I think that if you’re running up and you’re asking for money and they really are like, “we don’t have money, we’re sorry, we really don’t have money,” they will say that and it will be clear. But a lot of times departments have pockets of money around and if you know to ask, this will become accessible to you, but you have to know to ask and sometimes they’re not advertising that part as well. I know that for certain universities, they often have some study abroad relationship with one country in particular, so if you want to go to, if there’s a conference and it happens to also be in that country and your university already has a relationship with sending students there, even if it’s undergraduate students, there might be a pipeline for getting funding. That’s pretty easy. I got travel funding from a private fund that came from the donation that existed for grad students to travel internationally and present their work or attend a workshop and learn, and I didn’t know about that until my advisor said, “Hey, I don’t have money to send you to France, but you should apply for this thing.” And that worked out. Then there’s pockets of professional development funding around that, if you’re presenting your work, is accessible to you. The other thing is that sometimes graduate student unions have money set aside for helping grad students with this. I think our graduate student union had a some sort of rolling application that you can apply to get a couple hundred dollars towards travel and preference given to students that haven’t gone anywhere yet, that kind of thing. There’s a lot of weird avenues that you can find out there. There’s also cross-disciplinary or interdisciplinary types of collaborations and alliances that if you’re doing anything related to them you can reach out and say, “Hey, I would like to go to this conference that you guys are holding because I’m doing this thing, it’s related. Can you help me cover some of that cost?”

26:08 Emily: Thank you so much for listing all those different, as you said, little pockets of money that might be accessible to you if you have the secret key, the unlock code, to inquiring about them. It’s too bad that this is kind of secret grad school knowledge that has to be passed by word of mouth instead of sort of being out there and clear. And maybe it is clear in some places, but this is another one of those reasons, these are the ones that you’ve like observed that were relevant for your university and your department and they may or may not be similar with somewhere else, but hopefully if a newer grad student or a newer post doc entering a new place can ask some people a few years ahead, “Oh, I’m looking for funding to go to this conference. I ran into a barrier, there is no more pools of money in the standard place. Do you know how people have gotten funding.” Just asking those questions of maybe there’s some kind of work around here. I love all the examples that you threw out. I hadn’t heard of half of them before, so that’s wonderful and everyone can try those. But also, still ask your peers, what are the secrets to this place, these funding pools. Hopefully, if you ask enough people, you’ll get the right answer. Especially, go to people who have been traveling internationally, who have clearly done the thing that you want to do, and ask them how they went about doing that.

27:29 Mallory: I think a lot of times during our PhD we’re in our bubble and a lot of the things that are unique for us are not unique for the department and not unique for graduate students. You’re probably not asking for something new that’s never been done before. The other thing I’d like to mention is professors who have been professors for a while think about this differently. I think they kind of have the mentality of it’s ridiculous not to get compensated and of course, why wouldn’t you ask? So they’re not saying, “Hey, by the way, I can pay for if you ever want to do something like this, this or this.” It’s not because they’re trying to keep it a secret from you. It’s just, it doesn’t occur to them that you wouldn’t know about this already, which is crazy, right? If you’re a new student, why would you know? But they get kind of stuck in their experience within their bubble of what they see and what they deal with and how they think about salaries and funding, which is on a whole different level.

Tutoring as a Side-Hustle

28:36 Emily: Going back to your first point about simply asking and advocating for yourself in a very gentle way can be done with respect to this additional travel funding and so forth. Another topic that you wanted to bring up was regarding side hustling. Can you tell us about your experience with side hustling in graduate school?

29:04 Mallory: My side-hustling was a tutoring, so I didn’t aggressively side hustle. I didn’t need to really supplement my income, but it was nice to. Tutoring is something that one, there’s always a need for tutors for freshmen level physics; and two, if you look up what the typical tutoring charge per hour is, if you have your bachelor’s, that level is typically $25 to $30 or so, and then if you’ve got your master’s or your PhD, it’s $30, $40, $50 an hour. A couple of things with that. One, I hate charging students that are struggling with physics, like, “Okay, yeah I can help you but it’s going to cost you,” and so I never charged the whole amount that I should have, but I learned something in getting to the point where I was comfortable with charging: one, the students that were undergrads at my graduate school, their parents were paying their tuition bills, so I was not making some student broke, they were able to afford it; two, when I was getting compensated for my time, $20, $30 an hour, I was very happy to prepare for that well and to do a good job. Once I had some experience tutoring, because I went in with very little experience and I always joke I have to write the students I first tutored and say, I’m really sorry, I learned how to tutor with you and you didn’t learn any physics. But I learned after! But that’s okay. The other thing is that when you get stuck in graduate school and you can sit down at the end of the day and help someone learn physics, that’s really gratifying. I got stuck in my research, I struggled with my classes and being able to help someone else was like, okay, I’m not a failure as a physics person. I’m clearly benefiting younger students.

