Personal Finance for PhDs

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This Postdoc Epitomizes Side Hustling to Get Out from Under $100,000 of Debt

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Shana Green, a postdoc at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Shana finished her PhD with $108,000 of debt, and she decided to side hustle to pay it off as fast as she could. After trying several academic and non-academic side hustles, she is currently chiefly working as a driver for GrubHub. She’s on track to be completely debt free in less than four years total. We discuss the strategies she’s used to optimize her side hustle, how she feels about side hustling as a driver, and her goals for her YouTube channel, The Wealth Vibe.

Links mentioned in episode

side hustling postdoc

0:00 Introduction

1:09 Please Introduce Yourself

Dr. Shana Green is a Gates Millennium Scholar. This program funded all of her undergraduate education, and provided some funds for graduate education. Shana went to Howard University for her bachelors of arts in Anthropology. She got a Masters of Public Health at Columbia University, where she had to take out student loans for rent, food and living expenses. She went to the University of South Florida for her PhD in Public Health, where most of her education was funded but she had to take out some loans for her fifth year. She graduated in 2017 and worked as a postdoc at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She recently got a new position as a contractor for the CDC.

4:54 What was the total of your debt when you finished your PhD?

Shana was aware of her debt before she finished her PhD. She had $108,000 in debt when she graduated with her PhD. She says about $56,000 is from student loans. She took out about $40,000 from student loans, but she has accrued over $10,000 in interest. She had car debt, IRS debt, medical bills, and credit cards. One of her credit cards had $14,000 of debt.

She didn’t have to go into repayment for her student loans during her postdoc because she qualified for graduate fellowship deferment. She wanted to tackle her other debt first. Now she has about $63,000 in debt remaining. She paid off the credit card, IRS debt, and medical bills. She is very close to paying off her car. She will only have her student loans remaining after two years of he repayment journey.

Shana says that when she moved to Atlanta, she started side hustling right away. She couldn’t afford to go out and meet people and get to know the city. She went straight to the grind and working hard to pay off her debt.

8:50 How does your postdoc salary affect your debt repayment journey?

Shana is grateful she has a higher stipend than many postdocs. She was making about $70,000 gross annual pay from her postdoc stipend at the CDC. This is in contrast to the National Institutes of Health minimum stipend that was just below $50,000 annual stipend. She was in an Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) funded postdoc, which compensates based on education and work experience. She received about $5200, then she had to pay quarterly taxes. Her take home was somewhere around $4,000.

Shana says while this was a good stipend, it wasn’t enough to cover her debt payments. She calculated she needed to make another $1,500 to $2,000 more each month for her debt payments. Her goal was to be debt free by February 2021.

11:38 What are the different side hustles that you’ve tried since moving to Atlanta?

Shana says the first side hustle she tried was Instacart. In this job, she shopped for groceries and delivered them. She started that in October 2017. When Instacart changed their system so she made less money, she tried other jobs. She tried virtual assistance, Upwork, and local food delivery service. Since April 2018, she has worked for GrubHub and still does Instacart every now and then. She also does freelance research through Upwork. She says GrubHub is her “bread and butter” as a side hustle.

13:17 How does a GrubHub side hustle work?

Shana explains that when a customer places an order, she gets a ping on her phone. GrubHub provides the details up front to help her decide if she wants to accept it. She is free to reject orders. If she accepts, she goes to the restaurant to pick up the food and bring it to the customer. She contrasts this to Instacart, where she had to put together the order herself instead of just picking it up.

She makes about $20 per hour with GrubHub. The least amount she makes is $15 per hour, and the most is $25 per hour. She spends about four hours a night doing GrubHub. On the weekends nights she works 5 hours. She works at minimum three days during the week. There were several weeks that she worked every day of the week. After her work at the CDC for the day, she almost immediately started her GrubHub work.

17:34 How do you decide which GrubHub orders to take?

Shana keeps three things in mind: the payout, the distance, and whether the person tips. GrubHub pays a minimum of $3 base pay, a mileage contribution, and tips if the customer chooses. She says if the person has not tipped through the app, they won’t tip in person. She tries to take orders $8 or $10 or more. She also tries to do orders within a four mile radius. She maximizes the base pay and the tips, not the mileage. Shana mentions some restaurants are unreliable, which she learned through trial and error, and she factors that into her decision.

22:12 Has anything really bad or really good happened to you as you worked for Instacart and GrubHub?

Shana says she had unpleasant interactions with Instacart customers. She tells stories about customers that insult her and imply that she is “lesser” for working these side hustles. These customers have no idea that she has a PhD and works as an epidemiologist. Shana shares that she has felt down about having to work side hustles that are not using her expertise, but she gives herself pep talks and reminds herself this is temporary.

25:08 Why didn’t you limit your side hustles to PhD type of work?

Shana explains that she tried through Upwork to offer data analysis and research consultation services, but she didn’t get any clients. She realized that this wasn’t going to work, because she needs quick money. She wanted to be able to make money like an Uber or Lyft driver could.

She was a little ashamed of doing this at first, and she didn’t tell anyone except for her mother and her boyfriend. She felt like she had reached a level of success, like she was “Dr. Green” and she used to teach at a university. She worried that people would view her work at Instacart and GrubHub as a step back. Now she wants to inspire people to take on their debt and work hard for their financial goals. This is why she started her YouTube channel “The Wealth Vibe.”

Emily says that if anyone speaks negatively about this work, as if this work is “beneath them,” that speaks poorly of that person. She also says that Shana is on a great career trajectory, but the work for many PhDs is more limited and many have to be in adjunct position, which typically does not pay well. Emily says Shana is living like no one else like now because she is working hard, but in two years Shana will be debt free and living like no one else in the positive sense.

Shana shares that she also teaches an online course in Epidemiology. This pays $3,000 per semester. She says she makes way more money through GrubHub than she does as an adjunct. Shana says she found that PhD work does not pay well. Emily adds that there’s not enough volume, or demand, for side jobs for PhDs.

