To think my husband would earn a salary during a PhD?

[Badgoushk]

My husband is thinking about doing a PhD. He did a masters recently and got a high distinction so I don't think he'd have trouble getting accepted. But the question is can we afford it? Would he get paid? Did you get paid during your PhD? How much please? It would be in Energy/Climate change and it would likely be in London. Thanks.

oh ffs, MNers are so negative.
Especially about being an academic.
I research at a Uni, much of my work experience is in climate change areas (I have a relevant PhD). OP talks about her DH having an MSc which doesn't sound like arts or humanities. With a good science PhD in London there will be a lot of job opportunities, in academia, civil service, other branches of govt., "the city", industry, etc.

Go to findaphd.com & keep an eye out for opportunities.

I think the funding people are quoting sounds quite reasonable.
Dh did a phd, he considered two, one was medical research and considered very good money wise and considerably above the others. That was 8k, 15 years ago.

SOAS does an MSc in Asian politics. I don't think it does Science Science.

I have a former colleague who has recently started a funded PhD in a non Science subject (Education) aged 43. His stipend is about £14K. Entirely doable for him and his wife as she is still earning and was always the higher earner. It's always horses for courses.

DH having an MSc which doesn't sound like arts or humanities

I have an MSc in social and cultural History.

I did a science PhD and got 14k tax free funding for 4 years. This was average for a science PhD funded by BBSRC or EPSRC although some people do get more wellcome trust bursaries are particularly generous.

I don't think it's pessimism, more providing a realistic perspective on what a PhD entails and the impact it can have your job prospects.

Having just almost finished my PhD, with no intention of being an academic, I am well aware of what an utter waste of time and money and lost work experience it can be if you don't think ahead.

I just try to put across the reality that a PhD isn't really further study, it's more of an academic training scheme. As many people don't seem to realise this, such as me 7 years ago and also those people who ask me how my studying is going that I want to stab with a pencil.

As a side note the best place to do a PhD in a financial terms appears to be Denmark. I met someone at a conference who was getting £40K a year to do their PhD

In my experience, you get a lot of 'go for it, follow your dreams' type comments from people who know squat all. I certainly did.

I wish someone had laid out the reality more clearly for me.

my uni runs workshops and cv seminars on how to get non-academic jobs, out of necessity.
I'm on a funded masters. As part of my departmental funding I am required to apply for AHRC type grants. Obviously if some of the cohort are successful it reduces the commitment for the university. We are also expected to publish at the MA level (I was one of the few applicants with no publishing history, as my undergrad was from the UK).
Interestingly, our graduate advisor says that every academic cohort believes they are working in the worst possible time to get tenure, and sees the current situation as broadly comparable to the 70s.
I'm there for vanity. And because I was bored rigid as a 45yo in an admin job. As I am funded, there is no difference to my paltry wage, and a whole heap of actual intellectual stimulation lol. Oh I have a GTA too.

our graduate advisor says that every academic cohort believes they are working in the worst possible time to get tenure, and sees the current situation as broadly comparable to the 70s.

Yes, I have heard this from out-of-touch academics who think they're being clever, too.

They're not.

More honest people will admit that it's not really true.

There's a lot of negativity on MN about being an academic, I know it's a tough jobs market out there, and a lot of it is luck, but the way I look at it someone has to be lucky, and if you are well-qualified, have good publications and look REFable, then I think you will pick something up. I've worked in a very stable environment once I got my foot in the door and haven't had to move around between unis. I also really like my job, in fact, I would say I love it, which isn't that common among most people I know. I haven't had to leave the country, I had small children when starting out so simply couldn't.

The things is- there are disciplinary areas which are saturated, and areas which are still growing and where you can get your first shot and go from there. I would be reinventing myself to make sure I fitted in with one of those areas where there's still room for growth. Many academics are very purist and only want to do their particular 'thing' even though their 'thing' isn't funded at that moment. The ones I know who have done best are super-flexible and will move departments/disciplines to get work.

I honestly think it's a family friendly job as well, once you have a permanent post in one place. I took the afternoon off yesterday to do something different, and make it up on weekends. There aren't many jobs like that.

I don't disagree that there's long hours, job instability due to short term contracts, pressure, too much admin, but that's what I hear from pretty much all public sector workers at present, and lots of my friends have been made redundant/been on 2 year contracts out of academia.

It's like if you post 'shall I be a teacher?' on MN. Everyone will queue up to tell you it's terrible, worst idea ever, all escaping, but actually lots of teachers quite like their jobs and it's as good a career as any, with reasonable holidays to break it up.

These mythical easy jobs with high salaries with family flexibility living in one location with final salary pensions don't exist anywhere anymore, it's not just the academic sector.

I wonder how much of it is about class expectations, and how much of it is about the changes to workplaces that are occurring all over the place as part of the stripping out of workers' collective action and rights?

On the one hand, the precarity of being an academic - while far from ideal - is nothing like the precarity of many people working for minimum wage on zero hours contracts. I suspect that most people going for PhDs come from very solid middle class backgrounds, though, where the comparison is with previous generations of highly secure, well paid middle class work combined with lower student debt/housing costs. To have a job, even fixed term, for £27k plus is not, in national terms, a terrible situation with a terrible wage, but if your parents are lawyers and doctors, it probably doesn't seem that much. There is a bit of a question of perspective here - my sense is that many people don't realise quite how bad things are at the bottom.

