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This Grad Student-Parent Relied on University and State Benefits During a Tough Financial Period

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Laura Farrell-Wortman about her experience as a graduate student-parent at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Laura started her PhD when her daughter was an infant, so she was very intentional about choosing a PhD program that offered strong health insurance and a childcare subsidy. However, with a $9k/year stipend as the only income for a family of three, Laura’s family relied on the social safety net for a couple of years until both she and her husband increased their incomes. Laura shares the financial mindset she relied on to get through that tough period of time. Laura and Emily also discuss how the shifting political winds in Wisconsin in the early 2010s detrimentally affected the power of the grad student union at UW-Madison. Today, Laura works as a staff member at the University of Arizona Cancer Center and is making up for lost time in funding her retirement and her daughter’s college education.

Links mentioned in the Episode

This Grad Student-Parent Relied on University and State Benefits During a Tough Financial Period

Teaser

Laura (00:00): I also think it’s important to keep in mind you know, if you’re, if you’re feeling sort of weird about getting those benefits, that government benefits aren’t just you know, for people who are poor or struggling I get government benefits all the time. I get my mortgage interest deducted, right? I get my student loan interest deducted. Those are government benefits. And no, trust me, every rich person is getting every government benefit that they can. So you get your government benefits too. You earned them and you’re eligible for them.

Introduction

Emily (00:36): Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs.

Emily (01:07): This is Season 16, Episode 7, and today my guest is Dr. Laura Farrell-Wortman. We’re discussing Laura’s experience as a graduate student-parent at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Laura started her PhD when her daughter was an infant, so she was very intentional about choosing a PhD program that offered strong health insurance and a childcare subsidy. However, with a $9k/year stipend as the only income for a family of three, Laura’s family relied on the social safety net for a couple of years until both she and her husband increased their incomes. Laura shares the financial mindset she relied on to get through that tough period of time. Laura and I also discuss how the shifting political winds in Wisconsin in the early 2010s detrimentally affected the power of the grad student union at UW-Madison. Today, Laura works as a staff member at the University of Arizona Cancer Center and is making up for lost time in funding her retirement and her daughter’s college education. I’ve recently joined several different social media platforms, particularly for posting short videos. I’m using the next few months as an experimental period, after which I’ll focus only on the platforms where I’ve gained the most traction. So please give me a follow and engage with me there! You can find me on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, and LinkedIn at either PFforPhDs or Personal Finance for PhDs. You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s16e7/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Laura Farrell-Wortman.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

Emily (02:53): I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Laura Ferrell Wartman. She is the current assistant director for academic programs at the University of Arizona Cancer Center, but we’re actually gonna be mostly talking about her experience as a PhD student at the University of Madison. So Laura, thank you so much for volunteering to come on the podcast, and will you please introduce yourself a little further for the audience?

Laura (03:16): I did my PhD in interdisciplinary Theater studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison. I was a graduate student there from 2011 to 2017. And some of the really formative things about my time there was that I actually arrived to to grad school with a newborn. And so I think that’s probably gonna shape a lot of what we discuss today.

Financial Mindset During Childhood and Early Adulthood

Emily (03:42): Yeah, so a grad student parent and a unique kind of angle on this. Certainly for our conversation, the finances of that are very interesting as we’ll see as we go through. I should mention that Laura and I met at the Graduate Career Consortium annual meeting, and so it’s always a great time when I get to meet people face to face. And just from the first very few interactions that we had in the room that we were in together, I knew that Laura had to come on the podcast. So I’m really glad that , we made this happen. Okay. So let’s go back even before you started graduate school, actually. So let’s talk about like how you grew up and how, what, what your financial mindset was like during your childhood, your early adulthood, maybe through college and post-college leading up to this time when you were in graduate school.

Laura (04:26): Yeah. so growing up I grew up in a very high income area. I’m from Princeton, New Jersey. But due to a lot of specific factors within my family there was a real trend of scarcity in my childhood. And so I really grew up thinking that money was something that was very elusive. Something that was sort of to be afraid of and something where there was just never a sense that there was enough of it. And so I think that that is something that has really impacted the way that I view personal finance, and especially the way that I view my career because I know that stability and predictability is something that is very, very important to me. And that is sometimes at odds with working in academia, especially if you are not on the tenure track. And so that it very much impacted like the way that I viewed how I was going into my career.

Finances After College

Emily (05:30): So coming out of college, I understand you, you worked for some years right before you started graduate school. Is that correct? So talk to me about like your finances during that time and that decision to go pursue your PhD, especially as it relates to these, the mindsets and, you know, everything that was going on with you financially.

Laura (05:47): Yeah. Again, I think the, the time that I had spent working was very much related to both the sort of you know, desire for that stability but also my desire to continue the research work that I had started in my undergrad. So I, I really started to explore Irish theater and particularly Irish theater of this particular contemporary period when I was an undergrad. And I knew that I wanted to continue doing that. My sister had gotten a PhD. And so that really helped me to kind of see the possibility and see, you know, the, the things that I could do with a PhD. And so I knew that I wanted to, to pursue that. But first I was gonna need to get a master’s degree and a master’s degree in theater, just the, the ROI, the return on investment there is terrible, right? Um and so I got a job at the University of Arizona. I was an admin assistant and that paid for my master’s degree. So that was like, that was like fully a financial decision in terms of where I was gonna go for my master’s degree. And I do not in any way regret that. You know, I came out of that, I paid $25 a semester in tuition. I would highly recommend it to anybody who is looking to get a degree that maybe they don’t feel like they can you know, get that ROI in. But, so that was I was working in higher ed administration essentially, and really like working my way up the ladder while I was doing that master’s degree in theater. And that set me up really, really excellently in terms of you know, when I went into my PhD, I knew the possibilities in higher ed for somebody who has a PhD in anything. Um you know, there really is a benefit in higher education to just having a PhD. And I have noticed a big difference in terms of my career options after my PhD as opposed to before at the same institute. Being a full-time student and a full-time employee is really difficult. It definitely had a lot of financial benefits. I got married during that time and my husband was able to get a, a master’s degree paid as well. And so, you know, there were a lot of benefits to it, but it was I certainly don’t wanna sugarcoat it because it was very, very difficult.

Emily (08:04): So, because you had this long-term plan of getting the PhD, using the job, using the master’s as a stepping stone to get there, I understand during that time you were also saving up, right? And so you went into the PhD with some savings. Can you talk about how you did that or why as well?

Laura (08:19): That was around 2008, 2009. Both my husband and I were very lucky not to have lost our income during the financial crisis. I actually went on to write my dissertation about the financial crisis. You know, our, our income was middling. But we had very few large financial responsibilities. We had our rent, which was moderate. We had no current payments. We didn’t have children at that point. We, we just are frugal people. And so it was you know, we had a goal of, you know, putting money aside, not even really for any particular goal. I think for me, just having that savings, again, coming back to this idea of you know, that rug could be pulled out from under you at any point. So having, you know, liquid cash savings is something that just makes me feel better. So we had a a cash savings of about $30,000 by the time my daughter was born. And that was just from, you know, the jobs we were working.

PhD Admissions and Pregnancy

Emily (09:24): Okay. So let’s talk about the admission season. You mentioned that you had at least, you know, a couple offers, one unfunded, this one from Madison that you ended up taking because you knew at that time that your daughter was on the way. How did that play into your decision of where to attend? Like what factors were you looking at?

Laura (09:44): Yeah, so so being pregnant during admission season was very interesting. I did not do any visits because I didn’t want anyone to see that I was pregnant. Discrimination against pregnant people is a very real thing. And I was really concerned that I would be you know, deprioritized if they knew that I had a child on the way. So it was important to me to know you know, what the, the funding situation and what the daycare situation was in any area that we were planning to, to move. Madison happened to be the best overlap of those things. Daycare is extremely expensive in Madison. It was actually when we were looking in Manhattan because I had applied at a couple schools in New York. The, the daycare costs were essentially the same between Madison and and Manhattan. But the University of Wisconsin has a really comprehensive student parent support, well, system of networks really. And so that was what enabled me to get a PhD in a very real way. And so I think it wasn’t necessarily the top thing that I was looking at, but it was, it ended up being the most influential part of my graduate experience.

Emily (11:11): Wow. was this something that, I guess, I don’t know specifically like the timing of everything, but is this something that you were looking at at the time that you were choosing which schools to apply to? Or was it only by the time, okay, I’ve already applied to these sets of schools, now I know my daughter’s on the way and I need to, you know, evaluate how they’re doing on this front as well?

Laura (11:31): It was a little bit of both. There’s, you know, my, my specialty was Irish theater. There’s not, you know, a ton of schools where that’s going to be a strong focus. And admittedly, some of the schools that I applied to, it wasn’t a strong focus. It just was going to be a better you know, personal situation. But I think that there was a real you know, there, there’s sort of that cliche of like, you know, there’s never, there’s never the right time to have kids, and I think that’s very true. But for us it was like, well, we wanna, we know we wanna have a kid. I know I wanna get a PhD. I, I just think that these things can probably be true at the same time. You know, I was 30 going into my PhD which I’m, I, I’m, you know, really glad that I chose that point in my life to, to have my daughter. But I think, you know, it’s a, I think if people sometimes will try to time it out in ways that I think are never really gonna be, gonna be perfect. And so for me it was a, yeah, it was just kind of saying like, well, I want these two things in my life, and they’re just gonna have to, I’m gonna have to figure it out. And we did .

PhD Program Offer

Emily (12:47): Okay. So what else were you looking at in terms of the factors? We talked about the childcare subsidy, but like, what was your stipend offer, for example, and was that in line with what you were seeing at other institutions? I understand you looked carefully at the health insurance, so let’s talk about more like those other factors as well.

Laura (13:03): Yeah. so my stipend offer so I did, I did end up getting an offer of, of support from UW. This was in 2011. It was only $9,000 a year which is, I mean, it doesn’t approach a living wage. And again, I think that there are a number of different factors that go into that. I think, you know, part of it is that you know, in, in a lot of fields they have established minimums for you know, research assistants, graduates assistants and things like that. In, in theater that in the arts in general, that absolutely does not exist. And for state universities, that is also a difficulty. But yes my offer was $9,000 a year. The that did not include coverage of my fees. So I was still paying about a thousand dollars a year in fees. I was still paying, you know, reasonable but relatively market rate, rent to student housing on campus. So most of my money kind of ended up going back to the university. I, I did have really excellent health insurance though, which is again, to be attributed to the work of the union. Graduate students received the same health insurance as staff members and I didn’t know at the time how important that was going to become, but I was, I was diagnosed with a chronic illness my second year, and probably I would’ve had to leave grad school if my health insurance hadn’t been so good. So it was, it was very, really, really important, to, to have that health insurance.

