doing it for love

A number of science bloggers have been pretty quiet in 2009... maybe like me they were working on grants. There's good reason to be more excited about grants in the near term: NSF funding rates might not be as dismal as they have been in previous years, and science funding might be included as part of a stimulus package. Despite the current optimism, people are talking about working without funding, or with very very little funding. And even if the funding taps are opened full blast, there will be hard times ahead (boom-bust funding cycles), and some people will be asked to work on a shoestring lab budget, or work for free. As far/near as I can tell, working for the love of science, not financial security, has been asked of generations of scientists (less now than in the past, it seems)... but it's definitely not the sort of thing we advertise to prospective scientists.

Many of us work in labs for credit, or just as volunteers, as undergraduates. Whether this is a time-honored tradition or exploitation has been discussed in the comments here. Regardless, I don't think many undergraduates would think that this early donation of time is a harbinger of future sacrifices they might be asked to make for science.

In the old days, students paid universities for the privilege of being a graduate student. In some places, those "old days" weren't so long ago; one of my friends has a 2000 PhD and he had to pay for his tuition and went without a stipend for all semesters he wasn't a teaching assistant (and the stipend was very low when he did receive it, but the accompanying tuition remission was a big benefit). Before anyone tries to guess which university inflicted this on him, let me say his PhD was in biology, in an arguably biomedical field, the school is a large state R01, and he was a stellar graduate student. He just happened to want to work in a lab that while well-respected, was not well-funded. He had a previous career in computer programming in order to save the money to attend graduate school and specialize in the field of his choosing. In general, however, grad students today go to programs and labs where they are supported through four (maybe five or six) years through a combination of RAs and TAs, and don't have to go into the same levels of debt as humanities graduate students while getting a PhD. If their PI runs out of funding early on in their graduate career, the students often change labs rather than work for free and wait for the lab to become better funded. These are perfectly rational decisions, but the same financially-sound decision making doesn't apply when you are an older, getting-ready-to-graduate student whose lab runs out of funding. Especially if you had a guarantee of five years of funding from your advisor when you started, and you need a sixth year... it's not uncommon to have to donate your time for a semester, a year at the end of your graduate work.

Until fairly recently, this unpaid last year of the thesis was codified in the UK. PhDs are supposed to take three years, and students receive three years of support, though funding in the fourth year is now more common for biomedical graduate students. For students outside of these well-funded fields, any funding for the fourth year is ad hoc and is not merit-based.

I spent a semester unfunded at the end of my thesis, but that was more my choice than necessity. I defended and could have gone straight to my postdoc, but I wanted some time to destress and to finish up experiments in my thesis lab. I asked my PI to pay health insurance coverage and the registered student fee (this came to less than $1000), and I spent about half of my time in the lab, but came and went as I pleased. I have known students who had more penurious PIs who wanted the students themselves to pay these continuing student registration fees -- while they had no income -- so I consider myself lucky.

Most postdocs would not entertain the idea of working for free, but I have two friends who have done this. The first I have already blogged about, and she is doing a postdoc in her "spare time" while carrying a full teaching load in order to pay the rent. She is doing so in the city where her spouse has an official, paid postdoc. The other stayed in the town in which he did his doctoral work while his wife finished her degree. Both of these friends were unpaid postdocs for two years, and both had a partner with some kind of income at the time. This also took care of their health insurance needs. In both cases, these free postdocs would not be working for free but for their geographic restrictions.

The working for free does not stop once we get professorships. Many PIs go without summer funding -- calendar year contracts are an endangered species outside of medical schools, and summer salary was a routine casualty in the tight budgets at NSF over the last few years. Even when a PI has summer salary in the budget, there are advisors who, in shoestring budget times, choose to forgo their summer salary to give a graduate student another year's stipend and benefits.

There are concrete downsides to our working for love and not money. Many of us are not independently wealthy, and so we incur credit card debt to help us live through our unfunded patches. [Note: even if you receive a stipend you may be eligible for a Stafford Federal Loan while you are a graduate student... many are interest-free until you graduate and it's a much, much better option than carrying credit card debt for years] It harms our ability to save for retirement, build up a house downpayment, do all those fiscally responsible adult things that we see some of our friends doing. It can stress our relationships when we work all day (and night) and yet are not bringing home any bacon. Similarly, working in science and working a second job in order to pay the bills can create a stressful home environment. Yet, I know very very few people in science who haven't worked at least a few months unpaid while pursuing a science career. I have no idea how common this sacrifice is in other careers (especially those that require much less schooling; I know medical students go greatly into debt and might be laughing at this post). Is working for free one of the ways we distinguish the passionate from the complacent? Is this a continual initiation rite that we ask even professors to go through? Has it become more common while we were living in Bush administration budgets, and will it be more or less common in the next few years?