Update on Biology PhD salaries: UGA, Vanderbilt, MIT, and Princeton all cross the 1:1 line with U of Pittsburgh and U of Pennsylvania right below. Submit your Biology PhD program here:
My exit seminar is in 2 weeks and my 201-page dissertation has been sent to my committee, so I guess it is time to share that my NSF PRFB with
@roszenil
and
@evoblackrim
was recommended for funding!
"The decision by Duke University to close their herbarium is deeply concerning. Herbaria are not just repositories of plant specimens, they hold the keys to understanding and preserving our planet's diversity."
Petition with
@iDigBio
,
@NSCAlliance
@SPNHC
:
Congrats to UC Davis Plant Biology for being the first biology department at a public university to pay grads students a living-wage!
And big thanks
@Plant_Phillips
for updating the Biology PhD Stipend database with some of the new rates!
Despite being highlighted in
@Nature
and
@ScienceMagazine
-
@UF
will only raise Biology PhD by $559.5 (all stipends by 3% after not raising them since 2017). This doesn't even cover the cost of fees for a single semester.
@uf_gau
"The point labels are pretty much 'pointless'" -
@ReptileRhett
Thanks for all the submissions, we are now at 151 entries from 133 Universities. Click the link for info:
MIT Living Wage Updated - Only Washington Uni in St. Louis, Cornell University, The Jackson Laboratory + Turfs, and Brown remain across the line. Very sad to see $$ of life go up, and stipends remain pitiful. 💤 break - Enjoy the app:
Excited to share my first undergrad-mentee-led manuscript!
Here we introduce gatoRs, an R package designed to streamline the downloading and processing of biodiversity data.
(1/n)
A year ago today, Nature and Science both published news articles about the lack of a living wage for PhD students - both noted
@UFBiology
. Well, UF Biology has not changed and still lacks a living wage.
Luckily, other places have changed. (1/n)
Source:
Despite only leaving my house for doctor appointments, I tested positive today for COVID-19. So far, I'm doing okay. But what should I do to protect my way too cuddly cats?
Salaries for PhD students in the biological sciences fall well below the basic cost of living at almost every institution and department in the US, according to crowdsourced data
When we first launched the Biology PhD Stipends site, we did not expect as much continuous traffic!
Today we added a donation button to help cover the +$40 monthly cost for hosting the site -
🎉
So excited to see LeafMachine, which automate leaf trait extraction from digitized herbarium specimens, finally out!! Good job
@PhyloForFun
, twitterless Julienne Ng, and
@RobertLaport
Half a million models + many duck jokes later, I'm excited to share the preprint for nQuack:
This project started as a paragraph in a paper with
@JLandisBotany
,
@RobertLaport
, and
@desert_hopping
. But morphed into a new method and package. (1/n)
.
@ShellyGaynor
introduces nQuack, a program to ID autopolyploids w/sequencing data - many theoretical advantages over similar tools like nQuire. Will be available on GitHub soon!
Very grateful for folks like Shelly who do the math so I don’t have to…
#Botany2023
Ahh, this dataset is taking over my life. Please read the instructions before submitting, for ex. the error form requires sources with salary corrections, yet 6 submitted in the last 36hrs are missing these.
Im a grad student, I study plants not salaries. Work with me here.
MIT Living Wage Updated - Only Washington Uni in St. Louis, Cornell University, The Jackson Laboratory + Turfs, and Brown remain across the line. Very sad to see $$ of life go up, and stipends remain pitiful. 💤 break - Enjoy the app:
Stipends in UF Biology never get raised after admission and there are no internal top-ups. So ends up the highest and lowest current UF-funded PhD student stipends have a $15,350 difference. That is wild.
Cornell is increasing grad stipends to $43k for next year, requiring summer funding to be provided for all PhD students, cutting grad tuition costs for private Cornell colleges cause they are currently higher than the public ones
Undergrad: Yes. The profs in my department genuinely cared.
Grad: No. Faculty in my department repetitively forget we had met prior and/or forget my name (I wear a nametag), and I get asked if i'm an undergrad on a weekly basis. Its my 5th year. They also pay us shit.
Seems
@UF
gave the names of graduate students on DEI committees to the state and their emails were requested.
Isn't this a FERPA violation or something? Why are faculty not talking about this?
Faculty, staff, and student email accounts at UF are being searched with almost NO explanation or show of support from above; many finding out after the fact. People are understandably scared, especially untenured or soft-money folks.
Did
@UF
officials just tell grad students not to talk about their proverty level wages and their need for food stamps? In a
@uf_gau
bargaining session?
