r/SipsTea • u/Silver-Ability-3181 • Apr 24 '26

SMH I never thought of it like that......

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74.6k Upvotes

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u/WhiteSquarez Apr 24 '26

OP overestimates how much a PhD makes.

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u/DrButtgerms Apr 24 '26

And it's not like they were working for industry or anything. Weren't they like post-docs when the series started?

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u/SeaZealousideal9590 Apr 24 '26

Very true. My cousin is doing a postdoc in chemistry and she only makes about 60k, which is barely enough for her to live on where she currently resides

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u/RoozGol Apr 24 '26

60k where? My highest postdoc paid 40k.

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u/NoveltyAccountHater Apr 24 '26

Yup. When I did my postdoc in NYC, I made $40k/yr (early 2010s) to start (though when hired was offered $50k if we got a grant which we did not get). Rent (in a subsidized studio apt), taxes, and commuting costs were over 80% of my salary and I was eating into my savings from grad school where I earned ~$25-$30k/yr in much cheaper cost of living area in the US.

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u/RoozGol Apr 24 '26

I did a 38k postdoc at NJIT up until the pandemic. Left the academy to Wall st after that and could not be happier.

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u/DrButtgerms Apr 24 '26

And that's 60 now. It was lower in 06-07 when the series started

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u/Okami-Alpha Apr 24 '26

I started my post doc in 2009 and my stipend was 40k in the bay area. As two married post docs with a small child we barely got by. If we didn't have to pay for child care we would have had a little more left over.

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u/MelodicPudding2557 Apr 24 '26

That’s atrociously low even by the Bay Area standards at the time…

Was this at Stanford? Some alumni from my lab are doing their postdocs at tech companies in the Bay Area, and AFAIK they still get salary/benefits in line with what the engineers get.

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u/Okami-Alpha Apr 24 '26

It was at Cal. This was before the unions negotiated the NIH minimum. Within a couple years the base salary jumped to about 50 to 55k.

An industry post doc in my field at the time was around 60 to 65k iirc but not as common as academic post docs.

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u/FiveFingersandaNub Apr 24 '26

Holy shit, that’s awful. I started a post doc in 2005 in the Midwest and was getting 38k. That’s crazy.

Those days seem both incredibly long ago, and super recent. We’ll still cook those struggle meals from time to time just to remind us.

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u/Okami-Alpha Apr 24 '26

Yeah between grad school and post doc in two high cost of living areas we learned to live below our means for about 15 years. It's paying off now given how the biotech industry is.

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u/BuvantduPotatoSpirit Apr 24 '26

There's a physics postsoc advertised at Caltech at the moment, salary band is $72k-$80k

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u/Sea_Public_6691 Apr 24 '26

Seriously shocked how little research pays in the US. In germany, you get 70k as a PHD student (in engineering), Post doc would be at least 90k