Showing posts with label funding. Show all posts
Showing posts with label funding. Show all posts

Sunday, January 19, 2014

Go to grad school with your eyes open!


Stipends in grad school are.... modest (see above) and don't allow the kind of lifestyle that you can maintain with a "real" job. You're still a trainee in grad school, hence all of the comics pertaining to eating ramen noodles and the obsession with free food in PhD Comics, and other blogs about grad school... (and if you didn't think you could live on this kind of stipend [barring personal or family emergencies], why did you sign up for this?)

This past week, the Professor Is In blog began a survey of PhD debt to assess whether reports she'd heard about credit card and loan debt in the 100s of thousands of dollars could be real (i.e., >$260,000 in debt for a philosophy degree). Slate Magazine, The Atlantic, and The Chronicle of Higher Education all have articles about this survey too. You can go to the results of this survey through the above link, but here's a 2012 summary from a similar NSF survey:


Over 60% of the respondents reported zero debt, but nearly a quarter reported debt over $30,000. You can enter numbers for your own grad school experience at the Professor Is In blog. Post-grad school debt is much less of a problem for students in the physical sciences and engineering probably because most of those students are offered both a stipend and full tuition when they're admitted, and because those students spend only ~5 years on average in grad school.


As an undergraduate, I went to a local state university and my parents paid for my tuition. As a graduate student at a big research university, I was single and childless, drove a 15-year-old car, shared an apartment in a less expensive neighborhood that was a bit of a drive from campus, ate a lot of pasta, and didn't eat out much. I had a teaching assistantship for $12,000 (for 9 months) and my tuition was covered by the university. I graduated with $0 debt and had a blast in grad school (and I never took a loan, never had any credit card debt, and never worked another job apart from being a grad student). So zero debt is absolutely possible.... you just have to live like a student.


I really don't understand students that complain about being broke yet buy lunch out daily, drink Perrier instead of drinking out of the free water cooler that the department keeps, buy organic berries from Whole Foods (aka "whole paycheck"), get regular facials, or drive a new car. These examples are based on real people and they are what I consider pretty outrageous choices for someone in school.  If you're in grad school in the physical sciences and you're accumulating serious debt, you're making some seriously poor lifestyle choices, or you made some bad decisions en route to grad school (perhaps a you got a philosophy/religion/english degree at an expensive, small liberal arts college back east and piled up debt?). As a grad student, you're still a trainee (you don't have a degree yet!) and can't expect the same standard of living that your roommate(s) who got a job at Google straight out of college might have. But consider, your roommates may make a whole lot more than a typical grad student, but they have regular work hours, might have a dress code, get only two weeks of vacation per year (and can't leave for an awesome backpacking trip to Chile for 3 weeks at the drop of a hat [without getting fired]), and have to regularly meet deadlines (with complete, quality work...gasp!).

If you're thinking about grad school, go read the "Why did you take out the loans" comments in the PhD debt survey, think about what living like a grad student means, and consider if grad school is right for you before diving in...

Monday, June 29, 2009

On grants

I recalled a post by Female Science Professor that deals with the issue of grants and research funding that I dug up and partially re-post below. I'm doing this because I see no need to re-invent the wheel (and because even though I've recommended her blog, I'll bet that very few students have navigated over to that site nor spent much time there), but I would add one more point to what she's written - grants are written to conduct very specific research: The budgets are detailed and MUST be spent in the way spelled out in the grant (mas o menos) unless specific permission is granted by the program officer at (in my case) the National Science Foundation. The grant itself is a contract between the Principal Investigator (me) and the funding agency - it's my job to see that research gets done in the way that I've laid it out in the grant proposal.

"Over the years I have found that even moderately well informed and apparently sane graduate students have trouble understanding some basic issues involving grants and research. These issues include:

- Grants have start and end dates. They do not go on forever. This might be confusing in part because PIs can get no-cost extensions for a year (or two), so grants may have a longer life than their original start and end dates might suggest.

- Grants have budgets. They do not contain an infinite amount of money. Even when some students are told exactly how much is available for a certain activity, they seem to think that somehow there will be more and/or they are surprised and upset when the money runs out.

- The total $ amount of a grant is not equivalent to the amount the PI has available for the research. A substantial amount of the money in a grant goes to the university, not to the PI.

- Grant funds for grad students may be much more than just salary. Some institutions also require that the PI pay tuition and benefits. Grad students may not be highly paid, but they may be a significant component of a grant budget.

- Proposal budgets for most proposals can't be too high. PIs develop a sense for what the funding agency/program would consider to be reasonable vs. too high. For this reason, PIs have to do some delicate balancing between grad stipends (+ related costs) and research activity expenses.

- Students supported on a grant may start their graduate studies before or during a particular grant's lifetime. It may not seem fair to the student, but this timing relative to a grant's lifetime may affect the advisor's stress level about doing the research on a particular time scale, and that stress level may be transmitted to the student.

- The time between proposal submission and notification of the proposal's fate may be long.

- Some university accounting systems are so bizarre and complicated that it can be difficult for a PI to know exactly how much money is left in a grant. For example, it can be difficult to determine what is encumbered and what is not, and whether all outstanding invoices have been paid. There have been times when the actual amount remaining in one of my grants has been off by tens of thousands of $$ from what the accounting tables indicated. This is particularly stressful near the end of a grant. Budget stress level may fluctuate depending on when PIs look at accounting statements. A graduate student might perceive this as erratic behavior in an advisor.

- In some cases, departments/institutions make new policies that cost PIs money in existing grants even if this money was not originally budgeted. For example, my department occasionally mandates that graduate students receive raises that are effective immediately, even for existing grants. I supported the raises, but the money has to come from somewhere in finite budgets. This means less money for research activities.

Most of us could do a much better job of explaining the proposal/grant system to our students, but I think that it is inevitable that when issues of money, time, and stress are involved, as they are during a typical graduate program in Science, there are going to be difficult situations. I also think that grant management is one of those things that you have to experience yourself before you can really understand what is involved.

Maybe some computer science person will create a video game - SimGrant. Advisors can give it to students and postdocs to play and see how they do with the various decisions involved in writing transformative proposals, keeping various members of a research group funded, and dealing with kafkaesque accounting situations. I think this would be great, but the only problem is that the game couldn't use a proposal submission system like grants.gov or else no one would play, and those forced to play would end up shooting their computers."