postdoc

This PhD Healed Her Scarcity Money Mindset Using a Goal-Setting Framework (Part 1)

September 16, 2019 by Meryem Ok

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Lucie Bland about her financial journey from graduate school to self-employment. Lucie was severely underpaid as a PhD student, and she felt such guilt and shame around spending that she became terrified of money. Her money mindset didn’t improve when her income increased several-fold as a postdoc, and it wasn’t until she discovered the Good-Better-Best goal setting framework that she started to heal her relationship with money. She now describes herself as a money boss. In this first half of the conversation, Lucie details her financial journey from underpaid PhD student to well-paid postdoc and how she needed to take a break from full-time employment to set herself on the right career and financial trajectory.

Listen to Part 2 of this interview!

Links Mentioned in the Episode

Teaser

00:00 Lucie: I did go to some extent through that transition of seeing not money as like an enemy or something that needs to be hoarded, but something that can be used as an investment for a good life. When I was doing my PhD, I was not future-oriented. I was in survival mode.

Introduction

00:21 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season four, episode five, and today my guest is Dr. Lucie Bland, self-employed PhD living in Australia. Lucie has such an amazing story to tell that I’ve split it into two episodes. This one and next week’s. In this episode, Lucie talks us through the roller coaster of her financial journey from severely underpaid graduate student in London to well-compensated postdoc in Australia to not having an income to starting a business. Lucie describes herself during graduate school as “terrified of money,” And that didn’t automatically improve when her income more than tripled and her cost of living dropped. We discuss the intentional steps she took to heal her money mindset, including the goal-setting framework that she now applies in her personal and professional life. Without further ado, here’s the first part of my interview with Dr. Lucie Bland.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:26 Emily: Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. We have a really delightful set of episodes ahead for us. It’s going to be a two-parter. My guest today is Dr. Lucie Bland and so I’m going to kick it right over to her right now and have her introduce herself to you a little bit further.

01:44 Lucie: Thank you, Emily. Thank you for having me on the podcast. My name is Dr. Lucie Bland. I’m an editor and writing coach and I help researchers and writers get published.

01:54 Emily: Yeah, that sounds really exciting. Can you tell us what your background is?

01:59 Lucie: Yeah. I graduated from Oxford University with a degree in biological sciences and then I did my PhD at Imperial College, London in Ecology in 2014. That’s when I finished, and then I moved to Australia for two postdocs in conservation science. The first one at the University of Melbourne and the second one at Deakin University. And now for about a year I’ve been running my academic editing business, which I now do full time. So very much serving the academic community, but I’m no longer directly a researcher.

02:34 Emily: Yeah. Well, we are in the same boat in that respect. Can you say right away up top what your website is?

02:42 Lucie: My website is luciebland.com and that’s spelled l u c i e b l a n d.com.

02:49 Emily: Yeah. And any other personal details you’d like to share, maybe where you’re living now or is your household just you?

02:56 Lucie: I live in Melbourne with my boyfriend and our Burmese mountain dog that you might see in the video if he comes around.

03:05 Emily: Yeah. Enticement to hop over to YouTube and watch this on the video instead of over the podcast. Okay. So we have this great story that I know a little bit about already, so bring us back to your time in graduate school. What was going on with you financially at that time, both in terms of like how much money you were making and also what was your relationship with money?

Lucie’s Evolving Relationship to Money

03:30 Lucie: Yeah, my money situation, my relationship to money when I was doing my PhD was very different to how it is now. I was living in London, one of the most expensive cities in the world, and I was earning 13,000 pounds per year, which is 16,000 US dollars. And I would spend 650 pounds a month on rent, which is 60% of my income. And I remember that time reading a report that said that your level of basic socioeconomic level can be determined by how much you spend on rent, and the higher it is the poorer you are. So that was a little bit depressing to me. But despite having these really high expenses and that really low income, I was really not wise about money at all. My money strategy was to bury my head in the sand. I was paid quarterly, which would mean that I would run out of money every quarter.

04:27 Lucie: And I didn’t have a savings account. So normal accounts could be very regularly in the double digits and I just didn’t know how that would happen. And when I moved to Australia, I experienced a very different money situation in that my income pretty much tripled. I was paid $80,000 a year and I lived in a really funky flat on my own in the hipster part of town. So I kind of went from rags to riches, but I very much kept my very Scrooge-y lifestyle and I still didn’t budget. It did mean that I was saving $20,000 a year because my expenses were really low cause I would still collect vouchers and coupons and have that very “PhD student” lifestyle. But I wouldn’t say that my budgeting skills or my approach to money improved in any way. It was just that my income was higher.

05:26 Emily: Gotcha. Yeah, that’s a great overview, and I think it’s one that’s going to be relatable to a lot of people within the audience. Most of my audience is in the U.S. and the cost of living differences can be so wide between, you know, New York and San Francisco versus certain cities in the Midwest that are quite a bit smaller. And so a graduate stipend can also kind of be all over the map and it doesn’t necessarily correlate with higher stipends in higher cities necessarily. Sometimes that’s the case and sometimes not. I’ve interviewed several people on the podcast who live in high cost of living cities but have an okay kind of income, maybe double or more what you just mentioned, and others where that’s completely not the case. A much, much lower income. Actually, I want to go back a little bit further and talk about your mindset from even before you started graduate school. Would you say that you grew up middle class, or what was your mindset about money or the socioeconomic status you had prior to entering graduate school?

Money Mindset Before Grad School

06:34 Lucie: Yes, so I was definitely middle class. Especially my father had a very relaxed and confident approach to money and to some extent my mother as well. But in a way they hadn’t taught me any budgeting skills at all, which is a little bit sad, but kind of looking a bit backwards again. And that has really influenced my money story. My French grandparents grew up under German occupation and under rationing and that really influenced their mindset around money and around the use of resources. And to some extent, even in my kind of middle class nuclear family, especially, my mother could also have that very Scrooge-y or scarcity mindset. And I remember my grandparents still drinking chicory, which is a coffee replacement that’s made from the root of a plant, that French people used to drink under the German occupation.

07:30 Lucie: And so they still had some of these relic habits of, you know, we don’t know when the next meal is coming. And so you’ve got to finish off your plate, you’ve got to use all your resources in a very savvy way, which in many cases can be a good approach. But I think that as a child, I really internalized that. And one of the funny stories in my family is that at the age of 10 or 11, I signed up to this website, it was called scrooge.com and got lots of vouchers and was very obsessed with using those and not spending any money. So, I’m quite conscious that my personal money story and approach to money, well to some extent determined by my socioeconomic level or being from a middle-class family, was also influenced by lots of other family patterns that predated that.

Money Mindset During Grad School

08:20 Emily: Yeah. So I guess we could suffice to say that in some ways you were unprepared for being in graduate school on that kind of income and in that expensive city. In other ways, you had maybe some skills and some mindsets that would be, I hesitate to even say helpful. I mean helpful to survive, but maybe not helpful to be sort of healthy mentally overall towards money, especially later on once you have that income increase. So when you were accepted to graduate school and you knew what that stipend was going to be, and you knew more or less where you’d be living and that it was going to be 60% of your income going towards rent, what were your thoughts? How did you approach that situation? Did you think, “well, I’m just going to have to make this work. I’ll do it somehow”? Or did you consider debt? And I don’t know if that was even really an option for you.

09:14 Lucie: The thing is I didn’t even know that I was going to spend 60% of my income on rent because I hadn’t calculated it at all. I was completely in the dark, and no, that was not an option. I’ve never had a loan or credit card. Again, different countries have different approaches to that. And for me, I was just going to have to eat pasta. That’s how short-sighted my thinking was. To some extent, I could have considered a student loan, which I might not have been eligible for as a French person. But you know, my thinking was not even that advanced.

09:54 Emily: Right. And so once you did find out, once you did secure housing and you knew how much of your stipend was going to be eaten up by rent, what was your plan at that point, and kind of how did you get through it? And I guess this might be sort of advice in sort of how to keep expenses low. Although of course in the overall arc of this conversation, that’s not really what we want to be talking about. But for those years, how did you get by?

