Since there have been posings about cost of living etc I though it would be interesting to see which people would prefer - salary or PhD studentship

at the mo, my stipend £19k, tax free :-) its quite high for a stipend I think, but most goes on travelling to my uni and I work with an industrial partner, so a lot goes on travelling to them. But it would mean that to earn the equivalent in salary i.e. once tax, NI, student loan etc had been taken into account I'd have to be earning at least £25k to be taking home the same amount. I also get about £3k tax free from teaching and other work, which would be taxed.

So I will probably be worse off after my PhD unless I can get a well paid job. When you consider that graduates are starting on £28k in london, most of the London research jobs (that require MSc, PhD and experience) are only paying about £24! - v annoying.

(up) And then some! That's a fantastic stipend.

Mine was 13k, 14k and now 15k for the final year. It's more than enough for where I live and I don't need to worry too much about money. In my 1st and 2nd year I shared a house with a teacher, and because where we were living was so cheap (and we were so free) we lived like kings. Or at least it felt that way considering our undergrad years.

I think I've got a similar problem to sneaks though. To maintain this standard of living I'll have to avoid some of the lower paid jobs, especially in the london area. Ive applied for one that starts at 35K though, which would be rather nice 8-)

I feel totally shafted now, I've been on £12k the whole way through!

my hubby was on £12k. I think I get so much cos I'm a ESRC CASE in london, so I get an extra £2k for being CASE and another £2k for being in London. But unfortunately, the travel into london costs £6k per year :-(

I was getting just over 5 grand from an external organisation, but it's now gone the way of the dodo thanks to the "economic climate", so I'll take what I can - anyone wanna buy a kidney?!

I'd definitely go for the first option. And with reference to Dowhatnow - blimey, don't sell a kidney. You have 2 in case one fails - just like with lungs and fallopian tubes. I've always said that if I was going to sell an organ, if things really got that bad, I'd sell a 3rd of my liver due to its regenerative properties. Having said that, with the advent of xenotransplantation and stem cell technology, it looks like we'll be priced out of the market.

teek - me too! :-(

whats the 4 hours for?
love satchi

It should have said four hours a week paid teaching but not enough room.

The point is (and most of you have got it) is that you need to be on over £20k to be better off working which is close to the average salary. PhD studentships are actually very generous as they are tax and NI free plus you aren't paying pension contribution. A £14k stipend is worth just over £20K in gross salary so if you get that plus some hourly teaching (of which the first £6500 is tax free) you are MUCH better off than many graduate starting salaries.

All of these options sound like a dream to me! Including those saying they have been on 12k a year. I would be rich on that! I get the equivalent of 6k per year over here! Plus many people get no funding at all. I think we should just be happy for what we have. Doing a PhD is a choice and a privilege that many in society do not have.

Problem is that a lot of graduate schemes offer £28k easily for a graduate with no experience - the research jobs just don't match that. So I'll hopefully be 26 or 27 when i finish my PhD, my friends who went straight out to work from their masters are on about £35-40k (I recently found this out, to my dismay!) so I kinda feel that i have to go for a position, I would have been qualified for 4 years ago, and be paid a low salary, and then try and catch my friends up over the next 5 years, which is probably impossible, so I think I've lost out.

Average graduate starting salaries are around £24-25 - and that is very much distroted by law and finance. Most graduates on a training scheme won't be on that and many are on a lot less. And the very high salaries come with very hard working conditions - 60-80 hours a week is not unusual in finance or law and there isn't the freedom to take a day off becuase you feel unproductive.

The point I was making is that if you compare the £14k stipend with a £25k salary it sounds much less but in take home terms there's not much in it.

Maybe its just my field, maybe I should do another PhD :p