35:08 What is your YouTube Channel about?

Shana’s YouTube Channel is called The Wealth Vibe. She creates videos to help people increase their income, help them budget, so that people can build their wealth. She posts monthly videos about making her budget and paying off her debt. She also makes videos about her side hustles and how to maximize money you make. She has made videos about taxes, because her taxes are not withheld and she has to save for tax payments. She says she reaches a broad audience of people who are GrubHub drivers as well as who have PhDs.

39:40 Conclusion

How To Launch A Side Hustle in Grad School

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Side hustles are all the rage these days. Everyone seems to have one, and some even translate into big money! However, in my experience, few grad students are aware of (or understand how) to get one going. Even fewer faculty seem to be aware of how they could have one themselves OR how they can support their students in this endeavor. In this post, I’m going to talk to you about why you want to launch a side hustle, and why it’s worth your time to do it in grad school. If your a faculty member these tips can also apply to you!

Today’s article on how to launch a side hustle is by Dr. Leigh A. Hall. To read an article today by Emily, please visit Leigh’s website, Teaching Academia.

launch side hustle

What Is A Side Hustle?

A side hustle is a way to earn extra cash. Ideally, it’s going to be something you are super passionate about because you will be spending extra time creating it. Side hustles happen outside your current full time job (or graduate studies/assistantship). You decide how much time you want to devote to it and when you want to put in the hours. You can work with someone else, but most side hustles tend to start out as solo ventures. As they become more successful, you may find you need to pay others to help you. Some people have such successful side hustles that they eventually leave their full time job and devote themselves solely to their project.

Why Should You Launch A Side Hustle?

You might be thinking you have enough to do right now. You don’t need to have extra demands on your time. And there’s no guarantee that a side hustle will pay off anyways, right? But think about it this way – if your side hustle is inline with things you already enjoy doing then you’re not wasting any time by devoting yourself to it. If you were going to do it anyways, then you lose nothing by seeing if you can generate some extra income by sharing your work with others.

However, the side hustle is not just about you. While it can be a great way to generate extra income, ultimately you are providing a service that benefits others. If people are willing to pay you for your work – whatever it may be – that means they find value in it which means you are enhancing the lives of others in some way.

Finally, a side hustle can allow you to establish yourself beyond your academic career. It will allow you to connect with more people, and different people, than you likely would through academia alone. This can bring you a whole host of opportunities and open doors that otherwise would have stayed close. Your work as an academic will likely reach a narrow subset of people. Add a side hustle to that and you can expand your reach.

How To Identify The Right Side Hustle For You

Ok – you’re interested but unsure about where to start. The first thing is to figure out what you want your side hustle to be about. It can be connected to your day job, but it doesn’t have to. If you have a hobby that you are exceptionally good at then you could turn that hobby into your side hustle. It doesn’t have to extend from your job.

For example, several years ago I ran a successful yoga blog. I’m not a yoga teacher. I just wrote about going to yoga classes and what I learned in the process about myself. Eventually the blog ran its course, but I was able to get some great sponsorships and support along the way.

Because my blog added value to the yoga community, companies would send me yoga mats, clothes, shoes, all kinds of goodies for review. I even got to review a meal kit service so I had groceries mostly paid for now and then. My yoga practice was a serious hobby, and it was able to generate some income for me – even if just through free products – that I enjoyed and benefited from.

Currently, my side hustle extends from my job. I have a number of courses I sell. Do I generate massive amounts of income? No, but I do enjoy a nice supplement that I can do with as I please (I often just save it).

The key here is to pick a niche that you enjoy and that you want to share with others. And it’s perfectly fine to have both a hobby and a professional side hustle! You get to set the hours and how much you will be involved so do what’s best for you.

Launching Your Side Hustle

There are a number of ways to launch your side hustle, and any combination of them can work. After you identify your niche, you’ll need to consider how you want to connect with others. Some common ways to do this are:

  1. A website. You can get one for free (wordpress.com) and later move to a paid version. A free version lets you test the waters and play around without the stress of having to pay for it.
  2. A YouTube channel: I highly recommend this. Everything is going in the direction of video. A channel will allow you to build an audience. And while you are giving people content for free, once they see that you have something of value they will start to buy your more in-depth products.
  3. Patreon: Admittedly, I need to get this one going. Patreon allows you to sell memberships at varying tiers. For example, you might have people who give you 5.00 every month in exchange for specific things you create or offer. A second tier of people might give you 10.00 a month and receive something different/more. You get to decide how to price the tiers and what people get in return.
  4. Selling Courses: You may want to create one or more courses that people can access asynchronously. A number of platforms allow for this with varying advantages and disadvantages. Udemy allows you to post your courses free of charge, but they will take a hefty fee in return (they also help with marketing your courses). Platforms like Teachable and Thinkific require you to pay an ongoing fee or yearly subscription for your courses to be hosted, and they do no marketing. However, you stand to keep more of your money each time you sell a course here than on Udemy.

Launching your side hustle thus requires:

  • A clear vision of what you are going to be offering
  • Who would be interested in your product/creations?
  • Understanding where to house yourself and your work

A side hustle is going to require a mix of free and paid content. You are going to want to have a website or YouTube Channel (likely both) and a plan in place for content development. What do you want to sell? When will you find time to create this content and build out your offerings (both free and paid).

If you’re wondering if there is a right/wrong/best time to launch your side hustle my answer to you is this:

There is no best time to launch. You need to know what it is you want to do and what platforms you want to start out on. Then you go. You don’t need to do everything at once, and you can build out along the way as you get comfortable. The trick is to not get caught up on something not being good enough or that you only need to do X and then everything will be perfect. We’re not looking for perfect here. We’re looking for a few key things to be in place and then it’s time to go.

Having a side hustle can bring in extra income while allowing you to grow and develop professionally or with a hobby. The sooner you get started the sooner you will start to reap the rewards.