10:19 Lucie: I probably spent very little money on food, and I did go out a little bit, but I wouldn’t do anything that was fun. You know, I would probably not go to the cinema. I probably would not go to expensive parties. One of the things I did in London, I had a bike and I would be very savvy about whether I would take the tube or the bus. The bus was cheaper, and so everything became a decision. And if the decision presented itself to me, I would always take the cheaper option. So, I didn’t think long-term about do I need to build savings? Do I need to think a bit longer term? It was extremely short-term.

10:57 Emily: Was thinking long-term even an option though?

Short-Term versus Long-Term Vision

11:01 Lucie: At that stage, I wasn’t thinking long-term at all because I just couldn’t. I didn’t have the funds to do it.

11:09 Emily: Yeah. It’s not really a personal oversight. It’s just this is how the day-to-day is passing by of thinking about these really minute decisions around money, which are so important to whether you’re going to stay in the block for the month or the quarter. So you were surviving by being extremely frugal in many areas and not spending much on entertainment. I wonder, were your classmates living in a similar manner?

11:39 Lucie: Yes. Yes, we were all living in house shares in London. In quite difficult conditions with lots of issues with housemates, with landlords, with boilers breaking and not getting repaired. Like in a way it was a very kind of low-income status. And I remember kind of looking in awe at some of the PhD students who might be a little bit older who might have worked before and had a bit more savings or maybe had a partner who could support them, who lived in a real adult flat and had furniture that they bought new rather than scavenged from the streets. And to me that was very much a vision of the long-term future. It’s definitely not something I was doing then.

12:27 Emily: Did you find that it was helpful to have that comradery with some of your classmates? Did it make getting through this experience a little bit more bearable?

12:37 Lucie: Yes, and to some extent, even people who would start their first job in London. So, not a PhD student, would probably be on a similar income. And that was 2010. It was post-global financial crisis. So actually some people had decided to do a PhD or go to graduate school just to avoid getting a job. Because there were so few jobs. So that was kind of the economic climate of the time, which has improved slightly now, but we were all very much in that same mindset regardless of whether someone was starting, you know, their first teaching job or was doing your PhD or had a job in admin or in sales at a small company. None of us were making the big bucks.

Money’s Impact on Lucie’s PhD Perfomance

13:20 Emily: How do you think that being–it sounds like very consumed with thoughts about money and decisions around money on a daily basis–do you think that had any effect on your scholarship?

13:34 Lucie: Do you mean how I performed during my PhD?

13:37 Emily: Yeah. Like, let’s say your income was double of that, and you had an easier time with money, there was less stress there. Do you think that you would have done better?

13:49 Lucie: I actually think the opposite in that because I couldn’t do that much outside of going to work and coming back home, I worked really hard. And that’s what I would just do. I had a very traditional existence of cycling to Uni, doing my PhD, and coming back. And I think that to some extent doing my PhD, was a release from my money worries, and that’s why I worked so hard on it. So that could be my specific experience.

14:18 Emily: Yeah. I don’t know if that’s generalizable. I mean, I’m happy to hear that you thought it was a positive effect on your work. But I remember when I was interviewing for graduate schools that I heard that argument from–I interviewed in a city that didn’t have a whole lot going on. A very, very small city, rural–and the argument was kind of, well there’s nothing to do here except for our work. And the weather is really tough in winter. And so we just work, and that’s all. Versus if you lived in a very exciting city or one where there’s just a lot more fun activities going on, you might be more tempted to get out of the lab and go to these other things. But we’re talking about living in London and having that attitude. So, I’m a little bit surprised by that. That you were able to kind of “tunnel vision” on just your work during that time.

15:07 Lucie: Yeah. I think that in that case, it’s very much necessity is the mother invention or this dictates how you behave.

15:16 Emily: Yeah, exactly.

15:16 Lucie: And that’s why I was very relieved when I moved out of London, came to Australia where the cost of living compared to London is lower. You know, it’s kind of insane to say. Australia has a reputation for being expensive, but I found Australia very cheap.

15:32 Emily: Yeah. Let’s talk about that transition now. But first, how many years were you in London doing your PhD?

15:38 Lucie: Four years.

Financial Life as a Postdoc in Australia

15:39 Emily: Okay. So that’s plenty of time for this to become a very ingrained mindset and approach towards money. So, you finish up and you’ve accepted a postdoc in Australia. Tell us about that. Tell us about the money that you’re making and where you’re living and so forth.

15:55 Lucie: Yes. I was very excited to come to Australia to come to Melbourne. As I said, I would be making $80,000, which was way more money than I’d ever made. I could afford to live on my own, which was a big thing in a really nice little flat in the inner city. I bought a car, I bought new furniture, you know, things were going really well. But what I noticed as well was that I did keep a lot of my former habits in the sense that, for example, Melburnians are big fans of their coffee. All the postdocs would go to the really nice coffee shops and have take-away coffee and bring it back to their office while I was very purposefully making instant coffee in a little kitchen so as to avoid buying coffees. And most of my decisions were like that in that I still got reclaimed furniture from the streets. I would do most of my shopping at op shops, which is very eco-friendly but there is a limit to how healthy that is as well. And so, even though my income was higher, I had still kept that mindset of trying to keep my cost of living as low as possible. Not really from a conscious intention, but just because that was the only thing I knew how to do.

17:13 Emily: Yeah, it sounds it’s actually hearkening back to your example from your grandparents, right. Even the coffee, specifically. So this is really interesting to me to talk to you about this transition because it’s something that I think about a lot and that I talk about quite a bit as well of how should PhDs manage their money once they’re out of graduate school. And I think the standard personal finance advice that I often say as well is live like a college student. And that’s the general advice, and the way it applies for graduate students that I say is “continue at your graduate student lifestyle for as long as possible.” Even though, once you’re making this higher income, to kind of make up for the lost time and the lost income from the previous years, so that’s a time when you can be building up savings and starting to invest and so forth.

18:05 Emily: But I trip over that advice sometimes a little bit. And especially in a case like yours, because if your lifestyle was so constrained, due to your graduate income, that’s not good advice any longer, right? You should increase your lifestyle as your income goes up, and still do all the things you want to, you know, be saving and so forth, investing or paying off debt, whatever it is you need to do. But if you have been consumed and shutting out large portions of your life because of lack of money, that’s not something that should continue. So I’m really glad to have your example as one that is counter to the advice that I usually give and the advice that many people would probably hear once they are seeking out personal finance content. So, can you talk a little bit more about that change? Once your income is higher, how did you start changing how you were using your money and thinking about your money?

Money Change #1: Saving Toward Retirement

19:05 Lucie: The first decision that I ever made about my money, that was a very good decision, which was based on the advice of one of my friends who’s a financial advisor, was that when I started my postdoc in Australia, we’re very lucky that we have 17% of our salary be put into a superannuation fund by our employer. So the employer adds to our salary 17% and puts it into a fund for our retirement. But we can make additional pre-tax contributions. And I made the maximum pre-tax contribution, which was 9.5%. So, I basically had a quarter of my salary going into a super every month, and that was not increasing my lifestyle. That was making a very conscious decision about investing in my future. And that was pretty much the little seed that then grew not into expanding my lifestyle but into this view of investing in myself in the sense that I can invest in savings, I can invest in my super, but I can also invest in my own wellbeing, not because I’m being frivolous, but because it pays off.

20:17 Lucie: It pays off, let’s say to have a gym membership, to have a yoga membership, to have healthy social relationships, et cetera. And so I think that I did go to some extent through that transition of seeing not money as like an enemy or something that needs to be hoarded, but something that can be used as an investment for a good life. And that was what I’d seen in some of these older PhD students in London who were maybe buying a property, et Cetera, that they were investing in their future. Versus when I was doing my PhD, I was not future-oriented. I was in survival mode. Versus this increase in salary opened up for me the possibility that I could plan for a future.