Finances in Grad School With a New Baby and a Low Income

Emily (14:55): I wanna hear more about how you actually made the finances work, like, especially in this first year of graduate school. Okay. Like, you’ve got the new baby, you’re at a new place, you’re in student housing, like you’re not making very much money. You’ve got your husband to support as well, or, you know, your husband is factoring into this as well. So like, how did that go , especially like starting in that first year?

Laura (15:15): Yeah, it was, it was really tricky. My husband was looking for work but it was, it was really difficult to find. His background had been as an elementary school teacher and he had, he had done some work as like a paralegal. His, his main sort of goal and skillset was in horticulture. And that is what he does full-time now. But at the time, and in Madison it was really difficult to find those jobs. And so he, we also had this child, this infant who needed daycare, and infant daycare is just, I mean, my God, it is so expensive. So he was thinking, well, you know, I have this education background. Lemme see if I can just get a job working at a daycare and maybe that’ll be that’ll subsidize. Eleanor’s Care didn’t really work that way. He did get a job working in daycare. But essentially the money he made just, again, it went right back to the place where he was working because it was so expensive. And so there was no, there really wasn’t a benefit to, to that work. And he, he was able to sort of cobble together a couple of things, you know, sort of, sort of like temp work for that year. But for the most part, he was a stay at home dad. And so he was taking care of our daughter, and again, we were just using that like 25, $30,000 that we had in savings. So yeah, I would say we were living off of, I don’t know, like 35, 36,000 a year for that first year.

Emily (16:52): But not of income, right? Because that’s savings supplementing, yeah.

Laura (16:55): Yeah, yeah. So really it was like, yeah, that was, you know, like a few thousand bucks that I got from my TA work. And then just pulling it straight from savings. So in, in the next, you know, couple years when I was able to I got a a second job within the department working for the theater company of the department. My as my stipend went up a bit I got like a halftime TA instead of a third time ta. So I was able to get my income by the end up to, I think like 18, 19,000 per year, which felt it, it felt like so much money at the time, . And by that point, my husband had started working for the grounds department at UW Madison. And so you know, he was bringing in more money, but not, you know, a ton. Um and so we were, we were making it work, but there was, there was nothing going to retirement. There was nothing going to savings, there was nothing going to my daughter’s college fund, things like that. So we were we were definitely paycheck to paycheck but again, I didn’t have to take those loans for living. And I, I didn’t have to take out student loans to, to survive during that six year period, which is really, really helping now in terms of making up for those, those lost years of, of wealth building.

Emily (18:17): Yeah, let’s talk about that more in a second.

Commercial

Emily (18:21): Emily here for a brief interlude! I’m hard at work behind the scenes updating my suite of tax return preparation workshops for tax year 2023. These pre-recorded educational workshops explain how to identify, calculate, and report your higher education-related income and expenses on your federal tax return. For the 2023 tax season starting in January 2024, I’m offering four versions of this workshop, one each for US citizen/resident graduate students, postdocs, and postbacs and non-resident graduate students and postdocs. While I do sell these workshops to individuals, I prefer to license them to universities so that the end users, graduate students, postdocs, and postbacs, can access them for free. Would you please reach out to your graduate school, graduate student government, postdoc office, international house, fellowship coordinator, etc. to request that they sponsor one of my tax preparation workshops for you and your peers? I’d love to receive a warm introduction to a potential sponsor this fall so we can hit the ground running in January serving those early bird filers. You can find more information about licensing these workshops at P F f o r P h D s dot com slash tax dash workshops. Please pass that page on to the potential sponsor. Now back to our interview.

Using Government Benefits: Food Stamps, WIC, and Child Care Subsidies

Laura (20:12): Yeah, so because our income was so low we were eligible for, well, because our income was so low, and because we had an infant and I was within, you know, a a couple years of, of having given birth. We were eligible for a few different mechanisms. We were eligible for food stamps, we were eligible for WIC, which is stands for like Women and Infant and Children Support. And we were eligible for childcare subsidy from the state government. And so we did take advantage of each of those. We received, I wanna say like four or $500 a month in food stamps, which, you know, so that paid for like, all of our food, and that was so, so vital to us being able to, to, to make it work. WIC provided for for Formula I was unable to breastfeed after the first, you know, like couple of weeks. And so we, we had to have formula. But formula again is incredibly expensive. It provided for, you know, certain amounts and certain types of food. It was you know, more kind of staples, whereas food stamps is a lot you know, had kind of cast a wider net. And then for our daycare, once Eleanor ended up going to daycare, we were able to supplement UWs contribution with the state support. And so from there we were able to get our month, and that still didn’t cover everything for daycare, but we were able to get our monthly payment down to something reasonable.

Emily (21:55): And how long did you end up using those benefits for? Like as your, your income is increasing as your daughter’s getting older, like did those phase out over time?

Laura (22:04): Yeah, absolutely. We were on food stamps and wic for about a year. And actually that makes us essentially like the standard user of government benefits. The standard user of government benefits is white, and they were on it for about a year. And so I think that there are a lot of misconceptions about people who are relying on certain types of government benefits. But, but in truth, they mostly look like me. And it was something that we used in the short term until we were able to get our income to the point where we could pay for those things on our own. I think we used the state benefits for daycare for like two years.

Emily (22:47): Can you talk a little bit more about how, I guess maybe the decision or your like, willingness to access those benefits stemmed from your money mindset more generally in your experiences in your earlier parts of life?

Laura (23:03): Yeah, absolutely. So there were a number of things that allowed, allowed me to, to access those benefits and sort of allowed me to access them in a way that I felt confident about doing. I think it’s really important, first and foremost to say that I am white. And so, you know, being white and, you know, middle class essentially there was a lot less stigma about me using those benefits. And so I think that that is, is a barrier for a lot of people. I also had a working car and that is not nothing. So the ability for me to apply for those benefits to go pick up my WIC checks, because the WIC is like actual physical large checks, which are really embarrassing to use at the grocery store. And I had to go and get them but I didn’t have to use a bus in the, you know, Wisconsin winters. Um I had a flexible schedule. I was a grad student, right? I didn’t have to like tell my boss, Hey, I need to leave to get my, my food stamps. So there was a lot of privilege that went into being able to do that readily, easily, which is not to say it was an easy process. It was still a, you know, more of red tape and paperwork. But, but I made it work. And I think too that, you know, my, my feeling really was like, well, you know, I’ve you know, I’ve worked since I was 15. I’ve paid into this system. I, you know, if I’m eligible for these benefits, then I’m gonna take these benefits. And, and I still think that more people should have that mindset, right? Like, if you are a grad student right now listening to this and you are eligible for food stamps, go get food stamps. Like if you are eligible for food stamps, it means that you are at a level where you have a need, and this is just providing you with food. Like food, please go and do that. I also think it’s important to keep in mind you know, if you’re, if you’re feeling sort of weird about getting those benefits that government benefits aren’t just you know, for people who are poor or struggling I get government benefits all the time. I get my mortgage interest deducted, right? I get my student loan interest deducted. There’s all kinds of benefits that I get from, you know, having like, like a Roth IRA, right? I get tax advantages. Those are government benefits. And no, trust me, every rich person is getting every government benefit that they can. So you get your government benefits too. You earned them and you’re eligible for them. And so that was kind of the mindset that I, that I brought into that. And it, I’m not saying that it was always easy, you know, like I said, with food stamps or with EBT as they call it now, you get a card that looks just like a credit card and you, and you pay with that. And, and to me it’s a very dignified system when you’re actually using them. Whereas wic it’s like, I, I never had an instance of using the WIC checks where the cashier didn’t roll their eyes, didn’t sigh, didn’t sort of like give me a like, oh, great, now I gotta deal with these. And that is a real deterrent. Like, it was, it was embarrassing. And that is so unacceptable. So, so I think that there are ways that probably the government could make this a little easier, but they maybe aren’t inclined to. But yeah, I think that that was all wrapped up in, you know, again, feeling like, well, I’m a middle class white woman, I’m still going to use these.

Emily (26:44): Well, I do appreciate you talking about this like so openly. It’s something that graduate students are sometimes not aware that they can access these kinds of benefits, or in some places they actually might not be able to, even if their right income would put them at the right level because of their student status or because of the type of income that they have. So it’s certainly a state by state thing. But I really appreciate you speaking about how, like, how you thought about this at the time and how you felt like, yep, I need this, it’s a benefit. I’m gonna take it. Let’s do this even if it’s a little bit embarrassing. Because I do think that, like, like you said, you were only on it temporarily and it really helped you to move past the, the temporary income crunch that you all were in. I mean, you’re moving to a new place, you have a brand new baby, like yeah, a lot of people need help at that time of life, and you happen to access, you know, this these various social safety net aspects for that help. So anyway, thank you so much for talking about this. I really appreciate that.

Grad Student Union at UW Madison

Emily (27:38): So you’ve already mentioned a couple of times the union, the grad student union at UW Madison and how it had negotiated for the great healthcare and like this parental benefits and all this stuff. Could you talk more about your experience with the union during the time that you were a graduate student and also how the overall political climate in Wisconsin at that time, kind of the interaction between those two?

Laura (28:01): Yes. So I, I think I’m gonna do that sort of in reverse because the political climate in Wisconsin sort of heavily influenced my experience with the union. So the year before I started at UW Madison, Wisconsin had gone through a major change with Scott Walker was the new governor. And he had grand designs on leadership of the GOP think we can all recall his presidential campaign. And so one of those was to remake the labor landscape in Wisconsin. Wisconsin has historically been a a very strong labor stronghold. You know, really part of that rust belt that was, was, you know, built and facilitated by unions in a, in a, in a lot of ways. And so new legislation in Wisconsin the year prior to my arriving essentially stipulated that unions had to disband and remake themselves and that there couldn’t be a requirement for dues and things like that. And so this was you know, anybody who’s done any sort of you know, organizational work with people understands that if you have to disband your membership and, and re-up, that is a ton of work. And that’s, you’re not, you’re never gonna get everyone back. And that, of course, was the point. So there were major protests of which graduate students at UW Madison were a really important part. But it meant that by the time I arrived, the union was really trying to reconstitute itself, and I think they deserve a lot of credit for how much work that was and, and the fact that they, you know, are still an ongoing institution within uw. So they deserve a lot of credit for that. But it did change the, you know, the leadership, it changed the the makeup of the union and it changed the resources of the union. Uh so the, the union was not what it, what it had been. And the university was thankfully, you know, still honoring the commitments that they had made to the union prior to that 2011 legislation. But it did change things. Unfortunately and, you know, it’s, it’s tragic that, you know, that was, that was the, the planned outcome and it worked. But it did mean that the, the union had less power. It had less people to do the important work and I believe it had fewer actually full-time staff members which, which really made a difference. And so my, my sort of experience with it was like the, it just didn’t have the legs that it used to. But I will say that you know, having any sort of union as a graduate student can be a powerful thing. There was one instance in which I you know, I had a TA job and I was being told that it was a requirement that I work beyond my contract. And I, it was really great to be able to say like, okay, well I, like, since I’m a union member, I actually can’t. So let me just go to the union and talk to them about this request. And lo and behold I no longer had to work beyond the confines of my contract.

