A question for grad students......

[lordfoo]

My grad program was in the physical sciences/engineering, so the state paid me to go to school. What are you studying?

[wacki]

Bioinformatics.

I've had jobs working in the labs and internships out the waazooo. My resume could not look better right now. Still, I didn't find out about graduate assistantships till very late in the game.

Right now I'm a little over $70K in debt.

I'm not as bad as my sister who went to med school and ran up a $250,000 bill.

My brother went to Notre Dame and ran up a nice bill there.

I've just kind of turned a blind eye to it but consolidating my loans has made it hard to ignore. I'm in a bad mood.

[CrashPat]

I think that I will be 27K in debt after my final undergrad year, if I get my masters without help it will hit 45K or 50K, if I do what I want and get help it will stay at 27K, maybe hit 30K. I may not go for it though, and become a bum and move to nigeria, or fake my death and use the insurance to cover 16 of it, the rest is just federal stafford loans which are forgiven upon death anyway. [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

Realistically I am looking at between 30 and 50K with a 3 to 5% interest rate, I think I will be able to afford it.

[poincaraux]

[ QUOTE ]
Bioinformatics.

I've had jobs working in the labs and internships out the waazooo. My resume could not look better right now. Still, I didn't find out about graduate assistantships till very late in the game.

Right now I'm a little over $70K in debt.

[/ QUOTE ]

Ouch. Standard procedure here (biophysics, chemistry, bioinformatics, ecology/evolutionary biology, etc.) is to get yourself on an NIH training grant early on and maybe get your own funding later on. Failing that, the professors will usually write you into a grant. Everybody does a few semesters of teaching and/or graduate assistantship-ing along the way as well.

Seriously, it sounds like the person in charge of organizing your department is doing a bad job here. Especially in something like bioinformatics where there's plenty of grant money to go around.

On the bright side, you have a good resume and you're about to be done with the accumulating-loans phase.

[wacki]

[ QUOTE ]
Seriously, it sounds like the person in charge of organizing your department is doing a bad job here.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yes very bad. I really did get screwed on this one.

[phage]

It is not up to the administrators to push the students. Most administrators will certainly facilitate things but it usually up to the student and the PI to write the grant. That said most grad schools pay their students (and tuition is deferred).

[poincaraux]

[ QUOTE ]
It is not up to the administrators to push the students.

[/ QUOTE ]

That's not really true. Here's an easy example: all of the schools that admitted me said something like this in their letter: "we'll guarantee you $20K/year plus tuition and fees for 5 years, assuming you remain a student in good standing." Now, I went out of my way to find funding sources, but what if I hadn't? You can bet that our secretaries would have pressed me to apply for fellowships, etc. rather than have the department pony up $45K/yr.

More generally, things run better with money. Good administrators will do what they can to get as much extra money as possible flowing into their departments. And things run way better when the grad students have enough money to get by. Good administrators help to make sure this is the case.

[ QUOTE ]
it usually up to the student and the PI to write the grant.

[/ QUOTE ]

That's more true in some fields than others. I'm in biophysics, and every grant I've seen has been written either by the PI or by a Post Doc. Grad students might help out a bit, but they don't do bulk of the work. I'm pretty sure it's the same in bioinformatics, but I'm not positive.

My wife, on the other hand, is in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. She writes a ton of grants herself. Never the big multimillion dollar ones, obviously, but a lot of grants for a couple of thousand.

[ QUOTE ]
That said most grad schools pay their students (and tuition is deferred).

[/ QUOTE ]

In our department, most students are paid directly by their advisors, who are expected to have grants to cover such things. The tuition isn't deferred either; the advisors pay it.

[phage]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
It is not up to the administrators to push the students.

[/ QUOTE ]

That's not really true. Here's an easy example: all of the schools that admitted me said something like this in their letter: "we'll guarantee you $20K/year plus tuition and fees for 5 years, assuming you remain a student in good standing." Now, I went out of my way to find funding sources, but what if I hadn't? You can bet that our secretaries would have pressed me to apply for fellowships, etc. rather than have the department pony up $45K/yr.

More generally, things run better with money. Good administrators will do what they can to get as much extra money as possible flowing into their departments. And things run way better when the grad students have enough money to get by. Good administrators help to make sure this is the case.

[ QUOTE ]
it usually up to the student and the PI to write the grant.

[/ QUOTE ]

That's more true in some fields than others. I'm in biophysics, and every grant I've seen has been written either by the PI or by a Post Doc. Grad students might help out a bit, but they don't do bulk of the work. I'm pretty sure it's the same in bioinformatics, but I'm not positive.

My wife, on the other hand, is in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. She writes a ton of grants herself. Never the big multimillion dollar ones, obviously, but a lot of grants for a couple of thousand.

[ QUOTE ]
That said most grad schools pay their students (and tuition is deferred).

[/ QUOTE ]

In our department, most students are paid directly by their advisors, who are expected to have grants to cover such things. The tuition isn't deferred either; the advisors pay it.

[/ QUOTE ]

Clearly things are run differently in different fields/schools. However, I have never heard of an administrator going beyond frequent reminders when it comes to applying for fellowships. The salary burden related to a grad student falls on the PI and as such they tend to push their students to apply for fellowships. In this case the application (including the experimental outline) is often prepared by the grad student. Larger grants (NIH RO1 types) that fund the lab are indeed written by the PI with some help from postdocs. Again, I have never heard of a student or PI being responsible for tuition. Tuition is usually part of the operating costs of the department and if that burden were placed on the PI the size of most labs would shrink dramatically. Of course some scools may run differently but I can't imagine that many PIs would be willing to cover 10K+ tuition costs for untested grad students whe they could hire postdocs who have much more lab experience. All my experience relates to biomedical sciences so it may be skewed...

[eastbay]

[ QUOTE ]
Bioinformatics.

I've had jobs working in the labs and internships out the waazooo. My resume could not look better right now. Still, I didn't find out about graduate assistantships till very late in the game.

Right now I'm a little over $70K in debt.


[/ QUOTE ]

I'm confused. You PAID to go to grad school in bioinformatics?

eastbay

[onthebutton]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Bioinformatics.

I've had jobs working in the labs and internships out the waazooo. My resume could not look better right now. Still, I didn't find out about graduate assistantships till very late in the game.

Right now I'm a little over $70K in debt.


[/ QUOTE ]

I'm confused. You PAID to go to grad school in bioinformatics?

eastbay

[/ QUOTE ]

Believe it. NIH and NSF funding pays for people like us to get our Ph.D.s.