Dr. Leigh A. Hall is a professor at the University of Wyoming where she holds the Wyoming Excellence Chair in Literacy Education. She’s had a side hustle for four years now selling courses that can benefit graduate students and early career academics. See her work at TeachingAcademia.com.

How to Read Your PhD Program Offer Letter

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Congratulations on receiving an official offer of admission to a PhD program! This is truly an exhilarating period in your academic career. After celebrating your admission and letting the giddiness wear off, whip out your magnifying glass: It’s time to take a close look at your offer letter to figure out what it actually means. Offer letters can be a bit difficult to decipher (sometimes intentionally!), but this is a vital step so that you go into your PhD program with your eyes wide open regarding your financial situation. This article covers how to discern what your program is offering you regarding your stipend/salary, out-of-pocket tuition and fees, the type of pay you receive and whether it comes with a work requirement, health insurance, “guarantees,” and how your funding package evolves as you move through your PhD program.

PhD offer letter

If your offer letter doesn’t answer all the following questions (and you’re seriously considering taking it), turn to the offering department’s administrative assistant (for official answers) and/or current graduate students (for this-is-how-things-actually-work answers).

Gross Stipend/Salary

Right away your eye might be drawn to a phrase like “Your total financial aid package is worth…” and some huge number like $50,000 or $90,000. Don’t be distracted by it! You need to know what your actual pay will be – what is usually referred to as your stipend. The letter should delineate between your stipend and the cost of the tuition and fees paid on your behalf. The important take-away is what’s going into your pocket (before taxes) as this is the money that will pay your living expenses and fund your financial goals.

Tuition and Fees (Your Responsibility)

If your offer letter includes funding, it should say that some aspect of your tuition and/or fees will be paid on your behalf. However, when determining how much money you actually get to keep at the end of the day, you have to know: Are you responsible for paying any (partial) tuition and fees out of your own pocket? For example, perhaps your tuition is being paid on your behalf, but out of your stipend you are expected to pay a relatively small fee. Don’t be impressed by huge numbers in tuition and fees being paid for you! What matters is how much you have to pay out of your own pocket; ideally $0 or close to it!

Source of Stipend

Your offer letter will likely tell you the source(s) of your stipend: an assistantship or fellowship. One of the key differences between these two types of funding is whether there is a work requirement.

Fellowships do not have “work requirements,” and to maintain them you are generally just expected to make satisfactory progress toward your degree with respect to your coursework and dissertation progress.

Assistantships do have a work requirement; you are technically an employee of your university. Research assistantships with your dissertation advisor usually allow you to combine your work requirement with your dissertation research (with some exceptions). Teaching and graduate assistantships require you to teach or perform some other kind of service for your university (most often officially capped at 20 hours/week), after which you are free to work on your coursework and/or dissertation.

It’s vital to know whether you have a work requirement in your first year or really any requirements to maintain your funding (e.g., attending a seminar series, submitting progress reports). If you don’t meet those requirements, your funding could be revoked.
Your stipend offer letter should clearly state what your work requirement is or whether you need to secure one prior to the start of the school year. For example, you might be offered funding from a teaching assistantship, but it could be still up to you to actually arrange with a professor to TA a certain course.

Knowing about a work requirement will help you properly envision how you’ll spend your time during your first year in your PhD program.

Duration of Stipend

Your offer letter should tell you over what period you will be paid your stipend. Ideally, the answer is 12 months, although carefully note if the source of the stipend changes during that time. (For example, I was paid in my first 9 months of graduate school by a training grant and in the next 3 months by a research assistantship, and this was all spelled out in my offer letter.) If the offer letter says the stipend lasts any period shorter than 12 months, you need to follow up: Does that mean you actually won’t be paid (you’ll have to plan financially for that, obviously) or that you are going to have to secure other funding after the initial period?

Who Pays What for Health Insurance?

Health insurance is a huge issue for graduate students, and universities handle it differently. The key answers you need from your offer letter are:

  • Will you have an opportunity to buy student health insurance through the university? (Almost certainly the answer is yes.)
  • What is the yearly premium for the student health insurance?
  • If you sign up for student health insurance, is the premium paid on your behalf (similar to tuition and fees) or do you pay (part of) it out of pocket?
  • Are dental and vision insurance bundled along with health insurance, or would you have to buy them separately?

Even if you plan to stay on your parents’ insurance for some years at the start of your PhD, it’s important to understand what you may be paying for premiums once you switch to insurance through your university.

Is There a Guarantee?

Does the word ‘guarantee’ appear anywhere in your offer letter, e.g., is your funding guaranteed for 2 years, 5 years? A guarantee is nice to have, but it shouldn’t necessarily be a deal-breaker. If you don’t have guaranteed funding throughout your PhD (which might very well go beyond 5 years!), find out from current students whether students all pretty much stay funded or whether funding becomes tight/competitive in later years.

What Happens after the First Year?

Probably of the most important things to know about funding during your PhD is what happens in later years. A PhD is long, after all, and your offer letters might only discuss funding in the first year. Your offer letter might include hints of funding changes in the future, such as by saying you received a first-year fellowship or one-time bonus, or saying that your funding source will change starting in your second year.

You should be particularly wary of your stipend decreasing after your first year due to a one-time/first year-only bolus of money (a promotional offer, so to speak). It would be quite painful to find out at the last minute that your stipend is going down and have to scramble to adjust your living expenses. Better to build your life and budget around your ongoing stipend amount and use the first-year increase for one-time expenses or savings.

If you are seriously considering accepting an offer, you should definitely inquire about what funding looks like in the second and following years. The departmental administrative assistant may not be able to say for sure what will happen in your case, but he/she and current students can tell you the precedent.

  • What will my after-tuition/fees stipend (and its term) be in my second and subsequent years (lower, higher, pretty much the same)?
  • What will the source of my funding be in later years, and am I responsible for securing it? (For example, in your first year you might be funded from a training grant so you can rotate among potential advisors, but starting in your second year you must secure a research assistantship with your dissertation advisor.)
  • Are yearly cost-of-living raises typical?