All that said, I absolutely support striking for better conditions, and I do think it's definitely worse now than it has been for some time. I find the diminution of radical collective action in universities really depressing, and I find the denial of the worsening situation absolutely delusional (both in wider society- those people that insist that the wage/housing ratio hasn't got worse, in spite of all evidence to the contrary - and in academia).

(Apologies, I should have said 'To have a first job as an RA or TA for £27k'.)

It depends. Subject area can make a difference. Unless things have changed, you need a good first class undergrad degree and very strong research proposal to have any chance of funding in a humanities subject, but I've known people in the sciences get onto funded PhD programmes with a 2:1.

I think the thread has moved on, but FWIW, I have a 2:1 and had a funded PhD in a Humanities subject. It was not unusual when I started (2009) and it isn't now.

LRD me too.

Although to be fair some institutions put a great deal of weight on the undergrad degree classification in making their funding decisions.

Where I did my Masters had a very rigid scoring system for PhD funding and I didn't get a look-in on that basis. Where I did get PhD funding didn't seem to take it into consideration at all.

shove, I'm from a solidly working-class background (father and grandfather both lifelong binmen, both parents left school at twelve, first of my family to finish secondary school, let alone consider university) and while absolutely, it remains a very middle-class profession, and I have enough family in minimum-wage jobs to realise I am lucky to have a relatively highly-paid job that isn't physically exhausting and damaging, I don't think you need to have grown up with solidly middle-class expectations to feel the current situation in universities deeply depressing. I come from a long line of activists, and married into another clan of activists, and am pretty dispirited at what is going on at my institution currently. Two colleagues are off on longterm stress-related illness, and three have taken early retirement in the two years I've been here.

I was, as a WC kid, dazzled by university, and looked forward with slightly demented enthusiasm to my classes, and I suspect some of that - Oh my god, you can have a job that isn't working in a shop/office/factory and involves reading and writing books and talking about them all day??? - which is what I suspect brought me here, but would I make the same decision again with better advice? Maybe not.

For me I guess my background did shape my expectations a bit: neither of my parents went to university but they do both have 'professional' (they both work in finance) type jobs. I think what made more of a difference though was seeing my friends from undergraduate. They were buying houses, getting promotions and beginning to earn serious money; I was worrying about how to eke my money out over the summer (27k isn't so great if you're on a 9 month contract and employed in the UK's most expensive city outside London!) and about where my next job would come from. There were definitely times where I felt I'd made a stupid decision and thrown my prospects away. I'm much, much happier now (probably more because I got help for the underlying depression and anxiety than because of actually changed circumstances) but I really don't know if I'd have done a PhD if I'd really understood what that meant. So while I have sympathy with Bountybars point - academics do have to be careful about moaning, as it can make it sound like we think we have it worse than everyone else and that's not true and pretty tone-deaf - on the other hand I do think it's important to be honest with people considering this as a path. I also think we have to be really, really honest about how much of academic success is due to luck; I definitely got my first post-PhD job through being in the right place and knowing the right people at the right time, and that then massively helped me out later on. Telling PhD students that they're bound to get something if they're good enough is: a) a lie and b) setting them up to blame themselves for things that might be outside their control.

Gosh, that was some tortuous prose, wasn't it?! And to think that today is supposed to be a writing day (thus pissing about on Mumsnet...)

To have a job, even fixed term, for £27k plus is not, in national terms, a terrible situation with a terrible wage, but if your parents are lawyers and doctors, it probably doesn't seem that much.

If you work in subject where you can take your undergraduate degree and get 50-100k within a few years of graduation, 27k will seem a bad salary.

There is no way I would go into UK academia if I were choosing now and I am a senior academic. The commercialisation, reduced research funding, continual increases in teaching and admin, very long hours for no reward, continual pressure etc all make the job very depressing.

When we are talking about salaries, can we remember that the OP is in London please? 27k as a postdoc salary in London is not a great salary when similar graduate scheme salaries in the same field (science) are 38k plus private health insurance, plus maternity leave at full pay, plus food allowance each day.

I loved doing my PhD, but most of my colleagues did not enjoy it, complained bitterly and wanted nothing to do with academia at the end of it.

I was a postdoc in computer science. DH is a research fellow still. It is unheard of to do a unfunded PhD. Everyone has a studentship. Some are funded by UK money other by EU. So the answer is depends on field. I would imagine climate and energy to be all funded with research grants.

Have a look at jobs.co.uk. And search for studentship.

It is unheard of to do a unfunded PhD. Everyone has a studentship

Last year about 30% of my PhD cohort were not funded. Another 10 to 15% were partially funded and partially supported by their parents.

And to think that today is supposed to be a writing day (thus pissing about on Mumsnet...)

I suspect that's what most of us are doing. Though I did just put in a delightful two hour stint updating my personal profile on my institution website via the world's least intuitive-to-use software...

Medschoolrat - OP talked about him doing a PhD at SOAS - I think that guarantees he's not looming at Science!!!