Comment by navidfarhadi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by navidfarhadi | Hacker News Reader

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> You live off a meager stipend for about a decade

Keep in mind that this is not necessarily true for schools in countries outside of the US. At my school, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, as a PhD student you are considered an employee of the school and you are paid a living wage with full benefits. The current salary starts at 28600 SEK/month and can reach up to 33500 SEK/month [1] which is definitely a living wage in Stockholm, especially considering that you can live in affordable student accommodation (as long as you have been on the waiting list for at least a year or so for a student dorm). Sure, you can definitely make more money working in the industry, but at least you will not be living in poverty while pursuing your PhD degree.

As far as I know the public schools in Norway and Denmark operate very similarly to this, but I am not sure about other schools in Europe.

[1] https://www.kth.se/en/studies/phd/student/employment-1.52704...

This has been my experience as a CS Ph.D. student at a top US university as well--the pay is way less than industry, but it's enough to have a decent quality of life.

In my department, students make about $40K/year as a base salary, which is not a lot, but enough to get by with. Add a summer internship to this, and your income is not too shabby--I made about $70K this year.

Now, of course, I realize this is half or less of what students would be making in industry. But it's enough that quality of life is pretty decent.

>In my department, students make about $40K/year as a base salary, which is not a lot,

Erm. It's the median personal income and more than like 61% of the country's population makes. More than I make after 12 years on the job.

> It's the median personal income

But below median for a college graduate, much less one with an undergraduate degree in CS or another high-demand technical field, and way below median (and quite possibly poverty level) for some of the local areas where big-name CS graduate programs are located.

I live in a high cost of living area, and starting salaries are usually around $100-140K.

Students in my program usually end up paying 40-60% of the base salary toward rent.

> In my department, students make about $40K/year as a base salary.

That's incredibly high as a base rate! Most departments I know pay between $28k and $32k. The only people I know at $40k have an NSF fellowship.

We make double stipend during the summer, to try to somewhat offset the financial incentive to take a summer internship. I'm including this in the base rate--without, it's probably closer to $32K.

> but I am not sure about other schools in Europe.

For France and Germany, stipend/wages range roughly from 1200€ to 1800€/mont, so a bit over minimal wage, and definitely under what you could do in the private sector.

UK had a couple of options in my day for STEM stuff. Basic research council stipend was an untaxed £13K per year and then it could be upped with industry funding to £18K. I know that the Wellcomme Trust had some cross discipline medical/engineering programs that went up to £24K. Decent money and graduated in 4 years

lolwat, first year summer students make that in Finland :D Generally speaking, no graduated Bachelors should accept anything under 1800€ from the school and for graduated Masters anything under 2100€ from the school is an insult (in the workforce the numbers are something like 2k€ for first year students and <3k is an insult for Masters).

PhD students definitely earn >=2k1 here.

This is false for Germany.

A full-time position pays around 44.000€/year (varying a bit from state to state) which is ~3.650€/month. This goes up over time, up to around 56.500€/year. All of this is public information, TV-L 13 is the keyword to look for (TV-L stands for "Tarifvertrag der Länder", 13 is the group in which PhD students are typically placed by universities). Source in German: http://oeffentlicher-dienst.info/tv-l/west/ Table for salary per month in Euro (relevant row is E 13): http://oeffentlicher-dienst.info/c/t/rechner/tv-l/west?id=tv...

If you don't get a full-time position, you get proportionally less, obviously. In theory if you only have a 50% position and only get 1.800€/month, you should be able to work somewhere else to make up for it. In reality, though, this isn't happening as the professors are tricking the system and are practically abusing the PhD students' dependency on the professor's good-will as he/she is the one who is deciding whether they graduate or not. So even even if a PhD student is only being paid for 20 hours of work a week (50%), they are still expected to work 40h or more.

In non-STEM fields this is sadly happening all the time, sometimes to the extreme where 4 (or even more!) PhD students are being paid from the budget for a single full-time position. In Computer Science, however, I didn't meet a single PhD student that wasn't employed full-time.

I'm sure this varies across disciplines but a lot of PhD students in CS are hired to do their thesis as part of a research project. In these cases they get paid very decent salaries.

True and wrong at the same time for France. In STEM, that's true. But in humanities, one third of PhD student do not get any stipend.

Also, that's not so much under what you would do in the private sector. In 'industry', you don't so often start over 1800€/month with a master, even less so in humanities. I mean, it is not rare to start with more, but something like half of people will get less, and the other half won't get much more.

To my knowledge, in the Netherlands and Luxembourg there is a similar situation to the one you described in Sweden, Denmark and Norway.

In Portugal you get a fellowship that covers tuition and a monthly stipend which was increased for the first time in 15 years (by 1.4%) last year. PhD fellows are not considered employees of the University and since the stipend is not really a salary you are stuck in a weird financial situation.

Despite all this, it is enough to live (around 1000 Eur) in most of the country except for the capital (due to house/rent prices have been increasing for the past 2 years at galloping rate), which is where a great number PhD granting institutions are located.

Not to pile up, I've also discovered that you can be granted a PhD fellowship for a project at an host institution that is under equipped (if has any equipment at all) for that project.

Still, what I hear from some PhD students is that even with decent pay, it's not a great career. The chances of getting tenure are tiny, academic freedom isn't what it once was, and if you enter the job market, the PhD mostly cost a lot of time without adding a whole lot of value. Unless it's in Machine Learning, maybe.

I am not familiar with the situation in in other countries, but here there aren't many job opportunities for recent engineering/science graduates other than IT consultant. I've met people that took a PhD positions just because it was decent pay and less hours when compared with most junior and mid-level consultant jobs available.

In terms of adding value, I guess it depends on both the field and what your objectives are. For example, I work in a field where no one would offer you a job unless you have PhD or some sort insane amount of experience.

Really? My impression is that there's a permanent shortage of good programmers. Although my impression is that a big part of the reason is that Dutch companies are unwilling to raise the wages of programmers; that way they create their own shortage, of course.

But there is a shortage of good programmers. By engineering/scientists in my previous comment, I meant every kind of engineer and scientist.

From my experience, IT companies only differentiate CS, electric engineers and computer engineers for entry/junior level it jobs from the rest of the engineering and scientist. Biochemists, civil engineers, physicists, chemical engineers, industrial engineers, etc. Are all the same for the HR and assume you have 0 coding skills.

I had friends who did their PhD work in Switzerland, and they were making ~100K CHF a year.

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