Emily (31:44): What I’m taking from this is that you can’t be complacent about the benefits that are offered by your university and, and if there’s a union by the union, what the union has negotiated for, because like what I’m learning kind of as I talk to people in different states and people at different stages of the unionization like process is that like, like what you experienced in Wisconsin, like things can shift politically at the state level or at the national level, and that can really shift what happens at the university level and with unions or the formation of unions. And so it’s not something you can sort of take for granted. And you’re always gonna have to be responding to those like shifting wins, I guess . And so I, so I’m learning that like, just because there is a union doesn’t mean the union is safe forever, right? You have to keep advocating for yourself and keep organizing.

Laura (32:33): And I think that that is also true for universities. And I think that part of what frustrated me sometimes about our union and, and sometimes frustrates me in in general in terms of like, you know, the way that grad students can sometimes approach their relationship to their university is that there is a sense that the university has the resources to do everything it wants to do and just won’t. And that could not be further from the truth. This is something where, you know, having worked in higher education for my entire career universities are so much more hamstrung by a lack of resources by legislatures that are not supportive or maybe di you know, directly hostile and hamstrung by the need to consistently be getting federal grants. That it’s, it’s so much more complex of a, a situation than I think a lot of grad students that I worked with at UW wanted to acknowledge that this was not us against the university universities in general you know, the people who are in them, they are not here to get rich because we’re never gonna get rich working for a state university.

Emily (33:47): Mm-Hmm. And I think, I mean, your point is, especially I think well made for public universities that have to deal with these state level like issues again and their funding, but of course, all universities are dealing with the grant funding that you mentioned from the federal government and whether it’s there and in what amount and, and so forth. So thank you so much for pointing out. Like it’s not, it’s really not, especially I would say the individuals like at the lower levels working within universities, they’re not the enemies of the students. They’re not trying to work against the students. Like, we’re just all trying to survive within the system. Okay.

Impact of Financial Experiences in Grad School on Current Financial Life

Emily (34:20): In what way has your financial experience as a graduate student continued to affect your financial life to today? Like you mentioned earlier that you did not have any room in your budget for like retirement savings, for example, and so by the time you got out of graduate school, I’m doing some quick math. I think you were 36, so you can talk about that or any other ways that, that, that experience has still had like a financial effect on your life at the present.

Laura (34:44): So yeah, the, the, the period during which I was not able to be saving for retirement or saving for my daughter’s college education that so far has been the most impactful aspect of my finances. Again, I didn’t have to to take on those loans. And so you know, that my, my, my student loan payment has not really gone up. But the, I think it’s important for anybody who is in a PhD or considering doing a PhD to understand the opportunity cost that, you know, taking that time out of your life when you’re in your, you know, twenties or thirties, that is gonna be the most impactful period in which you can be saving for retirement because of compound interest. So the more that you can put away when you’re young, the less you’ll have to put away when you are older. Um and so, you know, know now that I am 42 and you’re right, I was in graduate school from 30 to 36. I am having to put more away towards retirement, and I probably will just have a smaller retirement nest egg. I am again, lucky to be in a university where in a state where I am in a pension system. So this is pretty rare to have a defined benefit pension. But the, the pension is not what it used to be. The pension will cover maybe 50% of my expenses in retirement which is great. I’m certainly not complaining. But it does mean that like I still have to, beyond the amount I put into the pension system, I have to be putting cash away into a Roth IRA. And that’s tricky because at this point I am I am saving for my own retirement. We’re saving for my husband’s retirement we’re saving for my daughter’s college education. So my daughter’s college education is also a strong determinant of where I work because the university I work for that is our local state university offers 75% tuition discount to the children of staff members. So that’s our college plan , right? Which is kind of rough. Like I, I was always kind of taught that like, you know, I had a lot of options for college and for my daughter that is not the case. And I think, you know, for, for Gen Z in general they’re much more savvy than us elder millennials are about these things at their age. But but it still means that like, okay, you know, the, the college savings that I do are aligned with the idea that 75% of her tuition will be, will be covered. Um and that again, is not you know, that was a, a very specific choice that I have made you know, to to to, to remain at a, you know, at a university where that is gonna be one of the benefits. So, you know, that’s also something where, that’s a decision that I made based on the financial situation I was in in grad school. At the same time you know, having the PhD has increased my, my earning potential greatly. And so even though you know, I am at a state university where I can just expect that the, you know, compensation is going to be lower than in the private sector I still am able to to make the kind of salary that allows me to, to save for all those things at once. But you know, there’s still you know compromises to be made. And that, you know, frugality that that my husband and I have always really, really had, has, has come in handy because I think it also can be very tempting, particularly for students who are coming right out of graduate school to have a lot of like lifestyle creep. And, you know, your, your paycheck gets bigger and so you’re spending more money. And I think the, the, the more that you can avoid that, the better.

Emily (38:42): Yeah, you really have to have that awareness right from that first paycheck they receive, you know, post PhD, post postdoc, that there’s a lot more on your to-do list financially that there probably wasn’t graduate school if you weren’t able to get to all those items like retirement and, and college savings and so forth. But I think your story sounds like pretty like par for the course, right? Like the PhD increased your earning potential, but you lost the, to a degree, the time value of money for the time that you spent during the PhD. And so there has to be, there’s the trade off, right? But then again, I’m sure you’re in a career that you find very fulfilling, and so there’s also that aspect of it. Yeah. Okay.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

Emily (39:22): So Laura, as we wrap up, I’m gonna ask you the question that I ask all of my guests, which is, what is your best financial advice for another early career PhD that could be for a current graduate student, a prospective graduate student, like we’ve mostly talked about, it could be someone more at your current career stage, however you would like to take that,

Laura (39:40): You know, addressing PhD students and particularly PhD students who are going on the job market or are close to graduation. I really want to encourage you to keep in mind that you have a lot of options. I think that there are PhDs who will take a truly suboptimal offers like adjuncting that they do because they don’t feel that they have any options. And the truth is that with a PhD, even if, even if your job is not specifically in your field, my current job is not in the field of Irish theater. But you have options. And please don’t let academia make you feel as though you have a responsibility to, to take these sort of really terrible adjunct offers because that helps perpetuate the adjuncting system, frankly. And you have the ability to, to to have the same sort of self-worth the same sort of you know, fulfillment, even the same publication opportunities in some, in some cases without having to to stay in that subsistence situation. So just really, really understand your own earning power because no matter what field you are in, if you have a PhD, you have pretty significant earning power.

Emily (41:11): Hmm. And even pivoting outside of academia, like within academia, you feel like you’re a dime a dozen because literally your university is graduating like whatever, hundreds of PhDs each year and probably several even from your own discipline. And so you feel like, like you’re nothing. Some people might feel like they’re nothing special. But if you take your training and those translatable skills into another context, you will likely find that you actually have a lot to bring to that other context and that you can be paid very nicely for it. So thank you so much for that, the kind of like shot of confidence to those people who are in that at that point in their careers. So Laura, it’s been absolutely wonderful to have you on the podcast. I’m so glad I ran into you at GCC and thank you so much for agreeing to give this interview.

Laura (41:56): Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate It.

Outtro

42:04 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! Nothing you hear on this podcast should be taken as financial, tax, or legal advice for any individual. The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by Dr. Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Dr. Jill Hoffman.

Unionization and Individual Negotiation to Improve Graduate Student Stipends and Benefits

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In this episode, Emily shares first-person stories of graduate students enjoying improved stipends and benefits thanks to prior negotiation. The first half of the episode includes the experiences of four graduate students with their unions or when taking part in unionization movements. The second half of the episode includes four individual negotiation stories from prospective graduate students.

Links mentioned in the Episode

Unionization and Negotiation in Grad School

Teaser

00:00 Katy P: But having a union means that there’s a level of protection between a department or sometimes even an individual and a graduate student. And that level of protection is the thing that in my opinion, only becomes possible under collective action, collective organizing. So I know that if I had not had a union, I wouldn’t have had anywhere to go to say like, Hey, this doesn’t seem fair, this doesn’t seem right. And because of a union, I had a system, I had clear instructions of how to do it. I had designated people to talk to. I had resources. I had people in the administration to talk to. I wasn’t alone negotiating a disagreement one on one.

Introduction

00:44 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others.

01:12 Emily: This is Season 15, Episode 4, and today I’m sharing first-person stories of graduate students enjoying improved stipends and benefits thanks to prior negotiation. The first half of the episode includes the experiences of four graduate students with their unions or when taking part in unionization movements. The second half of the episode includes four individual negotiation stories from prospective graduate students.

01:39 Emily: I’m beyond excited to announce that I’m offering a brand-new live one-hour seminar titled “How to Not Hate Your Fellowship During Tax Season.” It’s all about how to understand and properly handle your fellowship stipend that will not be reported on a Form W-2, which is what I call awarded income. Awarded income typically doesn’t have income tax withheld from it, which can become an unwelcome surprise and even financial hardship if the recipient is not taught what to do starting with their first paycheck of this type. In addition to teaching about estimated tax and self-withholding, I give pointers for preparing for and navigating tax season with awarded income. This seminar is intended to be taken during orientation or shortly after by people who are switching onto awarded income for the first time, so it will be exclusively available between August and October of this year. If you are starting on awarded income in the fall and your university doesn’t withhold income tax—or you’ve dealt with that scenario in the past—would you please recommend this seminar to your fellowship coordinator, program head, or graduate school? Please cc me [email protected] so I can pick up the conversation. My goal is for every grad student receiving awarded income to be forewarned about this issue before it rears its ugly head during tax season!

03:06 Emily: You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s15e4/. Without further ado, here’s our compilation episode on unions and individual negotiation.

What is Your Union or Unionization Movement Story?

03:25 Emily: This portion of the episode includes four responses to my open-ended prompt of “What is your union or unionization movement story?” If you would like to hear other episodes on unions, look up Season 12 Episode 7, Season 5 Episode 9, and Season 4 Episode 14.

