11 ms·

I lived on 54 cent pancakes covered in free butter and honey, 9 cents per can baked beans (turns out I don't like baked beans, I like good sauce which this was

• nabla9 7y ago
  Simpsons grad student sketch is different kind of funny for different people. For most people it's funny because it's exaggeration, for others it's funny because it's so close to reality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqrCoyVK80I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqrCoyVK80I --- On more serious note, grad student working for next to nothing serves similar function as unpaid internships in companies and politics. Some positions are designed to help young people coming from wealthy families without explicitly shutting anyone out. If you have trust fund, career in politics, academia or high profile law and financial firms is much easier.
  • butterthebuddha 7y ago
    > If you have trust fund, career in politics, academia or high profile law and financial firms is much easier. I'm having trouble parsing that
    • miscPerson 7y ago
      “If you have a trust fund, then a career in fields such as politics, academia, law, or finance is much easier.”
    • rdtsc 7y ago
      Only kids from wealthy families can afford to move to say DC or NY and spend a year there on an unpaid internship. So that becomes a selection criteria to exclude those from poor and middle classes from advancing in those domains.
      • skrtskrt 7y ago
        The same is true for entry-level media jobs. Paying $40-$50k in NYC... you can be sure kids without generational wealth & parents financial assistance choose other paths.
        • oh_sigh 7y ago
          It must be awful to have to settle for the 50th percentile income in an area as a brand new worker.
        • wutbrodo 7y ago
          This is definitely untrue. There are plenty of young people willing to save roughly no money for the early years of their 20s by trying to make it in the big city in a flashy career. I know several who don't get any financial support from their parents (and certainly don't have generational wealth). The most you can say is that people who have parents that _require_ financial support aren't able to take this path, but that's a significantly smaller group.
    • late2part 7y ago
      IF [ you have a trust fund ] THEN a career in {politics, acadamia, law, or finance} is much easier than getting a PhD.
  • RijilV 7y ago
    Except, in the case of big tech, Internships pay six figures. There are other perks of being a grad student than just the pay though... : sure, the internships aren’t typically a year long, but if you do the math for what’s paid for their duration it’s an incredible amount if it did last a year.
    • saagarjha 7y ago
      Of course, not everyone can work in big tech.
    • geodel 7y ago
      Then what's stopping unpaid interns to take big tech internship?
      • phaus 7y ago
        For one thing most tech internships want you to contribute to the business. Unpaid internships that involve doing real work are illegal in many industries/locations. In some places if you have an unpaid tech internship, everything you do has to be an artificial training exercise for the sole benefit of the students.
      • TeMPOraL 7y ago
        Nothing, except that: a) not everyone who figured out higher education is a racket wants to do 180 degree career turn b) many people would like to make their future in something else than easy code monkeying money If everyone goes to write NoSQL serverless CRUD for adtech, who will be left to do research or something actually materially productive in the economy?
• sjg007 7y ago
  I took out student loans in addition to my stipend just to survive.
• gist 7y ago
  Why do you (and others) think that education and academia is somehow special and not the same as, say, acting (or any career) where people regularly earn no money and work bad 2nd jobs just to survive and do something they love or want as a career? In a free market system nobody is telling you to choose that career and a University and (typically) a non-profit doesn't have any particular incentive to not act in their own self interest in order to self perpetuate themselves. Also I am sure the janitor at the University is paid decently and loves to work there. Reason is there are not as many people lined up for that job and basic economics takes over.
  • chrisseaton 7y ago
    Society needs researchers - it doesn’t need actors.
    • thebean11 7y ago
      That's a pretty simplistic view of society. Do we need not need novels or music either? Let's drink nothing but soylent and devote 80 hours per week to our STEM careers
      • chrisseaton 7y ago
        People literally die without research into things like drugs. They don’t die without movies.
        • nico_h 7y ago
          there are a lot of anecdotes about how a song or a book or a movie changed someone's life.
