Union

Bargaining for BU’s First Grad Student Union Contract as a DMA Student

October 26, 2026 by Jill Hoffman Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Dr. Sophie Lewis, who recently completed her DMA in Music Education at Boston University. Sophie served on the bargaining committee for the BU grad student union through their first contract negotiation, which included a nearly 7-month-long strike. She shares the incredible accomplishments of the union over that period as well as what didn’t make it into the contract and how the strike finally ended. Sophie’s own pay rate and personal finances radically changed for the better through that same period, both because of the union’s efforts and her personal actions.

Links mentioned in the Episode

Bargaining for BU's First Grad Student Union Contract as a DMA Student

Teaser

Sophie (00:00): Our argument the entire time we were in bargaining was that you should be able to afford to attend the institution that you’re working for based on only the job that you do for the institution that you attend. Um, and I think we’ve gotten a lot closer to that. Obviously, Boston is an expensive city, but it’s nice to know that we played a part in making it a little bit more affordable for people at BU.

Introduction

Emily (00:31): 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 (01:00): This is Season 25, Episode 5, and today my guest is Dr. Sophie Lewis, who recently completed her DMA in Music Education at Boston University. Sophie served on the bargaining committee for the BU grad student union through their first contract negotiation, which included a nearly 7-month-long strike. She shares the incredible accomplishments of the union over that period as well as what didn’t make it into the contract and how the strike finally ended. Sophie’s own pay rate and personal finances radically changed for the better through that same period, both because of the union’s efforts and her personal actions.

Emily (01:41): I’m looking for interviewees for Season 26 of this podcast! This is your official invitation to volunteer to be interviewed. I love that on this podcast I get to feature PhDs and PhDs-to-be who are almost exclusively regular people and learn and share their real-life stories and strategies. If it’s been in the back of your mind to volunteer, please go to PFforPhDs.com/podcastvolunteer/ and fill out the quick form, and I’ll be in touch over email. I look forward to interviewing you this fall! You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s25e5/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Dr. Sophie Lewis.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

Emily (02:38): I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today, Dr. Sophie Lewis. She recently completed her doctorate in music education at Boston University, and we actually met a few months ago. We’re recording this in September 2026. We met over the summer at the Graduate Career Consortium annual meeting, and I was just so taken with Sophie and the way she spoke about finances and specifically her experience with the union, the Grad Student Union and unionization movement at BU. And so I invited her on the podcast to tell us much, much more about that. So, Sophie, thank you so much for agreeing to come on, and would you please introduce yourself a little bit further?

Sophie (03:16): Yeah, absolutely. Uh, so nice to be back. My name’s Sophie. I just graduated in August with my doctorate in music education, technically a DMA. I’m one of those, uh, professional doctorates, as they like to call us in higher ed. Um, and I researched, uh, career preparation for music students in higher education and how, uh, post-secondary policy shapes the way that students feel prepared for careers after they graduate, and how they understand the value of the work that they do. Uh, unionization was a really big part of how I came to understand the value of what I do, and so it was really cool to bring those two things together. I also worked as a graduate assistant for the graduate and postdoctoral success department at Boston University, which is how we met at GCC. Uh, and my role was to help to administer the professional development micro-credential series online that Boston University runs. Um, happy to be graduated and, uh, speaking about my experiences at BU as someone who’s no longer at BU.

A $5,100 Annual Stipend as an International Student at BU

Emily (04:28): Absolutely. And so we’re kinda in this interview gonna go through your journey in graduate school and kind of parallel that with how the union changed or what shifted and what you learned and so forth over the course of that time. So let’s start with your arrival at BU. What was going on with, you know, your own employment and what was going on with the union when you first arrived?

Sophie (04:50): Yeah. So I came to BU in September of 2022, and I remember vividly right across… I played the cello, and I had a instrument locker in the basement of the music department. And across the hall from where my cello locker was, there was this poster about BU Grad Workers Union, and I was so excited, uh, because I’m from the UK where unionization is super common, and I was entering BU as a graduate research assistant in the College of Fine Arts on a salary of about $5,100 for the year for a 10-hour position. So I was like, any opportunity to get involved with a union that might help me to advocate for better pay was really, really welcome. You know, you’re used to low pay in the arts, but, uh, I was paying rent with loans for my first year of my doctoral studies. It was, it was a fun time.

Emily (05:57): Pause on that for a moment because… So were you an international student that’s – Like were you on an F1 visa?

Sophie (06:03): I sure was.

Emily (06:05): So to come to the US as an international student, my understanding is that you have to show that you can provide for yourself financially. Um, so did this… Did you arrange the student loans beforehand or like how did your funding in particular work with respect to being an international student?

Sophie (06:22): Yeah. Uh, I had organized the loans in advance of coming to BU. Uh, I’m really lucky to have an aunt and uncle who are US citizens, uh, who were able to co-sign loans for me for that first year. Um, and a lot of, like, what proves that you have the money is just that you have access to it. It doesn’t need to be liquid. Uh, so my family were able to show that we had access to that money, but they weren’t willing to pay my rent, uh, because I’m 27 and was paying my own rent. Uh, so <laugh> that was kind of how that balanced out, was we were able to use a combination of loans and family money to get my visa. Um, and I just ended up paying my rent with loans once I got to BU.

Emily (07:15): So you just told me a shockingly low number for your stipend. And tell me, was that just, like, strict, like, hourly pay for that 10-hour week position? Did it come with any benefits like tuition waiver or, like, how did that part of it work?

Sophie (07:28): Uh, it did not come with any other benefits. So part of being a professional doctoral student at Boston University means that you are not eligible for the five-year funding package like a regular PhD student is. Um, and this was really one of the main reasons why I wanted to get involved in unionization, was that we were doing the same jobs as our peers and PhD programs, uh, and those students were receiving tuition waivers and health insurance benefits and vastly higher pay than we were receiving in the music department. Uh, this was common for all of my colleagues in the music education doctoral program. Uh, so I actually was also paying for my health insurance and paying tuition, uh, for my doctoral program, um, which is uncommon and, uh, not something I would do again. <laugh>

Emily (08:26): Well, what was, like, the plan? Like, coming into this, you didn’t know about the union yet, right? Or what changes might be coming. So was your plan like, “Yep, I’m gonna keep this assistantship position 10 hours per week, this is my pay, and everything else is on loans?” Like you were comfortable with that for the duration of your program?

Sophie (08:42): I wasn’t super comfortable about it for the duration of my program. My plan was always to be applying for more scholarships and fellowships and see what I could do to kind of increase my funding package. I was planning to appeal my financial aid. That’s something that I’d done, uh, in my master’s program, which I did at the University of Denver. And I’d managed to increase my funding package to cover my tuition for that. So I kind of knew that that was an option to negotiate with the university for my funding. So I’d kind of gone in with a plan to, to take on a second job, uh, and to do some negotiation alongside applying for fellowships and scholarships and other sources of financial aid.

Emily (09:26): Okay. You just mentioned a second job, but how does that work with the visa situation?

Sophie (09:30): As long as you’re under 20 hours a week, you can have on-campus –

Emily (09:33): So it’s like an on-campus job.

Sophie (09:34): Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The Formation of the Boston University Graduate Workers Union

Emily (09:36): Gotcha. So that’s so interesting that you came in with a plan of obviously finding another job to get up to 20 hours a week, and then also an individual negotiation plan. But this obviously morphed into… Or maybe you did, still did that, but it obviously also became a collective negotiation, uh, plan. So we understand what your status was when you started. <laugh> What was the status of the union? When did it form? What contract were you in?

Sophie (09:59): So we, uh, had not yet voted to be recognized as an official union yet when I arrived. Um, the union students had been organizing things for a long time before I arrived at BU, and I kind of arrived just at the right time as we were getting ready in the spring of 2023 to vote on whether we wanted to start bargaining for a contract. So I connected with some members of the union in advance and asked how I could become involved, what it would look like in my department. Um, and through that, I participated in the vote to, uh, recognize the union officially. Uh, and then I was elected to represent the College of Fine Arts on the bargaining team. So I got very heavily involved pretty quickly in, uh, writing the contract and organizing my department and speaking on behalf of my department at the bargaining table, uh, which kind of started in the summer of 2023 and went through to 25, might have been the end of 2024, 25.