Courtney’s Union Story, Oregon State University

03:49 Courtney: Hello, my name is Courtney and I am a third year Ph.D. student at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon, in civil engineering. The Coalition for Graduate Employees at Oregon State was established in 1999 with the first bargaining contract in 2001 and since then, the union has successfully bargained for amazing health insurance, including dental and vision, and they have continuously raised wages and reduced student fees and provide a no strings attached hardship fund for graduate students. I directly benefit from this union by fully utilizing my health insurance. My deductible is only $100 and my co-pays are very minimal. I can go to the dentist every four months too. And my funding source is currently an external fellowship, so I’m not a full member, but I pay $10 per month to be an associate member as I still benefit from this work and I want to support them. Full membership is 2% of pretax monthly salary and is optional for grad students and assistantships and grad research assistants. The union also often has socials and provides many resources to support graduate students and assist with grievances. Full members also get discounts and deals at local establishments in Corvallis, which is pretty cool. And there are many hardworking members in this union who I am very appreciative of and make my graduate experience much more enjoyable.

Michele’s Union Story, Michigan State University

05:25 Michele: My name is Michele and I’m a Ph.D. student at Michigan State University. When I first saw MSU, I didn’t know very much about unions because of the pandemic. My department had lower participation in their graduate student organization or GSO, so there was no one to discuss unions at the orientation. However, the president of our GSO encouraged me to be our steward or graduate employees union. After I discovered that I was interested in learning more. So I’ve been representing my department for the last year and then continuing that role in the upcoming year as well. My funding is actually from fellowships and not from a teaching assistantship or a research assistant position in Michigan. Only teaching assistants are allowed to be covered under the current contract. So our research assistants and fellows are not covered under the current contract. However, the benefits that the teachers went through their contract are typically also given to RAs and fellows. For example, the previous contracts the graduate students bargained for gave to free health insurance, which was also extended to RAs and Fellows also received health insurance coverage. But we have to pay taxes on it as it is dispersed as a fellowship.

06:46 Michele: Even though RAs and fellows cannot be covered under the contract, they can join the union as affiliate members. This may change in the state of Michigan, though, as there was recently some legislation passed in the Senate that would allow us to start bargaining for a contract. I think one of the most important benefits of the union is that unites the grad students together and helps with information sharing. For example, the way fellowships are dispersed, MSU is typically in a lump sum at the beginning of the semester and during this spring semester. This past year, I did not receive my semester payment until about a month after it was stated that I was supposed to receive it on my tax form. But then I was able to contact other members of the union through our Slack channel who had a similar problem in order to resolve this issue as quickly as possible. I have also seen other members of the union get help on a myriad of other topics such as late pay and overwork. One drawback of having a formal union is that dues do need to be paid by members in order to help the union run. And then these dues are used to pay for staff organizers and paying dues to the The American Federation of Teachers and the MSU Union also had two recently increased dues for affiliate members because membership dropped a lot during the pandemic. However, as more people join the union, then the cost of running it can be spread out among more people. In addition, the benefits and pay increases that can be negotiated when the majority of graduate employees are in the union will also offset this cost.

08:31 Michele: It is also more important to make sure that you have an issue that you want to organize around, and the dues can then come later to cover the operating costs of the union once it grows. For those of you who are looking to organize a union at your own university, it will often depend on state legislation. Some states do not classify their graduate students as employees, even if they work as teaching or research assistants. And this means that they are not eligible to unionize. And a good book about learning how to organize is the secrets of a successful organizer.

09:08 Michele: And then from a personal finance point of view, the union has been beneficial to me and to all graduate students. They recently were able to negotiate a 5% raise above the minimum across the board, while bargaining has been on pause. And in addition to the health insurance, there’s also a 50% coverage on dental insurance. Overwork is also written into most union contracts, and enforcing it would also give someone more time to focus on a side hustle if they needed some extra cash. As long as it’s permitted by the university, their program. In addition, enforcing the contractual working hours, could also free up more time to focus on research.

09:54 Michele: Tuition waivers can also be negotiated into the union contract. So for MSU’s current contract, nine credits can be waived in fall and spring and five in the summer. And there’s also medical leave and bereavement leave. And so this year is also a collective bargaining year, and a new contract will be negotiated. So some of the bargaining planks that MSU has been focused on or full dental coverage, a pay increase that tracks inflation and cost of living and interest for late payments.

Katy Peplin’s Union Story, Thrive PhD

10:33 Katy P: Hi, I’m Katy Peplin from Thrive PhD, and I am a proud member of two former unions, both as a graduate student and as a teaching assistant. I was part of the UCLA union when I was there as a master’s student, and then I was part of the Graduate Student Union, GEO, at the University of Michigan my entire tenure there. I wholeheartedly believe in unions for graduate students. I think that one of the things that is most important about them is that they provide collective power in a place where individual concerns can really easily get swept under the rug. For example, when I was in my last year of teaching, I was supposed to be teaching a class which was a 50% workload. But in reality it was two sessions that I had taught for 2 hours of direct teaching, some grading, and then attending the lectures. And that assignment was switched without my knowledge or consent over the winter break into a four direct teaching hours plus screening, plus grading upper level writing class. And I was just informed that it was still going to be a 50% contract and that I would be making the same amount of money. So I immediately went to my rep and was like, Is this legal? And unfortunately it was legal, but I was able, with the help of my union, to negotiate for better terms of my pay. I was able to reduce the writing requirement and therefore the grading requirement of this class. And I knew that I would not have to rely on the word of my department and my advisors.

12:07 Katy P: So now that I work with graduate students all over the world, I think it’s really important to say that most faculty in most universities aren’t out to get graduate students. Universities run on the backs and labor of graduate students in a lot of different ways. But having a union means that there’s a level of protection between a department or sometimes even an individual and a graduate student. And that level of protection is the thing that in my opinion, only becomes possible under collective action, collective organizing. So I know that if I had not had a union, I wouldn’t have had anywhere to go to say like, Hey, this doesn’t seem fair, this doesn’t seem right. And because of a union, I had a system, I had clear instructions of how to do it. I designated people to talk to. I had resources. I had people in the administration to talk to. I wasn’t alone negotiating a disagreement one on one. My unions also made it possible for me to have livable health care, livable stipends, even if they were below the cost of cost of living at the time. And I know that those things were only possible because the group that provided so much labor for the university banded together.

13:19 Katy P: If you are a grad student who is thinking about unionizing, I really encourage you to reach out to other unions. The union that I was represented by as a Ph.D. student was formed in 1974. It’s one of the earliest university unions for teaching assistants. It’s geo at the University of Michigan, and I know that they have consulted with all sorts of burgeoning union movements all around the country. So there’s a lot of people who have walked this path before. GEO has experience dealing with shifting administrations, changing state laws, changing labor laws. They have experience with withheld pay and strike grievances and health care negotiations. And there’s a lot of information that becomes available when you start organizing in union that most graduate students don’t know anything about. Like, I had no idea what a bargaining plank was or how to get into meetings or what a provost was or who the board of Regents were. So being in a union for me was both a way to give back to the thing that was supporting me and giving me so much benefit, but also it was a really great way to learn about how universities work. Obviously, it’s a singular point of view about how a university works, and I’m sure that there are other administrations that might come back and say, You know, this isn’t exactly how it works. But for me on the ground as a union member, I learned so much about how university budgets worked, where my stipend even came from, how my health insurance was negotiated. And those are all really important skills that I’ve needed well, after I’ve left university. So even though I am no longer part of the union and I work for myself, I still use all of my union skills to think about what’s in the best interest, to look at insurance plans, to think about how budgets are made, or if I’m approaching universities to ask for funding.

15:06 Katy P: And it’s certainly something that I work with some clients every day, because the reality is that graduate school takes away from some of your prime earning your prime living years, and it’s for a good cause to create research and add to the knowledge in the world. But also there’s material impacts for taking a big chunk of your twenties or a big chunk of your twenties and thirties. Or to leave a secure job and come back to grad school. There are impacts for taking that time away. And the more that I work with people, the more I really see a distinct difference between campuses that have unions and their graduate students feel like they have some level of security, they have some level of a reliable stipend over the summer or they have some sense that their health insurance will continue from year to year, and students at universities who don’t have it.

15:56 Katy P: Sometimes it can be really easy to reduce unions to like, Oh, they’re the reason I get my good benefits or like, that’s the reason that I get a good stipend as opposed to a very crappy stipend. But I think that the the real benefit outside of those material benefits is just understanding and having some protection for these vulnerable years where you’re really giving a lot of yourself and wanting to have some protection back to them

Anonymous #1’s Unionization Story, A Private Christian university

16:25 Emily/Anonymous #1: This submission is from an anonymous contributor. Quote I’m a Ph.D. candidate and graduate assistant at a private Christian American university. When I started in my program, I was making just over half of what is considered the minimum cost of living in my city. I was not provided health insurance over the summer through my job. Needless to say, it is difficult to make ends meet in these circumstances. Eventually, the graduate assistants at my school put out a letter of demands to the university, insisting that we be fairly compensated and covered for our medical needs. We demonstrated how much money we bring into the university with each class we teach and how dependent the school is on us to teach many required courses for undergraduate students. For example, from what I can calculate when teaching just one class for one semester of 25 students, the school brings in six times more money than I am paid in a whole year. We also appealed to the school’s religious ideologies and ethics and pointed out the hypocrisy of a Christian institution taking advantage of people in this way.

17:28 Emily/Anonymous #1: The school did respond and met some of our demands, but continued to refuse to pay us a living wage. Higher ups at universities want to tell us that because we are also students, that much of our labor is an educational experience for which we should be grateful and not expect compensation. But the truth is that our labor is real work that we have trained hard to be qualified to do, and that the universities could not function without. To get a job as a graduate assistant a person must have a college degree and go through competitive selection processes. Many of us even already have master’s degrees before we start in Ph.D. programs and take these jobs. And it’s not as if we’re asking to be paid as much as professors. We are only asking for the bare minimum of what it takes to live in this particular town. But the university has refused. We realized that we weren’t going to get our basic needs met unless we united and organized. So the union effort began.

18:22 Emily/Anonymous #1: I am keeping my identity and the identity of my school. Anonymous, as we have not yet gone public with our union efforts. But we did want to take this opportunity to get our story out there so that graduate assistants at other universities would know that they aren’t alone in their struggles. Additionally, I want to say that we have been very inspired and invigorated by the efforts and successes of graduate students unionizing at other universities throughout the country. So a big thank you to all who have come before us and for the risks they took. It feels like this is a moment of progress for graduate assistants and we are excited to become a part of that. We gave our university the opportunity to write this wrong without us organizing, but they have refused. So we are going forth with our unionizing efforts. Thank you so much. Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast for having this episode and inviting me to share my story. We have a hard road ahead, but we are ready.