21:01 Emily: I think you put that so well and I want everyone listening, if you’ve resonated with anything, Lucy said so far to go back a minute or two and listen to that–what you just said, over again–because I think it was so, so insightful and well-put. As you were saying, the first intentional money decision that you made after this income increase was not about just going crazy and spending because you’d been so restricted for so long and just splashing out on everything. But rather, being able to think about really changing how you even viewed money. What you said was in viewing it as being able to invest in yourself and having an enjoyable and healthy lifestyle overall rather than trying to hoard it as much as possible because there was such a scarcity, you know, before that point.

21:52 Emily: And I did want to add a slight translation for my, my listeners in the U.S. So, our equivalent to what you did was, when you got your higher salary, basically we would call it “maxed out your 401(k),” which in the U.S. is $19,000 per year. So if anyone’s listening who has started a new post-PhD job and you’re wondering what to do with that lovely salary bump, maxing out your 401(k) is an excellent thing to do. For the reasons that Lucy just mentioned, that it is an investment in yourself and it’s an investment in your future.

Commercial

22:25 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 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.

Money Change #2: Impulse Shopping

23:13 Emily: So were there any other changes that you made, after that point, after starting to think about the long-term with respect to retirement? What other changes did you start making?

23:24 Lucie: Probably the next change that I made, which was not a good change, and that happened in my second postdoc, was that I started to impulse shop, and that was entirely related to the stress that I was under. So for, as you said, for a few years I managed to keep my spending quite low, and to have that fairly frugal lifestyle. But then after years of PhD, years of postdoc being put under a lot of pressure, I was starting to struggle, and I could see that being reflected in my spending. And I very quickly knew that this was an issue. So it wasn’t that I was being frivolous in being released, I was using that kind of as an emotional Band-Aid. And that kind of was one of the alarm bells that told me that maybe I need a bit of time off or to think about why I was in academia and what I’d wanted to do. Because one of the symptoms of this was how I was sending my money, which was not really in accordance with my values, and that was quite troublesome to me.

24:31 Emily: Yeah. I think that’s also very common behavior, whether people can afford it or not. So, coming to impulse spending just to emotionally relieve some kind of stress or difficulty or pain that’s going on. So, yeah. Can you tell me more about, having recognized that issue, what then did you do? You just mentioned you took some time off from your postdoc.

Leave of Absence from Postdoc

24:56 Lucie: So I think this was kind of part of a larger quarter-life crisis in the sense that the pressure had been mounting probably since the first day that I started my first postdoc in Australia. And now that was three years later of full-time work with a lot of international travel, a lot of publications. We’re all familiar with that kind of lifestyle. And I just didn’t know why I was in research anymore. I felt really lost and kind of, as we talked about before, I could not see my future in it. And I didn’t know if it was because I was too stressed or confused or because it was genuinely not what I wanted to do. So I was very lucky that I could ask for a six-month unpaid leave of absence from my university and kind of take a little break from all my responsibilities. Because, especially in my first postdoc, I think I must have supervised four or five students to completion. I think I kind of bumped to a lecturer role very quickly. But that amount of responsibility, and then it kind of caught up with me a few years later, was like, well, I’m going down this route very quickly. Do I want to continue with this route?

26:16 Emily: Yeah, really in many jobs, many workplaces, there is a great deal of just going with the flow and some inertia. And you can get to a point where your job duties are not at all kind of what you expected or what you signed up for, but it evolved. So that’s amazing that you made the decision and also were able to say, “okay, hold on a second, I need to take some time to figure out where I really want to go next.” And this is maybe a little bit of a naive question, but were you able to fund that period of being away from your job because your expenses had been so far below your income for the previous years?

26:53 Lucie: Yes, I had a lot of savings at that point.

26:56 Emily: Yeah. And, what I say quite a bit, that money gives you options. And so, you’d been earning quite a lot and saving quite a lot for those few years, and then you had the option to take a step back and have that time to reevaluate. So, what did you do with that time off?

Personal and Career Development Journey

27:16 Lucie: First, I had a holiday to see my parents in Europe, which was great. And I think the first two or three months of the six-month period, I was brain dead. I was recovering. I was watching TV, doing all of these silly things that people do when they finish their PhD. But I’ve seen that quite a lot in first or second postdocs in that people who don’t take a break between their PhD and their postdoc tend to get hit at a later date with trying to cope with all that change. I had also moved to Australia by myself and so I think it just all caught up with me a little bit later. So, I spent a few months resting and relaxing, and that’s when I started to coach myself. I became very interested in these personal development and career development books.

28:09 Lucie: I started to use a career coaching book that’s called, What Color is Your Parachute? It’s a very famous career coaching book.

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

28:16 Emily: Yes, I’ve read that.

Part-Time Editing, Part-Time Postdoc

28:18 Lucie: Yeah, it’s great. And basically, I figured out that probably a very good job for me, which matched to actually want I wanted to do as a child–I wanted to be a writer. And what I was enjoying, what I was really good at as an academic was publishing. And kind of putting these two things together, I was like, “well, getting a job as an editor would be quite a good fit.” And I got a small job with a big global editing company, editing research papers, writing research papers, kind of being a writer for hire. And I really enjoyed that but it paid very little, and I was just starting out. And I could see with the budgeting that I had started doing when I was off work–because that was another really great habit that I’ve gotten into–was that just having that editing job was not gonna cut it for the type of life that I wanted. And that kind of spurred that decision to go back to my postdoc part-time. I was also not sure whether I wanted to quit academia completely. I thought that maybe if I worked part-time, I could cope with the challenges of academia better because I would have reduced hours. Then I could do my editing job as well. So that was the plan in that period, which would be to do the postdoc job part-time and the editing job part-time, and then together it would make a healthy income.

29:52 Emily: I love just how intentional you were with all of those decisions. The series of decisions that you made there, in trying to align your career with what you really wanted to do. And also, you briefly mentioned, but starting to budget is a major, huge leap in one’s personal finances. And that, it sounds like, sort of contributed to the career planning. Right? How much money do I actually need to make to fund the lifestyle that I want and then how can I redirect my career to make sure that I make that amount of money? And is that how it worked out? Did you find that the half-time postdoc position was lower stress, and was that a good situation that you were then in?

Backfired Plan: Full-Time Work for Part-Time Pay

30:35 Lucie: In a way that was a complete failure, in that I was doing full-time work for part-time hours and part-time pay. And I’ve heard that story a lot with other people, in that research is a job that is difficult to do part-time. And a lot of mothers, a lot of people who would want to work part-time for lots of reasons, find it challenging. After a while, I did end up quitting the editing job because it was too much in that postdoc responsibilities would come during my editing hours and would influence the quality of my work at the editing company. And because I was an employee of the university, they kind of took it as this is your priority, and your other job is not a priority. And that was quite difficult to manage. And also at that time I would realize that having my own business would enable me to make the kind of money that I want it to make from editing instead of working for an editing company. And so that spurred my decision to quit the editing job and to start my own business. So, as you’d mentioned, some of these decisions were intentional, but also some of them were just due from the decision to go part-time, in a way, backfired.

32:02 Emily: Yeah. So, did you end up not staying part-time for very long? How long did you stay at that part-time?

Going Full-Time into Self-Employment

32:09 Lucie: I stayed part-time for a year. And then I went full-time with the business. I had a few months to start the business when I was still part-time at the university. And that gave me a little bit of a cushion. And then again with the budgeting, I realized within three months that actually with the business, I was making enough money to not need the Uni job, which I then let go of. It makes it sound like a very drastic and calculated decision. There was a lot of kind of emotional decisions that went into it as well because I love research and I continue in a way, but I knew that having my own business would be a better decision for me for the lifestyle that I want to have, for the type of people that I want to surround myself with, etc. And finances were I guess one of the drivers of that decision. But there were also lots of other things that went into it.

33:08 Emily: Yeah. I have many of the same thoughts around and motivations around becoming self-employed. So, we’re going to talk plenty about your transition to self-employment in the second part of this two-part series. But before we do that, I wanted you to introduce this Good-Better-Best framework that you started using. I believe during this period when you were taking a break from work and when you started budgeting. What is that framework, and how were you using it?

