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Comment by boldlybold | Hacker News Reader

This led to me consulting during my PhD to supplement the stipend up to a reasonable salary. A lot of PhD students, especially if your work touches on computational sciences, are a lot more valuable than the university would like you to believe.

After moving to industry, I'm starting to realize how valuable the consulting experience was. The project management and scoping skills, and wearing multiple hats, were big benefits.

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> are a lot more valuable than the university would like you to believe.

Category error. Correction: You have the ability to do outside work that pays more than anything the University needs.

It's not the university's fault if you want to do a low value research job at the university.

The rate universities charge external funding agencies for one hour or one year of grad student research work is substantially higher than what the student gets paid for that amount of work

> than the university would like you to believe.

You may not know it, but the truth is more like "than the university is able to pay". These are non-profit institutions, typically. Consulting is a great idea for many reasons, not the least of which is building your network.

Non-profit institutions with billion-dollar endowments, massive overhead costs, and "tuition" charges that make no sense. I have a really hard time believing this for the larger institutions.

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