Commercial

19:11 Emily: Emily here for a brief interlude. Would you like to learn directly from me on a personal finance topic, such as taxes, goal-setting, investing, frugality, increasing income, or student loans, each tailored specifically for graduate students and postdocs? I offer seminars and workshops on these topics and more in a variety of formats, and I’m now booking for the 2023-2024 academic year. If you would like to bring my content to your institution, would you please recommend me as a speaker or facilitator to your university, graduate school, graduate student association, or postdoc office? My seminars are usually slated as professional development or personal wellness. Ask the potential host to go to PFforPhDs.com/speaking/ or simply email me at [email protected] to start the process. I really appreciate these recommendations, which are the best way for me to start a conversation with a potential host. The paid work I do with universities and institutions enables me to keep producing this podcast and all my other free resources. Thank you in advance if you decide to issue a recommendation! Now back to our interview.

Individual Stipend Negotiation 

20:31 Emily: This portion of the episode includes four responses to my prompts regarding individual stipend negotiation. The prompts were: “What was your original stipend and benefits offer? What was the process of negotiating this offer? What was the outcome of the negotiation?” If you would like to hear another episode like this one, look up Season 8 Episode 7.

Anonymous #2, University of Georgia

20:58 Emily/Anonymous #2: This admission is from an anonymous contributor. Quote, I’m an incoming doctoral student at the university of Georgia, located in Athens, Georgia. I’m in the social sciences. 

What Was Your Original Stipend and Benefits Offer?

21:09 Emily/Anonymous #2: My department gave me an offer of a research assistantship and they nominated me for a university wide fellowship. The RA-ship pays $26,000, and the fellowship is $7,000 per year for four years. In addition, my tuition is waived, and every student in my department gets a $500 conference stipend per semester. All in all, I am receiving funding from two sources, one from my department and one from the university overall.

21:35 Emily/Anonymous #2: I also had a competing offer, which is what allowed me to feel comfortable negotiating with my department. The other offer was about $5,000 more a year at a roughly comparable institution. Both are one SEC schools, although the departments and selves aren’t as comparable. That offer was also comprised an assistantship and fellowship with the extra $5,000 coming from the fellowship.

What Was the Process of Negotiating This Offer?

21:57 Emily/Anonymous #2: At the time I had these offers, I was also in the last year of my master’s program, and I was really well-positioned to negotiate by virtue of my existing professional connections. Members of my faculty knew the faculty at both of the institutions I was looking at, so I asked them if negotiations were the norm in our field or if I would be perceived as out of step. I also think it’s worth asking the newer faculty in your department what they did when entering grad school and during their job search, because the tenured professors haven’t job search in a while, so their norms and experiences might not be as up to date for the actual negotiations.

22:31 Emily/Anonymous #2: I drafted an email that laid out that I had a competing offer and asked if there is anything else I should consider while making a decision. I wasn’t sure what would shake out as a result of me asking, and I was told asking directly for more money wouldn’t be the best way to approach negotiations. So I gave them an opportunity to sell me on the program. I had been corresponding with the program coordinator, so that’s who I sent the email to.

What Was the Outcome of the Negotiation?

22:54 Emily/Anonymous #2: They responded with a very kind email that basically said that they weren’t surprised I had other offers and they offered me a named department award that was specifically for professional development funding for $5,000 over four years.

23:06 Emily/Anonymous #2: I was happy for a few reasons. One, it showed me the department was willing to invest in me. Two, I got the money I asked for, and three, because it was a named award. I can put it on my CV. At that point, I went ahead and immediately accepted the offer and let everyone involved know that it had worked out. Ultimately, I’m glad I negotiated it because I got the funding I requested and because it told me more about the department culture than anything else could have. I also feel really well-positioned to take advantage of conferences and professional opportunities in my field without worrying about how I’ll pay for them. I would recommend negotiating as a graduate student, even if just to see how the department reacts. In most cases, it’s a reasonable request. So if they respond with disapproval, that could be a sign for your future in that department, end quote.

Anonymous #3, a Large Public University in the Midwest

23:58 Anonymous #3: So I just completed the second year of a five year humanities doctoral program at a large public university in the Midwest. My current program was my top choice during the application process, and thanks to guidance from the Personal Finance for PhDs podcast, I was able to use the offer for my second choice program to negotiate and improve the financial package of my top choice program.

What Was Your Original Stipend and Benefits Offer?

24:22 Anonymous #3: Originally, my top choice offered me a five year funding package that included a two year fellowship to be used during a first and last year of my graduate studies. This fellowship relieves me of teaching duties and also offers a higher stipend. The original 12 month stipend was $28,316, but the university increased the stipend right before my first semester to $30,420. So this is the amount I received during my first year when I was on fellowship and I will receive this amount or perhaps even more if the university decides to increase it again for my fifth and final year. My remaining three years of graduate study are funded by a teaching assistantship. So as a GTA, I teach one course per semester. The nine month GTA stipend is $21,280 in my department. There seems to be more and more opportunity to teach a course over the summer, which pays approximately an additional $7,000 on top of that nine months stipend. However, this is not a guarantee and international students have priority over domestic students for these positions, specifically in my department.

25:29 Anonymous #3: My second choice program offered me a 12 month, $24,000 stipend for the five year program, in addition to an extra $5,000 to be used for research over the course of the five years. So in total, the financial package is about $5,000 more than that of my first choice program. But of course, this is not taking into account small differences in fees.

What was the process of negotiating this offer?

25:51 Anonymous #3: Ultimately, I sent a brief direct email to the DGS at my top choice program. I explained that I was deciding between two programs and that the other program of interest, which I named specifically in the email, had offered a more competitive funding package which included guaranteed summer funding. And I outlined all of the details of the funding package in the email to the DGS.

What was the outcome of the negotiation?

26:13 Anonymous #3: My negotiation process was actually quite easy. The DGS responded the next day and offered an additional $6,000, a lump sum that I could use any way I wished. So there was really no back and forth. I sent the email. I asked if there was anything that they could do to increase the financial package, and they responded and said, yes, here’s an additional $6,000.

26:33 Anonymous #3: So this is the financial commitment that I needed to make my final decision. I accepted the offer and I received this cash amount when I arrived on campus. Ultimately, my second choice program has since increased stipends to $30,000 per year. However, my current program has also made changes to funding packages. Summer teaching opportunities have increased in my department specifically for domestic students, and health insurance will soon be covered 100% by the university, so my first two years there was an 85% subsidy. So it seems to me that financial packages can really shift and evolve over the course of one’s program. But I think it’s critical to make sure that you have a guaranteed financial package that is workable for you from the very beginning. For me, as a 31 year old doctoral student who left a career to pursue a PhD in a completely different field, financial security is really important and pursuing programs with strong funding packages in affordable cities and then negotiating with my top choice and continuing to seek out additional grants and awards now that I’m here has been really important for my success in the program and also for my well-being overall.

Anonymous #4

27:47 Emily/Anonymous #4: This next contribution was submitted anonymously. Quote, Hello. Newly minted Ph.D. student here today. I’ll be telling you a bit about my experience of “negotiating” my offer letter for grad school. I say negotiating with air quotes because my experience was not the typical case of using an offer from one school as leverage to improve your offer at another school. But I think my experience can help motivate others to negotiate, which is why I’m happy to share.

28:14 Emily/Anonymous #4: So for a bit of back story, I knew from early on during my undergraduate education that I wanted to go to graduate school. However, the research I was doing as an undergrad wasn’t something I was super passionate about. By my senior year, I found a research area that was more interesting to me, But felt that I wasn’t ready to apply to grad school since I’d be switching fields in order to gain a better understanding of the state of the field and really specify a topic. I could devote six years of my life to. I worked as a lab tech for two years doing research in the field. I thought I wanted to pursue in graduate school and yay, I was correct in my judgment. I found a research topic I really enjoyed. The downside to this perhaps, was that I consequently narrowed my options for grad programs.

28:58 Emily/Anonymous #4: I ended up applying to two programs that are both direct admit, so I knew which lab I’d be joining and have a general idea for a project I’d work on. Following interviews, I realized that one of the labs was not the right fit for me. So by the end of the application cycle, I only had one offer letter. Now, during my interview at this institution, two PI’s, neither of whom were the P.I. I was interviewing for, and one of whom was on the grad committee. Both encouraged me to negotiate my offer. Then, prior to receiving the offer letter my PI emailed me saying we should zoom once I got it so we can go over the details and, quote, discuss anything I’d want to negotiate. So I was confident that negotiation was not taboo for this program and was reassured that my PI would even help me.

What was your original stipend and benefits offer?

29:41 Emily/Anonymous #4: But how exactly do you negotiate without the leverage of another offer? You just ask. My original offer was a 12 month appointment with a stipend of $32,000 for my first two years. Then the departmental rate guaranteed for nine month appointments for three more years, as well as an additional departmental award to be paid over my first three years. Even though I didn’t have another offer, I was still planning to ask for smaller things such as relocation assistance. Then I was awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. With the Fellowship. I recognized I had a little bit more bargaining power, but at the end of the day, there was only one school I’d be able to take it to. Still, I knew that my PI and department were generally okay with negotiations, so I figured I had nothing to lose if I asked for more.

What was the process of negotiating this offer?

30:26 Emily/Anonymous #4: I first zoomed with my PI, That’s when I asked about relocation assistance. But I followed up on that zoom call with an email basically saying, I’ve heard that other NSF recipients asked for these things. Is any of this even possible? And listed the following agreement to pay the NSF stipend on non-NSF years: partial control of the $12,000 cost of education fund that is part of the fellowship and a sign up bonus.

What was the outcome of the negotiation?

30:52 Emily/Anonymous #4: My plan was to gauge what my PI thought would be reasonable requests, then go forward with only those. But they actually just went ahead and asked about all of them. And two days later I had my answers. First, the school will match the NSF statement. First, the school will match the NSF stipend on non NSF years. Second, I won’t have control over the $12,000 funds. However, the school may top it off with $2,000 that I can use for conferences, workshops, etc. I say may because this component is negotiated separately from the stipend and is still in the works. Third, a sign on bonus is not possible. However, the department award in my original offer letter was reworked into a larger amount that I will receive in my fifth year. So while it’s not technically a sign on bonus, it is an additional lump sum that I’m being guaranteed. And finally, my PI can reimburse up to $600 in relocation costs.