31:11 Emily: I think that tutoring, I would say it’s the number one thought of side hustle for a grad student, because clearly as you were just saying, you do have something to teach. You have a great deal of expertise in some areas, even if it doesn’t feel like that on a daily basis, once you can look back a little bit, you’ve really come a long ways within your field, and so it’s so accessible to be able to teach people coming along behind you by a few years. The other thing about charging students and feeling a little bit weird about that is that you have to remember that this is above and beyond all the resources that the university itself is transferring to those students. They have the class that they’re in, they have the TA for that class, they have their professor, they have maybe, at least at the college that I went to, there was sort of a free tutoring center available that you could just make appointments out for various subjects. Being a private tutor — well, they’ve already maybe either gone through those resources and haven’t found them sufficient or they don’t want to use them for whatever reason. They’re willing to pay someone for their time, for the individual attention, whatever it is. Just to keep that in mind when you are going into that situation that you’re charging for. They already have a lot of resources available to them that are included with what they’re paying already for tuition. They have decided that they want something above and beyond that.

32:36 Emily: I wanted to ask you about the difference between how you distinguish yourself as a TA versus a tutor. And maybe you weren’t teaching during that time. Was there ever a time when you were both TAing and tutoring and how you sort of draw a distinction there? Presumably, you are not tutoring the students who are enrolled in your class.

32:54 Mallory: Our department actually, they had a list of tutors that they just said they gave the undergraduates and these people said they’re interested in tutoring, contact them. But you were not allowed to tutor someone that you’re TAing. That’s probably a good rule, because then they’re paying you to get preferential treatment in some sense of it. The other thing is, when I got to be on my feet about tutoring, I would have more students that could contact me than I could handle. I can’t tutor more than five or six students in a given week. That’s a significant time investment. But what you can do is try to get all students that are in the same course so that you’re not having to cover new material. It would get to be, I do one hour of prep and then I tutor four people because it’s just bang, bang, bang. It’s the same material.

34:03 Emily: That’s a really good idea. I hadn’t thought of when you have such a demand for your skills, it makes sense that you could then select among the potential clients that you have. The other thing I’ll say to that is raise your rates. If you have more demand, raise your rates. Standard thing. Did it ever occur to you to do group tutoring? Would that have been possible when you were already lining up these students in the same course?

34:31 Mallory: Yeah, I had done some group tutoring and I think that, at least for my style of tutoring, more than two people becomes really less one on one. My one on one rate was one thing. My group rate was like lower per person because I just think that the experience that I could offer in that environment was a little bit less. But that’s a good way to do it if there’s a lot of demand and you feel like you want to really help the students. That’s a good way to minimize the impact on your time to help the maximum number of people.

35:13 Emily: It’s a little bit of a win-win: lower the rates for them, you raise your hourly rate for yourself. Don’t just split the same rate among everyone, you’re working harder. Or raise it and then split it.

35:25 Mallory: Yeah, raising it and then splitting it, absolutely. But then also, I think, at least the undergrads that I encountered, they were like, “Well no, we’re paying for one on tutoring experience. I don’t care how much it costs the, I’d rather have that than that group thing.” I couldn’t really convince them to make the group thing a thing, but that’s okay.

35:48 Emily: Yeah, that makes total sense. Well, I’m really glad that your department made that easy for you because often when I think about tutoring, I guess I don’t really think about going through the departments first, but that’s a very, very natural match. If the departments are willing to have a running list you know grad student tutors available, then that’s great. Did your advisor know about your tutoring side hustle? You were on a list somewhere so he or she maybe could have known?

36:17 Mallory: Yeah, definitely. I’m sure my advisor knew. It was something that I did after hours and so I didn’t consider it like I need to ask for permission for this. It’s my time. Also, since the department encouraged it, there’s some advisors, I’m sure that would discourage you thinking about anything other than your own research, but it was sort of okay because it was normalized.

