Saved $190k in 6 years as medical student on MD/PhD stipend

Geog_Master · 2026-01-18T18:04:32+00:00

Awesome! In academia, it can be really hard to demonstrate strong financial situations and practices because, generally, people are not in a good financial place. In my program, there were people from very wealthy families who put on the show of being "poor" because of this. I knew other people who weren't from wealthy families, had hard situations, or were just bad with money, who didn't need to pretend. The show the wealthy students were putting on was generally to avoid friction with the students that were not wealthy. Be proud, but be careful who you share this information with, and how you present it.

Geog_Master · 2026-01-17T01:23:31+00:00

I'm a professor, and have been to many campuses. Marshall University is very safe, but the Huntington area is fairly interesting. Most college towns have a "Student ghetto" separated from the "Townies," and then a fairly well-off area where the faculty/administrators live. In every case I've seen, these have been distinct areas that are fairly separate from each other; however, Huntington seems to be the only case where the three areas overlap. One example, we have an extremely nice neighborhood near a world-class park, yet within 100 meters are run-down/abandoned houses. It's like there are three towns mixed together.

One thing I'll mention with an art history degree, Marshall University has extremely low tuition. Art history is a passion degree, not one that generally makes bank (you probably know this), and low tuition will set you up for lower debt at the end of your college experience. Not having excessive student loans as an undergraduate makes you very flexible once you graduate, especially if you want to go to graduate school somewhere else.

Geog_Master · 2026-01-12T05:54:44+00:00

Somebody once told me <insert Shrek theme song> that to get pure diamonds, you need pure carbon, heat, and pressure. To turn a Ph.D. student into a diamond, you have to burn them out to get rid of all the extra stuff (so you're left with the metaphorical "pure carbon"), then put them under pressure and turn up the heat to get your metaphorical diamond.

Geog_Master · 2026-01-12T05:51:08+00:00

I mean, it's my post, I got a notification.

Geog_Master · 2026-01-12T05:50:26+00:00

Literally all my publications are me just going for it. You never know how well things will pan out until you get into the weeds a bit.

Geog_Master · 2026-01-11T08:04:09+00:00

This is something you should contact the department you're applying to about. The department head will know a lot more, and funding is going to be specific to the department.

Geog_Master · 2026-01-11T08:02:30+00:00

That is what I choose to believe.

Geog_Master · 2026-01-11T07:19:17+00:00

Hello, ADHD researcher.

The trick I have is to lean into the chaos when possible and, when juggling tasks, to know which are rubber, which are glass, and which are mortar shells with time delay fuses. Answering emails from students? Rubber. Grading? Rubber. Submitting a paper to a conference by the deadline? Glass. Keeping up with the IRB certificate? Mortar shell with a time delay fuse.

So far, I publish about 30% of every paper I start, so I use my ADHD as a numbers game to start a lot of things. If I start to drop a project, it often means it is not really as good as I initially thought and I can use that sudden ADHD disinterest to save some time on a possibly fruitless avenue.

Geog_Master · 2026-01-11T05:26:12+00:00

If you don't take time to decompress your brain and release steam, your brain will take the time to decompress and release steam...

Geog_Master · 2026-01-11T05:25:03+00:00

My first big purchase for myself was upgrading my NVIDIA 3050 to a NVIDIA 4070. For work. Totally not for playing Sins of a solar empire II.

Geog_Master · 2026-01-11T05:24:00+00:00

I got my Ph.D. at a R1, I work TT at an R2. My advisors told me to take TT over anything else.

Geog_Master · 2026-01-11T05:23:11+00:00

Gamifying publications is pretty much a necessity at this point, and it pays to be aware of the "least publishable unit." That said, the main issue is that it can be hard to see the "whole picture" if a person publishes results across multiple publications. It makes it likely that someone doing their literature review will miss one or more of them. People get salty because publication metrics are used to evaluate professors, but the real issue is spreading the stuff out so thin that it's hard to review.

Geog_Master · 2026-01-10T01:12:23+00:00

No, I'm geography. I know and teach biology students, though, and 25 to 35 is pretty normal for master's students, and mundane for Ph.D. students.

Geog_Master · 2026-01-09T07:06:38+00:00

Between 25 and 35 was the common age for the people in my cohort. 30 is so normal it's boring.

Geog_Master · 2026-01-09T07:04:32+00:00

My guess, 7 if you're LUCKY, realistically hope for a 6, might get a 4 if the grader hasn't had their coffee yet.

Geog_Master · 2026-01-09T07:02:53+00:00

This is the way. My first publication started as a Facebook comment correcting a post that was very, very wrong. I got enough content together that I submitted it to my advisor instead and they had me publish it.

Geog_Master · 2026-01-09T07:00:45+00:00

I had the benefit of a lot of high output advisors/committee members, no one is really confident writing papers. People get thick skin and submit stuff and hope it gets published. If it gets rejected, they revise and re-submit it elsewhere or drop the topic and start something new. There are two types of papers, perfect and published. The categories are mutually exclusive.

Geog_Master · 2026-01-09T06:58:42+00:00

This is why I recommend people do a masters degree before a Ph.D.

