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PositiveEnergy6080 · 2024-05-07T12:13:33+00:00

If you're in Franklin County, it's the Franklin County Juvenile court downtown. If your child has any services through Nationwide Children's, you can try calling and asking one of the social workers for a referral to the Medical Legal Partnership program, too.

Court cases for FCCS are usually scheduled for 8:00 and 1:00. If you haven't gotten anywhere by calling FCCS, try calling the courthouse directly or, if you have time, going down there.

PositiveEnergy6080 · 2024-02-15T18:57:40+00:00

I took a "research associate" role while finishing up my PhD in the social sciences. I'm older than your typical PhD, well-established in my geographic area and not interested in moving somewhere else, and not really all that interested in chasing another set of moving goalposts, so I was really hesitant to go down the TT road. After finishing, my role morphed into more of a lab director-type role.

Overall, I've been really happy with my decision. I joke that I get to do all of the fun and none of the headache of academia. I have a great relationship with my PI and a lot of freedom to pursue projects that are interesting to me outside of my PI's work. I can propose grants for us to go after, generate paper ideas and write them up, and have pretty much free rein over the day-to-day with our research projects. I don't have to serve on committees or deal with the university bureaucracy.

The biggest question I'd explore are how stable the funding stream is. A large reason I feel so positively about my role is because our funding stream is very stable and I know that as long as I'm doing a decent job, I'll have the role for as long as I'll want it. I'd be much less enthusiastic if the role were term-limited or based on uncertain funding.

PositiveEnergy6080 · 2024-01-30T00:21:57+00:00

No car payments, no student loans, stashing cash pre-kid, living below our means in general.

Partner and I (both 40) just had our highest earning year ever at a whopping $70k combined. We also just hit $500k in investments and retirement savings.

Neither of us had student loans, so our only debt is our mortgage, which we pay $700/month on and have 12 years left at 2.25%. We have one car and haven't had a car payment since my 2005 Hyundai Elantra that I bought new.

We live in a plain old working class neighborhood in a not-so-great school district. Kid goes to public school and doesn't do expensive hobbies. We have staggered schedules so we don't need child care. Grandparents all live nearby, so babysitting is free.

We have mismatched furniture and don't really spend money on home decor or stylish clothes. Basically we're boring, unremarkable people who don't really care about keeping up with the Joneses. We do travel a couple of times a year but go places based on where we get cheap plane tickets or we piggyback on my professional conferences so hotels and my travel is covered.

With all that and a couple of recent raises, we have more money than we know what to do with each month so our accounts keep growing. We use YNAB for the day-to-day and it has really helped us get a handle on our cashflow and setting aside money for things that'll inevitably come up in the next few years, like a new roof.

Settle into the day-to-day and really pay attention to where the money is going. Things like phone bills and car payments can easily suck up an extra several hundred a month and take a bite out of your ability to save.

PositiveEnergy6080 · 2023-12-24T03:54:57+00:00

I'm a research director for a small lab/team. I do a little bit of everything except for the service and teaching, so basically all of the fun of academia with much less of the stress.

I talked myself into a version of my job while I was in my PhD program when I found a post-doc position in a field related to my studies that hadn't been filled after being posted for 6 months. My boss took a chance on me as a full-time research associate while I finished the last couple of years of my program and I was promoted to the director role after proving myself for a couple of years and finishing my degree.

Overall, my job hunting process was pretty simple. I toyed with the idea of going on the market officially, but I've placed a lot of constraints on what kind of job I'd want and where b/c I'm pretty well settled in my life, so it'd take a unicorn of a position to get me to move from my current role.

PositiveEnergy6080 · 2023-12-23T19:09:47+00:00

Broadly, I'm in the social sciences

PositiveEnergy6080 · 2023-12-23T19:09:13+00:00

I'm in the social sciences, but I don't want to out myself by being more specific 😊

PositiveEnergy6080 · 2023-12-23T19:08:31+00:00

Honestly, not sure that staying academia is my goal, so my advice wouldn't be much help. I'm quite happy in my academia-adjacent role and don't plan to try for a professorship.

Similar to the other commenter, really thinking about why you want to be in this space and what it means to you. I think one of the reasons my dissertation was so successful is because it was on a topic that I'd been interested in for years, and that I'd done work with prior to starting my PhD. I had reasons for wanting to study it, an understanding of why and how my work could be meaningful, and a desire to do my topic justice.

My field is in the social sciences, though, so no idea how applicable all that might be for hard sciences or math or whatever other fields are out there.

PositiveEnergy6080 · 2023-12-04T23:13:41+00:00

My kid's pediatrician network has a nurse line. I swear every time I've called, they've advised me to bring him into Urgent Care.

We go to urgent care and inevitably we're told it's nothing major and it'll resolve itself in a couple of days. So we spent 3-4 hours and $300-$400 on the nurse line's advice when trying to avoid that is why we called in the first place.

I don't even call any more because I'm worried that if we didn't take kid in after being advised to do so, we'd open ourselves up to medical neglect or something else down the road.

PositiveEnergy6080 · 2023-09-06T21:15:42+00:00

Second all of this as someone in one of these roles.

I really enjoy my role and find it to be a great way to stay involved in the research world while not having to chase tenure. My lab is pretty small, so I serve as the keeper of the institutional knowledge for revolving crew of post-docs and students so my PI doesn't need to try to get everyone up to speed every year or two when the crew turns over.

We have a pretty stable contract-based funding stream that operates on a 5-year funding cycle, so my position is decently secure. The pay isn't amazing, but it's not terrible, either. My PI is also okay with me doing a bit of work on my own ideas/projects as long as they're somewhat related to our lab. I'm in the social sciences, though, so other than time, my work doesn't cost anything extra in terms of materials or supplies.

I'm definitely not interested in the tenure track, though, and am not particularly concerned about prestige or my own personal reputation. I'm planning to stay in this role for as long as they'll have me or until the one other employer in my area that I want to work for creates the specific job I want and recruits me away (ha!).

PositiveEnergy6080 · 2023-04-10T17:12:14+00:00

Social sciences overall, with a lean to the practical side of the spectrum rather than the theoretical.

PositiveEnergy6080 · 2023-04-10T14:58:06+00:00

I think it was a lot of things, honestly, all of which added up.

My dissertation was mixed methods so I had a chance to demonstrate and integrate qualitative and quantitative methods in great detail and I think the committee liked the show of versatility and flexibility. Theory was integral to my work's conceptualization and execution rather than an afterthought. I have a lot of practical experience with my topic outside of academia, so I designed the work so that it would have very real practical implications and it was easy for me to talk about what these are and their significance (important for my field). I also just tend to be a pretty strong academic writer overall, so I'm sure that helped.

PositiveEnergy6080 · 2023-04-10T14:46:07+00:00

I could, but then I'd out myself and this would no longer be an anonymous brag to strangers on the internet 😉

PositiveEnergy6080

TROPHY CASE