Congratulations to
@UCFBiologyDept
! This departments PhD pay went from $16k in 2018 to $22k in 2023!!
The faculty members fought hard for these raises and are an amazing group committed to improving conditions for grad students (with two faculty job apps open now).
Very proud of my colleagues - UCF Biology is increasing graduate TA stipends by over 15% for next academic year, while also improving workload equity across TA appointments, with a second increase planned for 2024. All with a static graduate program budget! 👩🔬🎓💵 😁
Not only are these two highly cited, but highly equitable:
1. They let students be corresponding author.
2. Students aren't required to include them on every paper (only on ones they contribute to)
3. They encourage lots of collaboration, the more the merrier with authorship.
Doug & Pam Soltis (
@soltislab
) were recognized as being in the top 1% of
#HighlyCited2021
researchers by
@ClarivateAG
. The Soltises have collectively published more than 600 papers that have been cited upward of 50,000 times in studies since the 1980s.
Someone is posting grad salaries & living wages for job ads on EcoEvoJobs.
Grad students are not paid well, committing to academia is accepting that your lab members will not make a living wages. To those applying this season, don't bum yourself out focusing on this & good luck!
Can I get a refund from
#Botany2023
for food? Every break is dairy, breakfast was dairy. I filled out a form to say I couldnt eat dairy.
The dairy free options at the ASPT dinner is kinda pitiful:
Well, the
@Botanical_
award ceremony at
#Botany2021
is going fast! Excited to be passing the Student Rep torch to
@ioana_anghel
!
The last two years have been a wild ride. Learned a lot from the opportunity and am so glad I got to work with
@0_minyaaa
and
@imenarv
along the way.
Excited to present a short workshop next week on using R for Digitized Natural History Collections in Research at BCEENET 2021 Virtual Meeting. If you are attending - my session is Tuesday (June 15th) at 2 - 4 pm Eastern. Check out the material here:
85 ECRs are looking for Masters, PhDs, Postdocs, Jobs, collaborators, and more in the general field of botany. If you are looking to fill these positions, please add to the
#Botany2020
Virtual Networking Board:
Finally finished and uploaded my
#Botany2022
talk!
Excited to share some results from a theoretical chapter of my dissertation on coexistence of multiple cytotypes!
Got home today and immediately started working on emails before feeding my cats. Mabel wasn’t having it, so she unplugged my internet.
#worklifebalance
Since I started the Biology Stipend database, ~50 departments have raised their stipends. Some even passed the living wage line.
Meanwhile, UF actually has continued to cut funding for graduate teaching assistants. The reality of higher education is that
@UF
fell behind.
…they say that they cannot change the “reality” of higher education, where graduate students either come from wealthy backgrounds or have to face poverty…
Before I start promoting all the
@Botanical_
student events - Stop by my
#Botany2021
talk on Wed. at 3:30 PM ET in the Pop Genetics and Genomics Session.
Excited to share some of my dissertation and my first autopolyploid simulation! And you get to play spot the 🐈
We are excited to announce that the Botany 2021 - Virtual! registration is now open and with even lower rates for students! To learn more about
#Botany2021
- Virtual! visit , and to register visit .
#iamabotanist
#BSAmembers
Before I start promoting all the
@Botanical_
student events - Stop by my
#Botany2021
talk on Wed. at 3:30 PM ET in the Pop Genetics and Genomics Session.
Excited to share some of my dissertation and my first autopolyploid simulation! And you get to play spot the 🐈
I started undergrad research with barely a 2.9 GPA. The more research I got involved in, the better my grades became. I ended up getting 5 papers out of my undergrad research.
Really excited to share our social hangout rooms for
#Botany2021
! Aren't these do cute?!? These 4 rooms will be open everyday from 8-10 am, 12 – 1pm, 5-6:30pm and 8-10pm ET.
Last week I left the discussion on naming based on a seemly antisemitic share of who I follow.
Today to discredit me further they joked about how much money my parents spent to send me to college and reported people saying I'm problematic.
Personal attacks aren't needed.
Do graduate student unions always mean increased grad student salaries? Though there have been some amazing wins by grad unions, it doesn't seem like their presence alone = more $$ 🧵(1/n)
Life things I'm doing to prepare for the next week of writtens: Prepped 5 dinners, made easy-to-grab snacks, vacuumed the house, slept for 12+ hours, charged my interactive cat toys, and made sure my lucky shirts were washed!
Wanted to share a
#labdaptations
as part of
#DisabilityPrideMonth
. Hand chopping was super painful, but lucky for me a friend finishing his OT degree made me this ergonomic razor blade holder as his class project.