Don’t be dazzled by a pumped-up first-year offer if the reality behind it is a department where students compete with one another for limited funding and you’re paid the same stipend in your fifth year that you were in your first!

You can see that to properly understand your funding during your PhD you need a lot more information from your stipend offer letter than just the number that will hit your bank account each month! Again, you only need to investigate beyond the offer letter to the degree that you are considering accepting the offer (most likely based on other factors). But even if you don’t care about money at all, I strongly encourage you to find answers to these questions for the program that you ultimately accept before you commit to a lease or move.

This Prof Used Geographic Arbitrage to Design Her Ideal Career and Personal Life

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Amanda, a tenure-track professor at a small college in the Midwest. While a postdoc, Amanda listened to career advice from R1 university faculty, but ultimately decided their path was not for her. Instead, she employed geographic arbitrage to maximize her academic salary while minimizing her cost of living. This choice enabled her to quickly pay off her student loans, and now she is considering buying a house. Amanda gives great career and financial advice and encouragement to current graduate students and postdocs, particularly emphasizing the importance of deciding for yourself what your career and personal priorities are. Amanda writes about personal finance at Frugal PhD.

Links mentioned in episode

geographic arbitrage PhD

0:00 Introduction

1:25 Please Introduce Yourself

Amanda has a PhD in Digital Media. She does research on digital media and learning, and digital equity. She teaches courses on these topics, and on research, writing, and information literacy. She completed her PhD in 2015 at a large research university in the midwest. She did a two year postdoc at a large private university in California. She got married during her postdoc to another PhD who she met during graduate school. Now, she is a faculty member at a small liberal arts college in the midwest.

3:07 What is geographic arbitrage?

Geographic arbitrage is a concept promoted within the Financial Independence / Early Retirement (FIRE) community. Arbitrage is the practice of taking advantage of different prices in different markets. Geographic arbitrage is taking the cost of living of different places into account and taking advantage of the fact that your dollars can go farther in a place with a lower cost of living. If you’re still working, you can see if you can find a higher salary or work remotely to live in a place with a lower cost of living. If you’re financially independent, you would move to the place with the lower cost of living to stretch your dollars.

4:34 How did you use geographic arbitrage in your job search?

During her postdoc, Amanda and her husband lived in a large city in California with one of the highest costs of living in the U.S. They considered what their finances would have to be to live comfortably there, including what the downpayment on a house would be and what it would take to pay back student loans. When she was on the job market, she started to pay attention to how salaries compared to the cost of living. Although people expect salaries to be higher in more expensive places, she realized that this pattern was not consistent for academic jobs.

Amanda had an interview for a job in a city with a high cost of living, but the salary was less than what she received as an editor with only an undergraduate degree. Then she interviewed for another position in a small city with a low cost of living. The institution offered her a salary comparable to what a first year faculty member would have been making in her current location in California without adjusting for cost of living. This discrepancy in salaries and cost of living caught her attention.

Both Amanda and her husband had a campus interview in a city on the West Coast, but it was one of the most expensive zip codes in the U.S. They realized that even with spousal hire, they still wouldn’t make enough money to afford a house. They decided to move to a semi-rural part of the midwest for Amanda’s job offer, even though her husband didn’t have an offer in that location. Amanda accepted a tenure track position in a location where they could both live on only Amanda’s salary.

Emily shares her experience, which contrasts to Amanda’s experience. Emily lives in Seattle with her husband. Seattle has a high cost of living, which Emily believes is associated with the opportunity of getting tech jobs from Amazon, Microsoft, and many other places. However, faculty jobs are distributed across many locations, so there may not be correlation of place with salary. Amanda shares that she considered jobs in Seattle, but being near family mattered to her. Amanda’s family lives in the midwest, where she lives now. Emily shares this value, but Emily wants to move to Southern California to be close to family and is willing to put up with higher cost of living to be near them.

12:13 What did you hear from other academics? How did you take or filter that advice?

PhDs from research institutions receive a lot of advice about landing tenure track jobs and getting positions at R1 universities. Amanda says many people assumed she wanted a tenure track position at an R1 university. However, because Amanda attended a small liberal arts college for undergrad, she felt like her goal was to work at an small college. She felt like she couldn’t be transparent about her goal. She got a lot of advice about how to get a position at a big research university, how to negotiate spousal hire, and how she should be willing to go anywhere for the R1 position. She felt like a big university wasn’t the best fit for her.

Amanda and her husband felt like they could be happy in the academy as well as outside of it. Amanda felt pressure to be in academia, and academy was the only trajectory she could speak about with her mentors. She struggled with how she could talk about what she wanted. Amanda and her husband have important personal goals, and they want work-life balance. They decided to accept Amanda’s job offer in the midwest even though they both had more interviews planned. This gave Amanda’s husband more time to explore job options and say yes to the right thing.

Amanda and her husband’s financial situation allowed them to make these decisions. They have a solid emergency fund, live on a portion of their income, and work in a place with a low cost of living. Money gives you the flexibility to pursue what you want professionally and personally. Emily discusses the financial strategy for two-income households to budget off of only one income, so the other income is free for financial goals.

19:30 How has your choice to live in a low cost of living location affected your finances?

Amanda’s husband accepted a new job last year. Since then, they both made major progress on paying off their student loans. They have paid their loans off completely. They accomplished this goal by deciding to keep living off only one income. Amanda’s husband’s income went toward their student loan payments.

Amanda says that academic life is inconsistent and can make budgeting challenging. She attends conferences and travels often, but it’s made easier when she’s not worried about when reimbursements are going to come in. Budgeting for travel and reimbursements is hard for graduate students, and it is hard for faculty members too.

22:35 What are your next financial goals?