31:48 Emily/Anonymous #4: So overall, my negotiation, which was nothing more than just asking, was largely successful. I do want to note that there are two important factors to consider in my case. One, because this is a direct admit program, my PI was in my corner doing the asking for me. I never did any of the negotiation with the department directly, which may be the case for those entering rotation programs and why asking can be more intimidating for others. Second, my PI has external non-government funding which allows for more flexibility in how it’s spent. I’m almost certain that I would not get the NSF stipend match nor relocation assistance if my PI didn’t have private funding. So it can be useful to know what sources of funding your potential PI has to help you gauge if certain asks are reasonable versus unreasonable. I hope my story will help motivate others to ask for more than what their initial offer consists of. Whether they have offers from five schools or one school. And even if you don’t have an external fellowship like I did at the end of the day, the school offered you a spot. They want you there. I truly believe that making reasonable requests will not hurt you in the eyes of a university that wants you to commit to their program. You’re never going to have an answer unless you ask. End quote.

Anonymous #5, Negotiation Advice

33:06 Emily/Anonymous #5: This is from an anonymous contributor. Quote, I will be starting in a PhD program in fall 2023. After some correspondence with the professor in charge, I managed to secure a bit of additional funding. My advice is to think of the process as just asking questions instead of negotiation. Make a convincing case and focus on controllable and movable points.

33:30 Emily/Anonymous #5: One. Thinking of the process as simply a communication exchange helped me in two ways. By removing the pressure of negotiation, it helped me to think clearly about what I need to support myself financially and the pressure points in the initial offer, e.g. rent. And as such it help me to communicate clearly about my financial concerns. Admitted, but not accepted is the time to discuss financial details and faculty fully expect students to ask questions and are prepared to leverage their resources to adjust offers to convince students to join

34:06 Emily/Anonymous #5: Two. Making a convincing case stemmed from thinking concretely about how I would support myself on the initial offer and subsequently asking questions that were detailed and specific. Asking many detailed questions served as evidence of real and reasonable financial and material concerns. I had. Functionally, this worked analogous to asking research questions in the statement of purpose.

34:28 Emily/Anonymous #5: Three. focusing on controllable and movable points made this correspondence actually productive. What are the principal pressure points in my current offer? What tools does the program have at their disposal to improve offers? Often they do not have much wiggle room over a pure stipend amount, but have other programs or fellowships they can leverage. Focusing on effective and real possible offer adjustments helped me to help the professor better understand what they could do to turn an admission offer into an accepted offer. Relatedly, I advise taking advantage of additional funding opportunities, such as filling out optional personal statements, end quote.

Outtro

35:14 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode! I have a gift for you! You know that final question I ask of all my guests regarding their best financial advice? My team has collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to access transcripts or videos of each episode? I link the show notes for each episode from PFforPhDs.com/podcast/. See you in the next episode, and remember: You don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance… but it helps! The music is “Stages of Awakening” by Podington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC. Podcast editing by Dr. Lourdes Bobbio and show notes creation by Dr. Jill Hoffman.

The Motivation and Strategy Behind Biology PhD Stipends

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

Links Mentioned in the Episode

Image for S14E10: The Motivation and Strategy Behind Biology PhD Stipends

Teaser

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

Introduction

00:25 Emily: Welcome to the Personal Finance for PhDs Podcast: A Higher Education in Personal Finance. I’m your host, Dr. Emily Roberts, a financial educator specializing in early-career PhDs and founder of Personal Finance for PhDs. This podcast is for PhDs and PhDs-to-be who want to explore the hidden curriculum of finances to learn the best practices for money management, career advancement, and advocacy for yourself and others. This is Season 14, Episode 10, and today my guest is Shelly Gaynor, a fifth-year PhD candidate in botany at the University of Florida. After learning of the possibility of a stipend decrease last year, Shelly dedicated herself to raising the stipend in her department at UF. She and a partner even launched an app to collect stipend information from other biology departments around the U.S. Shelly shares everything she’s learned about the factors that influence how stipends are set and her advice for other stipend advocates. The interview concludes with a round-up of all the stipend and benefits advances Shelly has witnessed in her department, through her union’s negotiations, and at other institutions.

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

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

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

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

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

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

Biology PhD Stipends

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

08:16 Shelly: Yes.

08:17 Emily: Okay.

08:17 Shelly: From my understanding.

Building an Argument

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

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

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

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

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

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

11:28 Shelly: Exactly.

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

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

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

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

Phases of Data Collection

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

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

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

14:31 Shelly: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

17:47 Shelly: No, they are not.

Commercial

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

Reallocating Funds for TAs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Behind-the-Scenes Factors for Administrators

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

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

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

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

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

Graduate Assistants United 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advice for Prospective Students

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

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

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

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

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

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

34:39 Shelly: No problem.

Outtro

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

The Necessity of Both Economic Justice Advocacy and Personal Financial Responsibility

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In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Ian Gutierrez, a PhD in clinical psychology and former union leader at the University of Connecticut. While in graduate school, Ian served on the bargaining committee for the newly formed graduate student union, and viewed a higher income as the solution to his personal finance challenges. During his internship year, despite earning about what he had as a graduate student, Ian challenged himself to live within his means and pay down his previously accumulated debt and in the process reformed his practice financial attitudes and practices. At the end of the episode, Ian and Emily discuss the importance of both advocating for economic justice and, to the extent possible, having good personal finance practices.

Links Mentioned

grad student union

Teaser

00:00 Ian: It was about at that time when all of the failings of my financial planning became extremely evident. Suddenly I realized that I had to live within my means, which was sort of embarrassing to say 29 or 30 year old.

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 six, episode four, and today my guest is Dr. Ian Gutierrez, a PhD in clinical psychology and former union leader at the university of Connecticut. While in graduate school, Ian served on the bargaining committee for the newly formed graduate student union and viewed a higher income as a solution to his personal finance challenges. During his internship year, despite earning about what he had as a graduate student, Ian challenged himself to live within his means and pay down his previously accumulated debt. And in the process reformed his financial attitudes and practices. At the end of the episode, Ian and I discuss the importance of both advocating for economic justice, and, to the extent possible, having good personal finance practices. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Ian Gutierrez.

Would You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

01:23 Emily: I have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Ian Gutierrez, and Ian and I first connected actually when I was looking for guests for my “Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise” episode that came out season five, episode two. That was the one that was a compilation episode, with a lot of people and had a couple of guests talking about unions. Ian and I connected and we had such a great conversation that I was like, “Can we just have a whole episode, just your own interview instead of trying to cram all you have to say into just this little tiny spot. So that’s how this episode came about. So Ian, will you please introduce yourself a little bit further to the audience?

02:01 Ian: Sure. Well, first of all, thank you for having me on the podcast. This is very exciting for me. My name is Ian Gutierrez. I have a BFA from New York University in recorded music, which was actually my first love. And then I got my Master’s degree in psychology from the New School, prior to becoming a doctoral student at the University of Connecticut, where I was enrolled from 2012 to 2018 when I defended my dissertation. So I now hold a PhD in clinical psychology from UConn. Shortly following the completion of my clinical training at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio, I was very briefly a postdoctoral fellow at the Uniform Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. And I am currently a research psychologist with Tech Works LLC in the Washington DC area, where I conduct psychological research on mental health and resilience in support of our nation’s service members.

The Intricacies of Unionization for Graduate Employees

03:03 Emily: It sounds like a fascinating career path, something that would be great to explore at another time, but we’re actually going to go back to your graduate school days at UConn. And of course you were involved at that time with the union. Can you talk a little bit about what the climate was UConn at that time and why you got involved with the union movement?

Impetus for the Union

03:22 Ian: Sure, absolutely. I would actually say, first and foremost that it was one of the best parts of my graduate school experience was being involved with the graduate student unionizing effort. I often tell people that the experience that I had negotiating our first contract after we unionized was one of the best classes I ever took in graduate school. I first got involved with the unionizing effort in 2013. I was serving on our university’s graduate student government, and at the time the university was moving, or attempting to move graduate students over from a state-based employee health insurance plan into a student health insurance plan. Some people call it a SHIP. And bottom line was that we were getting worse health coverage for a higher price. Within the graduate student government we tried to advocate as best we could, but parallel to that, a number of other students thought that maybe unionizing was the way to go.

04:37 Ian: Now, personally, I grew up in a union family. All of my parents are union members in the theater business, actually. So that naturally struck me as the far more effective way to go about advocating for what we needed. I joined the organizing committee for our nascent union at the time and we, after interviewing a number of international unions, where you talk to the Communication Workers of America, Service Employees International Union, AFT, the American Federation of Teachers, we ultimately decided to organized with the United Auto Workers, which had had a lot of success in the area, unionizing graduate students, for instance, just up the road at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. So we organized our union in 2013 we ran a membership drive, a card counting campaign, to get legal recognition for our union, and that it was a very successful campaign. Very exciting. The state of Connecticut recognized our union in April of 2014, and from that point we moved into the bargaining process with the university administration. At that point, ran to be one of the six members of the bargaining committee, and then over the course of the following year from starting about August of 2014, up until June of 2015, we met with the university administration, I don’t remember exactly, a dozen times, maybe more, as we negotiated our first contract. We were fortunate enough to successfully negotiate our first contract with the union in 2015.

Issues at Play in Union Negotiations

06:29 Emily: Thank you so much for giving that context. I’m wondering when you, when you went into negotiate that first contract, was it mainly the health insurance issue that you all were focusing on, or were there some other issues that also came into play?

06:42 Ian: When we went into negotiating our contract with the administration, of course health insurance was a major issue for graduate students. Of course, it wasn’t the only one. I think actually the university was quite surprised by the litany of issues that we brought up and the many things that we wanted to negotiate over. Healthcare, in the end, turned out to be a remarkably, I won’t go so far as to say easy, but there was a very equitable solution that we were able to come to. In this particular case, the state of Connecticut had what they called the Connecticut Partnership Plan, where the state would work with local governments to work out affordable health care plans for local employees, and so that provided a very nice rubric that could be applied to graduate employees at the university.

07:39 Ian: But that was again, not the only issue that we covered. I think the biggest issues that really came up for us were fee waivers, and then a lot of the rights and protections for the union itself. One of the major differences from being a graduate employee who’s not unionized to being graduate employee who is unionized is that there’s a clear grievance procedure, which in my opinion is actually one of the strongest components, one of the most important components of being unionized as an employee anywhere, is that there’s some kind of legal recourse when something comes up in the workplace, and there’s very clear rules about who to go to, who to raise the issue with, and how the difference can be resolved.

08:34 Ian: But second to that, of course money talks, right? Fee waivers for us was, I very clearly remember, was sort of the last issue that we negotiated over it at some great length and turned out to be the hardest thing for us to come to an agreement on. We ended up coming to a resolution where, what the university called it’s infrastructure fee, which was a $460 per year fee, ended up being waived for graduate assistants. And then the university provided GAs with a hundred dollar credit every year, that ramped up by a few dollars over the course of the contract, to help offset the cost of fees. So those were some of the major issues that came up. I think that barely scratches the surface and certainly we could talk for a long time about the, the 30 to 40 provisions in the contract, but healthcare, tuition and fees, and a grievance procedure where, I think, some of the biggest issues that we really cared about.