Good Better Best (GBB) Framework

33:40 Lucie: Yes. So the framework that I was using at the time along with my budgeting is called Good-Better-Best goals. And it’s a framework that was devised by business coach Megan Hale. So when I was on my break, I just sucked up a lot of books and podcasts on how to be an entrepreneur. And usually these guys have much healthier attitudes to money. People have worked really hard on their money story and their finances to be at a stage where they can own their own business. And so that GBB method relies on defining Good-Better-Best benchmarks in terms of income generation. So, your “Good” goal is your minimum viable income. It’s the minimum of amount of money that you need to survive. Probably, my income when I was a PhD in London was even below what could be called a minimum viable income because it came with so much strain.

34:40 Lucie: A “Good” goal in the GBB framework is your basics, your rent, your bills, et cetera. Your food, and maybe something that you find really important–a little bit of going out or a Netflix subscription, but it really doesn’t go overboard. It’s pretty much the minimum that you need to have a relatively happy life. Then it gets very exciting when we go to the “Better” and the “Best” goals because then we start to cast out some of these big dreams that we have. So, for example, for me and my “Better” goals, I’ve got things such as buying furniture, buying a new dog, going on holiday. So, that’s when your lifestyle starts to improve and increase. Like you were mentioning, with having a postdoc that has better pay. Usually, people get to that “Better” benchmark where they can start to save money. They can work towards these big dreams. And because they cast it out in advance, it’s very motivational in the sense that, let’s say budgeting or restricting your income and things that you don’t like. It comes natural because you want to reach these other goals. Instead of feeling restricted, you’re just moving your money around to enable going towards the things you really want.

35:56 Lucie: And then the “Best” goal really blows your mind in the sense that if you could make that much money, it would be almost unfathomable. And you could afford so many different things. So, here you can cast a lot of these bigger dreams like buying a house or going on very luxurious holidays, et cetera. And so because you have these three benchmarks, you can always assess where you are in this very logical and objective manner. And maybe that’s something we’ll go into the next episode. It helps you get out of this very emotional attitude to money or this very fear-based attitude to money because then they just become numbers in a spreadsheet. They are in an order: Good, Better, Best. And then you can address them in this objective manner rather than having no numbers or this nebulous idea in your head that your dreams are never going to come true because they are too expensive, versus when you know exactly how much it’s going to cost, you can start working towards it.

Expanding the GBB Framework for Personal Goals

36:59 Emily: Yeah. I think you explained that very well. So, the source that it came from for you and the way that you first learned about it is very oriented around being self-employed or being a business owner in terms of having variable levels of income and a degree of control over your income. If I make this amount that’s going to keep the lights on and my life’s going to be okay. If I strive for this amount, then the next levels I could unlock in my lifestyle, and then, okay, the third level is even well above that. But given your history, coming as a PhD student and then as a postdoc, how did you massage this framework into something that you could use maybe in your personal life and not just as an aspiring business owner?

37:46 Lucie: Yes. Well, first, just defining the “Good” goal. This is applicable to anyone in the sense that most people actually don’t know their minimum viable income. And that would change their decisions on what type of job to take, what city to move to. They might think that a certain city is too expensive or a certain job doesn’t pay enough, et cetera, versus if you have a really good handle on how much you actually spend. For me, I’ve done personal budgeting for more than a year, so I know my yearly fluctuations. That enables me to make much more informed decisions about every aspect of my life. Because if I want to go for job, let’s say I’m not self-employed, I would know what this job would allow me to do and whether, let’s say I would be ready to move to a cheaper area or to a more expensive area. And the GBB goals would put that into context.

Financially Navigating a PhD Career Transition

38:47 Emily: Yeah. I actually love that you brought that up in terms of evaluating your next position. If you’re getting out of graduate school, going to a postdoc, going to another job. This is actually something that I’ve talked about in some materials that I released in the summer of 2019, which if you want to check that out, you can go to pfforphds.com/next. N e x t. And that’s about putting a job offer, a salary offer that you receive in the context of the local cost of living for the new place that you don’t live yet. And there’s ways to do that without having tracked your own spending like you’re talking about. Like trying to figure out, okay, how does this new city’s cost of living compare to where I currently live, what I currently make, what would I be making there? How does it compare?

39:27 Emily: But it’s much, much more powerful if you actually do what you’re talking about and have tracked and budgeted for yourself wherever you’re currently living. And it gives you so much more information for then evaluating that next salary offer. And like you were saying, okay, maybe in graduate school, you’re able to spend at the “Good” level. Or maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re at an insufficient level and it’s even below what you would consider to be a “Good” level of spending. You’ll at least have a handle on that. You’ll know where your current salary and current expenditures relate to that, “Good” or “Better” or whatever it is level. And that will help you evaluate, as you were saying, the next position that you might be offered. Or in your case, well, how much money do I really need to make to make this leap into self-employment, which will be so much better for me and you know, x, y, z other areas. But can I do it financially? It helps you evaluate that. Am I getting that right?

40:21 Lucie: Yes. Completely.

Final Advice for a Healthier Money Mindset

40:23 Emily: So, something that you mentioned when we were first talking about doing this interview was that you had used this GBB framework to heal your mindset towards money. So, that’s this period that we’ve been talking about. And when you’re really facing your numbers and starting to budget and so forth. What advice do you have for another, let’s say PhD student currently who is struggling both with a low income and with an unhealthy mindset towards money?

40:53 Lucie: Yeah. My main advice would be to start taking action now in the sense of doing very basic budgeting because not knowing where your money’s at makes things worse. We think when we’re putting our head in the sand that things are better because we’re not looking under the hood but it actually makes things worse. And the reason why it’s important to take some form of action really early on–and this thinking is corroborated by forms of therapy such as cognitive behavioral therapy–is that by changing your behaviors, you actually change your beliefs. It doesn’t really work the other way around. You won’t wake up tomorrow with another set of beliefs about money. It’s about taking action. And then this informs our beliefs and how we evolve in relation to money. And so by taking small actions such as when I started, which was very simple, which was just to print out my bank statement and then put a little circle around the expenses that brought me a lot of joy or a lot of value and then a little cross with the ones that I was not so sure about. I was like, maybe that’s wasted money. And then just gradually adjust your spending so that you only have the little circles. And that can help you towards what is your minimum viable income, what’s your “Good” goal without all the extraneous bits that you spend money on but actually you don’t enjoy that much.

42:14 Emily: Yeah, I absolutely love that advice. It’s sort of increasing the efficiency of the use of your money. So, I think that’s wonderful advice for that student.

Outtro

42:23 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 to 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 Podington Bear from the free music archive and is 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

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.

How to Find and Apply for Fellowships (with ProFellow Founder Dr. Vicki Johnson)

September 2, 2019 by Meryem Ok

In this episode, Emily interviews fellowship expert Dr. Vicki Johnson, the founder and director of ProFellow. After completing multiple professional fellowships and her PhD, Vicki decided to help other fellowship seekers do the same by creating the ProFellow database, which now contains more than 1,200 professional and academic fellowships. Vicki relays the best way to find and apply for fellowships and gives excellent advice for making your fellowship application stand out. Winning a fellowship is the best way to increase your stipend or salary as a graduate student or postdoc, and Vicki shares from her experience some of the other career benefits that fellowships bring.

Links Mentioned in the Episode

Teaser

00:00 Vicki: At the end of the day, these organizations that are outside of the university are funding fellowships as a way to further their social impact mission. So make sure you understand what is the mission of the fellowship organization, why are they funding your research or would want to. Make sure you tie your story to their mission, how you’re going to further their mission. That will make you a more competitive candidate.