Amanda and her husband are figuring out their plan for home ownership. Navigating the career stages of graduate student, postdoc, faculty as a pair can be very challenging. Many partners spend time living apart. People with PhDs seem to delay home ownership more than other groups of people. They are considering buying a single family home, but a duplex or triplex appeals to them so they can bring in extra income from renting the other units. They are still considering if purchasing property makes sense for them at this time and in this location.

Another one of their goals is to get caught up by saving, investing, and building retirement funds. She needs to balance buying a house with saving for retirement. Amanda and Emily discuss that common retirement savings benchmarks, like retirement fund of one year’s salary by age 30, are challenging for PhDs to meet. Many people don’t start saving for retirement until their 30s, not just in the PhD community. Amanda says that finance benchmarks can be very demoralizing, and she wants people to know that it’s never too late to care about your finances.

27:44 Advice for setting personal finance goals.

Amanda emphasizes that she didn’t learn about personal finance until she was in her postdoc. As a graduate student, she was not financially savvy. Once she was a postdoc and her husband was working full time, they started learning about personal finance. Amanda says she used her graduate student situation as an excuse to put off thinking about finances. She used to think money was something that could work itself out later. Now, she knows it’s never going to work itself out later. Amanda wishes she hadn’t used being in graduate school as an excuse to not know about personal finance.

A common roadblock is figuring out where you are financially, because it’s uncomfortable. Becoming aware of your finances is the first step to set goals and make progress. The beginning is the hardest part, bud don’t give up. Amanda used the Personal Capital tool to track her net-worth and visualize her finances. In just a few years, Amanda has changed her financial situation. Now she makes intentional decisions and has seen big changes in her finances in a short period of time.

Amanda connects her career decisions to her new attitude towards finances. When Amanda felt trapped in the R1 career trajectory, she avoided thinking about personal finance. She realized she needed to be assertive about the career she wanted and finances, because this was related to her quality of life. As she opened up to other career trajectories, she realized that being in a good place financially is deeply connected to her goals. Emily shares that sometimes personal and professional aspects of decision-making in our lives collide, and maybe personal life holds sway, but it’s not easy to talk about in a professional setting.

33:10 What is your advice for someone finishing their PhD training and looking for job?

Amanda tells other PhDs looking for a job, “you have options!” Amanda accepted the narrative about tenure track jobs at R1 universities, but she felt it was so empowering to realize it was her life. She says do everything you need to do to figure out what will fulfill you and make you happy. Make sure you are true to you and what you want.

The online community Beyond the Professoriate helps PhDs explore non-academic positions. Amanda took an online class, and it was great to have community and resources. She learned how to make use of LinkedIn, how to make CV into a resume, how to network, and how academic skills are useful in industry. Beyond the Professoriate has an online conference every year. Additionally, there are resources for understanding your finances at Emily’s site Personal Finance for PhDs.

37:57 Conclusion

Before PhD Admissions Season Starts, Discover What a Standard Offer Is in Your Field

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At this point in the year, you should be (nearly) done preparing your PhD program applications and looking forward to receiving at least one offer of admission. Congratulations on your progress!

If you haven’t already, this is the right time to fully investigate what a standard offer of admission looks like in your field and particularly at the caliber of universities you have applied to. That way, when your offer letters arrive, you can tell which ones are up to the standard and which aren’t. You can also begin to form an idea of what the time management and financial sides of your life will be like during your PhD.

standard admission offer

My PhD is in a STEM field (biomedical engineering), and my understanding when I was applying to programs was that I would be fully funded for at least 5 years. This is common in well-funded STEM programs, but more hit-or-miss in other disciplines and at programs struggling for sufficient funding. However, when I was applying I didn’t understand that the source of my funding mattered quite a lot to how I would actually spend my time in graduate school. I wasn’t very discerning regarding that aspect of my funding offers, so this article encourages you to do a better job than I did preparing to understand your offer letters and investigate the funding norms of the programs you’re admitted to, especially for upper-year graduate students.

What Does It Mean to Be Fully Funded?

Have you ever heard, “You shouldn’t pay to get a PhD” or “An acceptance without funding is a rejection”? These statements are valid for many fields (e.g., STEM), but not necessarily all. If you are in one of the fields where it is common to (partially) self-fund or need an outside job, you need to know that to have realistic expectations of your offer letters. If you are in a field that is supposed to fully fund students, you know that offers with partial or zero funding are not ones worth accepting (even if that’s the only type you get!).

What it means to be funded can also vary by field and institution.

The fullest definition of funding is to have your tuition and fees paid on your behalf and receive a livable stipend for all 12 months of the year guaranteed for the entire duration of your PhD. (I didn’t receive any offers that were that generous!)

It’s quite rare to receive an open-ended guarantee of funding as the programs want you to progress toward graduation at a reasonable pace. It’s important to find out if the typical course for a PhD student in the programs you’ve applied to is to be funded until graduation (after a reasonable period of time, even if it’s more than 5 years) or if funding becomes difficult to secure later on in the PhD (e.g., there are 10 funded positions but 15 students competing for them).

While ideally you would accept only an offer of full funding, in some fields that isn’t a norm, and you might not get a PhD in that field if you held out for that. But the other side of the coin is that in fields where full funding is typical, you shouldn’t attend a program that can’t or won’t offer it to you. Either the program is under-funded or you aren’t their priority.

Further reading: Unfunded Ph.D.s: To Go or Not to Go

Do Graduate Students Take on Outside Work or Debt?

A corollary to the above discussion about the degree of funding offered is how students pay for their lives (and tuition and fees) if they don’t receive full funding.

Is it common for graduate students in your field to have outside jobs, either year-round or during unfunded semesters? (Some fields pay stipends only during the academic year, leaving graduate students to their own devices over the summer.)

Do graduate students sometimes take out student loans, and if they do is it to pay their tuition and fees or to pay for living expenses?