Emily (11:18): What kind of mandate was the vote? Like, at what percentage did it pass? And, like, what were the key issues that were motivating graduate students to take that step?

Sophie (11:26): Yeah. Uh, I, I’m pretty sure we were a really high percentage that voted to form the union. Like, I think it was, um… I’m sure I could find this information somewhere on Instagram, but, uh, as far as I remember, we voted in the high 80%s to form the union. And then, um, most of the issues we were organizing around was a cost of living adjustment and tying wages to the cost of rent in Boston. Um, so our, our main priority was to alleviate all graduate workers from rent burden, which is around, you should be spending less than a third of your income on rent, I think, was the number. Um, and so that was the main things we were organizing around, because I think at that time, the lowest paid PhD student was getting around $23,000 a year, um, which in Boston is not, not really enough to, to pay rent in Boston. Um –

Emily (12:35): Yeah, you, you could pay rent.

Sophie (12:37): And nothing else.

Emily (12:37): And nothing, nothing else. <laugh>

Sophie (12:39): Um, so I think it was primarily the, the movement was centered around that cost of living adjustment, and we were also campaigning for better childcare provisions for, uh, working parents, uh, and just other supports for international students and students with disabilities as well. That was a big part of the movement.

Emily (13:03): All right. So you’re on the bargaining committee. <laugh> Tell us about a view that not many people get to have directly, right? So, like, just tell us about that experience.

Sophie (13:13): Yeah. Uh, so I worked really closely with a lot of the non-PhD students, so people like master students who held hourly jobs on campus, people in other professional doctoral programs like I was in, that includes, like, the doctor of physical therapy and ed students, um, a lot of the programs that make up a lot of the student body but aren’t covered by a five-year funding program. Um, and we did a lot of research into how much would the hourly wage have to be in order for us to be non-rent burdened in Boston University dorms, because that’s, that’s where I was living at the time. I was, like, living in a campus dorm. Um, and so we did the math on how much money we’d have to make in order to afford a BU dorm, and we ended up with an hourly wage of around $45 an hour. So that was kind of where we entered into our negotiations, was everybody on an hourly job needs, uh, this much an hour.

Emily (14:24): Our – But sorry, going back to the, the rest of your funding package. Was that considering how much would be paid towards tuition, et cetera?

Sophie (14:31): No, that was purely looking at how much would it cost to live in Boston and attend the institute, like, to, to live in the city where you go to school. Um, we had a separate group working on tuition remission, uh, which was the biggest, uh, from my perspective, the biggest sticking point, uh, when we went into negotiations with the institution, um, mostly because we thought that if you were working for the institution, you should receive the same benefits as anyone else, uh, but the institution argued back that it would be too difficult to track master’s students who, like, came in and out, um, and that that tuition remission was too high of a benefit. So that was one of the things that we kept putting back into the, the contract, and the university kept asking us to take it out, um, and it ended up not making it to the, to the final contract, um, which is still one of my, like, my bugbears if I was on the, if I was on the union again, I’d go back and really fight even harder for that tuition remission, especially for professional doctorates who are doing, you know, research the same as any other PhD student. Um, it’s kind of tough to, to be paying to write your dissertation. Um –

Emily (15:58): Something that I hear often and, and, and say from time to time is, like, the university, you know, they view these student workers… It’s a, it’s a dual thing, right? When it’s convenient to the university the student worker is a student, and when it’s convenient to the university, the student worker is a worker, and they kinda get to dictate how the relationship is viewed. Um, so it sounds like they were really trying to keep, um, those of you outside the PhD programs still students um, as more of a worker and… But a part-time worker. Not like a full-time worker who gets full-time type benefits, which would include things like tuition reductions. But rather this, like, part-time worker, but really just a worker kind of status, and really viewing you in a different category from the PhD students. That is what I’m hearing.

Sophie (16:47): Yeah. And I, I would say that that’s how it felt as well. Like, I gradually, throughout my time at BU, transitioned away from working as a research assistant at CFA to being employed, uh, full-time per international student regulations at the GPS office. Um, and those two worlds were completely separate for me. Like, my job at GPS had absolutely nothing to do on paper with my, my status as a student at the CFA, um, the College of Fine Arts. And a lot of the time, those two things never crossed paths. Um, so what I was doing in the provost office was completely separate from what I was doing as a student in the music education department. Um, and certainly, like, I, I left and went to GPS because there was more opportunity for better pay and better opportunities for progression in that position than working as a research assistant. Um, but it, it really did feel like I was doing a second job on top of writing my dissertation because there was no overlap. It wasn’t like I was, you know, doing research for my dissertation that got paid. I was doing a dissertation and working 20 hours a week for a different position.

Emily (18:14): I think that’s a really important thing, especially for prospective graduate students to understand about how money <laugh> works in graduate school. It’s like having a research assistant type of position when, as you just said, your research goes into your dissertation, it’s very holistic. You get to spend your 40 hours a week or whatever, you know, however much you’re trying to do, um, on all things that are furthering your own professional development and progression towards, you know, graduation. Whereas if you have… Like what I would say, like, I would put a umbrella term over your position as like a graduate assistantship, like it’s more administrative type work, um, and also to some extent teaching assistantships. Those are things that you have to spend time on that don’t directly contribute to your research. Now, maybe if you’re lucky with the teaching especially, there could be some degree of overlap, but for those kinds of positions, you really have to be more like looking that you’ve found something that is furthering your own professional development so that it’s helping you in that next stage of your career, even if it’s not directly helping you write your dissertation.That’s the way that I think about it. Is that also similar to how you think about it?

Sophie (19:18): Yeah. I think I developed a completely different set of skills working for GPS. Like, I, I got to speak at conferences about graduate student professional development. I helped to initiate completely new systems at the university that are now being, you know, used after I’m gone. And I got to see how administrative positions work in higher education, which was worth way more than anything I was doing in a research assistant capacity, um, because I got to be in the room where those conversations were taking place. Um, so that… Like I don’t regret having that job, but it… There’s nothing I did there that I could then take into my dissertation. Um, and it’s, it’s a different set of skills that I can put on my resume and my CV now, and I’m looking for jobs in administrative positions. Um, but it also isn’t like I can show a university a teaching role and say I taught undergrads this position. Like, I’ve definitely got to work harder to communicate how those skills transfer into what traditional faculty positions are looking for.

Emily (20:33): Well, let’s go back to the, the bargaining, um, table, the bargaining experience. So you shared what didn’t make it into the final contract that was most relevant for you and your peers. Um, can you share with us some things that did change, um, through that bargaining process, and also maybe some other things that ended up not making it in that you were attempting?

Sophie (20:52): Yeah. Uh, so I think our biggest win overall, something that I’m so proud of and have got to see really make a difference to a lot of my colleagues’ lives was that we raised the minimum PhD stipend from, as I said earlier, like $23,000 for the lowest paid to the mid – 40s. I think it’s around $45,000 now. So we’ve effectively doubled the lowest paid PhDs salary, um, which made a huge difference. I have friends who were like, “Oh, I can breathe now and I don’t have to work an additional job outside of my PhD. And like, I can afford to maybe go home and see my family every now and then.” Um, and that was, that’s made a huge difference, uh, across our student body, I would say. And I think that’s something I’m really proud of, is that we managed to get that, that quality of life improvement for so many students.

Commercial

Emily (21:55): 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 2026. These educational workshops guide you in identifying, calculating, and reporting your higher education-related income and expenses on your federal tax return. For the 2026 tax season starting in January 2027, I’m offering live and asynchronous workshops for US citizen/resident graduate students, postdocs, and postbacs and non-resident graduate students and postdocs. Would you please reach out to your graduate school, graduate student government, postdoc office, international house, fellowship coordinator, etc. to request that they host one or more of these 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 hosting 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.

