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Comment by whatever1 | Hacker News Reader

Poor pay is an understatement. Back in 2010’s when I graduated, I was making USD$21K per year! If you calculate the hourly rate it is probably close to $3/hour given that PhDs work every day, and specially in the holidays that the advisor has more free time.

We were jokingly say that they don’t dare to call it a salary, that is why they call it a stipend.

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That’s exactly how much I was making in 2010 when I graduated. It’s even much worse than that because the benefits sucked and the school took back about about 1/3rd in the form of outrageous parking fees and outrageous student fees that required us to pay for tickets to every sports game we couldn’t even attend. Add overpriced books to that too.

It took a PhD to figure out how not to accumulate any new debt for those 6 years. I would have been first in line for food stamps, if they were available to us. I literally couldn’t afford to stay in student housing.

That's awful! I was a postdoc then and the NIH standard was $40k.

are you in the US? that's surprisingly low as by the mid/late 2010's PhD students in stem fields were averaging 30k. for the many postdocs on nih-supported grants i seem to remember ~60k being standard at that time. eg https://www.niaid.nih.gov/grants-contracts/salary-cap-stipen... .

In 2013, I graduated from a top 3 school in my field of engineering. I was getting paid $23 000/year as a PhD student.

I hated it every second of it too. 11 years later I still loath everything I did then.

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