You may find variations in these norms across the programs you are accepted to, even within the same field; this is a more difficult subject to investigate, but a very important one. Even if a program tells you that you will receive a year-round stipend all through graduate school, the students will be able to tell you if that stipend is livable or if they are turning to outside work or debt to supplement it.

What Do You Have to Do to Receive Funding?

There are two sources of money for stipends: fellowships and assistantships. When you are granted a fellowship that pays your stipend (or you might be on a training grant), you have officially “no work expectation;” you are free to pursue your classes and/or dissertation with all of your time. An assistantship that pays your stipend, on the other hand, comes with a work expectation between you and your department/university. An assistantship to receive a full stipend is generally 20 hours/week, but some assistantships offer fractional pay for fractions of that time.

There are a few variations of assistantships that are important to distinguish among. A teaching assistantship requires you to teach or assist a faculty member in teaching a course. Research assistantships require you to do research under the supervision of a faculty member; this research could become part of your own dissertation (more common) or be separate from it (less common). Sometimes assistantships are for other types of service around the university, such as an administrative role; these might be labeled graduate assistantships or similar.

In terms of having the maximum time to pursue your PhD, fellowships and research assistantships for your dissertation are superior to teaching assistantships, graduate assistantships, and research assistantships not for your dissertation. The former set allows you to devote all your time to degree progress, while the latter set carves probably 20 hours/week out of your time for non-dissertation-related work. (That’s not to say that the latter set of work might not benefit you in other ways, but whether it does or not depends on your career goals.)

It is imperative to know what kind(s) of work requirement is typical for your field to evaluate your offer letters and have realistic expectations about how you will use your time in graduate school. It’s not uncommon for graduate students to receive funding from different types of sources throughout their PhDs, so don’t assume that because you were offered a fellowship in your first year that it will necessarily continue. In particular, how are students funded once they are finished with classes and ready to sink into their dissertation research (e.g., have achieved candidacy)?

What Is the Time to Degree?

A question for the programs that have accepted you is: What is the average time to graduation? (Bonus: What is the standard deviation?) Make sure that the answers you get from the programs are in line with recent averages in your field.

While a shorter average time to graduation is attractive, make sure it’s because students are actually graduating on time and not just being kicked out for failure to progress if they take too long.

If the average is longer, ask how students support themselves after the fifth or sixth year: Are they still funded or are they on their own?

Where to Find Answers

The best places to find answers to these questions are:

  • Current or recent students in your field (e.g., alumni from your college, (friends of) friends)
  • Professors in your field who you already know (e.g., your research/academic advisors at your college)
  • Administrative assistants at programs you’ve been accepted to
  • Potential advisors who are courting you (talk about this outside your interview time)
  • The PhD Stipends database (pay particular attention to the Living Wage Ratio)

Having a baseline of knowledge of what funding packages are standard in your field will help you immensely to read and understand the offer letters you receive.

If you are a current graduate student, please report your field and what a standard offer of admission is in this anonymous 6-question survey!

The Complete Guide to a Side Hustle for a PhD Student or Postdoc

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It’s no secret that PhD students and postdocs are paid a meager salary, sometimes not even as much as the local living wage. While a fraction of graduate students have probably always pursued side income to supplement their stipends/salaries, e.g., through part-time jobs, moonlighting, or odd jobs, only in recent years has it become easy to make money online or make money from home. Enter the ‘side hustle.’ The term exploded in popularity during the Great Recession along with the ‘gig economy.’ The flexibility of modern side hustles has made it possible for students and postdocs to fit their income-generating activities around their busy research schedules.

This article details why a graduate student or postdoc would want to side hustle, whether it’s allowed by their university/institution, examples of real side hustles held by PhDs, how to best manage the side income, and advice from PhDs with successful side hustles.

side hustle PhD postdoc

Motivations for Side Hustling

The motivations for having a side hustle during your PhD training are to make up for the deficiencies in what the university provides: money (primarily) and career-advancing experiences.

Increase Income

Pursuing your PhD during graduate school or gaining additional training as a postdoc is supposed to be your full-time (or more) pursuit. Research is life, right? Unfortunately, the positions don’t pay anywhere near as well as a regular full-time job.

The best case scenario for a PhD student or postdoc is that you will be paid enough to support yourself without making extreme lifestyle sacrifices, i.e., living in a van. However, there are plenty of programs and universities that do not even meet that low bar for a single person with no dependents. For a graduate student or postdoc with a dependent spouse (e.g., of an international trainee) or children, the low stipend or salary is almost certainly inadequate.

Graduate students almost always turn first to cutting their living expenses to be able to live within their means. They know that they are supposed to devote the lion’s share of their weekly energy to their coursework, research, and teaching. But when their backs are against the wall, some make money on the side to avoid going (further) into debt.

Career-Advancing Experiences

Some graduate students and postdocs are motivated to side hustle not by lack of income but rather lack of practical career preparation.

What careers does a PhD or postdoc prepare you for? These days, the vast majority of PhDs are not hired into tenure-track faculty positions. (Time to stop calling the jobs most PhDs get “alternative”, right?) Some universities have acknowledged this and put in place programming to help PhDs transition out of academia (my alma mater, Duke University, and in particular the Pratt School of Engineering, is innovating in this area), while others are still catching up.

Of course, PhDs have plenty of transferable skills that can be put to use in a wide variety of careers, but landing a job is still challenging.

Further reading: How My PhD Prepared Me for Entrepreneurship

A judiciously chosen side hustle (or even volunteer work) can help a PhD build out her resumé/CV and network to stand out from the other PhD applicants. A side hustle can teach you new skills, give you an opportunity to demonstrate the skills you already possess, and introduce you to professionals who can further your career journey.

Video Series: How to Increase Your Income as a Graduate Student

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Are Side Hustles Allowed by Your PhD Program or Postdoc Position?