36:48 Emily: Yeah, I guess I would say for an environment where it hasn’t been normalized, like maybe that list isn’t available or you don’t really see other grad students working with undergrads at the same institution, tutoring is still available. It’s just you might have to look to a different population like in your city, like high schoolers or students at another university or community college. Or do it within your own university, but keep it a little more quiet. There are just a lot of options available for tutoring. And like you were saying earlier, it’s not really necessarily a distraction from your research if it’s reinforcing basic principles for you and improving your teaching skills and improving your confidence within your own field or whatever it is. I feel like tutoring is one of those side hustles that’s both easily accessible and potentially has benefits in your primary professional life, not just, “Okay, I’m earning an extra income here.”

37:43 Mallory: Yeah, absolutely.

Any Last Words of Advice?

37:45 Emily: To close out, Mallory, what advice do you have for a grad student or postdoc who’s looking to increase her income?

37:53 Mallory: I’d say find out the resources that are available in your department. Find out every opportunity for getting expenses covered. If you’re traveling to a conference, typically there’s some expense coverage for doing that traveling. That includes the meals when you’re traveling, and just sort of knowing what’s reasonable. There’s always fellowships and things to apply for and my advice is to apply. I wanted to apply for a fellowship and I applied for one and I didn’t get it. I didn’t feel like I really deserved a fellowship. I had a friend who applied for a different fellowship and she was encouraging me to apply for that fellowship also. And I said, “Oh, no, no, no, I don’t qualify for this.” And she applied for it and she got it. I don’t think our background experiences were so different. You looked at our records on paper, we had a lot of similar things. Don’t close yourself off to opportunities because of where you think you’re at or what you think you’re worth. Go for everything and let them tell you. You might be surprised.

39:29 Mallory: The other thing is just doing everything. If you care about maximizing your income, minimize your expenses. Don’t get a Netflix account on your own, share it with 10 friends. If you can bundle your car insurance into a six-month payment or yearly payment that’s on auto pay, you can get significant discounts. Other weird things like, do you ever need a rental car? Because if you are considered in any way an employee of the university, there are often just global discounts with major car rental companies that you can say, “Hey, and I work for this university,” and even if it’s for personal travel, they’ll still say, “Oh, okay, well we can give you an 18% discount.”

40:19 Mallory: I never really went out to maximize my personal, wealth. I just wanted to sort of do well and, and keep my head above water. I think that if you really want to maximize your wealth, then you’re the expert in providing all of the information for how to do that. But you don’t have to maximize everything in order to just do well financially. I’m happy with where I’m at financially. I could be somewhere else entirely, but I’m doing well and that’s all I need.

41:06 Emily: I think finding that point for you where you can have whatever income level it is, where you feel comfortable and happy and if you can have a job that allows you to have that income level and you can feel fulfilled professionally and have the lifestyle that you want, that’s a really sweet spot. Right? I think because we’re speaking to academics, people who have been in academia at least in the past or maybe in the present, I think it’s a pretty well, you know, shared value that being wealthy or being incredibly rich is not the number one priority for everyone, because you wouldn’t have made the life choices that you have at this point if that were the case, right? You would have gone into high finance or you know, high tech or whatever. You would’ve made different choices. But I think what you’re saying is exactly right. If you can find that professional fulfillment, know what the standard things are in that area and just try to optimize where you can within that. I think, for example, your goal as a student or as a postdoc should be to not pay for your own professional travel. Your goal should be to not pay for any component of that out of pocket. You should find funding to cover completely. Now if you fall a little bit short and you end up paying for your meals on one trip or what have you, that’s okay, that’s acceptable. But you should just be trying and striving to find the funds that will cover that. That’s a small way that you can maximize your income/minimize your expenses. After all, this is professional related travel, right? It should be covered by someone else other than you.

42:44 Mallory: I was shocked when I was the young student at traveling and I didn’t know that this was sort of expected people were like, “Why would you be paying for anything? You’re taking this trip because you’re asked to for your career. You shouldn’t be paying for anything.” And I thought, “Oh, you paid for my flight. That’s more than enough. I shouldn’t ask for more.” No. When I went to my first trip to go to this other lab for a couple months and do this research project, they said, “Okay, here and you get $5 a day for food.” And I said, “Okay.” And another student from my group joined and said, “This is ridiculous.” And immediately called up our advisor and said, “They’re giving us $5 a day for food. This is completely unreasonable.” And it immediately became like $10 or $15 a day. So it’s the squeaky wheel gets the grease, a little bit, with stuff like that

43:41 Emily: Well, Mallory, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today and for sharing your insights into these areas.