Introduction

00:25 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, a higher education in personal finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts. This is season four, episode three and today my guest is Dr. Vicki Johnson, the founder and director of ProFellow, the leading online resource for academic and professional fellowships. Vicki herself did four professional fellowships in addition to her funded PhD. Vicki and I discussed the best way to find and apply for academic fellowships, and Vicki gives excellent advice on how to boost your applications’ chances of success. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Vicki Johnson.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:06 Emily: Welcome to the podcast. Today, I am joined by Dr. Vicki Johnson, who’s the founder and director of ProFellow, which is a fantastic fellowships database and just amazing resource for graduate students and postdocs and anyone pursuing fellowships kind of in any way. Vicki and I are going to be talking today about everything fellowships. How do you find them? How do you apply for them? How do you win them? Because she is really the premier expert on this topic in our space. So Vicki, thank you so much for joining us today.

01:41 Vicki: Thank you for having me!

01:42 Emily: Can you tell us just a couple words about your background? You know, you have a PhD and how you got started with ProFellow.

01:50 Vicki: Sure. I actually started out in the fellowship world as a professional. I did four professional fellowships in the field of policy and I did some in the U.S. and some abroad. As I was progressing through my career, I did my Masters and then ultimately did my PhD, which was actually just a serendipitous thing that I did while I was on a professional fellowship. Then I had a major career transition about five years ago and decided to teach other people about how to find and win fellowships through ProFellow. And now I’m fully focused on that as my thing. I love fellowships, and I’m excited to tell people more about them.

How Do You Define “Fellowship”?

02:27 Emily: Yeah, it sounds like you have a ton of personal experience as well as your extensive professional experience. So yeah, let’s get started with that– with a pretty basic definition. What is a fellowship? Because that term can mean a lot of different things depending on who you’re talking to. So how do you define it?

02:45 Vicki: So for the purpose of our website, we sort of decided that the definition would be “short-term funded opportunities to do something exceptional.” So there’s a lot of funding opportunities, professional development opportunities, graduate school funding opportunities that aren’t necessarily called fellowship and title, but they do provide funding. They are time-limited, so they’re usually anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of years in length. And they provide you the resources and the network that you typically wouldn’t get in either a job or even just the regular scholarship. So it’s a pretty broad definition. People typically have heard of postdoctoral fellowships or they’ve heard of scholarships and things. But it’s a really very broad definition. So there’s quite a few professionals fellowships and also a whole other world of academic fellowships.

03:36 Emily: Yeah. And so I think today we’re going to be focused mostly on those academic fellowships, the ones that will pay your stipend, maybe pay some tuition and fees, pay your salary if you’re at the postdoc level. But just so people are aware, your site covers much more than that. And in fact, I did a policy fellowship myself after I finished my PhD. It was the, the Mirzayan Fellowship in DC. And that’s something that I wrote about for your site because that fellowship is one among the many others that you cover. But we will be focusing today on those academic fellowships. But just for anyone who’s thinking about another fellowship opportunity, still go back to ProFellow because it’s going to be an amazing resources for you as well. So with these academic fellowships, how do you go about finding them? We’ve all heard probably of the standout one in each of our fields, whatever that is, but there are going to be a whole lot more, too. So how do we go about finding these fellowships?

How to Use ProFellow to Find Fellowships

04:26 Vicki: Well here I’m going to do a big plug for the site profellow.com because we have an enormous database of fellowships at both the professional and academic level. So if you sign up for free to use ProFellow, you can create an account and come in and search our huge database. And within it there are filters. So you can either select fellowships for doctoral study, graduate study, which would include masters programs and postdoctoral research in addition to professional, even summer fellowships for students. You can narrow it down that way and then you can also narrow them down by discipline, your citizenship, years of work experience. I would also say use certain keywords. So let’s say you’re working in conservation. You can use that as a keyword in the database. But for the most part, I tell people to keep their search filters quite broad because there are a lot of fellowships that are multidisciplinary in nature.

05:18 Vicki: So even if it’s not specifically a conservation fellowship, there could be a whole range of fellowships that you can do a conservation related research project, or dissertation research or whatever, with the fellowship because it might be a broader social sciences fellowship or STEM fellowship. So keep your search broad and take the time to look through. We purposely made the listings so that they’re really brief and easy to skim and you can bookmark opportunities. And then you can also from the listing go to the website to learn more. And honestly, I only say this because it’s true. We are a better place to look for fellowships than, say, on Google. If you Google these things, you’ll come up with all sorts of stuff that may or may not be relevant to what you’re looking for. And it’s very difficult to find fellowships on Google or even just through word of mouth. So, use the website. It’s free, and it’s a great way to also find out about new opportunities that are coming up every year.

How Do You Maintain the ProFellow Database?

06:12 Emily: Yeah, thank you so much for that. I’ve been referring to ProFellow for many years as a key database for all of this, and it’s exciting to hear what all you do. I’m actually wondering how you find all these fellowships. Are you well-known enough that these new programs just e-mail you when they have something new coming up, or how do you maintain this database?

06:31 Vicki: Oh, good question. Well, back in the day, nobody knew who we were. But now that we’ve been around since 2011, we have a brand name in the fellowship industry. And honestly, some of the larger categories of fellowships– like, let’s say you’re Googling journalism fellowships or mid-career fellowships or postdoctoral fellowships– ProFellow will rank some of our articles at the top of the list. There are other keywords that we’re still fighting for to get to the top of the list. But if you’re listening to this and you’ve heard of us, you’ll see that. And we’re also very active in the fellowship industry. I just came back from a conference in DC, the Impact Fellowships Summit. So, our name is growing. We’re still a bit skewed toward, U.S. Citizens, U.S. Students, or people coming to the U.S. in terms of what funding is out there. But we are also growing globally. So we are getting more and more fellowships for non-U.S. citizens, international students, or people from other countries going to non-U.S. countries. So, it’s growing. So, there are more and more things. The more you share us with your friends and your colleagues and your professors, the more well-known we will be and even more fellowships we will list.

Applying for Academic Fellowships

07:40 Emily: Yeah, wonderful. Okay, so we have a grad student or a postdoc or an aspiring one of those categories who wants to win a fellowship. What’s the application process like for these academic fellowships?

07:54 Vicki: Yes, well, if you have never applied to a fellowship before, you’ll see that actually it can be similar to applying to graduate school. Usually, there’s a personal statement, recommendation letters, short answers that you have to respond to. In many cases, for the academic or research-related fellowships, you might even have to put in a research proposal. That could be anything from a really brief research proposal to something that’s really long and intense. So, it’s different for every fellowship. I say, get started early. The first thing you should identify is: what do you need to include in the application? I think if you’re in graduate school, you’ll be used to this process of writing a personal statement and talking about your goals, what you want to achieve in your research, so that experience will help you as you pursue the fellowships.

08:42 Emily: So I liked that you drew parallels between the process of applying to graduate school and the process of applying for fellowships. In fact, sometimes even the timing of those things can come together. Right? Do you find that fall is a heavy fellowship season or is it kind of spread out around the year?

08:58 Vicki: Oh yeah, that’s a very good question. Yeah, typically it’s just like the graduate school process where it’s based on the academic year. So you do want to look for fellowships as early as possible. Deadlines tend to fall anywhere between October and January. That’s kind of a typical, what we call, fellowship season. And so if you’re looking for funding, it’s often not very easy to get a fellowship that’s going to fund your next semester right away or even in a few weeks or a few months. Usually, you’re looking a year out. So that’s why, let’s say you’re entering your coming year– your academic year. The fellowships that you apply to this fall typically will fund your following academic year. So yes, keep that in mind. It’s an important kind of timeline that people should be aware of when they’re looking for fellowships.

How to Get Ahead of Fellowship Deadlines

09:42 Emily: Yeah. This is definitely something you need to plan ahead for. Can you tell me a little bit more about, not necessarily the timeline about the fellowship applications cause presumably they just have a due date, but all the various components that could go into an application. Different kinds of essays, letters, just stuff that you need to be working on. Like what do you need work on well in advance of these deadlines?

10:03 Vicki: Well, I think it’s really important if you’re looking for funding for academic research, say your dissertation, to do field work and that sort of thing. A lot of times what the fellowship organizations want to know is they want to know that you’re going to be successful. So when they fund you, they want to know that your project can be successfully completed in the time period of the fellowship with the resources available with the funding available.

