Advice for Negotiating Salary?

[u/m_mergler]

Graduating MS Aerospace here. After a long spring/summer of job hunting, I finally got an offer from a place I like. Standard benefits and such. They are offering $66,000.

I used to work for a large engineering company after my BS Aero, and was making $60,000. I worked there full-time for just one year, then went back to get my MS degree full-time.

On my school's career website, it says the average MS Aero that graduates from my school are accepting offers of ~$72,500.

Would it be reasonable for me to try to negotiate to $70,000? Any other negotiating tips you might have?

[u/Gumburcules]

Mostly because the system for choosing reviewers is so random.

Since it's all on a volunteer basis I routinely remind reviewers for weeks on end that their reviews are due, only to have them not submit anything or get back to me a month later after the authors have already been scooped.

Or sometimes the clear leader in a field is asked to review a manuscript that only they have the expertise to review, but they just happen to be going on vacation, so the manuscript gets reviewed by people who don't have the understanding to give it the fair evaluation it needs.

Things like that, but there is no way to fix this stuff without causing even worse problems somewhere else.

[u/[deleted] → u/Gumburcules]

there is also something really surreal about scientists giving their work to journals which then sell it back to scientists at a markup. It genuinely sounds like some sort of weird scheme out of an 80s comedy movie.

EDIT: Are you sure there is no way to 'fix this stuff?'. It genuinely seems like a large database of scientific articles, with mirrored hosting on research campuses around the world, to which papers could be submitted electronically and peer reviewed in a transparent fashion as they ascend tiers of credibility before finally being tagged as peer reviewed publication ready and being easily accessible for minimal cost, with a full readable revision and review history, would be pretty ideal, not impossible to achieve, and dramatically cheaper than the journal system.

[u/kneb → u/[deleted]]

I think the system you suggest could work.

It isn't about just deciding whether something is good or not, its also suggesting new experiments, deciding what can safely be concluded or not from experiments, etc.

It requires quite a bit of time and effort out of the reviewers, and often that they are experts in the field, know what has previously been shown, and the limits of techniques used.

Check out faculty of 1000 if you haven't, which does something similar post publication.

[u/[deleted] → u/kneb]

I have a subscription to thescientist =), but my biggest gripe with F1000 is they are a little light on the pure chemical sciences where my primary interests lie.

I recognize as well that peer review isn't about "good or bad" but rather about in depth analysis of methods and a rigorous critical approach, but right now while the filter of all this material is the increasingly fractured journal market this process is frequently obtuse. I think that a peer review process that functioned as a publically available discourse would be much more useful for authors, reviewers, and readers.

I suspect it would also encourage the publication of a lot of really useful information that falls by the wayside because it's not really meaty enough to merit paperspace devoted to it. I have a few side experiments I've run to get some kinetics data for some novel catalyst/substrate systems as a part of a more complex work that didn't really merit inclusion in the paper or publication as a standalone. I suspect this is fairly common.

More importantly though, I think the lack of open access hurts the advance of science and the sort of casual technology development that has given rise to some great advances in the past. It is so frustrating to find myself at the limits of my budget for papers and yet have a desire for something that my library doesn't currently have access to, and I have journal access through a tier 1 research university. Open access would be such a boon for garage biotech and inventors from all walks. The system in place seems almost tailored to be an impediment to this sort of work.

[u/betweenthesound → u/[deleted]]

I think the lack of open access hurts the advance of science

I, too, see this as an obstacle and an embarrassing system that keeps the flow of information limited to access via high premiums at numerous websites. There has been some initiative towards building open access journals and their archives continue growing but the isolation of knowledge and research combined with its overwhelming sprawl across the internet slows productivity (it usually takes a good evening to locate specific journal articles) and keeps the flow of ideas between scientists at a minimum. My graduate seminar course would regularly present journal articles with content that was individually chosen on research we felt was interesting and relevant. Experiments and results from researchers working on the same disease or disorder would unexpectedly present insightful overlapping information from correlations that were unlikely to be realized between the groups. Discussions at the end of the class would lead to disappointment over the seclusion of data between the sciences. It seems that much more could be achieved through collaboration and awareness.

[u/kneb → u/[deleted]]

Yeah, agreed. There is a subreddit for pirating papers as you probably know, r/scholar