43:48 Mallory: Thanks very much for having me Emily. It was a lot of fun. I’m happy to talk. Thank you very much.

Outtro

43:49 Emily: Listeners. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode. PFforPhDs.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. There you can find links to all the episode’s show notes, a form to volunteer to be interviewed, and a way to join the mailing list. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you want to support the show and my business, please go to PFforPhDs.com/helpout. There are plenty of ways to sell without laying out any of your own money. See you in the next episode, and remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it doesn’t hurt. The music is Stages of Awakening by Poddington Bear from the free music archives and it’s shared under CC by NC.

How This Multi-Fellowship Winner Managed Her Applications and Finances

September 9, 2019 by Lourdes Bobbio

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Anne Rocheleau, who holds a PhD in biomedical engineering and currently works in industry. Anne won several fellowships during grad school (and applied for many more), including ones that paid her stipend and tuition and fees and ones that paid for conference travel expenses. Anne shares her process of finding and applying for fellowships and the extracurricular activities she pursued to make her a competitive candidate. Anne’s established budget helped her manage her income as her pay frequency changed while going on and off the fellowships, but she did have an unpleasant surprise one April since her fellowship did not withhold income tax. Overall, Anne’s fellowships greatly contributed to her development as a researcher and science communicator as well as her personal finances.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

  • How to Find, Apply for, and Win a Fellowship During Your PhD or Postdoc
  • Why You Should Apply for Fellowships Even If You’re Fully Funded
  • Personal Finance for PhDs: Schedule a Seminar
  • Personal Finance for PhDs: Podcast Hub
  • Personal Finance for PhDs: Help Out
  • Find Dr. Anne Rocheleau on LinkedIn

fellowship award finances

Teaser

00:00 Anne: Fellowships can be a really wonderful way to broaden your experience in grad school and I know a number of students that studied in a different country, for instance, which is a great experience that they wouldn’t have gotten necessarily if they had stayed on a research assistantship or a teaching assistantship.

Introduction

00:23 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season four, episode four and today my guest is Dr. Anne Rocheleau, a PhD in biomedical engineering who won several fellowships and travel awards during grad school and her postdoc. Anne gives advice for other fellowship seekers based on her experience of finding and applying for several fellowships each year and shares the enriching experiences she sought out that made her a competitive candidate. The fellowships had a positive effect on Anne’s personal finances and scholarly development and we discuss how to avoid the financial pitfalls that come with some types of fellowship income. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Anne Rocheleau.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:13 Emily: I’m joined today by Dr. Anne Rocheleau. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast and we are going to be discussing fellowships, how to win them and what happens to your finances once you do win one. Anne has plenty of experience with this, so thank you so much for joining us today and will you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

01:33 Anne: Sure. Thank you so much for inviting me to be part of this podcast. I’m really excited to be here. I got my undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. I did my Masters of Science degree at Cornell University in chemical engineering, as well, and I did my PhD in biomedical engineering, also at Cornell. Then I worked for a year as a quality engineer in Massachusetts, before moving out to the west coast to Portland. I was a postdoc for a year and a half at Oregon Health and Science University and now I work as a research scientist at a startup medical device company here in Portland.

02:17 Emily: Well, we’re going to get on a little diversion here already because I’m curious about you having a real job for a year and then going back to having a postdoc. I didn’t know that was a thing. Was there any difficulty in landing that postdoc, having been out of academia for a little bit of time? And also, what was the reasoning behind that? Was it just, “I want to live in Portland and this is the kind of job I can get”, or what?

02:41 Anne: Yes, it was largely a geographic. I wanted to move out to Portland to be with my now fiance, but also, it was really fun to work in industry for a year. It was very different and it got my mind working in a totally different way, being a quality engineer, and then when I wanted to move to Portland, I had a connection from my PhD advisor, who knew my advisor that became my postdoc advisor here in Portland, so that was a really natural fit and I really liked OHSU, Oregon Health and Science University. To work in the med school environment was really great, so that was a really cool transition. It was interesting going back into academia. I felt like I had a little bit of a different take on things and it really solidified my desire to stay in research. I love research.

03:37 Emily: Glad to hear that it added to your career. It sounds like you networked your way into it, so that’s very natural.