Unionizing and Striking for Higher Stipends

Emily (23:16): I happened to interview, um, a PhD student at Boston University a few months ago. It came out in season 24, episode 3. Richard Coca’s my guest. And I believe he was in like a neuroscience type field. And he shared that, um, his stipend didn’t change too much. It went up, I think, a little bit, um, but his program was already paying close to that, um, what became the new minimum. Um, so I just wanted to point out, like, it wasn’t like everybody across the whole university was being paid at that 23. There was a huge disparity um, in the stipends. And I think that, you know, absent a unionization push, like, I don’t really see universities, you know, equalizing their stipends or, or setting a higher minimum, like, across the board. Um, I, I’ve seen it happen very successfully under the unionization conditions or the, or the threat of unionization, um, but not without it. So yeah, what, what’s your insight about that? Like, was there any motivation for those programs to raise their stipends, like, absent y’all’s efforts?

Sophie (24:17): I don’t think so. And it, it actually became a little bit of a sticking point within the university was that, like, people whose departments were already paying above that minimum, uh, were not as incentivized to keep going for the students and workers who were below that minimum. Uh, so one of the areas of pushback we got when continuing to hold the strike on was that, you know, a lot of students were not, were happy with the concessions that had already been made, and so they didn’t wanna be on strike anymore, whereas we had some people in lower paid programs who were like, “No, this, this is still a big difference in my quality of life if we keep the… If we don’t push to get the minimum raised.” Um, so it’s certainly, like, it’s not all sunshine on the union side of things either where, like, the membership was in such a diverse space where you’re trying to convince people who already have a relatively good salary to hold out until the people who are far- farther behind can catch up to them. Um –

Emily (25:28): But it did happen. So tell us more about, um, the strike and how you all motivated the students to, you know, see it through.

Sophie (25:36): Uh, it was tough. That was a really long strike. And I, I think we might still be the longest grad worker strike in US labor history, which is, uh, something to be both proud of and a little bit, like, sad about, uh, because it was tough. I think everyone missed their jobs. Like, a lot of our people were teaching and they loved to teach. Um, and it was kinda sad, but we actually got a lot of good buy-in from the undergrads. Like, when, uh, when undergrads told their parents that, like, we were on strike and this is what the university was doing to try and, like… There was a, there was a moment where they tried to replace us with AI. The university encouraged, uh, professors to use AI to lead discussion groups instead of the grad students. Uh, and when that got out to parents, there was a lot of backlash. Um –

Emily (26:35): Boy, I can imagine. <laugh>

Sophie (26:37): It was, like, that was maybe not the best move that the university made. It was a really special moment for me to see people from all over the institution and our alumni network come together to support us and recognize that a rising tide lifts all boats. Like, the, the lecturer’s union was there to support us. We had local politicians and, uh, Ayanna Pressley, our member of Congress, came out as a BU alum to support the strike. Um, we had a, um, like a GoFundMe situation that we were using to, uh, support s – workers who were losing wages, uh, and that raised a lot of money. A lot of people in our alumni network, and, again, parents of current BU undergrads were really supportive, and other graduate workers’ unions from across the country donated to our strike fund to help to support students who needed to pay rent, even while they were on strike. Um, and SEIU were great as well with that. They had a strike fund as well, so as long as you came to the picket, um, or participated in other strike-related activities, like phone banking or, um, other kind of online… We had online opportunities as well, you were eligible for strike pay, um, which was another great way to just support people while they were engaging in the strike. So, um, it was long, it was tense. Uh, I think a lot of people, um, felt a little bit betrayed by the university just with all of the tactics that went on to try and figure out who was on strike and how they, they could dock wages for being on strike. Um, but I think it was effective, and we really… I felt really heartened to see how people came together to support one another, and all of the big community cooking sessions, and, um, being together through a really cold March. It was really, really cold, uh, every day to pick it outside on the campus. It was just, uh, a really unique experience.

Emily (28:58): So tell me a little bit more details about the strike. I don’t think I’ve interviewed anyone who’s participated in one as a graduate student. Um, h- how long did it go on for overall?

Sophie (29:07): Uh, nine months, I think.

Emily (29:09): Nine months. Yeah. That’s what I was… I was thinking it was, like, most of an academic year or something around that. So were people then, some graduate students, not being paid during that period of time? So, you know, you’re just mentioning other sources of funding. And how does that work for people who are… Do they still get to progress in their programs? Or, like, how, how does it functionally work maybe for, you know, you mentioned TAs, that’s, like, obvious thing of not participating in your TA activities. How would that work for, like, a research assistant?

Sophie (29:38): Uh, it was kinda complicated because we definitely encouraged people to keep working if they were… If it would s – if it would affect their progress to a degree. Uh, so a lot of the people that were on strike were people in TA positions, uh, administrative positions. Um, there was a distinction between what was considered like service and non-service, um, which I can’t honestly remember the exact detailing of, but it was, that was kind of how the distinction was drawn both in the contract and within the union. So if your job was considered, uh, service, then you would strike. And if you were non-service, uh, which like my position within graduate and postdoctoral affairs, as we used to be known, uh, was non-service because it wasn’t related to my degree. Um, so I was on strike as a research assistant at CFA, but not from my position within GPS, um, because those two were considered different types of positions. It was really weird and complicated. And, uh, it was complicated as someone in the union that kind of played into a lot of people’s favor because the university also couldn’t tell between who was service and who was non-service. And so a lot of people didn’t have their wages withheld because they couldn’t tell who was service and non-service and it just, uh, it became quite messy. Uh, yeah.

Emily (31:22): That is so interesting. And did you also, was there also support coming from the faculty, either like overtly or subtly?

Sophie (31:31): Um, sometimes it depended a lot on the department. Um, so like in my department, none of the faculty are tenured either. So there was, uh, covert support, but not anything as vocal as some of the other departments who had like tenure behind them, who had unionization behind them. Um, and certainly a lot of what we were doing was working with supportive faculty to kind of understand how administration were communicating, what was happening to them, um, how we could communicate what we wanted more accurately to faculty too was really important because a lot of, uh, what was happening in the news was that our, our demands were being taken out of context. Um, and so we tried to keep an open line of communication with faculty too to, to help understand that like if we get better working conditions, you get better working conditions too, because we can better support you. Um, and hopefully that will encourage better treat-, like better pay for faculty members in future as well. Um –

Emily (32:48): Good point. As you said, rising tide lifts all boats, not just across the grad student population, but you can’t have faculty who are making only 10% more than, you know, the graduate students or whatever it might be. Um, okay, so you in the bargaining committee as the strike is going on, are there still conversations happening? Are there breakdowns and, and going back and forth? And what seemed to be, I guess, from your point of view, the university’s reaction to all of this and kind of how it came to a conclusion?

Sophie (33:18): Um, it, it kind of got to a point where we were both at a bit of a stalemate where it was like the university were like, “This is our best and final offer.” We were still, uh, unhappy with a lot of that, especially in terms of like hourly pay. I think we ended up with a minimum pay of $20 an hour where we really wanted 25. I think what eventually ended the strike was that enough of our members saw a significant enough increase to their quality of life that the majority then voted to end the strike. So every time we came back with a new, uh, offer from the university, it was presented to our union members to vote on whether we wanted to accept the offer or not. Um, and it just, I think after nine months being on strike, everyone kind of just wanted to, to get on with life again. Um, and I think there was a lot of really great stuff in the contract. There’s certainly room for growth as they’re currently negotiating the new contract. This was a three-year contract. So they should be negotiating in the next year for the next contract cycle. I haven’t been involved with the union very much since we kind of got that contract through. I was like, “Okay, I have to write my dissertation <laugh> now.” Um, and so I kind of took a step back from union life. I told everybody I’m Weingarten right trained, uh, so I was still very involved within my department as like a union member and if you need anyone to come and help you in any disputes, you know, I’m, I’m around and happy to help out. I’ll be excited to see what the new contract looks like. Like there’s a lot of connections with other schools in the area. I know Boston College, uh, they got a pay raise because of what we were doing at BU. I have a friend who is doing their PhD over at Boston College, and he was like, “Hey, when you guys went on strike and we threatened to unionize, they bumped our pay too, so thanks.” Like it’s nice to know that kind of there’s that, uh, knock-on effect of what’s happening in the community around us.