10:25 Vicki: So if you’re applying for, say, like a summer fellowship that is only three months in length. That’s not enough time to do your entire dissertation. You’re probably just doing one element of it. So make sure that your research proposal, if that’s part of your application, really reflects what the fellowship is offering and what can be accomplished in that. Because feasibility is very important. It doesn’t matter how great your ideas is; if it’s not feasible, it won’t make it to the next stage. And in the personal statement too, they want to see more about why you’re passionate about your research topic. What are your longterm goals? Often people forget to put in what their career goals are or what they’re going to do after the fellowship. That’s really important. Make sure to include those because at the end of the day, these organizations that are outside of the university are funding fellowships as a way to further their social impact mission. So make sure you understand what is the mission of the fellowship organization, why are they funding your research or would want to. Make sure you tie your story to their mission, how you’re going to further their mission. That will make you a more competitive candidate. So those are, I would say, the main things to include.

Commercial

11:29 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, et cetera. 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 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.

More Advice for Fellowship Applicants

12:18 Emily: Yeah, so it sounds like there are some of these elements, you know, essays that you can reuse much of for several different applications that you might have. But some things are definitely going to have to be tailored to the specific organization.

12:30 Vicki: Absolutely. My mantra is that the amount of effort that you put into your application directly correlates with your likelihood of success. So, I know people don’t want to hear that, “Aw, man, I have to put a lot of time into my application,” because on top of it you’re studying and you’re working, you’re doing other things. But it’s true that when you’re focusing on an application, start it as early as possible because then you can break out times on your calendar to be able to focus just on the application and also make sure to tie in your professors, your mentors. They’ve been doing this a long time. Many of them have won multiple fellowships, multiple grants and funding awards. Don’t do this in a little silo by yourself. Make sure you tell your advisors, your professors that you’re applying for the fellowships because they could have some great insights. They may even be connected to the fellowship in some way you might not be aware of. So, be sure to reach out for advice from those groups, too.

How to Stand Out as a Fellowship Applicant

13:29 Emily: Yeah, we’re definitely getting into some good advice here for fellowship applicants. These fellowships presumably get hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of applications. What’s going to really make a candidate stand out and make a fellowship application look very, very strong?

13:48 Vicki: Yeah. The two main things, especially with the academic research, if you are applying to a fellowship that is being funded by a foundation, a nonprofit government agency, NGO, whatever that is, make sure that you understand the mission of the organization. I think I mentioned this already, but a lot of people sort of skip over this part. They are so wrapped up in explaining their research and why they want to do it that they don’t really tie why their research aligns with the mission of the organization. So it’s very, very, very important that you touch on that mission. They may not ask you how you feel about their mission. They may not ask you how it ties to their mission. But when you think about the other group, the other person–the investors, as I like to call it–they’re investing in you. Make sure you make a really clear reason as to why they should invest in you because they have a purpose for the fellowship and you have a purpose for your research and you’ve got to make sure they tie together.

14:47 Emily: Yeah. Excellent. Any other advice for making an outstanding fellowship application, but let’s say also just an outstanding fellowship applicant? What can you do in your life that will go on your CV or that people will be able to write about in your letters that will help you stand out?

Fellowships: More than Just the Fellowship

15:05 Vicki: You know, I think some people get a little bit intimidated by the fellowship process. Like you said, there’s hundreds, thousands of applications and it can be really disappointing to get a rejection letter from a fellowship that you worked really hard on the application on. But just keep in mind that the effort that you put in, your professors and your supervisors are watching as you do this. And so even if you’re rejected, I’m telling you, there’s something extra that you get. I don’t know what the right word is, that will help you as you go further in your career. So it’s not all for not if you don’t get into the fellowship. But also, if you do get into a fellowship, make sure to take advantage of the wider resources that the fellowship offers.

15:49 Vicki: There’s usually an alumni network. They’re connected to high-level organizations and leaders in your field, both in the U.S. And globally. Take full advantage of every opportunity that the fellowship provides beyond just the funding that they’re going to give you. Because we all know that when it comes to career tracks that, these days to get a job, you have to be in the know. You have to know somebody, you have to be an influencer, you have to have personal connections. And these are things that are very valuable that you can get out of the fellowship. But also, these personal connections that you make are also very valuable when you’re applying to fellowships, too. So as you’re applying, reach out to alumni, reach out to professors and mentors, get as much advice as you can. All of this, little bit incrementally, adds to your success long-term.

How Often Should I Apply for Fellowships?

16:37 Emily: Yeah, I’m really glad you brought up the other benefits of winning a fellowship aside from the funding itself. So I had a friend in graduate school who was a Hertz Fellow. I was blown away by the number of networking events and opportunities to meet potential employers that that fellowship provided. It was truly outstanding, and I don’t know that there are that many others that go to that degree. But certainly as you said, there are alumni networks that you can be connected to. Really, it is another way of networking. A very, very good, strong networking connection to have won a fellowship. One other thing I wanted to ask you about: another guest that I just had on who was a fellowship applicant said something along the lines of, “it’s sort of a numbers game.” You just need to apply to a lot of stuff and hopefully, here and there you’ll win something. But really, as you said, each fellowship application takes a good amount of time dedicated to it. Would you say that people should be applying to a few fellowships every year? Not necessarily like full, “it’s going to pay everything” fellowships, but just some kind of award that they could go up for.

17:42 Vicki: To be honest, I’m not really in the mind frame of the numbers game. I’ve heard people say that. I’ve heard multi-award winners say that. As as I said, I have won multiple fellowships, but for each of them I was sort of applying for them one at a time. When you’re applying to graduate school or looking for graduate funding, often you do have to apply for a few at a time in the hopes that you get one of them. But I don’t know necessarily that it’s a numbers game where you just throw out a million applications and hope that one sticks, because I do think that approach could also distract you a little bit from really putting in the focus that you need to create a strong application. I would say just make sure that you’re a good fit for the programs that you’re applying to.

18:23 Vicki: If it really is a stretch, is your research actually furthering the mission of the organization? If it’s really a stretch, it might not really be worth applying to. Whereas if you find two or three fellowships that you think you’d be a really good candidate for, go for all three, because it will be worthwhile. And I should also say people should look into summer fellowships too, which are just kind of brief summertime fellowships that are specifically for students. Some of them are professional in nature. Some of them are for academic research as well. But even those little summer fellowships give you those professional networks and experiences that you can’t get otherwise and they’re very, very good for your post-graduation career goals.

Final Advice for Fellowship Applicants: Be Yourself

19:06 Emily: Yeah. Thank you for your insight on that. I’m going to ask you a little more about ProFellow in a moment, but just before we get there, any final words of advice for fellowship applicants?

19:17 Vicki: Oh, just be yourself, too. I think people worry too much about telling the organization what they want to hear. And I do teach people about the social psychology of really understanding the mission and making sure that you link your work to that. But at the same time, to be your authentic self is really valuable. There are people reading these applications. They’re not robots. They’re people. So, tell your story, your authentic story, and really be yourself. And if you get thrown a hard question, answer it as honestly as you can. If it was meant to be, it will be.

Additional Resources at ProFellow

19:51 Emily: Okay. So tell us a little bit more about ProFellow. You’ve talked about the database a little bit already, but I know you have a lot more stuff going on aside from just, this is where we can search for fellowships.

20:00 Vicki: Sure. At profellow.com, we do have this huge database of funding opportunities that you can search. We also do articles featuring fellows and ask them about their fellowship experience and their application tips. So it’s a great place to hear what fellowship alumni say about how they made their application stand out, what they did to get above the hundreds of thousands of applicants. We also do listicles, we do articles. Specifically, “10 fellowships in policy,” “25 dissertation fellowships.” So we have a lot of resources that help you find the fellowships and get the tips. We also have workshops, usually on a monthly basis, on everything from creating a great personal statement to creating an exceptional research proposal.