Finding and Applying to Fellowships

03:45 Emily: Let’s hearken back to your grad student and postdoc days when you were applying for and winning fellowships. Which fellowships did you end up winning?

03:56 Anne: I did my master’s degree on the National Science Foundation Science Master’s program fellowship. That one I actually got lucky, I didn’t have to directly apply for it. I was offered that program by my department, so that was the first one. Then, during my PhD, I received the National Science Foundation GK-12 fellowship. That was a full tuition and PhD stipend fellowship and also included a teaching element. I was part of the Society of Women Engineers as a grad student and so I received a scholarship through them, that was $3,000. I applied for and received two travel grants for the Biomedical Engineering Society’s annual meeting, so those travel grants covered the meeting registration as well as $400 for travel. When I was a postdoc, I received a travel grant for a conference and I wasn’t presenting there, but I did attend some workshops and I think that was about $2,000.

05:03 Emily: I’m glad to hear that list because I just want students and postdocs to get an idea of the diversity of fellowships that are out there, it’s not only from the NSF, it’s not only the GRF, there’s a lot of other ones as well. There’s all these travel grants from the conferences and everything. Conference travel is a big pain point for grad students and postdocs and so it’s just good to hear that there is money available. You have to ask, get a little bit lucky, or put together the right kind of application and the money’s there for some people, so that can help a lot.

05:39 Emily: Can you tell me a little bit about your process of applying to fellowships and finding out about these fellowships. You said there was one you were automatically nominated or awarded, but other ones you had to seek out. What was that process like? How did you find these fellowships?

05:57 Anne: I have a couple of recommendations for that. First of all, I found internal university resources to be excellent for finding fellowships and talking to other folks that were in my department that had received these fellowships in the years before me, that was really useful. There were some databases at my university, where they aggregated fellowship opportunities. Professional societies are a great way to find fellowships, both for conferences and I also received one that was a scholarship. My other recommendation for this is ProFellow.com. This is an awesome website. I’m still on the email list. It’s post-bac, post-graduate fellowships, graduate fellowships, both long term, short term, all fields, all over the world. It’s a fantastic resource for fellowships.

06:52 Emily: It’s so funny that you mentioned that because we’re recording this on a Tuesday and I’m interviewing Vicki, who’s the person behind ProFellow, on Thursday for the podcast. I don’t know which order they’ll come out in, if yours will come before hers or vice versa. I’m not sure, but listeners, these two podcasts episodes are coming together, they’re a pair. Thank you so much for mentioning those resources. I have a post, I’ll link to it in the show notes, on how to find fellowships, which includes a couple of the databases you mentioned that I saw. Some universities have really extensive ones, but I’m going to add some of the things that you just mentioned to it. So listeners if you want to see some links to this, go to the show notes and find that post. Thank you so much for adding that. I really liked the tip about the professional societies. I hadn’t thought about that at all, but it totally makes sense.

07:42 Emily: So you found some fellowships you applied for. You told us which ones you were successfully awarded, but did you have some others that you applied to that you didn’t win? Were you applying for a lot or maybe only one or two a year or what was it?

07:55 Anne: Oh, yes, I definitely applied to a number that I wasn’t successful in. This is definitely a numbers game and sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you don’t. So yes, there were certainly several from all levels — from scholarships, fellowships, travel grants — that I did not get.

08:14 Emily: Well, it’s good to hear that you were just trying a lot. Since you were submitting a number of these applications per year, how did you think about that in terms of the usage of your time? Did you feel like it was, not a waste of time, but not really within your core mission of what you were doing in graduate school? Like something you had to do that was kind of extra, or did you really see it as just grant writing and building a skill set? How did you view it?

08:43 Anne: I do enjoy writing, so that’s part of it, and I was happy to develop those skills. In the case of the NSF GK-12 fellowship, it was a great way to enhance what I was doing with another skill set. In that case it was teaching and mentoring. I was paired with a teacher that I mentored for a project in the summer. I think fellowships can be a really wonderful way to broaden your experience in grad school and I know a number of students that studied in a different country, for instance, which is a great experience that they wouldn’t have gotten necessarily if they had stayed on a research assistantship or a teaching assistantship.