          • craftinator 7y ago
            There are a lot of data about how many people have been saved through research. Anecdotes are data with n=1. Not a great comparison.
• pkaye 7y ago
  In college, a professor recommended me for an academic award from industry. It was $1000. So I go to the yearly awards dinner and a month later got a check for $800. Apparently the university takes a 20% as administrative cost!
  • thaumasiotes 7y ago
    http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1005 http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1005
  • ganoushoreilly 7y ago
    That's actually low! Most of the Universities we've explored research grants with wanted 45-65% overhead for the university, then another 10-15 for Research organization, with the remainder sorted between the researchers / company. We found it was actually just cheaper to pay for the research ourselves and hire the students directly for part time work than go through the grant process. I sat on a couple school boards for a while, all that was ever discussed was fund raising and how we should be contributing more. Very little focus on education. Sadly it's turned me off spending time with Schools and just targeting students / researchers directly.
    • gjs278 7y ago
      it’s not actually low. you’re both just being scammed.
    • yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
      > and just targeting students / researchers directly. Sounds like a win-win, yeah? So, sorta happy ending...
      • ganoushoreilly 7y ago
        To a large degree yes, but a lot of the work would have fared better with a larger pool of people to work on the problem. We have to be more selective in candidates and in turn, we spend more money out of pocket vs wider spread from the grant pool of cash. The original purpose of grants was to spur technology growth and acceleration, now they're just one more notch on the ole' funding universities piece. We need an overhaul on bloat in state schools at a minimum, then we're good. The other issue is patent / design ownership arguments, but that's for another day.
• datashow 7y ago
  There must be some misunderstanding. The provost doesn't take the overhead, the university does, which is a common practice.
  • lovich 7y ago
    I didn't realize that "common" was a synonym for "good" or "desirable"
    • datashow 7y ago
      There is a reason for this common practice. Do researchers pay office spaces, internet, electricity, utilities, etc...? No. So there is overhead.
      • asdff 7y ago
        Expected that there is some overhead to keep lights on, sure. But should lab A who brought in a 1 million dollar grant pay 500k in overhead for internet and electricity while lab B in the next bay in the same room brought in a 50k grant and only needs to pay 25k? Overhead is baked into salary budgeting too, you might budget 60k for your technician in your grant, knowing they'd receive 40k, the 20k allegedly covering the employees various benefits (which said employee will find are withheld from their 40k paychecks anyway).
      • ivalm 7y ago
        This is not actually where overhead really goes to. A lot of overhead simply pays for departments that don't bring in money (eg humanities, some social sciences) and I think that's fine too. But let's not say that an experimental lab with ~10 people and ~2000sqft that pays >$1mm a year in overhead spends it on "office space, internet, electricity, utilities..." because that is disingenuous (btw those numbers reflect the reality of the lab i got my phd in). Most overhead comes from expensive experimental labs (hard science + engineering + medicine).
• PeterStuer 7y ago
  Can you provide more detail? Usually grants/projects etc in research in Europe explicitly budget "overheads" as a separate budget line. The size ove the overhead varies between the different funding instruments, but are usually between 20% and 100% of the direct costs (mostly wages). Universities will have internal regimes that distribute the overheads between the central administration, for covering such things as office space, heating, shared services etc., and the research group in which the research takes place for covering computing, office supplies, local admin, travels, publication consumables etc. So for example a 2 year project that has 120K allocated in direct cost salary, with a 75% overhead regime in a university with a 25% central overhead take would have an overall budget of 210K of which 120K would end up payed as salary to the researchers, 52.5K taken by central administration, and 37.5K taken by the research group. While technically you could argue paying researchers more would also net the university more money, asthe overheads are calculated as a % on direct costs, in reality this does not hold as funding for research is very finite and funding agencies would not approve paying higher project grants. Both universities and large businesses have been successfully lobbying for years for higher overhead % regimes in grant instruments, and since the budget for funding research has not changed in line with these evolutions, defaco shifting the windfalls of research grants from the researcher's wages to the administrations.