Emily (35:33): Not just that community. Like it, it ripples out nationally too. I mean, it’s more salient when you can do a comparable, you know, cost of living comparison. Having seen so many graduate student unions formed over the last five, six year, eight years, it’s bolstered everybody’s case that comes after that. And the comparisons with peer institutions doesn’t just have to be local, right? It’s national as well.

Sophie (35:54): Yeah, absolutely. It was huge for us to get those wins, and I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve done in terms of making life better for students at BU. I think our argument the entire time we were in bargaining was that you should be able to afford to attend the institution that you’re working for based on only the job that you do for the institution that you attend. Um, and I think we’ve gotten a lot closer to that. Obviously, Boston is an expensive city, but it’s nice to know that we played a part in making it a little bit more affordable for people at BU.

How Dr. Lewis’s Personal Finances Were Impacted by Unionization

Emily (36:37): Let’s… We, we started the interview talking about your funding situation, how, how you were affording your program. So post, you know, contract goes into place, you’ve already shared you had switched positions, you were working 20 hours a week. Like how were your personal finances impacted or your loan amounts or whatever it is?

Sophie (36:55): Uh, so I was able to negotiate myself into a salaried position at GPS, um, as the contract went on. It… I mean, I, I have a very unique case where, like, a lot of my advisors and supervisors at the GPS office were also people who were on the bargaining team on the university side of the table. And so they kind of saw both sides and, and we learned to, you know, keep unionization at the table and keep my work at work. Um, but they were really gracious in, uh, helping to set up a more sustainable work environment for me at BU. And so, uh, at the end of the summer of 2024, which I think as the contract resolved, uh, I became a salaried worker. So I didn’t have benefits or anything else, but I was making an equivalent salary to a PhD student on the contract, um, which meant that I was, uh, no longer paying tuition because I was down to just paying for continuing education credits to, as I wrote my dissertation. I’d also gotten into, uh, subsidized housing through the university, which was like a competitive scholarship situation, but my rent went down to, like, $500 a month, <laugh> which was insane. <laugh> Um, and my pay doubled, basically. Um, so that change kind of meant I didn’t need to take out any more loans. I was able to save, which has made huge difference, uh, to my financial wellbeing. Um, and I got to keep a job that I really enjoyed doing, um, without needing to, like, find something else to do at BU. So I’m lucky I was able to advocate for myself and have supportive supervisors who were willing to push that through, so.

Emily (39:09): I like presenting that, um, sort of story of hope for other graduate students who come in with a funding package that they’re not… <laugh> It’s like, “Well, I guess I could do this for the duration of the program, but I’m not thrilled about it.” Um, that, you know, once you make those connections at the university and you demonstrate your value, that you can move into different positions and it it can have a better outlook over time. Yeah. Um, so I’m, I’m really heartened to hear that. Sophie, this has been such a lovely interview, and thank you so much for, you know, sharing your experience with this. Um, is there anything you wanna add more about the unionization process?

Sophie (39:43): Talk to your colleagues. That’s, like, the best piece of advice I could have to people, and especially as unionization picks up around the country. Like, talk to your colleagues, understand what’s happening in your department, and know how your pay compares to your colleagues, uh, because knowing that difference makes life a lot easier when you are able to point to someone else and say, “Well, they’re making this. Why am I not making this for the same work?”

Emily (40:12): Totally agree. Salary transparency is one of my, um, big, uh, areas of, of work and promotion within my business. Um, to that end, my website, PhDStipends, is where you can go to anonymously share your stipend information, but it is more powerful if you can do it with the person down the hall or in the next office, um, because like you said, then you can take that as your case to your higher ups.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

Emily (40:37): Well, Sophie, as we come to the end of our interview here, I’ll ask you the question that I ask of all my guests, which is what is your best financial advice for an early career doctoral, um, recipient? And it can be something that we’ve touched on in the interview already, or it can be something completely new.

Sophie (40:53): I would recommend that everyone know when to expect your pay and who to contact if and when that pay does not come. Uh, one of the things that gets really messy with unionization is just, like, knowing who’s gonna get paid what and when they’re supposed to get paid, and just knowing when to expect it to hit your bank account means that you can fix problems a lot more quickly if and when they come up. And just knowing who to talk to about that stuff is really helpful in a very messy university system.

Emily (41:25): Yeah, it’s actually good advice more broadly for everyone of just, like, know who to go to if you had a certain type of emergency come up, like, “My pay didn’t arrive on time or was the wrong amount or, um, that tuition waiver didn’t post and my bill is due.” You know, just when it’s an urgent situation, already having done the research of knowing who to reach out to, super, super helpful um, if and when that moment arrives. Okay, Sophie, thank you so much again for giving this interview. It was wonderful to see you again.

Sophie (41:55): It was so lovely to see you too, and thanks for having me.

Outro

Emily (41:57): 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? We have collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to view transcripts or videos of each episode? We 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. Podcast editing by me and show notes creation by Dr. Jill Hoffman.

This PhD Candidate-Parent Draws Financial Support from Her State, Her Union, and More

September 14, 2026 by Jill Hoffman Leave a Comment

In this episode, Emily interviews Madeline Hebert, a 5th-year PhD candidate at the University of Connecticut and married mother of a toddler and newborn. Madeline shares how her money mindset has changed over the last several years, from poring over every last expense in her budget to investing in frugal strategies and increasing her income through fellowships and paid projects. She also details the systems from which she has drawn financial support, chiefly through state childcare benefits and her grad student union. The total value of these benefits is so high that Madeline chose not to pursue a $100k one-year fellowship because it would have negatively impacted her family’s bottom line.

Links mentioned in the Episode

This PhD Candidate-Parent Draws Financial Support from Her State, Her Union, and More

Teaser

Madeline (00:00): I found myself applying for like every single award, grant, um, scholarship. And before I would let imposter syndrome affect it a lot more being like, oh, like I’m not qualified or I don’t fit that or whatnot. But instead now I’m like, I need money. I’m taking every single opportunity I can get.

Introduction

Emily (00:21): 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 (00:51): This is Season 25, Episode 2, and today my guest is Madeline Hebert, a 5th-year PhD candidate at the University of Connecticut and married mother of a toddler and newborn. Madeline shares how her money mindset has changed over the last several years, from poring over every last expense in her budget to investing in frugal strategies and increasing her income through fellowships and paid projects. She also details the systems from which she has drawn financial support, chiefly through state childcare benefits and her grad student union. The total value of these benefits is so high that Madeline chose not to pursue a $100k one-year fellowship because it would have negatively impacted her family’s bottom line.

Emily (01:41): Let’s talk fellowship taxes for a minute here. These action items are for you if you recently switched or will soon switch onto non-W-2 fellowship income as a grad student, postdoc, or postbac; you are a US citizen, resident, or resident for tax purposes; and you are not having income tax withheld from your stipend or salary. Action item #1: Fill out the Estimated Tax Worksheet on p. 12 of IRS Form 1040-ES. This worksheet will estimate how much income tax you will owe in 2026 and tell you whether you are required to make manual tax payments on a quarterly basis. The next quarterly estimated tax due date is September 15, 2026. Action item #2: Whether you are required to make estimated tax payments or pay a lump sum at time tax, open a separate, named savings account for your future tax payments. Calculate the fraction of each paycheck that will ultimately go toward tax and set up an automated recurring transfer from your checking account to your tax savings account to prepare for that bill. This is what I call a system of self-withholding, and I suggest putting it in place starting with your very first fellowship paycheck so that you don’t get into a financial bind when the payment deadline arrives. If you need some help with the Estimated Tax Worksheet or want to ask me a question, please consider joining my workshop, Quarterly Estimated Tax for Fellowship Recipients. It explains every line of the worksheet and answers the common questions that PhD trainees have about estimated tax. The workshop includes video content, a spreadsheet, and invitations to at least one live Q&A call each quarter this tax year. The last live Q&A call for this quarter is today, Monday, September 14, 2026. If you want to purchase this workshop as an individual, go to PFforPhDs.com/QEtax/. You can find the show notes for this episode at PFforPhDs.com/s25e2/. Without further ado, here’s my interview with Madeline Hebert.