09:40 Emily: Yeah, that’s a really good point because, what I tend to forget about is fellowships pay you or pay your expenses, but really their purpose is to further your development as a researcher. That could be through doing whatever you’d be doing as an RA at your university, or it could be having these much more independent experiences, as you just mentioned, that are really enriching in a variety of ways. That’s what a fellowship is for, right? It’s good to be reminded of the core mission of a fellowship, which is to develop an individual, not necessarily to further some larger grant or whatever that you’re working on.

10:24 Anne: I have one more thing that I can add there too. I felt like it really deepened my connection to the professional societies that I was part of as well. I’m actually now involved in my local chapter of the Society of Women Engineers as a scholarship chair, so it really inspired me to turn around and give back after graduate school. It really meant a lot to me and it was inspiring to me that those organizations believed in me and I felt like that also came out as well in these.

Fellowship Application Tips and Tricks

11:00 Emily: Wonderful. What about the process of actually writing these applications? Did you have any tips for another grad student or postdoc going through that? What was that process for you?

11:12 Anne: I generally kept these materials together and it was my folder of preparation for what I needed to write some of these applications. First of all, you almost always need a copy of your transcripts, so I just had that handy so I didn’t have to go searching for it when I needed it. You almost always need a CV, so again, I just had that handy, a two page CV. I also had my set of go-to recommenders because many of these a fellowships also require recommendations. Then I had some talking points that I used as a basis for the essays for these different fellowships. They all require something a little bit different, but they almost always have a research component — what you’ve previously done, what you would like to do, some quantifiable results if you have those. Many of them have an outreach component, so I had this running list of what I was involved in with volunteer efforts and professional society involvement. Many of them have leadership component too, so again, I just kept that list of bullet points of some of the things that I’ve done and this just really helped me make the process smoother and faster, and when I went to go actually write one of these, I had something already there to go off of.

12:39 Emily: It kind of seems to me that the more of them you write, the easier it gets, right? Because you can reuse the themes and reuse some of the wording and so forth from your previous submissions.

Building Up Your CV

12:51 Emily: We talked a little about the process of writing applications, but what about the other things that you just mentioned, which was building up your CV, building up your leadership experiences, building up your outreach experiences. What did you find were relevant experiences that you had that you think helped you win these when these awards?

13:16 Anne: I got involved in some of the organizations through my department and through my university. We had some outreach events through my departments that were really fun. I had a good time participating in those. I also started getting involved in the leadership executive board of the professional society chapter at my university. I did that throughout my years in grad school, so I felt like that was really valuable. And again, I kept a list of the deliverables for my research, so I always had that ready to go. I think that was helpful too.

14:02 Emily: Define deliverables, because I’m thinking papers, but maybe there’s some other things in there too.

14:09 Anne: Yeah, papers, presentations. This wasn’t applicable for me, but if there was any media coverage of your research or anything special like that, if your university highlighted your work or a local news station highlighted your work, something like that. Those would be the main deliverables that I’m thinking of.

14:30 Emily: Did you have publications early on that were easy to point to when you have these further applications, like from your masters, for example?

14:40 Anne: Yup.

14:42 Emily: Yeah. I think that just goes into being the kind of candidate who wins these fellowships, having those deliverables come out early. So push for that, I think, is the advice for a current grad students. Don’t try to publish all your papers right at the end. It’s nice to get maybe one out the door early on.

15:00 Anne: Yeah, absolutely.

Writing the Fellowship Application

15:02 Emily: Anything else around advice for writing and winning fellowships?

15:08 Anne: I would say, first of all, if you have any questions about the content of the materials of the application definitely reach out to the organizational contact. It’s an obvious thing, but make sure you’re completing the full application packet. Sometimes they can be pretty long, a little bit complicated, and also don’t give more than they ask for. That might be held against you, potentially. If there’s an essay limit, stick to the essay length limit, things like that. When you’re organizing your essay, make sure you have an introduction. Make sure you have a section that’s organized around your research, the content of what you’ve done before, what your proposal is. Make sure you group any other outreach and leadership experience together. And then also explain how the fellowship could benefit you and your career path. I think the people that are reading, and having been now on the other side, I think it really is nice to know that it really would make an impact to the person if they received the fellowship. They’re not just applying willy-nilly to these. It really would be meaningful and helpful to them, financially too.

16:30 Emily: Can you give an example of that? What’s beyond the obvious of how a fellowship would further your career? Maybe something that you included in one of your essays?