09:45 Emily: Yeah, I think all of those are also really common ones to come up in these negotiations across many universities. And I really appreciate your point about the grievance procedure being one of the most important components because it is like the wild west out there in academia. I mean, there’s all these power structures and imbalances and just lack of clarity, and so that actually sounds really great that you would have that in place after that point. Something I wanted to ask you about is from your position at the bargaining table, how did you come to understand that the university, or at least that university, that administration, the people who you were talking with, how did you understand that they viewed graduate students and especially around their financial issues?

Grad Students vs. the Administration

10:27 Ian: Yeah, really interesting question. That to me was one of the more shocking components of the experience. You know, university administrators talk a lot about how important students are to the university, and will say things about how the student body is the lifeblood of the university and the reason that it exists, of course, and there’s a whole political rhetoric around the way in which administrators talk about students. And I think a lot of that comes primarily from their dealings, especially with undergrad, what the undergraduate population, where things are a little bit cleaner. Undergraduates are the public consumers of the education that the university is providing. And they also make up the majority of the student body at almost almost any university.

11:20 Ian: With graduate students, it’s a little bit more complicated because on the one hand graduate students are students. We are receiving an education, but in our roles as research assistants, teaching assistants, graduate assistants, generally, we’re also employees. So things get a lot murkier there and they’re very comfortable talking about us as students. They’re much less comfortable talking about us as employees and at the bargaining table where we’re really presenting fully and in that context only as employees, a lot of that kumbaya rhetoric about us being students really falls away remarkably quickly.

12:03 Ian: At the same time there’s a lot of nostalgia that comes up for a lot of these administrators because most of them, not all of them, but most of them, were graduate students at one point, too, but a lot of their touchstones to what the graduate student experience was like, is what it was like in the sixties, seventies, the eighties, the nineties. And they were looking at a much different financial picture then, than graduate students are looking at now. Not only that, but the demographic of graduate students has in many cases shifted pretty dramatically as well. So it’s not like you’re getting…I mean, who’s ever heard, nowadays of somebody getting out of school through PhD at the age of 24 or 25. Impossible? No, but pretty rare. A lot of folks are getting their PhDs, I know at least in clinical psychology, the average age is about 31. So we’re talking about folks who might already have kids, maybe elderly parents to care for, potentially. Possibly chronic health problems.

13:08 Ian: We’re looking at a much different, a much more complicated picture of who we are, and for the administrators to come to the table and understand who we are, I think was a leap for them, in as much, to be perfectly frank as it was for us to understand the complicated financial picture that the university has to deal with. And I want to be clear in saying that, well certainly there are many acrimonious relationships between graduate employees and administrators at many institutions. I actually came away from the process being more proud of being a graduate of the University of Connecticut, because I think that, while we didn’t always see eye to eye, the administration was really fair in their dealings with us, and I think that we returned that to them in kind. It was certainly a learning experience for us, and I like to think of what’s a learning experience for them as well.

14:11 Emily: So fascinating. Thank you so much for adding that. And I am glad to hear that it wasn’t totally an adversarial relationship there at the table. I actually thought you might’ve been going in a little bit of a different direction when you mentioned the shifting demographics of current graduate students versus maybe some decades ago. Because I’m thinking about more like first generation students getting to graduate school and earning their PhDs. Also people who don’t necessarily come from families that can provide them financial support in the case of an emergency or just on an ongoing basis. I don’t know the stats on this, but I would assume that’s more common now than it was some decades ago, as you know, diversified who’s earning a PhD, which is a great thing, but it certainly comes with different sets of issues and problems then maybe people who got their PhDs some decades ago were facing

14:59 Ian: Just to jump in on that point, I think it’s also really important and one of the other really key components of what makes me proud to have been a part of that union too, was the union’s strong focus on diversity and representation. I understand full well that as a white man, receiving a PhD at a university that I come to the table with a lot of privilege and a voice that some other people might not have. But one of the things that really struck me in the way that our union organized is that the people who in my personal view really made it happen were the student employees of color, and the women who were in our organizing campaign. And it was really actually two women in particular who really made our union possible, and in many ways, to the extent that I was a part of it, I think I sort of rode on their coattails. And when we were negotiating at the table, equal protection policies for our students who might have green cards, or students of color, making sure that there was bathroom access for the trans community at the university — all of these things were a very large component of what our union was about. And I’m very proud of that.

Commercial

16:35 Emily: Hey, social distancers, Emily here. I hope you’re doing okay. It took a few weeks, but I think I have my bearings about me in my new normal. There is a lot of uncertainty and fear right now about our public and personal health and our economy. I would like to help you feel more secure in your personal finances and plan and prepare for whatever financial future may come. You can schedule a free 15 minute call with me at PFforPhDs.com/coaching to determine if financial coaching with me is right for you at this time, I hope you will reach out, if only to speak with someone new for a few minutes. Take care. Now back to our interview.

Personal Finances in Grad School in Relation to Unionization

17:21 Emily: Okay, so you’re in graduate school, you’re at the bargaining table, you’re working for better benefits, better processes, higher stipends, fee waivers and so forth. That’s one aspect of personal finance, right? What income is coming in, what your benefits are and so forth. What was going on with you? How were you handling the money that you actually received at that time?

17:43 Ian: Oh man. I would say that despite my heavy involvement in the union, I would mostly describe my practice for personal finance in graduate school as primarily relying on some degree of magical thinking. I didn’t really have a theory of the case regarding my personal finances really in any sense. I had a big picture sense that “more money, good, less money, bad,” but I never had any kind of robust plan on how I was going to move away from debt and towards wealth. I think the implicit thought process that I had was, well, I’m a graduate student and I’m poor and I’m in debt now, and somehow it all kind of come out in the wash after I get my degree and get a real job.

18:40 Emily: I think that’s super common. That sentiment is everywhere in graduate training.

18:47 Ian: And for me, even thinking about personal finances, a component of my life was…I engaged in a lot of avoidance around my own money management. And I think, as I have read into more financial guidance, you know, your Dave Ramsey or your Suze Orman’s or whoever — where do they start? They always start with, in a budget you want to first take a look at how much money you think you have coming in every month. Well, personally, speaking personally about my family background, my family worked in theater and even though you might be a part of a union, how much money you’re making in a month, you don’t know how much money you’re necessarily making in the next week or two weeks. You don’t know when your paycheck is coming and when it comes, you don’t necessarily have the best idea of how large it’s going to be. I never really had a financial budget education from my family background. But then sort of even more strikingly, I never had it in high school. I never had it in college. I never had it in graduate school. I just never had it, which, for being a pretty well educated person, still kind of leaves me. floored. Talking about money, it was almost like talking about sex. It was like everywhere and defining the culture, but you couldn’t actually get a grasp on what was going on.

20:34 Emily: That’s a great analogy.

20:34 Ian: Really striking. I think it really is because money is so personal and it’s such a component of who we are that we all have a lot of the feelings — good, bad, otherwise — around what it says about who we are and our understanding of what our life is and where our lives are going. Long story short, I just really engaged in a lot of avoidance around it, and I also think that part of the way that my own income from graduate school was structured led me into some poor practices as well. For one example, I received half of my income from a GA stipend that I received every two weeks, like a paycheck, but then the other part of my income I received from a fellowship check, which came in these two big checks every year. What it sort of led me to believe was that, well, as an adult, twice a year, you’re just going to received this huge windfall, so I can just spend up a lot of money on a credit card, and, well, no big deal because I’m going to get this big windfall every August and every January. Come to find out, at the end of this golden brick road, that’s actually not what happens in the course of typical adult living. Suddenly, after graduate school, I had this student debt and the cavalry’s not charging over the hill anymore.

22:18 Emily: That’s so interesting. I haven’t interviewed anyone before who’s spoken about the pay frequency, which I mean what you described as maybe a little bit unusual, but there’s plenty of people who deal with a couple of times per year, big checks coming in, or maybe just a pay frequency that they were unfamiliar with, like monthly instead of biweekly, or just any kind of shift. It’s interesting just to hear how that impacted actually the way that you handled your money. Of course there are many budgeting techniques to deal with this and that’s a conversation with me for another time. But I’m really curious now to hear about what actually caused you to change these attitudes in this behavior. Was it getting out of graduate school and realizing that you had a steady paycheck and it wasn’t ever going to be these windfalls? What was your motivation to start exploring the subject area?

23:05 Ian: Well, the one thing that I did decide, and this is a little bit particular to the way that graduate education is structured in clinical psychology, is that if you’re pursuing a doctorate in clinical or counseling or school psychology, you have to complete a year long internship. Most people move for this year long internship and the internship pays a stipend that is roughly similar to what you would get paid as a graduate assistant, depending on locale. It’s anywhere from $20 to $30 grand a year. When I made this move, I knew that I wasn’t going to be enrolled in enough course credits to access loans and I can either fork up a bunch of money to take on six credit hours or whatever it was, so that I could have access to student loans, or I could not sign up for those credit hours and not be eligible for loans.

24:03 Ian: I chose to not sign up for the credit hours and not be eligible for loans. I sort of took the cold turkey approach to student loans. And it was about at that time when all of the failings of my financial planning became extremely evident, because now I wasn’t receiving my windfall fellowship twice a year and I had cut myself off from student loans and a lot of my credit card balances were fairly high. Suddenly I realized that I had to live within my means, which is sort of embarrassing to say as a 29 or 30 year old, but that’s part of the reason I’m here on the podcast saying it, is because I know that my assumption in life is that if it’s affecting me, it’s probably affecting someone else. I can only imagine that there is a silent, I don’t know that it’s a majority, but a silent plurality, of current or former graduate students out there who have also suddenly realized at the ripe age of 30, that they know nothing about financial planning, have been behaving, you know, somewhat irresponsibly, and now they’re in a bad situation.

25:26 Ian: I never really took myself as someone who lived wildly outside of my means. I bought and paid off and used car and sure, my wife and I would go out dinner from time to time, but I wasn’t living the high life by any stretch of the imagination. And yet still, after all of that, I realized that I just didn’t have any scheme for how I was going to manage any of this. To keep on with the language of addiction, and there’s certainly many parallels to be drawn between credit cards and addiction, to be sure, I had sort of hit a rock bottom, where I suddenly realized that I need to come up with a plan, not only so I can pay this stuff off, but so that I can build and save for the future.