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

Emily (04:08): I am delighted to have joining me on the podcast today a repeat podcast guest, Madeline Hebert. She is a rising fifth year PhD candidate at the University of Connecticut and was last on the podcast in season 16, episode one, talking about having her first child very early on in graduate school and how she budgeted for all of that and figured out childcare. And we’re gonna be revisiting some of those same topics, but in, you know, a few years further along in this episode because Madeline has now had her second child during graduate school, um, and has, you know, that’s really changed her thinking about, um, things related to money. So Madeline, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. Will you please introduce yourself a little bit further for the audience?

Madeline (04:50): Thanks. Yes. Um, my name is Madeline Hebert. I am a fifth year graduate student at the University of Connecticut, and I have two children now. One who is two and a half, will be three in August and the other one was born on, in February. So I’m really excited to be back here. I study LGBTQ youth, um, and interested in public policy, intervention prevention for them. And then my husband, he’s a telemetry worker. He’s also now a student himself and he has been working an hourly rate and now is about to go down to, um, about like per diem, what they call, is what they call it.

Emily (05:28): And what’s he studying?

Madeline (05:29): He is, um, he just got entered, uh, accepted into a dental hygienist program. It’s at the local community college and we’re really excited about that because yeah, he’s really excited to get to change career um, transitions basically.

Parenthood and Its Impact on Your Money Mindset

Emily (05:43): Awesome. Well, let’s get into it. Our last interview fell at a really like interesting stage because you, at the time of the art interview, you were pregnant, um, with the first baby. And obviously, you know, that, that stage is what it is and you’re a parent already, but now you’re a parent in a much different way <laugh> having two babies out in the world in childcare, you know, you have to balance everything with your, your work and all that. So just, you know, give us your thoughts now about how your view of money has changed, you know, in the past few years, um, with these life stages.

Madeline (06:15): I think that like at the beginning, I used to be super really anxious about money and I was doing like a l – I was following like a lot of the budgeting and itemization and looking back behind and, um, and that was really useful for the time. But now with like two children, it’s much more difficult and stressful, I think, to do like all the item line by line and to take the time and have the time to be budgeting like that. So I find that instead thinking about money in a very global sense, being like, okay, I know how much I’m generally going to be making this month and we try to stick to that expenditure within the month and we kind of more so like maybe once a week I’ll look at my app and be like, okay, like we are either above or below what I think that we should be for having spent for that month. But that has also reduced a lot of financial anxiety and has also helped a lot with being able to manage like, okay, are we able to spend what we need?

Madeline (07:10): Also thinking about money as like, okay, I have to buy things in a very cost effective way. So we signed up for a Costco membership, which at the upfront is a bit more expensive and we’re very fortunate to be able to cover that cost because in the end we’re ending up saving a lot on buying in bulk and buying shelf stable foods and buying, um, things like freezer, large amounts of meat that we can freeze and use throughout the month kind of thing. So we kind of now shop monthly. So that’s also kind of affected my, the way that I think about money. And then like literally just finding every single way to make money, um, from a kind, not from a side hustle perspective, because again, like when you have kids, your time becomes very precious and very limited I have found, but at the same time it’s much more intentional. And so instead it’s more kind of like, not even passive income, but making use of a high yield savings account and taking advantage of entry, um, entry modes for the fact that I travel at least twice a year for conferences, I invested in a travel, um, the, a travel credit card that is a little bit, again, pricey at the upfront, but then I essentially am being paid to have it because of how much I’m using it and the benefits that it’s giving me and the, um, travel credits that it’s given me. And so things like that, um, I’ve been taking advantage of. Um, I’m also been trying to find, I found myself applying for like every single award, grant, um, scholarship. And before I would let imposter syndrome affect it a lot more being like, oh, like I’m not qualified or I don’t fit that or whatnot. But instead now I’m like, I need money. <laugh> I’m taking every single opportunity I can get. I’m trying to, I find myself having to try to hop onto every single like project that I have the capacity for and I have to be much more intentional about which projects I sign up for because again, that time’s limited and I’ve had to turn down some opportunities in fact because they were not paid. I have to be like very upfront and being like, I’m sorry, but I’m looking for a paid summer, um, project to work on and to help with. But that’s also led to me reaching out to other faculty who I might not have reached out to before because I knew that they had funding and I tried to find ways that, in which my own research could fit into their project. So this way I could also be of hireable help in the, in other words.

Madeline (09:34): So that’s been kind of interesting because that relationship with money I’ve found has also affected my relationship with my research in trying to be like, okay, I need a project and a research interest that helps me also create a path forward in careers that are more popular in the higher paying industry. So moving towards a public policy research prevention intervention space has allowed me to be looking into more government type jobs and looking into public policy related jobs, public health jobs. So that’s something that was also kind of a, I am interested in it, but also because the way of my relationship with money now I’m moving towards that as well.

Emily (10:17): I think all of those shifts that you just mentioned are really positive and ones that probably other grad students, whether they’re parents or not, probably need to be moving in those directions. I mean, understanding that like your work and research has to have some market value, like yeah, of course it does, like especially moving out of graduate school or out of academia. I wanna take some of the things that you just mentioned piece by piece, um, because again, I do think these are all like really positive evolutions, um, maybe for you motivated by becoming a parent, but also again, something that other people can learn from whether they’re in that situation or not. And the first one you mentioned was about like sort of getting out of the weeds of, um, super detailed tracking or like daily basis kind of tracking and getting up into the, um, how can I have a longer term view of my money and of frugality so that you are, as you were kind of saying, like it’s okay if something costs more upfront if it’s able to help you spend less over time. And that is something that I think maybe can take some time for people to make that leap because they do need to get out of the like s- serious paycheck to paycheck cycle to be able to do something like purchase a Costco membership or, you know, pay the upfront annual fee for a travel credit card. But it is possible for a lot of people who to start taking that longer view. So I’m really, um, glad that you mentioned that. Do you think, because I have also made the shift dur – I also made the shift during graduate school. Do you think it was necessary to be in the weeds for a period of time before making that jump? Or do you think, mm, I could have just taken this like higher level view from the beginning and that would’ve been better?

Madeline (11:58): I think that was really beneficial. I’m not entirely sure if it was necessary per se, but I do think that for me it was really beneficial because it helped me get a good grip of like, okay, this is how much I can spend. I tend to think of very black and white thinking. So saying, okay, I have $20 to spend this week on snacks really makes me aware of like, okay, how much have I gone to Starbucks this week? But then it also gives me this freedom to say, oh, if I want Starbucks, I have like X amount of money still to set aside to spend on myself. Whereas now I’m like, okay, like I know that I want to go and spend money on myself, but now I’m a little bit more like, okay, like, well, where are we a little bit and want to check in with my husband about it? And then, but because I have a husband to also kind of like talk about finances with, it has made it to where we do have to talk about like, okay, like, do we want to set aside a little bit of money or make sure that we have spent roughly an allocation of particular amount of that monthly bu – higher budget? But because he works an hourly job, so some months he’s only worked like a full three weeks instead of four weeks or we travel for two weeks, like that is a constantly shifting number. So it helps us to not be like, oh, well, this week we don’t have this much or it reduces a lot of the anxiety around there by not having that, um, minutia or minute, um, examination of the numbers.