16:41 Anne: Yeah. For instance, the NSF GK-12 fellowship had the teaching component and I think learning about science communication, that was really something that was really important to me, and being able to translate my work to others, that was what I included in that essay. And even though I’m not actively teaching in a professor capacity right now, that really was valuable to me and that really was something that meant a lot to me to gain out of that fellowship.

Commercial

17:18 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. Through my business, I provide seminars and webinars on personal finance for graduate students, postdocs and other early career PhDs, for universities, institutes and conferences, associations, etc. I offer seminars that cover a wide range of personal finance topics and others that take a deep dive into financial topics that matter most to PhDs, like taxes, investing, career transitions and frugality. If you are interested in having me speak to your group or recommending me to a potential host, you can find more information and ways to contact me at pfforphds.com/speaking, that’s p f f o r p h d s.com/speaking. Now back to the interview.

Financial Impact of Winning a Fellowship

18:08 Emily: Let’s shift gears and talk about the financial effect that winning a fellowship has on you, the awardee. So in your case, what happened? You won some fellowships, what happened with your personal finances?

18:25 Anne: One of the really great things about the fellowships I received was they were actually higher than the RA or TA stipend that I would have otherwise received, so that was really great and definitely a motivation for others to apply for fellowships. They’re often higher than what you would receive from your university. One thing to note is that different fellowships pay out slightly differently, so I had different payment arrangements depending on the years. One fellowship paid at the beginning of the semester, so just twice, and the other paid biweekly, every other week. It made a difference in my monthly budgeting. I didn’t change really how I budgeted because of that necessarily, but depending on how you operate with your budget, it might. The other thing is that the year that I received the the $3,000 Society of Women Engineers Fellowship Scholarship, that was actually on top of the GK-12 fellowships, so I stacked those, which was really cool. That’s sometimes possible as well. I’m trying to think of what else.

19:44 Emily: Well, there’s already a lot there. Let me ask a couple follow-on questions. Okay. So the first one — it sounds like, in total for your years in graduate school, were there two years when you received a fellowship that paid above the baseline stipend or was it more than two years?

20:01 Anne: It was two years.

20:02 Emily:  Okay, so two years out of how many?

20:04 Anne: Five.

20:06 Emily: Did you do anything different in those years compared to the other three? For instance, did you live in a different place that was maybe more expensive or were you a little bit freer with your discretionary spending? Or did you end up saving more? What happened to the increase in pay since it wasn’t the entire time since it was only a couple of the years.

20:30 Anne: No, I didn’t change my budget really at all. I probably should have saved a little bit more when I was making the slightly higher salary that one year, but no, I didn’t change it really very much.

20:46 Emily: Okay. I just kind of always think about people who win a multi-year fellowship at the beginning of grad school and then they set their spending level in line with that fellowship. Then at some point they go down to the base stipend and I worry about those people. I’m a little concerned for them. Okay, so you didn’t really change anything but you could have saved more during that time. I think it’s really just about being intentional. Whatever you decided to do with it, just decide and don’t kind of float along with it. Okay, so slight increase in pay, that was one thing. Another thing you mentioned was a change in pay frequency and pay timing. Out of curiosity, when you were an RA or otherwise not on these fellowships, what was the pay frequency for that kind of position?

21:36 Anne: It was every other week.

21:38 Emily: Every other week, so also biweekly.

21:41 Anne: Yes.

21:41 Emily: So the same with one of your fellowships, and then the other one was once per semester?

21:46 Anne: Yes.

21:47 Emily: I can definitely see that the ones per semester might be a challenge, but it sounds like since you were already budgeting, already in that mode, maybe you could handle it a little bit better. How did it work for you? Just explain to me how you managed it.

22:06 Anne: It didn’t change too much. I tracked every dollar in graduate school, I still do, so I was very aware of what my base spending was. It didn’t vary a ton over my years in grad school, so that was the basis of how I budgeted.

22:25 Emily: It sounds like you got this influx of cash into your checking account and you just left it there and kind of drew it down according to your normal spending pattern as the semester went on and then you got another in flow for the next semester. Yeah, I just think that that can be a really challenging situation for someone who doesn’t already have a handle on their finances. Maybe someone who it’s their first semester in a new city — you don’t really know what the expenses are going to be, and you have to make sure that money lasts you until you get that next check coming in. I was thinking actually, how did you handle irregular expenses with your budgeting in grad school? Maybe it’s traveling, or health, dental, vision, those kind of expenses, anything that’s kind of big and occurs one time a year, a couple of times a year. How did you handle that, let’s say with your biweekly pay?