While some academics may take the view that side hustling distracts from classes, teaching, research, etc., for some people a side hustle is the main factor that enables them to stay in their graduate programs or postdoc positions. They side hustle because they want to keep doing PhD-level research; otherwise, they can just leave and earn more money elsewhere! If conceived and managed properly, a side hustle is not a distraction from the student or postdoc’s training but rather an enhancement of it.

If you think about graduate school or your postdoc as similar to any other type of job, usually the only stipulations regarding your side hustle are that: 1) it does not interfere with your primary job and 2) it does not present a conflict of interest. That logic is helpful for thinking through whether a side hustle is allowed, but the universities sometimes add layers of complexity.

Further reading: Can a Graduate Student Have a Side Hustle?

Side Hustle Permissibility by Position Type: International, Fellow, Employee, Etc.

There may be explicit bans on making money on the side or it may be frowned upon. The income and experience gained from a side hustle is not worth getting kicked out of your graduate program or postdoc position.

International trainees

The F-1 and J-1 visas generally only permit employment directly in your capacity as a graduate student or postdoc. Sometimes, you can seek permission for other employment ventures, such as Optional Practical Training (OPT) for F-1 visa holders. A side hustle that you work on simultaneously with your research will likely not comply with these rules, so it’s a no-go.

Fellowship Recipients (Graduate or Postdoc)

Check the terms of your fellowship funding supplied by your university, employer, or funding agency. There may be a stipulation that no outside income is allowed as the fellowship is designed to support you completely and require your complete dedication. If you choose to pursue a side income against the terms of your fellowship, proceed with extreme caution and recognize the downside is potentially losing your primary funding. In other cases, outside income is not mentioned by the fellowship terms or is even explicitly allowed.

Research and Teaching Assistants

This is the category of graduate students most likely to be able to get away with a side hustle or be explicitly allowed because your responsibilities are generally time-limited to 20 hours per week (officially). Of course, beyond that, you are responsible for your dissertation work, so side hustling might conflict with that important pursuit. If you are in a contract with your university, check its terms. If outside income is not allowed, proceed with caution as you might lose your assistantship. You might, however, find a provision that allows outside income, perhaps up to a certain number of hours per week.

Postdoc Employees

A postdoc employee has a regular job, albeit a demanding one. Your desire to side hustle at that point in your training is more likely motivated by career advancement rather than income. Again, check your contract, but a side hustle may very well be permissible as long as it doesn’t interfere with your work. If you are working in your field, though, it could be a good idea to seek your advisor’s permission in advance.

What Does Your Advisor Think?

The person with the most important opinion on your side hustle–after you–is your advisor. Allowed, disallowed, frowned upon… The status of side hustling in the eyes of your university, department, or funding agency is less important than its status to your advisor. If your advisor is an unforgiving taskmaster who expects his myopic view of the supremacy of research to be adopted by his trainees, a side hustle is a very risky endeavor. However, if your advisor is a reasonable and kind person who respects work-life balance, it may be better to ask for forgiveness rather than permission if your side hustle is discovered and viewed negatively.

The Bottom Line: The Spirit of the Law

The spirit of the law when it comes to side hustling during graduate school or your postdoc is that it should not distract from your training. (This sentiment does not apply to visa holders; the letter of the law is most important in that case.) Financial and career stress itself can easily distract from training, so it may be a matter of choosing the lesser of two ‘evils.’

Prohibitions against outside income make sense when the income comes from a part-time job with fixed hours (meaning that you wouldn’t be able to stay late in lab if necessary) or if it takes so much time overall that you can’t complete your work healthily. But I don’t find prohibitions against outside work that doesn’t interfere with the student or postdoc’s primary ‘job’ any more logical than prohibitions against having a family or a hobby (assuming no conflict of interest).

Ultimately, rules or no rules and advisor’s opinion aside, you are the only person who gets to decide whether to pursue a side hustle. You are the one who will manage it and make sure that it enhances your PhD training instead of detracting from it.

Types of PhD Side Hustles and Examples of PhD Side Hustles

I break side hustles for PhDs into four categories: ones that advance your career, ones that you enjoy, ones that pay well (enough), and passive income. A side hustle that pays well and advances your career is ideal. If you can’t achieve that, doing something you enjoy is obviously preferable to doing something that you dislike or feel neutral toward that simply pays some bills. Passive income is outside of this ranked order as it doesn’t involve trading time directly for money.

By the way, if you are looking for a way to increase your income that your advisor would be totally on board with, try applying for a fellowship. I’ve created a guide to applying for and winning fellowships that includes a list of broad, portable fellowships that pay full stipends/salaries.

Further reading: How to Find, Apply for, and Win a Fellowship During Your PhD or Postdoc

PhD Side Hustles that Advance Your Career

There’s no better type of side hustle than one that pays you and helps you along in your career. Through this type of side hustle, you put your current skills to use, learn new skills, expand your network, and/or explore a possible career path. Often, this sort of side hustle is related to your current field of research or uses skills you’ve honed during your PhD. You might even be able to start working for a potential future employer while you’re still in training.

Examples of PhD side hustles that advance your career are:

  • Consulting
  • Writing
    • Freelance writing (Derek)
    • Freelance academic writing (Vicki)
    • Journalism
  • Editing
    • Freelance scientific paper editing (Julie and Amy)
    • Freelance scientific paper editing (Jenni)
    • Thesis/dissertation editing
  • Internships
    • Scientific research summer internship (Alice)
    • Engineering summer internship (David)
  • Professional fellowships
    • Science policy fellow (Emily)
  • Analysis
    • Research analyst for investor relations (Adam)
  • Teaching

PhD Side Hustles that You Enjoy

Sometimes an enjoyable hobby can be monetized or you can find meaning and delight in a side hustle. This kind of side hustle is one you would likely spend some time doing even if you weren’t being paid and can be particularly revitalizing during the long slog of your PhD or postdoc.