20:45 Vicki: So if you’re on our mailing list, you’ll be alerted to those things as well. And actually, next week and two weeks from now I’m doing a Fulbright applicant mastermind for people that are applying for the international Fulbright awards. So that’s something that if you’re considering as an enrolled student for either your field work or just to have an international experience, a Fulbright is something you can consider. But yeah, we have all sorts of stuff. We even have ProFellow academy, which is another platform for free advising. So you can ask questions, connect with fellowship alumni, have office hours. So yeah, we’re just chockfull of resources. Most of it’s free. So, sign up, get on our mailing list and then you will have access and also get alerts about new fellowship opportunities.

How to Connect with ProFellow

21:26 Emily: Yeah, that sounds amazing. I’m actually trying to think, “oh, is there any fellowship that I could apply for? Does that fit in my life right now?” One of those professional fellowships that you mentioned. So profellow.com, is that the best place to go? Or are you on social? Any other contact information you want to share?

21:41 Vicki: Oh, yes. You’ll find us also on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. But really just go to profellow.com. That’s the place to be. Sign up right on the homepage and that’ll get you right into the database. You can also search our site for all the other great stuff. Be on the lookout for our biweekly newsletter, ProFellow Insider.

22:00 Emily: Yeah. Thank you so much, Vicki for joining me on the podcast today and sharing your expertise with us.

22:06 Vicki: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Outtro

22:08 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 to 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 Podington Bear from the free music archive and is shared under CC by NC.

This Grad Student Defrayed His Housing Costs By Renting Rooms to His Peers

June 10, 2019 by Emily

On today’s episode, Emily interviews Dr. Matt Hotze, an administrative director at Rice University and co-host of the Helium podcast. When Matt moved to Durham, NC for his PhD, he immediately purchased a 3-bedroom house and rented the two extra rooms to his labmates. The rent Matt collected from his two housemates covered nearly all of his mortgage payments during his years in grad school, though he had some financial bumps in the road as well relating to house repairs and his dual relationship with his housemates. Ultimately, his decision to sell the property also hinged on his personal relationship with his tenants. Matt shares the overall effect this investment had on his finances and his three key pieces of advice for another early-career PhD considering this route.

Links Mentioned in the Show

CEREGE (European Center for Research and Education in Environmental Geosciences)
Helium Podcast
Rent vs. Buy Calculator
Financially Navigating Your Upcoming PhD Career Transition (/next)
Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast Home Page

Would You Please Tell Us More About Yourself?

Matt has a PhD in environmental engineering. His advisor moved from Rice University to Duke University near the start of his PhD. He purchased a home in Durham when he moved there in 2005. After he finished his PhD in 2008, he did a postdoc in France and then another postdoc at Carnegie Mellon. Subsequently, he had a career in publishing with the American Chemical Society, serving as the managing editor for four journals, where he learned the business side of science. Currently, he works at an engineering research center at Rice with 80% of his time, and the other 20% of his time is dedicated to the Helium Podcast.

How Were You Able to Purchase a Home During Grad School?

It is no mean feat to buy a home during grad school!

Further reading: Purchasing a Home as a Graduate Student with Fellowship Income

First, Matt was “blessed” to not have any debt from undergraduate degree.

Second, when he started grad school in Houston, lived with his parents for most of his first year and banked much of the stipend. Living with his parents in the suburbs was cheaper because the distance from home to campus impeded going out and spending on entertainment. His motivation to save money was due to his upbringing; since he was able to save, why not do so? He expected there to be some use for it eventually, though he didn’t have specific plans to buy a home when he started. Saving the money wasn’t a big sacrifice as living with his parents was comfortable.

Third, in 2005-2006 the houses in Durham were not that expensive. This was after the dot com bubble burst in early 2000s and the housing crisis hadn’t hit yet. Matt hadn’t necessarily planned to buy, but he saw that the nice, recently built apartments were rather expensive to rent.

Though Matt had enough money for a 20% down payment, he still needed his parents to co-sign his mortgage because his income alone wasn’t sufficient to support the mortgage payments. He bought a modest 3BR home and rented out the other two bedrooms for below market rate. The purchase price for the home was approximately $200,000.

Further listening: How to Qualify for a Mortgage as a Graduate Student or PhD, Even with Non-W-2 Fellowship Income

Matt bought the house even before he moved to Durham, so he never rented there. He felt he was on a time clock to own the home for long enough during his PhD to make the transaction costs worthwhile. He decided he would either buy right when he arrived in Durham or he wouldn’t do it at all.

Emily had a similar thought process a few years into grad school when it might have been possible to buy, but since she was already a couple years into grad school she decided against buying due to the time clock.

Matt’s first tenants in Durham were the other grad students in his lab also moving with his advisor, which also influenced his decision to purchase right away.

What Were the Pros of Renting Out Rooms to Peers?

1) Matt had almost zero housing expenses as the rents from the two bedrooms basically covered the mortgage each month.

2) Matt’s house became the gathering spot for his grad school friends, so instead of spending money going out they would drink beer and play board games at home. (Emily had a similarly inexpensive social experience in grad school.)

3) Didn’t have any issues with the great majority of his tenants.

What Were the Cons of Renting Out Rooms to Peers?

1) Once Matt moved on from his PhD, he didn’t know his tenants quite as well. One of his tenants asked to pay his rent late a couple times. It wasn’t possible to handle this completely professionally because of the social ties between him and his tenants. This did end up working out, but it was stressful to handle this, especially from afar. Matt was especially concerned about being fair to all his tenants but not establishing a precedent that it’s OK to pay the rent late. The rental agreement between Matt and his tenants was helpful in this case, not only the legal components but also to set expectations.

2) The home inspector didn’t catch some flashing around the chimney, so a water leak developed soon after the purchase. Matt used some additional cash he had on reserve (~$500) for this repair, so it was a good thing he hadn’t used all his cash on the purchase. Another time, the water heater exploded. Thankfully replacing it didn’t cause an issue because Matt already had cash built up for these kinds of repairs. Emily references the 1% rule: You can expect to pay 1% of the home’s value in maintenance/repairs each year – but that’s only an average! It can be much higher or lower in any given year.

Why Didn’t You Sell When You Left Durham?

When Matt left Durham for his postdoc in France, it was not a difficult decision to keep the property. He still had tenants in place who would take a couple more years to finish their PhDs, and with three rooms rented out the property was now earning money above expenses. One of Matt’s friend-tenants served as the property manager so he didn’t have to hire a professional company.

At the end of grad school, Matt had a good amount of savings built up, and after the postdoc he had even more saved. This really set him up to be financially successful in subsequent stages of life. He lived in Pittsburgh for his second postdoc. When Matt married his wife and combined their finances, he was able to significantly contribute to their nest egg. It was great to not have to worry about (non-mortgage) debt.

All of this financial success came from the germ of financial parental help during college and that first year of grad school. Good financial fortune and bad financial fortune early in life do not guarantee any particular financial outcome, but certainly put momentum behind your finances one way or another.

How Did You Decide When to Sell the House?

When his friends finished their PhDs at Duke, Matt no longer felt able to hold on to the property. He didn’t have the bandwidth at the time while working in an intense postdoc position and applying for faculty positions to figure out how to hire a property management company from afar. Deciding to sell was really a trust issue. If he didn’t trust his tenants through personal relationships, he didn’t want to be a landlord any longer. It’s not always about numbers, sometimes it’s more about your feelings!

Matt ended up selling in 2009, which was pretty bad timing with respect to the national economy. He sold the house for just about the same price that he bought it for. Even without the property appreciating, the financial benefits he experienced through those years made it a good financial decision. Even though he didn’t make any money on the house, he defrayed all his housing costs when he lived there and continued to make money afterwards.

What Advice Would You Give to a Grad Student or Postdoc Who Is Considering Buying a Home and Renting Out Rooms?

1) Use a calculator to figure out whether buying and renting out rooms in a home makes sense financially in terms of the costs you will incur and the rental prices.

2) Are you OK having uncomfortable conversations with your tenants? Someone will inevitably not pay rent or break something or something stupid in the house. This will happen whether you know the renters or not!