Emily (13:24): I think probably you’ve also most likely dialed in your larger necessary expenses, um, and you’ve become very familiar with them over the time that you’ve been in graduate school so that, um, you don’t have to pay as much attention to those really, really tiny expenses if the, if the large ones are dialed in appropriately. I know we’re gonna talk about childcare a little bit later on, but can you share with us how, like, your housing has changed over that period of time?

Changes In Fixed Expenses: Housing, Food, Internet, & Streaming Services

Madeline (13:51): It’s funny that you mentioned it because the housing changed after the childcare changed. So originally we were living in a one bedroom, um, apartment and it was about 1,400 starting off in every year it would increase about $50. So that was a pretty, like, manageable increase. And, um, that has now actually increased to an apartment that is about 1,800 now, now 1,900, just recently, 1,945 for our two bedroom apartment, two bathroom apartment, which, which has honestly been, like, much higher quality of life for us though. Um, but that changed. Our food has been still roughly around 300, some months 400 to 500, but we don’t go out very- I find that we swapped going out to, like, a nice restaurant for more Taco Bell and McDonald’s kind of restaurants, and maybe once a month we’ll actually go out to a real restaurant. Um, and so those kind of expenditures have changed. They, but it still feels like we’re going out to eat. It still feels like, oh, we’re not, like, cooking every single night. Um, but my husband makes a very good point that very often we do cook, probably more so than a lot of our peers that he finds. Um, and so, like, just about every night he cooks or we have a, like, leftovers. Um, and so that, um, has gone down. Trying to bundle, like, expenses for, like, streaming services usually. He’s got, like, for example, Disney through his phone bill. I realized that our internet service was doing, like, another deal. It had increased after, like, that two-year promotional contract, but then I found out that I’ve, every now and then I check. And so by doing that, I found out, “Oh, wait, they’re doing a new promotion that’s actually cheaper than what I’m currently paying. Let me get in on that, and now I pay less again for my internet.” So s- some small things like that. Those are our biggest expenses, that electricity, water. We don’t really spend much on, on other things. Those are kind of the big bucket spending things I find.

Emily (15:52): Yeah, it’s really good that you’re paying attention to those fixed expenses, like, you know, phone bill, internet bill, these kinds of things. Like you said, you just have to touch base, like, maybe once a quarter, you know, one, once every, you know, twice a year, something like that. And then you can find those opportunities. And it doesn’t have to be the daily checking in, right, like you sometimes would do with your variable expenses. Now, there was another, um, sort of big category you mentioned earlier in your answer, which is about, um, increasing your income has become much more of a priority for you, um, having the children. And again, I think this makes a lot of sense that the general grad student evolution, and of course, thinking forward to your next stage in your career. I really like that you mentioned that you used to feel some, um, imposter phenomenon and now you’re just like, “I have to get through it because I just need the money. I just have to apply anyway.” Um, can you expand on that a little bit more, like, maybe how you look for opportunities?

Finding Opportunities to Earn Extra Income During Grad School

Madeline (16:44): My department, they tend to do, like, a little weekly announcement being like, “So-and-so, congrats. They got some sort of award.” Um, it’s been making me, like, they, we also get these, like, daily digests that are super annoying, honestly, but they also offer, like, a rewards and fellowship, scholarship opportunities. And I, every single day now, I s – just scan it being like, “Hmm, is there anything that looks like it might be worth my while to go look into?” Um, if I hear that so-and-so got, like, an assistantship with a professor, I’m like, “Hey, um, can, I was wondering if you think that they might have a little bit, if they might be still looking for people or, um, is there, like, anything that might need assistance on?” Um, just, also just remembering, okay, like, every single time I’m reminded that there’s yearly of scholarship awards, I apply for every single one that I can. And I try not to get in my head by being like, “Oh, well, like, do I deserve to apply for, like, the financial need-based scholarship? Do I, um, is it bad that I’m asking for government assistance?” So, like, I know that my state offers, um, financial assistance for winter heating, even if your heating is included in your rent. It offers assistance for diapers, it offers assistance. My university has, like, a parent resource event once a semester, and I go attend that and I make sure I grab some diapers and some, and some wipes and stuff. So, like, not trying to get the shame and the guilt and all that encumbered, and instead being like, “Okay, like, these are things that I need to take advantage of so that this way, like, I don’t have to spend these expenditures later on.”

Emily (18:16): I’m so glad you brought that up, because it’s actually a theme I’ve been exploring in some other podcast interviews recently, and also in the writing that I’m doing about kind of getting past the mental blocks that might tell you this assistance being offered is not for me, or I do not deserve to avail myself of these resources. Um, and just, like, from an outside perspective, like, you haven’t even mentioned how much money you make or anything, but, like, you’re a PhD student, your husband’s now, like, working part-time and going to school. Like, you all are investing in yourselves, in your education, in your professional development right now, and that’s something that our society should support. And for goodness sakes, you got two children too. So, like, let’s support this family as you’re all growing and developing, and that will make you so much more successful and able to, you know, contribute so much to society, both of you, all four of you, um, in the future. And so, it just makes sense to me that, like, that people make these resources available and that you should take advantage of them, um, and as much as possible, get out of your feelings about it. Like you’ve said, that you’ve really been trying to, like, push past. So, like.

Commercial

Emily (19:25): 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, budgeting, or designing your financial life, each tailored specifically for graduate students and postdocs? I offer live workshops, asynchronous online courses, and cohort-based programs on these topics, and I’m now booking for the 2026-2027 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, medical school, postdoc office, or postdoc association? My workshops are usually slated as professional development or personal wellness. Ask the potential host to go to PFforPhDs.com/financial-education/ 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.

Connecticut’s Government Assistant Program: Care 4 Kids

Emily (20:54): Let’s move on to then talking about, like, what are the sort of helps and, and systems and resources that you have noticed around you, especially since becoming a parent, um, and just go through them, like, one by one, because other people may, you know, see similar things in their own surroundings.

Madeline (21:10): Perhaps the biggest number one support, um, system besides my family itself is probably, um, this, honestly, the state government assistance and that exists within Connecticut. So the Connecticut, um, offers a, what they call Care 4 Kids program, which is a state subsidy program for childcare that the, the kind of effect that it’s had, it has reduced a childcare that normally is, like, around at least 1400 up to $2,000 per kid down to, like, $200 for our family. Um, and so, like, you can hear, like, just how enormous of a difference and shift of financial, um, freedom that that allows, and financial flexibility that that kind of assistance allows. Um, so that has been just monumentally incredible for allowing us to be able to move into our two bedroom apartment, to be able to continue buying healthy foods for ourselves, to make sure that we’re able to sustain ourselves, not only in just not, to where we’re not just surviving, but we’re actually being able to still thrive to some degree. And so –

Emily (22:14): May I ask, um, because on the last interview that you gave, I, I believe you were talking about how you had chosen, like, a campus affiliated daycare. That I think maybe was sliding scale, if I’m remembering correctly. Um, did you not know about the state system at that point? Or, like, when did that s- When did you kinda, like, plug into that?

Madeline (22:31): That’s a good question, because I don’t remember if I didn’t know about the state assistance back then or not. I don’t think I did. I think that I learned about it a couple of months in, and that’s actually been a really tricky thing, because the state system requires you. They, they prioritize parents who are working, they prioritize parents who are working, and students. So, PhD student, um, parent, really great candidate. Um, but it also has income caps where you have to make, um, to get in, you have to make around, like, 65% of the state median income, and then once you’re in, you can make up to 85% of the state median income to remain in the program. And so, but they base it off of either what you make yearly or what you make monthly. And so what I make monthly, because I’m a student with a stipend amount monthly, it looks much higher, even though yearly I’m not being paid for three months. So in reality, I have to essentially save away a portion of my income for, to cover this summer month. So what I ended up doing is I applied it as an annual income, and I indicate that I’m being paid essentially annually because that would reduce how much I’m being shown to be m- making for the monthly expense, which allowed us to be able to enter into the program. But that’s really tricky because if you don’t realize that you can and need to do that as a graduate student, especially on this kind of contract system, then you look like you’re making too much and you don’t qualify. Literally, when it first happened, it looked like I was like, “You’re, like, $20 over. You don’t qualify.” And so for actually, like, up until probably in January, maybe even March of the first year, we were paying, like, $900 every single month. And that’s only because I divided what is a 10-month tuition rate, um, across a 12-month, um, span.

