Official Ph.D question/advice thread - Page 71

KoreanBuffet · 08-17-2012, 08:15 AM

Last chance at my macro prelim today.

Clear minds, full hearts, can't lose.

beserious · 08-17-2012, 12:12 PM

nice post Wyman

cobrakai111 · 08-17-2012, 11:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by smokeandmirrors

Just curious-what percentage of the time do you guys feel your research is useless or won't make a large impact in your field? I'm not a grad student, but the impression I'm getting from the interwebs is that most phds research extremely specific topics in the hopes of contributing .01% to the "bigger picture" of whatever they're trying to accomplish. Sounds brutal/no sense of accomplishment especially if no one of importance ends up needing your contribution. Just browsing through pubmed it also seems like a fair amount of natural science studies end up saying "we can't conclude anything with any sort of confidence following our research". Is this not super demoralizing?

plz no bashing if i'm way off. as i said, never had any interest in actually attending grad school so don't actually know what y'all do all day.

This is actually one of my biggest problems in academia and something I always seem to bring up in my phd seminars. So much focus by many professors in my field seems to focus on developing theory and mass producing research that everything forgets to introduce it to the practitioner world.

Part of the problem behind that (at least in my field - sport management) is tenure requirements don't care if your ideas actually get distributed or utilized, so long as they are published in good journals. Most of my work as a student has been in collaboration with NGOs and I always make an effort to create an impact report for the organizations along with any scientific publications I write.

One of the main reasons I've gone the qualitative route. It gives me the opportunity to actually speak with the people I'm trying to help, learn their stories and publish/write articles and reports that can be understood by the lay person and isn't full of deep level statistics that most people will never read.

But this is from a sociologist perspective, I can't speak for the people that actually are pursuing/have PhDs in real science disciplines.

il_martilo · 08-20-2012, 11:17 PM

Old research? 100% of it was useless in terms of benefit to humanity.

New research? 100% is useful. That's why I'm sticking with this.

solsek · 08-21-2012, 10:14 PM

Random kind of off topic question. Have any of you guys financed a car with a grad stipend? Never bought a car before and want to know if it's a fairly common thing to do for grad students that move across the country.

Cueballmania · 08-21-2012, 10:35 PM

I leased a new car this year. I have a good credit history since I've had a credit card since HS. It's not too bad if you stay with the cheaper smaller cars (plus, they have the best gas mileage).

zoltan · 08-22-2012, 01:59 PM

I was only on year 2 of car payments when I started. Just another budget item imo.

Wyman · 08-22-2012, 02:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by solsek

Random kind of off topic question. Have any of you guys financed a car with a grad stipend? Never bought a car before and want to know if it's a fairly common thing to do for grad students that move across the country.

Depends where you're going, of course, but most of the people I knew at Michigan had older cars. I'm not sure whether they were 1-owner older cars, or whether the grad students bought/received them new in college. My current attitude toward cars is that if I could live without one I would, and I really want to downsize to a smaller used car (and I am far-removed from grad school).

In any case, I'd try to hold off for a year anyway and see how necessary a car is where you are and what your usage would be.

edit: yes, btw, my gf and I bought a car together when I was in grad school. I had an internship for the summer and had to leave for a few months so we needed 2 cars. Our primary source of income at that time was my stipend. But we really have only needed 1 car ever since.

KoreanBuffet · 08-23-2012, 08:51 AM

Only a few people in my cohort have cars. None of them are currently making payments I would guess (all driving older things or hand me downs). It's possible and probably depends on the cost of rent where ever you're moving. In a college town like Champaign Urbana I could do it in St Louis I would be eating too much boxed mac n cheese to swing it.

dalerobk2 · 08-23-2012, 09:12 AM

I took the question to be about how difficult it was to get financing for a car with a grad stipend, not whether or not he needs a car. It would be very hard and nearly impossible, I would think, to get a car loan on a stipend. At least without a co-signer. I got divorced in grad school and tried to get a 5-year $8,000 car loan on a $15,000 stipend. This was late 2006. I couldn't get a loan. I have a credit score of +800.

Wyman · 08-23-2012, 09:41 AM

Ah, if that was the question, we had a combined income at the time of about 45-50k and both had >800 credit scores, and the loan was only for ~10k, so I can't help you

peterchi · 08-23-2012, 12:51 PM

yeah, i don't know anyone who has done this. i have a friend who almost did, after he won like a $20k/year NIH award on top of his usual stipend, but then he ended up changing his mind -- I don't know 100% if it was because of money tho.

almost everyone in my program that i know with a car was gifted it by their parents, except one guy who bought his while he was working full time before getting here.

anyways, if i had to buy a car on my grad stipend, i'd just go the used route. yeah it can be a pain, but even something for like $1k will probably run alright at least for a few years if you get it checked out by a mechanic first.

solsek · 08-23-2012, 12:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wyman

Ah, if that was the question, we had a combined income at the time of about 45-50k and both had >800 credit scores, and the loan was only for ~10k, so I can't help you

Thanks for all the advice everyone. My stipend is ~33k/yr and I have about 7k saved up for a car so I think I will just skip the loan. I want to get one that is really reliable (plan on driving across the country at least once or twice in the next 5 years), so I will probably just save another 8k and just buy a car next summer. I know it's probably a bad idea (lol investing in a car), but I don't have very many expenses or debt and a car would just be soooooo helpful. Buying groceries is a 3 hour ordeal lmao.

Cueballmania · 08-23-2012, 01:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by solsek

Thanks for all the advice everyone. My stipend is ~34k/yr and I have about 7k saved up for a car so I think I will just skip the loan. I want to get one that is really reliable (plan on driving across the country at least once or twice in the next 5 years), so I will probably just save another 8k and just buy a car next summer. I know it's probably a bad idea (lol investing in a car), but I don't have very many expenses or debt and a car would just be soooooo helpful.

You could lease a car so easily. I put 2K down and pay $175/mo. It's a new car, so it has the warranty stuff. For the smaller cars, the buy rate at the end of the lease is less than the car will be actually worth. That, of course, is my experience.

solsek · 08-23-2012, 01:01 PM

Hmmm. I'll look into that. I'm completely new to this buying/leasing a car thing haha.