3) Are you comfortable making basic repairs on your own? It’s expensive to outsource it all the time! Are you able to talk with vendors and negotiate? This is a needed skill.

4) What’s your gut feeling on owning rather than renting? You’ll make a good decision!

What Is the Helium Podcast?

Christine and Matt co-host the Helium Pocast. They help early-career researchers – senior grad students to early faculty – navigate the transition from grad school into first faculty position, from landing the position to navigating the position to advancing within the position. They bring on interviewees to talk about career transitions. Check them out! New episodes come out every Tuesday.

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

June 3, 2019 by Jewel Lipps

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

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

Moving to a High Cost-of-Living City on a Postdoc Salary

April 22, 2019 by Jewel Lipps

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Sushmitha Vijaya Kumar, a postdoc at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Sushmitha recently completed her PhD at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she lived comfortably on her graduate student stipend. However, living in San Diego on a postdoc salary is a whole different level of financial challenge. Sushmitha shares her story of finishing up her PhD, finding housing, and moving from a lower cost-of-living city to a higher cost-of-living city, including the resources she used and the pitfalls she nearly fell into.

Links mentioned in episode

0:00 Introduction

1:06 Please Introduce Yourself

Dr. Sushmitha Vijaya Kumar is a postdoc at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. She is originally from India, where she studied for her Bachelor’s and Master’s in biotechnology. She moved to Tennessee for her PhD and worked at the Oak Ridge National Lab.

2:47 How was your life in Knoxville and working at Oak Ridge?

Sushmitha says Knoxville, Tennessee is a beautiful place in the Great Smoky Mountains. Living in Knoxville was affordable. The graduate stipend was more than enough to live comfortably. Oak Ridge National lab has a super computer for bioinformatics and experimental research. The lab is funded by the Department of Energy. They emphasize collaborative research. She also took courses and taught classes at University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She learned how government research worked compared to how university research worked. She learned that she preferred the government setup that emphasized collaboration.

Sushmitha’s fiancé got a postdoc at the Salk Institute in May 2018. As she thought about her next step after her PhD, Sushmitha knew she was restricted to the geographic area of San Diego. This is when she started looking for postdoc opportunities at the Scripps Institution for Oceanography.

5:17 What was the stipend in your last year of graduate school?

Sushmitha’s salary stayed the same for the four years of her PhD. She received $24,000 annually. She got about $1800 per month. In Knoxville, a one bedroom apartment is 800 to 900 square feet and $900 per month for rent and utilities, at the maximum. PhD students have at least $1000 remaining after rent for food and travel needs. She says having a car is cheap because gas is around $1.20 per gallon. It is easy and affordable to travel by car. She says Knoxville is very affordable to live in as a graduate student, as well as to save money and do exciting things.

7:17 How did you start preparing for the move to San Diego?

Sushmitha’s fiancé moved in May 2018 and did the groundwork. She says it was more difficult than she expected to make the move. Not only did she need to finish all of her PhD work, she had to pack up the place she lived for four years. They decided to take only the bare essentials in their car. She said it was difficult to let things go. They took a road trip from Knoxville to San Diego in late December. The drive took five days. She says she wasn’t prepared for leaving her friends and the familiar place.

9:07 What was your PhD defense timeline?

Sushmitha says the university’s deadline for defense was November 1st. She went to India in the summer for two months. She returned and decided she wanted to wrap things up. She had one month to write her dissertation and prepare for defense. She defended at the end of October. The very next day she flew to San Diego for her interview for her postdoc position at Scripps. She flew back to Knoxville, then she had fifteen days to finalize her dissertation with comments from her committee and submit it to the university. She also had to finish experiments in the lab. December 13th was graduation, and her family came from India. She had three days to pack up her house and prepare to drive to San Diego. Sushmitha says she felt like she made a wrong decision to graduate early, but she doesn’t regret it now. She would advise other people to take more time. She would’ve loved another month for this process, though she didn’t need another full semester.

12:24 How did you arrange for your new housing in San Diego?

Sushmitha says her fiancé didn’t take a full apartment to himself because the postdoc salary is not enough money to qualify for an apartment. You have to prove that your monthly income is three times the monthly rent to qualify. In San Diego, one bedroom, one bath apartments range from $1600 to $2200. The apartments for $1600 are located farther from the institutions and require a car for the commute, which her fiancé didn’t have. Her fiancé lived with a host family and paid $1000 per month for a room in the house.

Sushmitha contrasts San Diego housing with Knoxville housing. In Knoxville, it is easy to find an apartment because many properties have management offices. You could go to the leasing office and choose from available apartments. In San Diego, no apartment complexes are close to the institutes. Housing is managed by individual landlords, and you have to rent from the owner directly. Sushmitha and her fiancé had to show documentation to prove their income, but Sushmitha didn’t receive her documentation in a timely manner. They lost money to application fees during this process.

Sushmitha says they dealt with scammers during their housing search. They experienced five different scams, but didn’t fall for the scams. She knows people who did fall for scams and paid $500 security deposits for places that weren’t real. She’s never seen this before.

When she finally received her offer letter and documentation, she and her fiancé got a one bed one bath in a duplex. The rent is $2200, so one of her paychecks goes to rent and utilities. Emily summarizes that in San Diego, they needed two incomes to show that they could afford the rent together.

18:25 Where did you find housing listings?

Sushmitha says they used Craigslist, Zillow, Apartments.com, and the Facebook group Free and For Sale University of California, San Diego. On Facebook, people post about roommate openings, available apartments, and advice. She also asked her HR department for help.

She says the scams came from the Facebook group and Craigslist. She posted in the group that they were looking for one bedroom one bathroom and they received fake offers. On Craigslist, some of the listings are scams. The postings include photos of real apartments and seem real. When you email the lister and ask to visit the apartment, you receive an excuse about why they’re out of town and they’ll ask for money without showing you the place.

22:28 How did you find the place you are living in now?

Her current apartment was listed on Zillow. Her fiancé saw the listing the day it was posted. He emailed the agent and got connected with the owners. The owners showed him the place, and he showed the documents. They were the first to contact the owners and they got the apartment. Emily says the process is similar in Seattle. Who arrives first and drops off the information and checks gets the place.

24:00 How much are you making as a postdoc?

Sushmitha makes $50,760 annually. This is the University of California, San Diego postdoc pay rate. It is 10% higher than what the National Institutes of Health recommends for postdoc pay. Monthly, this pay is about $4000 but after taxes and health insurance, it is $3200 take home pay. She says there wasn’t state tax in Tennessee, but California has both state and federal tax. She is an employee with a W-2 and pays social security tax.

Emily shares the example of her husband’s pay after graduate school. His salary was a 40% gross increase but a 20% net increase after taxes and health insurance. You have to take these new costs into account.

26:14 What else do you want to tell us about this transition?

Sushmitha says it’s good to talk to people and know about the city you’re moving to. With the high cost, it was a mental adjustment. She has a hard time with the how much she pays for the apartment and gas. Gas in San Diego is closer to $4 per gallon. Mentally, you have to prepare yourself for higher costs. You think you’ll be able to have leftovers for savings, but it is hard. She mentions that people with computer science jobs in San Diego make more money and may have a different financial situation. But as a postdoc, the financial situation is much tighter. She says they are trying to save money for the wedding, but it is difficult. You have to be prepared for the first year of living in a high cost city.

If you’re moving to a city with well-paid jobs, don’t talk to the people in those position. You need to talk to postdocs and graduate students to know how they live. Sushmitha shares that there are free shuttles for UCSD and everything is walkable. Emily says you can’t apply the same lifestyle from one place to another, and you need a mental adjustment. Talking to your peers is helpful.

30:29 Anything else about your adjustment to postdoc life?

In graduate school, you have a cohort and form tight friendships. As a postdoc, you are more independent and it is harder to make friends. She went to a networking event, but the new postdocs just wanted to make friends instead of network. Emily shares that it is hard to make friends as an adult after moving to a new place.

33:18 Final Comments

Anyone who is making a big move will benefit from this conversation.