Emily (24:22): So at the time that you first applied, you had to be at 65% of the median income for the state or lower. Um, and it sounds like, you know, y- you figured out a way to present your income accurately, um, but so that it showed that. And then after that point, you would be permitted to increase your income. So when you’ve talked about, like, applying for more fellowships or, like, applying to, you know, have additional assistantships or, or what have you, that has not bumped you above that 85%, it sounds like.

Madeline (24:47): Correct. Correct.

Emily (24:48): So it’s a little bit of a game of, like, we wanna increase the income, but we know there’s a ceiling at some point.

Madeline (24:53): Yes. And that part of that was when we were like, “You know what? Now’s a great time for my husband to drop down from being full-time to part-time and so, and become a student, so this way our income cannot go above that threshold.” So that- He had already been planning on becoming a student, but the original idea was that he would go after my PhD, but then we were like, “Actually, it’s really beneficial for us to be able to, um, have you go now, so this way we don’t go above that threshold.” So it’s being cognizant of, like, okay, how much are we making now to fit into all these, like, little pieces? It’s like a puzzle game.

A $200 per Month Childcare Bill That Gets Reimbursed

Emily (25:28): I don’t know if your second child has already entered into, um, daycare, but when you have the two in, what’s the total cost gonna be for the household?

Madeline (25:36): So they do what’s called a family fee. And at first, I wasn’t sure about how that would work because the family fee is supposed to be like a percentage of your total income. And it turns out that no matter how many ch – well, at least for our case, having two children in it, it’s still basing upon the family fee itself. So one child now we pay for, and the other child is essentially free, actually. I don’t know what that’s going to look like because every single summer they change daycares because the current, the school affiliated daycare is only open until June, and I still got work in the summer, so they switch daycares and then back, they return back in the fall. And those daycares have different rates, so that’s a little bit complicated. But, um, essentially, we only pay $200, and we were paying $200, and now we still pay $200. So that’s been really incredible.

Emily (26:26): That is incredible. I, I think about, like, you know, when people talk about how, like, you know, the US is one of the only developed countries that doesn’t have, like, early childhood education and all of that. It’s like, wow, Connecticut is doing it at least for these, like, low income, like, residents like you all are. So, again, that’s really, really encouraging that that’s available to you. And, um, something that, you know, people who aspire to become parents during graduate school, if you know that beforehand, you can really look carefully at, you know, the individual universities and the states that they’re in to see what kind of support is gonna be available to you from those different, like, levels. Okay, so you said the main big time support is this childcare program through the state, that’s amazing, but what else has helped you financially?

Madeline (27:08): My union’s been really great as well because they offer also a childcare reimbursement program, or not program, but they have a childcare reimbursement fund. And so, they actually calculate a per kid rate, and because our, um, childcare costs are so low now, we essentially get reimbursed fully for the childcare costs from that funding as well. So, that’s another little bump up that we get, um, from the union every semester.

Emily (27:35): Okay. My mind is, like, blown right now. Like, <laugh> like, okay, childcare, number one, like, I think we talked last time, like, there are several big costs going into, you know, having a child. Childcare, top of the list, leaves also up there, insurance also up there, medical bills, of course, feeding and, and diapering and so forth. But, like, the childcare is, like, the main. Once you get through the whole birth and, and, you know, newborn phase, like, the childcare is the main, main, main big expense. And so, ugh, I’m just so pleased that those resources were available for you, um, because, yeah, you, you wouldn’t have to, you know, take such a huge financial hit for this decision to become a parent during graduate school, so that’s amazing.

Madeline (28:15): The fact of the way that the childcare subsidy program works, the way that my union works is actually a reason that I declined, like, the. Well, I almost had the opportunity. I was, um, in the process of getting interviewed for a job that would pay, like, 100K, honestly, but it had no health insurance, no contracts for any sort of assistance like that. And because it paid so much on paper, I would essentially make myself in, um, ineligible for remaining in the subsidy program. And when I did the math, I came out making less per month, essentially, because of all the additional costs compared to just staying as essentially the idea of the poor graduate student, right? And so that was kind of ironic to me to see, like, the- just the. We don’t talk about it as much, I think, the financial relief that, like, just having certain systems in place, because it doesn’t come on paper that I’m making a lot, but I essentially am receiving the benefit of a much more higher cost than, than what I would be making if I were making much more money.

Madeline (29:21): Especially, especially being pregnant and then expecting to deliver that baby and such. Um, I though about that too. I was like, “What’s the cost of paying marketplace health insurance compared to what my union subsidizes through our employment and everything and what that covers too, because we don’t, we didn’t pay, we don’t pay anything for hospitalizations or anything that comes from hospitalization. Um, and I know that people can pay, like, a couple thousand dollars for having a baby, just like most basic way of having a baby. Um, and we’re really fortunate because our baby ended up in the PICU center right after birth, and it was such a relief to know that we wouldn’t have to really worry about being hit with a extremely high medical bill after that.

Emily (30:05): Oh my goodness. Yes.

Madeline (30:07): Yeah, I, I think that people don’t realize like, oh, like looking at the benefits that a place offers you is, is almost just as important as looking, well, probably just as important as looking at the actual numbers that the place is offering you. That’s what I’ve learned. <laugh>

Emily (30:21): And when you were looking at that job offer, the 100K job offer, would that be like you would’ve left your PhD program and that would’ve been your full-time thing?

Madeline (30:29): Yes. I would’ve taken. I was planning on, um, considering an academic leave of absence because it’s a one-year fellowship to work as like a state governor’s, um, fellow. So I didn’t have the job offer officially, but it was, um, I was in the second round of interviews and then I found out I was pregnant and then I was like, “Oh dear, I need to figure out this before I make serious adjustments.” Um, and part of that was because with all the budget cuts and everything, my department and a lot of departments across, um, the university have been limiting the graduate assistantship hours from a full-time to a 75%. So that was something that I was trying to navigate. And that goes back to that value of money, prioritizing, making sure that my family is cared for and making sure that we’re making enough money versus being like, okay, like not necessarily being like, oh, is this necessarily the best trying to get out of my degree as fast as I can or trying to go on every single project I can. I have to think a little bit differently than I think than I would’ve if I weren’t in this position as a grad student.

Emily (31:26): Mm-hmm. And is that because of basically your limited work hours, like because of the amount of childcare/how much time of course you want to spend with your children? Um, is that the limiting factor is at the time?

Madeline (31:37): I don’t find it’s the time actually. It’s, it really is just making like at 20% we’re able to afford life. It really, and then at 75% we would be going into debt more. And so it’s, it was a waiting game of figuring out like, would I be able to secure a 20-hour assistantship? Would my husband, what is my husband going to be paid at? How many hours is he going to get? How many hours do I need? Just all of the, those small, that’s where my new money calculation into the weeds has gotten into, is to looking at like those kind of things being like, what do we need to be able to afford life at not even like high quality, I would say, but just like being able to be like, okay, we don’t have to fear like going into debt really, um, for just like daily living. And so that was what I was really considering. I was like, oh, like 100K looks really good to be able to know like, oh, I, I’m pretty sure we can, we can survive off of that kind of thing. Um, and how is that gonna look with my husband going to school and having to drop hours potentially because of schooling and stuff? Um, ironically, I find myself to be even more focused and more, working more because of daycare. I’m like, oh, I only have nine to five. I gotta get some work done in this hour. Whereas before I was like, it’s three o’clock. I wanna go nap. I can work later in the evening. And then, and not actually work probably.

