It is amazing how quickly attitudes can change with one’s condition. While I have been fortunate to be paid relatively well as a graduate student, there were a number of times when more money would have been useful. To keep things in perspective, I have no kids, no house (and none of the potentially high associated costs), and no car payment. Graduate students with the same salary and even one of these three things likely have a much smaller margin for error in their monthly budgeting. When talking to a fellow graduating student recently*, however, I remarked that it was a good thing we got paid so little because if the pay had been any higher I may have been more willing to delay the completion of my Ph.D. He rightly pointed out that I haven’t received a single paycheck from my future employer but I’m already thinking like The Man. It may be a good thing that there won’t be any graduate students at my SLAC, since I won’t be able to tell them how I got by in graduate school just fine on five dollars a day** and that they should be able to do the same.
*I guess I could have formatted this as a Scatterplot-esque “Overheard” post.
**Thankfully, this was not my actual graduate student salary.
Memoirs of a SLACer 