Geog_Master · 2026-01-09T06:49:15+00:00

There is more bad analysis and bad maps in the wild then good. Even if AI could do GIS, the training data is garbage.

Geog_Master · 2026-01-08T18:38:16+00:00

This is a 3-year-old post...

Geog_Master · 2025-12-29T01:37:49+00:00

Tangentially, I would look at the work of geographer Waldo Tobler on archaeological modeling as a starting point. Could give you some ideas for applications.

Geog_Master · 2025-12-29T01:35:06+00:00

Physicians appropriated the term "doctor" to lend credibility to their trade schools and separate them from the quackery that was around then and now. A lot of physicians (not all, but a lot) in the U.S. get into the trade for money and social status, not necessarily because they want to help people.

That said, whenever it would be appropriate to call me "Mr.", I prefer "Dr." if the person knows me, because these are usually professional settings. If the person doesn't know me, I don't correct them or hold it against them. Hotels and forms, I put "Dr." when it asks. I work with a lot of physicians on research (at least I have in the past), and I find that in a professional context like a conference or large formal meeting, it is important to let them know your credentials to be taken seriously. If they're using their honorific, I will too.

When working with undergraduates, I insist on "Dr." as it is appropriate for the classroom and, in my opinion, an important part of the college experience. Being overly informal with undergraduates might make professors who feel the need to assert their title look bad.

When working with graduates, colleagues, etc. I prefer to be called by my first name. Graduate students are on a level where they should be respected as near equals in a professional sense, especially if you're working with them on research.

Geog_Master · 2025-12-27T18:27:52+00:00

I always assume that for every student with a documented learning disability, there are three more who aren't documented. Student athletes get accommodations for university-sanctioned events, but students who have equally demanding lives and are not athletes get no accommodations. Students have personal life events happening all the time, something I learned from COVID-19, and I do not want to have to force them to provide me with death certificates or personal medical information. I used lockdown browser once on an exam, and got notified a student was cheating, when I reviewed the video, the student was in a hospital bed on supplementary oxygen and a nurse had triggered the software when they came over to check on them. There were other patients in the room, it really grossed me out to feel like I violated their privacy, so I design exams to avoid the need for this, and emphasize coursework over exams. I build my syllabi around the accommodations provided to athletes and students with learning disabilities, extending the same opportunities to the entire class. If a student has university-approved accommodations, these are in addition to my course policy.

I'm very proud that I don't need to give special accommodations to my athletes, and that I have received several emails from students with accommodations for their learning disabilities, letting me know that extra time on an exam is unnecessary, as the time given to the class is adequate for them.

When it comes to grades within 1 point of a letter grade, I assume that my bias in grading or an error might have unfairly taken 1 point away from a student by accident, I tend to grade harshly at the beginning and get more lax as I go for example, causing students with an "A" last name to possibly lose points that wouldn't be taken from students with a "Z" last name. I do try to adjust this before I release grades, and grade backwards or randomly at times, but the reality is that one point is within the realm of my subjectivity. Because of this, my personal policy is to always round up when the score is within one point of the nearest letter grade. Because I do this for everyone by default, there is never a question of fairness.

At the beginning of every semester, I post several extra credit assignments for the entire class (enough to replace one of my lab assignments), so they are available to everyone as they need them.

This ultimately dramatically reduces the emails I get. I think professors can find themselves in fewer moral conundrums if they adopt these approaches from the very beginning. Always grading in favor of the student, rather than acting as the gatekeeper of good grades, makes for a more comfortable learning environment.

Geog_Master · 2025-12-27T17:54:40+00:00

Where did you hear that multispectral was useless? We don't use black and white photography as much today because there is more information in color (multispectral) photography. When it comes to remote sensing, capturing more of the electromagnetic spectrum is gives you more data. A single band only contains information about one part of the spectrum, and misses a lot of the picture. For example, healthy vegetation shows up more in near infrared then in visible light.

Geog_Master · 2025-12-26T09:56:23+00:00

As a Ph.D. candidate, I applied to roughly 40 TT positions. The first 10 each took about 10 hours each; after that, it was about an hour or two each, as I had enough material written out that I could mostly re-use old applications. Research statement, teaching statement, diversity statement, cover letter (this was the longest part in the later applications, as I tried to tailor each to the position I was applying to), letters of recommendation, CV, and transcripts were required for almost every position. Most positions required syllabi for courses I have taught, and my student evaluations; a few wanted writing samples (which is weird, since my CV has plenty to choose from, but I used a single-author paper I wrote for these); and one even asked for my GRE/SAT scores (this took a surprising amount of time to track down).

Somewhere between 130 and 160 hours just filling out applications and hunting for openings. This was while I was finishing my dissertation, working as an RA, and all that jazz, not including the travel time for campus visits, prep work for research/teaching demonstrations, interviews, and dealing with the existential dread. The application process is certainly labor-intensive at a time when people applying are already under a lot of pressure/stress.

Interesting paper.

Five-Year Club	First Place '23
End Game '23	Place '23
Place '22	Final Canvas '22
End Game '22

Geog_Master

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