Emily (33:02): Yeah. I definitely saw that in graduate school with like the postdocs in my lab who were parents, like who kept very rigid hours but were very efficient when they were there. Any other sort of, um, sources of support that you’ve relied on?

Creating a Village During Grad School

Madeline (33:15): Yes. Um, a lot in the parenting community I find you talk about like creating a village. And so I have found the village through having, finding friends through my daycare, finding friends through literally just seeing people at like the farmer’s market with a kid and being like, “Hey, you have a baby. I have a baby. Let’s be friends.” Um, just finding different ways of support. And so that’s been emotionally, that’s been sometimes even financially, not necessarily that they’re paying us, but for example, when our baby was in the hospital, our friends picked up our oldest. Our friends helped us by, we do family dinner nights now. And so we share in the cost of like eating together, sometimes getting groceries. We go to Costco together. So like sharing in purchases like that sometimes financially has been really beneficial.

Emily (34:01): I think the intangible support though, like, not intangible, the, the tangible support that doesn’t have a dollar sign associated with it, um, is really, really important. And I know you’re long distance from your family and your husband’s family, right? Um, and similarly, when I had my children, we were long distance from all of our family members. And I also created a village with other parents in a similar situation. Uh, there were a lot around. Um, and so actually this has come up in recent interviews as well of like, in that case, my interviewees were talking about how it’s so beneficial to have roommates because you have a built-in support system that’s different than having just friends who you don’t live with. Like yeah, that person’s gonna give you a ride to the airport or like you can share food or what have you. And so you’ve created a similar thing among like the community of parents around you. Makes total sense. And it does, it does boil down to your bottom line eventually because maybe you get those favors, you know, that you would’ve had to pay a babysitter to do, um, otherwise. Or like you’re saying, the time that you would spend like cooking, maybe you only have to do that, you know, half as much as you used to because you’re able to share with your community. Um, it has both a positive like emotional effect as well as ultimately a financial effect.

Madeline (35:11): Yes, it definitely. The babysitting part’s big time because we’ve babysit for each other now and I’m like, that saves like easily 100, $200 because babysitting is not cheap.

Emily (35:21): My, uh, parent, community of parents near me now, uh, our kids are a little bit older, but we’re always like, “It’s easier when there’s other kids over because they just entertain each other and we can, you know, go cook or whatever needs to happen.”

Madeline (35:33): That’s exactly our thinking behind those family nights.

Emily (35:36): Yeah. So we’ve gone through, um, the, the state system and the childcare, the union, um, your, the village you’ve created. Any other sources of support that you’ve leaned on?

Additional Supports: Home Visitors and a Buy Nothing Group

Madeline (35:47): The other systems I can think of would be like the, um, home visitors, uh, which is part of the state systems that exist. And then also our Buy Nothing group, ironically, even though, like, it’s not the same as any other system that I have, to be honest. It’s been very interesting in that I can just say like, “Hey, like, we are looking for some help with, for maternity photos. We would love to have some, but we can’t afford them. Would someone be willing to come take our photos?” Just something like that, having neighbors who we can say, “Hey, um, can you help us move into our new apartment?” Um, they’ve been really, really helpful just to be like, “Hey, I need somebody who can drive my husband because my kids are all asleep. Can you take him to the doctors for us?” So those are other kind of little systems just like that we’ve created that’s kind of part of that village, but it’s not quite the same relationship as like a friendship, I would argue.

Emily (36:38): Mm-hmm. That’s interesting that your buy nothing community extends to like favors. I, I haven’t noticed that in mine. It’s more just like things, like take these things, have these things, you know, um, which I certainly use now. And honestly, for children who are growing very quickly, it’s very, very useful to have a pipeline of, you know, hand-me-downs coming your way and a place to get, you know, cheaper free equipment or car seats or just anything in that, um, line. So yeah, I can totally see how buy nothing would, um, help in that way.

Madeline (37:07): It was a, it was actually the suggestion of our home visitor. She’s like, “Why don’t you just ask that group that you always go to because it can’t hurt to ask and stuff.” And so we, that’s another way that I supplement like that itch for shopping. Like there’s like that you wanna doom spend or you feel stressed and you want some retail therapy and you’re like, “I don’t really have money to do that kind of stuff.” So instead I just go on my buy nothing group and I’m like, “Hmm, what, what’s popping up there?” And you get that thrill of dopamine being like, “Oh, I got selected,” or, “Oh, I got to it first and stuff.” So that’s kind of another psychological way of like kind of handling the stress of like not having a whole lot of disposable income I find. Um, it’s just kind of shopping on Facebook like that.

Emily (37:46): I love that idea. And again, it applies to non-parents as well. If like the thrill of the shopping is what you’re looking for, then put that extra layer of challenge of it’s gotta be free. <laugh>

Madeline (37:57): Yeah, 100%.

Emily (37:59): Well, I’m so thankful for all the insights that you’ve shared in this interview. I mean, especially about, you know, looking at that fellowship offer, or not offer, but like the interview process you were going through for that fellowship and realizing, oh wow, that number is high, but the benefit, the lack of benefits is completely offset and like what the situation you’re currently in is actually pretty good, especially that you wouldn’t be delayed another year for finishing your PhD and, and getting out into the, you know, permanent workforce and all that. So there’s so many insights that you’ve shared. Thank you so much, Madeline.

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

Emily (38:28): Um, I will end our interview by asking you the question that I ask all of my guests, which is what is your best financial advice for another early career PhD? And it could be something that we touched on already in the interview or it could be something completely new.

Madeline (38:41): Best thing that I have to say for an early career PhD student, um, would be just to really consider like what do you need and not be afraid to try to go for it. So if that means that you need financial assistance, try to get out of your head about that. If you need, um, if you need help with childcare, looking to see like what are creative ways to work through that. Be willing to ask friends, be willing to ask and find a neighbor that you feel you can trust, be willing to look into what government state assistances there are. And also just recognize like the power of systematic effects, like making sure like, oh, do, is there good health insurance available? Is there, um, are there other good benefits available? Not just looking at that bottom number, um, that bottom line.

Emily (39:28): Of course. Thank you so much for illustrating that for us during the interview today.

Madeline (39:32): Thank you. I’m so happy to have gotten to talk with you for this. So thank you for having me back.

Emily (39:37): Absolutely.

Outro

Emily (39:40): 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? We have collected short summaries of all the answers ever given on the podcast into a document that is updated with each new episode release. You can gain access to it by registering for my mailing list at PFforPhDs.com/advice/. Would you like to view transcripts or videos of each episode? We 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. Podcast editing by me and show notes creation by Dr. Jill Hoffman.

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

December 4, 2023 by Jill Hoffman

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

July 31, 2023 by Jill Hoffman Leave a Comment

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

May 15, 2023 by Meryem Ok 1 Comment

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

Links Mentioned in the Episode

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

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

Teaser

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

Introduction

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

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

Will You Please Introduce Yourself Further?

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

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

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

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

Biology PhD Stipends

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

08:16 Shelly: Yes.

08:17 Emily: Okay.

08:17 Shelly: From my understanding.

Building an Argument

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

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

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

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

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

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

11:28 Shelly: Exactly.

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

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

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

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

Phases of Data Collection

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

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

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

14:31 Shelly: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

17:47 Shelly: No, they are not.

Commercial

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

Reallocating Funds for TAs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Behind-the-Scenes Factors for Administrators

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

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

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

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

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

Graduate Assistants United

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advice for Prospective Students

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best Financial Advice for Another Early-Career PhD

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

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

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

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

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

34:39 Shelly: No problem.

Outtro

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

The Necessity of Both Economic Justice Advocacy and Personal Financial Responsibility

May 25, 2020 by Lourdes Bobbio

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

Find Dr. Ian Gutierrez on Twitter
Related Episode: Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise: Choose a PhD Program That Will Support Your Personal and Professional Development
Personal Finance for PhDs: Financial Coaching
Personal Finance for PhDs: Podcast Hub
Personal Finance for PhDs: Subscribe to the mailing list

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.