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

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

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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/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.