C. Boake wrote:
> >and the community. If you want to get any research accomplished, you
> have
> >to have other people collect most of the data, and thus you become a
> >personnel manager (bet you didn't get any training in that!). On top
> of
Although I am a very well paid post-doc (well over that $18k figure
I see quoted here all the time), the personnel manager aspect is one
thing I use to console myself when I think about the disparity between
my salary and the salary of the PIs. Like most fields I'm familiar with
(engineering, computer science, teaching, respiratory therapy), you
don't really get much in the way of raises (compared to entry-level
salaries) unless you get promoted into management. As far as I can
tell, academia is much the same way. The tenured PIs that make good
money don't do any research themselves, but hire people to do it,
supervise them, write grants, spend time in meetings, and spend time
on the phone. I don't like managing people and prefer doing the
science, and have found my post-doc to be really carefree (I'm not
responsible for paying people, I don't have teaching duties, I
don't have committee duties, and I don't have the dissertation
hanging over my head--I'm just here to do research! It's great!).
Lest you all think I'm deluding myself by sounding so cheerful,
I should add that I'm an bioengineer with lots of programming
experience, so the dismal academic situation doesn't affect me
as much. I can always work in industry, get paid more, and
still be doing work I liked.
> >see, many academic salaries are lower than "average": I don't know
> where
> >universities get their "average" figures but I wonder if they add 3
> months
> >to 9-month salaries and pretend that the faculty get paid for 12
> months.
Well, that seems likely to me, because institutions are probably
reporting
the base salaries. If you're writing a grant, you budget a certain % of
your institutional base salary, not your 9 month teaching salary.
In engineering at least (the field of most of my contemporaries
with tenure track positions), you start with a salary of around $60k,
of which you are paid $45k for your 9 months of teaching, and you
are expected to find your own summer money.
Valerie
