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This Grad Student Advocates Individually and Collectively for Higher Stipends
Personal Finance for PhDs
English - July 18, 2022 08:00 - 37 minutes - 34 MB - ★★★★★ - 46 ratingsCourses Education Business Investing debt money phd budget frugality graduateschool investing personalfinance postdoc Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
In this episode, Emily interviews Alyssa Hayes, a rising 4th-year graduate student in nuclear engineering at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Alyssa is a first-generation college student who experienced food insecurity and other forms of financial precarity as an undergraduate. Now that she earns a stipend of approximately $45,000 per year and lives in a low cost of living city, she feels financially secure—and wants the same for all graduate students. To that end, Alyssa shares two advocacy approaches: 1) Ask for what you need. As a prospective graduate student, she negotiated for a top-up fellowship to be added to her assistantship stipend. 2) Share pay information with your peers across universities and use that data to collectively bargain for higher stipends in individual programs. Alyssa and her peers in nuclear engineering are currently gathering this data, including stipends, benefits, cost of living, and university and departmental ranking.