26:20 Emily: Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that because I think you’re absolutely right that many people are waking up at some time or another to realize that in the same way that you did. So first of all, average American kind of thing, a lot of people don’t live within their means or they do in some aspects of their budgeting and they don’t in other. Like they are racking up credit card debt and then occasionally will pay it down, and there’s this cycle there. That’s pretty common. But I think that the graduate student experience sort of exacerbates that mentality. I think academia tells us that well, while you’re a graduate student, even to some extent while you’re a postdoc, you’re excused from the general financial responsibility that you might feel at another stage or at another time in life because well, you know that your pay is going to be low and so what expectations can you really have of yourself when your pay is so low. That’s one aspect of it. The other one is, as you mentioned, the access to student loans, which I think that if people aren’t necessarily using them, they may kind of forget that they do have access to them all the way through graduate school really. But it is there as a backstop, as a good decision or as a bad decision to take it out. You really are given an out all through graduate school that you don’t have to live within your means, unless you choose to, because the culture is telling you you don’t have to do, you have student loans there if you need to take them out. It kind of just contributes to that overall problems. I definitely don’t think you are at all alone.

27:46 Emily: I really think about myself going into graduate school. I very intentionally told myself I’m going to live within my means. And I actually thought about it that way at that time, for various reasons. But that was partially because I had a break between undergrad and grad school, where I had to live within my means. I didn’t have access to student loans, and so it was like, okay, I’m just going to carry forward into my graduate degree with what I learned when I was out of school. But if you don’t have the same attitudes that I do or didn’t have exposure to the same stuff, or you went continuously from college to graduate school, you may not have had the wherewithal to even think about it that way.

Personal Finances After Grad School

28:22 Emily: Okay, you’re getting into your internship year, you don’t have access to the loans, you have the high credit card balances, you’re realizing you actually have to live within the paycheck — what did you do? How did the story evolve?

28:36 Ian: Well, let’s see. I would say that I didn’t start by coping with it in a very…I mean, despite my training in clinical psychology, I want to say that I dealt with it like in a very logical or sensible way. I think mostly I felt terrified, and then anxious, and then afraid, and then hopeless, and then angry, and I cycled through all of this stuff. That was my first reaction, and of course none of that was really particularly helpful. Eventually, I took out a Dave Ramsey book from the library. And I would say that I have mixed feelings about his guidance. I certainly have mixed feelings about prosperity gospel, for sure. But I think the basics, like the super, super basics of what he, or I mean really anyone — him, or Suze Orman, Gaby Dunn — any of these folks out out there, is that the 101 clearly gets you on the right path of figuring out how much money you have coming in every month, determining your expenses, and figuring out what you need to do to balance that equation. There were some other components that I found particularly helpful, where my feeling was, I had heard about this thing called debt snowballing with credit cards and I knew that I wanted to do that, but reading, at least based on Dave Ramsey’s recommendation, that if your finances are really a hotness, which that’s me, the first thing you want to do is save $1000. Save enough money so you have some kind of stop gap if car breaks or unexpected medical bill or what have you.

30:41 Ian: I think that’s what really got me started with it, but I do also want to say that what also got me started with it was after graduate school, having an income that gave me enough hope that I could pay down some of these debts, which I think brings me sort of full circle to a point of balance in my own way of thinking about finances, where I personally believe that true financial responsibility is not just about managing your own finances, but also advocating for greater economic justice. That they’re not separate. Blaming all of your financial problems on the world and the way it is, is not the healthiest way to look at things. Viewing your finances as a personal responsibility that you, yourself need to carry like Atlas to the end of time, come hell or high water, no matter what else is going on out in the world, I also don’t think it’s particularly healthy.

31:52 Ian: There needs to be a balance where we can say to ourselves that the world can be a cruel and unfair place. We have to do whatever it is that we can to live a financially healthy life now, while advocating and fighting for a better future for ourselves and for our children. Even in sort of tying it back to my time in the graduate students union, if I have two legacies that that I left at university of Connecticut, one is my dissertation, which is going to metaphorically collect dust on a server, because the likelihood that anybody will read it except for figuring out how to format own dissertation is pretty low. But the legacy of knowing that we have left, that I and all of the other students who worked together, hand-in-hand, to create a union so that future students could have a more prosperous future while they were in graduate school, that’s something that I can really look back on with pride. I think coming to that sort of healthy balance for me is where I’m currently at in my own thinking about financial health.

33:15 Emily: Yeah, thank you so much for that articulation, that was absolutely fascinating. And I think I also am going on a similar journey to come to the same place, but starting from the opposite side of, okay, just keep your head down, focus on your own business, and not necessarily look up at the wider picture as much. I’m sort of emerging from that viewpoint. Thanks to a lot of these interviews that I’m doing through the podcast, it’s been really a big growth experience for me.

33:45 Emily: What I wanted to ask you about though is in coming to that healthy place of being able to do both of these things, what you think about the idea of the necessity of having your own personal finances in the best shape that they can be in as enabling you to go out and do that good work in the world and advocate for others. I won’t say it’s impossible to do the latter without the former, but I think if you come from an area of personal strength, that it just further enables you to do that work. What do you think about that?

34:17 Ian: I like that idea. I think it resonates with this idea that to help others you need to help yourself, like on the airplane where you’ve got to put the oxygen mask on yourself before you help somebody who’s sitting next to you. I think that that can be true. I don’t think that one needs to preceed the other, however. I think that it’s important that we have a broader conversation, both within higher education, but within society as a whole, about the relationship between economic justice and the economic structures that we’re embedded in, and our own personal financial health. I think, actually, that unions could be a really nice and really good nexus at which students can find that, because at least to me, if a university administrator who’s making $200,000, $300,000 a year comes and lectures me about financial responsibility, my response is not going to be, Thank you, I appreciate that. As a graduate student, my response to that would be, go take a hike, to put it politely.

35:46 Ian: However, I think if unions can sell this idea that a stronger union, a more just economic society is one in which its advocates and its members and its stakeholders are able to responsibly manage their own finances, I think that’s really important. While, at the same time recognizing that there are some situations in which financial responsibility is not itself always the primary problem for someone who’s having financial difficulties. A few examples that come to mind are if you have a child or a loved one or yourself who has had a severe medical emergency and suddenly you have a six figure bill put on your doorstep, the problem there is our healthcare system, and not necessarily how you’ve managed your own money. Of course you still have to come up with a solution and that’s important, but let’s not lose sight of the big picture.

36:59 Ian: I think it’s also important that we recognize the impact that mental health can have on a person’s finances. While I was in graduate school, one of the things that I studied was gambling disorder, for instance. The processes that underly gambling disorders, I mean, I’m sure there are graduate students out there who have issues with gambling, but sort of more broadly just than gambling, if you think about shopping addiction, any kind of mental health problem that might lead to episodes of irresponsible financial behavior. Bipolar disorder would be another one that would fall very neatly in that category. We have to make enough room within our economic justice advocacy to recognize that there are people for whom their financial problems are not primarily caused by a lack of what you might call personal responsibility. I think we can come at it from both directions, but part of getting folks who are able to be financially responsible, to be financially responsible is to have the right vehicle for learning about that, that says the world can be a terrible and unfair place, but in light of that, in recognition of that, let’s help give you the skills to thrive to the best of your ability, financially, in spite of that adversity.

Best Financial Advice for Graduate Students and PhDs

38:27 Emily: I’m so glad you put that in the larger context. I’m really glad that we took the time for that. So as we wrap up the interview, what is your best financial advice for maybe a graduate student or another early career PhD, perhaps something that you’ve learned, post this transformation after you’ve reformed your own practice of personal finance?

38:50 Ian: Sure. I would say that I have three small pieces of advice. The first is keep track of everything that you spend. And this is just personally, I think if you keep track of every little thing you spend, you really understand where your money is going, and it starts to sort of become like a fun game of saving money, where you can go “Oh, well, you know, I could spend, you know, $4 at Starbucks or I could buy a bag of beans and make a cup of coffee at home for 25 cents.” That’s sort of my simple suggestion.

39:29 Ian: Number two is forgive yourself and it’s never too soon to start. Again, sort of having worked in the world of recovery, it’s never too soon to start. Whether you’re 22 and just thinking about graduate school or whether you had gone back to graduate school and you’re 37 and you have two or three kids and you’ve never really seriously considered how to build wealth, it’s never too soon to start.

40:07 Ian: And then number three, my final point would be make economic justice advocacy a core component of your own financial responsibility. Really own the idea in your heart, that taking care of others is taking care of yourself, and taking care of yourself is taking care of others. And in that spirit, hopefully, all of us can create a more economically just life for graduate students in higher education and more broadly, in society at large.

40:45 Emily: Thank you so much Ian. I’m so glad to learn from you and to have your perspective here on the podcast. So thank you so much for giving this interview.

40:53 Ian: Thank you so much. If you would like to, you can follow me on Twitter at @ianagutierrez and it’s been a real pleasure to be here.

Outtro

41:02 Emily: Listeners, thank you for joining me for this episode. PFforPhDs.com/podcast is the hub for the personal finance for PhDs podcast. There you can find links to all the episode show notes, and a form to volunteer to be interviewed. I’d love for you to check it out and get more involved. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, please consider joining my mailing list for my behind the scenes commentary about each episode. Register at PFforPhDs.com/subscribe. See you in the next episode, and remember, you don’t have to have a PhD to succeed with personal finance, but it helps. The music is stages of awakening by Poddington Bear from the Free Music Archive and is shared under CC by NC podcast editing and show notes creation by Lourdes Bobbio.

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

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

Links Mentioned in the Episode

grad student union experience

Teaser

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

Introduction

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

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

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

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

Finances while at a Non-Unionized University

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

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

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

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

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

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

04:38 Emily: How about dental and vision?

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

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

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

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

05:51 Carly: No. Pretty tough.

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

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

Finances while at a Unionized University

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

06:05 Carly: Right.

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

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

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

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

What about Travel Funding and TA-ships?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paid Leave and Other Union Benefits at UMass Amherst

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

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

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

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

Departmental Differences in Pay Rates and Raises

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

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

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

Additional Experiences with the Union

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

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

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

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

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

16:23 Carly: That’s right.

Commercial

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

History of the UMass Amherst Union

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

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

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

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

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

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

How About Changes in Fees?

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

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

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

Any Downsides or Tradeoffs with the Union?

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

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

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

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

Other Union Groups on Campus

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

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

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

26:56 Carly: Right.

Anything Else About Your Union Experience?

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

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

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

Grad Students: When are you Working versus Studying?

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

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

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

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

31:31 Carly: Yep, absolutely.

Financial Advice for Early-Career PhDs

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

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

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

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

Outtro

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