by David Kordahl
When I was a physics graduate student at Arizona State, one of my fellow grad students had a roommate who, after obtaining an undergraduate business degree, got a job as an office assistant for an economics professor. The roommate (remember, not a grad student) was earning like a young professional, not a wizard’s apprentice. “You know what he’s doing this week?” the grad student told us during a typical lunchtime rant. “He’s downloading files one by one from a dot-gov website and copying them into spreadsheets. A week of work, for what I could write as a five-minute script! And he’s getting $60,000 a year for this!”
Whether or not $60,000 sounds like a lot of money depends on one’s position. My whole life, I have seen claims the median physics B.S. graduate makes that much, but I personally didn’t make $60,000 until my third year as an assistant professor—and, even then, only after getting another job and negotiating a raise.
Science Nonfiction: Behind the Scenes in University Research, the new memoir from Dr. Darren Lipomi, chair of the Department of Chemical and Sustainability Engineering at the University of Rochester, addresses such issues bluntly—until it doesn’t. “There is a fair case to be made that the financial burden of research is borne not by the taxpayer,” Lipomi writes, “but by the ‘forever trainee’—the twenty-two-year-old PhD student who becomes a postdoctoral scholar at twenty-nine, and an untenured research scientist at thirty-four.” But now in his mid-forties, having more or less figured the system out, Lipomi is doing better than fine, and his memoir charts an uneasy path between celebration and critique. Read more »
