[the_only_law]

> If this person was living on $300,000 a year in the industry, do they really want to come here and work for me as a doctoral student for $62,000

Damn $62k as a PhD student? I thought it was more like half that. It wasn’t too long away I was only making a bit more than that in a failed industry career.

I’m thinking about doing one (not in CS though) and this does seem like a helpful blog, though I’ll have to complete undergrad first, which is it’s own beast a non traditional student (I’m convinced the university system doesn’t give a damn about non traditional students outside very specific demographics)

[mattkrause]

That is a crazy stipend! Maybe somewhere in California + CS + some kind of top-up, but elsewhere, half of that is still relatively generous.

For reference, the NIH stipend for a starting grad student is $26,648; you'll get to $62k after six years...of postdoc.

[keithwinstein]

That's the current salary for a Stanford CS PhD candidate who stays for the summer in a "90%" research assistantship (as is typical in some subdisciplines), but (a) obviously the cost of living here is high, and I think some of that salary has to go back and pay for housing and some portion of health insurance, and (b) many PhD students do an internship in industry during the summer and can end up making more than that.