Examples of PhD side hustles that you might enjoy are:

  • Monetized hobby
  • Non-academic teaching
  • Resident advising
    • Resident advising for graduate students (David)
    • Resident advising for a fraternity (Adrian)

PhD Side Hustles that Pay the Bills

If the only purpose a side hustle fulfills is bringing in some money, it’s done its job. Sometimes these pursuits are necessary for survival, but you shouldn’t spend any more time on them than absolutely necessary.

Examples of PhD side hustles that (likely) simply bring in income are:

  • Tutoring
  • Retail
  • Food service
  • Uber/Lyft
  • Childcare

PhD Passive Income

Passive income has become a bit of a buzzword in recent years. Ostensibly, passive income occurs after you make some kind of investment that then pays a residual.

Making a monetary investment in a rental property or dividend-paying stock is a classic example of passive income. The former is definitely a possible income source for a PhD who owns her own home.

Further reading: Should I Buy a Home During Grad School?

If you don’t have money up front, you can “invest” your time and talent into a product that people will buy over time. The classic example of that type is an author who is paid a royalty with each book sale.

The current fad incarnation of passive investing is a promise that you can “make money while you sleep!” through online business, generally selling previously created digital products. (I do this in my business.) However, almost no online business runs for long without input of time and labor. The upside for a graduate student or postdoc, however, is that the large time investment needed up front to generate passive income and the maintenance over the long term can generally be performed on your own schedule and under the radar.

Examples of PhD side hustles that are passive income:

  • Writing (i.e., published author)
  • Patent holder (licensed)
  • Digital products
    • Flash cards and ebook (Alex)
    • Courses
  • Investing for current income
  • Landlording

Video Series: How to Increase Your Income as a Graduate Student

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Balancing Your Side Hustle with Your PhD Work

Figuring out how to make money and settling into a groove of earning a side income can be exciting. It can even be more gratifying at times than your research as research is basically a series of failures punctuated by occasional successes. In those weeks and month when nothing is going right in your research, being able to turn to an activity with a known outcome ($$!) can be a welcome relief. However, you should not forget why you are pursuing the side hustle in the first place: to finish your PhD and pursue a certain career. (Of course, your side hustle may spur you to leave your program, but only do so after serious reflection! It shouldn’t be about the side hustle per se but a carefully considered evolution of your career plans.)

To that end, there are a few strategies you can use to make sure your side hustle complements and does not compete with your primary role:

1) Track Your Time

Set weekly limits for yourself on the amount of time you will spend on your role as a graduate student or postdoc vs. on your side hustle. If your time spent side hustling creeps too high or your time spent on research dips too low, you know you need to readjust. Expect your weekly time goals to change throughout the seasons of your PhD training.

2) Set Geographic and/or Temporal Boundaries

It’s best if you conduct your side hustle in a different location than your primary PhD workspace; for example, you could work from home on your side hustle and never in your office or on campus. An alternative to geographic boundaries is temporal boundaries, such as never working on your side hustle during daytime working hours. The exact boundaries you set will depend heavily on the nature of both your PhD work and your side hustle.

3) Choose a Flexible Side Hustle

An ideal side hustle for a PhD is one that can be accomplished from anywhere at any time and ramped up or down depending on how busy you are with your research. This is not realistic for all side hustles, but the more axes of flexibility yours has the better it will complement your primary job.

4) Keep Your Side Hustle Quiet (If Possible)

An internship or professional fellowship that requires time away from your graduate program or postdoc obviously can’t be kept secret, but many other side hustles can fly under the radar of your advisor and department if you want them to. The seriousness of the possible repercussions or how “frowned upon” side hustling is should dictate how open you are about your pursuit. Keep in mind that a side hustle in your current field of research may very well get back to your advisor as communities are quite small, so in that case it may be better to be completely above board.

Best Financial Practices for Your Side Hustle

Most side hustles are independent contractor or self-employment positions, which means that you become an entrepreneur (or solopreneur) of a kind. There are some common best practices in self-employment you should put in place from the start of your side hustle.

Further reading:

1) Use a Separate Business Checking Account

Separating your personal transactions from your business transactions at the account level will help you keep track of exactly how much money you are earning after expenses and what is deductible on your tax return. You can make periodic transfers from your business account to your personal account to pay yourself.

2) Set Aside Money for Tax Payments (Quarterly or Annually)

Your PhD side hustle generates (potentially) taxable income, subject not only to income tax but also in many cases self-employment tax. Add your marginal tax brackets at the federal, state, and local levels together with the FICA tax you must pay, and set aside that fraction of each of your side hustle paychecks to ultimately pay the extra tax. If you earn enough in your side hustle compared to your primary job, you eventually will need to start paying quarterly estimated tax. Fellowship recipients who don’t have automatic tax withholding are already familiar with this process. Even if you aren’t required to pay quarterly, expect a larger year-end tax bill.

Further reading: The Complete Guide to Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients

3) Give your Earnings a Job

The best way to ensure you don’t blow your side income is to assign it a job to be completed as soon as it hits your personal account. You could pay a specific bill or two with your side income or only allow yourself certain indulgences from your side income. For example, Jenni saved her side hustle earnings for travel.

Closing Advice and Thoughts from PhD Side Hustlers

“Honestly, it kept me sane to have other things going on… [They] helped me to finish my dissertation more quickly because I was more focused on the time I had, instead of having lots of unstructured time to work.” – Kathayoon

“I’d encourage graduate students to pursue a lot of different opportunities while in school, even ones that are at a slant from what they usually do. It’s easy to get tunnel vision as a grad student, but if you open yourself up, you can develop really useful skills while reinvigorating your academic work.” – Derek

“I definitely recommend finding something in grad school that’s unrelated to the work you do, monetized or not, so that if all your experiments fail one week, you still have something meaningful to throw yourself into.” – Shannon

“This experience was critical for my transition out of graduate school. I ended up getting a full-time offer at the same company after maybe 2 months of hourly work and have been there for almost 2 years now. The best part was that I had an opportunity to try out my job before starting full-time. How else do you know if you want to launch a career in a certain field?” – Adam