To everyone stupid ambitious enough to take a shot at graduate school in anything, the most important thing isn’t rankings, or how well you mesh with the department. People will tell you to pick a department that “feels right”. Of course, it’s important to not feel like an indentured servant in your department for however long you’re stuck there, but there is something far more important than any of this. Funding.

You could attend the best department in the country, everything feels right, and you could be willing to give up your left arm to go there, but if they can’t pay you, you’re going to have problems. I’m going through this right now: I love the department, I’m talking to an advisor who does really interesting and good work, but I’m running into issues with finding money. I applied for Federal Work Study over the summer under the advice that it will pay for everything. It would pay for everything, if you were a cheap bastard who could live on $200 of spending money a month. I’m not.

So I’m left with two choices: eat a huge hit out of my savings (no) or work as a TA (ugh…). I’ll probably have to opt for the later option, which is not optimal since it means I have to spend X hours a week teaching lab, Y hours in meetings, and Z hours grading. If I am only productive for twenty hours out of the week (which may be a bit liberal counting on its own), this means that I have 20 - X - Y - Z hours to devote to research. If I’m a TA for three classes, that’s six hours in lab, about four hours grading, and three hours in lab meetings. That’s seven hours of research per week. SEVEN. And this is what I’m supposed to be at graduate school for. I can’t blame the department, TAs make classes function, and classes get the department funding, so really I’m just doing something that’s a critical function to even having a graduate school. That doesn’t make it any less frustrating, though.

I’m willing to put up with this for now, on the understanding that there should be money after next year, but if that falls through, I’m faced with some very bad options. The lesson I’m trying to get across is: Ask about funding, and make sure it’s there for you. If you aren’t fortunate enough to come out of undergraduate with a cushy fellowship, make sure that there are multiple available professors in your field that project having money for you. Nothing cuts short a stay in graduate school faster than realizing that there’s no money for you, and it’s really through no fault of your own.

I’ve been looking into a few options for myself. One of them would be to take a job as an “adjunct instructor” at a local community college. It doesn’t pay great, but it could get me by. The other is to write a grant proposal myself, to the NSF among other agencies, to try and secure my own funding for the rest of my time in graduate school.  This is pretty far-fetched, but it has the up-side of not requiring me to teach three classes a semester so that I can stay in graduate school. If X + Y + Z was adding up for a TA, I can’t imagine being an instructor for three classes. I’d be more than interested in hearing somebody’s thoughts about this.