23:22 Anne: Yeah, that’s a good question. I didn’t have a giant emergency fund, but I did keep a small emergency fund throughout grad school. That was where I would draw out of, and again, I kind of honed it in over the course of five years when those expenses would come, so I knew to expect them. I did track it throughout my five years so I could make sure that I wasn’t getting a lifestyle creep or anything and made sure I kept that cushion my emergency fund at all times.

23:57 Emily: Okay, so if that was your method, then having the once per term fellowship wouldn’t change it that much, it’s just you have more money on hand and it goes towards paying these normal, same expenses as always. Because you already had that stuff in place, sounds like it was pretty easy for you and not much difference. I also wanted to ask, you mentioned taxes, right? In one case you didn’t have automatic income tax being withheld, so did you end up paying quarterly estimated tax during that year?

24:30 Anne: No. I remember it took me by surprise when I was filling out my taxes, and again, thankfully I had the emergency fund, but I was just not in that mindset at that time, so I didn’t. I was lucky I had that emergency fund to smooth it over when tax time came and I owed taxes.

24:54 Emily: So it sounds like you weren’t even aware that it wasn’t being withheld.

24:59 Anne: Maybe vaguely, but not properly.

25:00 Emily: But not enough to prepare for it. Fair warning, to any listeners. It sounds like in one case you did have automatic tax withholding, in one case you didn’t, so hey, figure it out. Maybe you’ll be pleasantly surprised that you are having tax withheld from your fellowship. That could be the case, but you certainly need to know if you’re not, either for that large tax bill in April or for paying quarterly estimated tax, if required to.

25:30 Emily: Yeah. Any other effect on your personal finances from winning those fellowships?

25:36 Anne: No, I think that’s about it.

Professional Impact of Winning a Fellowship

25:38 Emily: And how about effects on you as a researcher, as a PhD? Did the fellowships do what they were supposed to do and further your development?

25:48 Anne: They strengthened my credentials, which was wonderful. They gave me the opportunity to attend conferences and present my work. I learned a lot of those conferences and they were inspiring to me. I definitely improved my writing skills through the application process and that continues to help me today. I also feel like the application process, in general, helped me hone my elevator pitch about what I was doing in graduate school, which I thought was really great. Like I said before, I do think it helped me to explore some other interests that I had, while a graduate student, and it also gave me encouragement and support while I was a graduate student, and that meant a lot.

26:42 Emily: I have an article on my site and again, we’ll link it from the show notes. It’s called something like why you should apply for fellowships, even if you’re fully funded as a grad student or postdoc. It was for me, to some degree, tempting to kind of just rest on, “well, I’m going to be funded, I know that’s going to happen, I don’t need to go this extra mile or many extra miles submitting all these applications”. But it really sounds, based on your experience and others, that it’s worthwhile, even just applying, even if you don’t end up winning anything, which like you said, if you end up applying a lot, it’s a numbers game, so hopefully here and there you’ll win something. But even the process of applying without even winning is valuable. Plus, if you do win then further and further, it really develops you as a scholar. I’m really glad to hear your examples of that.

Advice for PhDs and Postdocs Applying to Fellowships

27:37 Emily: Any final concluding words of advice from you on how a person who wins a fellowship can get the most benefit possible out of it, whether it’s financial, whether it’s benefiting them professionally? Any words on that?

27:56 Anne: I would really encourage people to take a look at some of those lesser known fellowships. Especially in my field, I remember there were some really big ones that everybody knew about that were more competitive, but there’s a lot of fellowships out there for all kinds of things. And get creative, try something new. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t get one, because yeah, it’s a numbers game. And have fun.

28:28 Emily: Well, thank you so much for sharing your experience with us and I’m really glad to hear such a positive process and outcome from you.

28:39 Anne: Well, thank you very much, Emily. I had a good time. Thanks.

Outtro

28:42 Emily: Listeners, thank you so much for joining me for this episode. PFforPhDs.com/podcast is the hub for the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast. There you can find links to all the episode show notes, a form to volunteer to be interviewed, and a way to join the mailing list. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you want to support the show and my business, please go to PFforPhDs.com/helpout. There are plenty of ways do so without laying out any of your own money. See you in the next episode. And remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it doesn’t hurt. The music is Stages of Awakening by Poddington Bear from the free music archive, and it’s shared under CC by NC.

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