The 100 by 30 project

Job interview DON'Ts

A few days ago, we had a young (26 or so) grad student giving a job talk. In academia, a job talk is what it sounds like -- a talk faculty job candidates give about their current research.

So the speaker is giving his introduction and emphasizes that his work looks for genes related to aging.

"So you can see this is an important issue, especially for the ladies."

The funniest part is this wasn't an offhand, foot-in-the-mouth comment: it had the stiffness of a rehearsed joke!

Royalties and bureaucracy

For the past three years or so, my husband has worked on a side project with a friend of his on his own time, under the direction of a PI at the same institution where he works full-time (his boss knows about the project and approves, but this has nothing to do with his full-time job).

By most measures, this project has been very successful. The product has been licensed by the institution, taken on by several producer/distributors, and demand was high for it before it was even available. They've even earned a few consulting jobs in order to assess a company's needs and see how their product might help.

Obviously, my husband and his friend were awarded the right to royalties by the institution. The royalties are laughably small -- about $2/unit -- but it was always more about working on a cool project with his friend than any expectation of a giant windfall (and hey, it's some passive income that the pf blogosphere is so wild about!).

But it's been about nine months since the first unit was sold, and we haven't seen a dime! Because payments were to be quarterly, at the extreme end we could understand a six-month lag. But nine months? My concern is not that the institution will stiff him; I know that they will pay eventually. This is bureaucracy, not fraud. But I believe that this behavior will cost the institution money. Here's why:

This is not a niche project with a few applications: this is a very general product that could sell many, many units with the right support. (Also, the institution makes a lot more than my husband does; more like $20/unit.) But my husband and his friend are not under any sort of contract and they have no obligation to keep working on this project; in fact, my husband is losing interest. Now that we're thinking seriously about having kids, he's thinking hard about ways to bring in some additional income, and when brainstorming yesterday I suggested spending time seeking companies that might be interested in the product and proactively contacting them about its merits. He was not interested in this at all. Now admittedly, primarily this is because he's a tech person, not a business person, and I think he considers hustling a little unseemly. But I think he would have done this a year or two ago because his enthusiasm for the product was so strong. But in the absence of royalty checks to make him still feel connected to the project, he's ready to move on. Most likely he will move onto something that has no affiliation with the institution and will make no money for them. So instead getting his labor to help them sell more units which they profit from and getting their name out (the institution is obsessed with getting press and being thought of as a top institution), they'll get nothing.

Bureaucracy has its costs.

“I Need This Class to Stay on My Parents' Health Insurance”

One of my favorite non-pf blogs is Confessions of a Community College Dean. Dean Dad always provides such caring and thoughtful insights into academia, especially the underfunded, non-sexy world of community college. The topic of his most recent post is especially interesting: students who register for classes they have no intention of taking so that they can stay on their parents' health insurance.

But there's something fundamentally wrong with a system that rewards people taking that extra class just to get the insurance. I don't entirely blame them for doing it – they've found a loophole in a ridiculously unfair system – but it certainly distorts what we're trying to do. These folks show up in our attrition numbers, our outcomes assessments, and our (non)-graduation rates, all of which get blamed on us. And they get lower GPA's than they probably ought, simply from spreading themselves unrealistically thin.

Go read it.

I feel sick

I generally spend very little time regretting bad financial decisions (if I did, would I still be spending $150/month on soft drinks?). But recently, a mistake has come to light that I think will be causing me waves of nausea every time I recall it over the next two weeks:

Every year my husband and I dutifully go through most of his (and formerly my) employer's open enrollment package. This package covers all non-PTO benefits, such as health, vision, dental insurance;  life and long-term-disability insurance; and health care and dependent care reimbursement accounts. We've been doing it either as singles or as a couple for six years, so it can be pretty routine.

But, you know, it's a long binder. So after we read through all the changes to the four different available medical plans -- even the ones that aren't ours, just in case the changes make them more attractive to us than they've been in the past -- and once again weigh dental and vision options, which has become more interesting to us after having spent $1200 on a root canal and crown combo of mine that was hardly covered by insurance, we get a little worn out and don't always finish the binder. After all, the very end is just the long-term-disability insurance, which I know is very important for kids our age and we already have maxed out, and life insurance, which we already have through State Farm, which also carries our auto and homeowners' insurance.

But this year, being in no particular rush yesterday afternoon and enjoying our time together doing Adult Things, we decided to continue onto the regions of the binder we usually ignore. The first section was LTD, and we ended up deciding to buy a new option that improves the cost-of-living increases for LTD payouts, because it was $3/month.

Then we got to the life insurance section. (Note that currently I have $125k in life insurance via State Farm, and my husband has $60k via work that he gets for free as some percentage of his salary. The imbalance is mostly due to inertia; if anything, he should have the higher coverage so that I could finish my degree even if I lost him.) The rate, for people under 30 like us, was $.07 per thousand dollars in coverage per month.

7 cents per month per thousand. That seemed really, really low.

"What are you paying for State Farm?" my husband asked. Sadly, I had no idea. So I went to look up my latest bill. Astonishingly enough, for what I'm paying for $125k in coverage, we could instead be buying $721k in coverage through work! And to top it off, the first $50k of coverage is paid with pre-tax dollars!*

Sickening. Just sickening.

So what have we decided to go with? In total, my husband will have $250k in coverage and I will have $92k. Our family will have $160k more in coverage for $40 less per month. And we've learned a hard lesson about always reviewing all the options available to you.

* To be precise, for people who care about these sort of details: technically, the full premium is taken out of pre-tax dollars, and then the premium prorated by (total coverage - $50k)/(total coverage) is counted as imputed income, on which we must pay income taxes.

The value of B-school: none?

The Times has an article arguing that business school is a waste of time and money for anyone aspiring to be a Master of the Universe. They make two main arguments:

1. if you have a job in finance, a cost-benefit analysis will reveal B-school isn't worth it
2. if you do go, future employers will reject you for having bungled said cost-benefit analysis

The caveat is that if you're trying to transition into finance from, say, engineering, business school might not be your blackball.

And, of course, none of this necessarily applies if you aren't looking to be one of the hedge fund superstars.

Summer glow

I'm really enjoying my summer too much to think or worry about money. Even when I do, I rarely do anything practical like calculate change in my net worth or figure out how quickly I can pay off the student loans if I increase my monthlies by $100 -- more often I sit around calculating how much I would have to make so that A. could stay home with the kids yet we could still afford this house:

 

Answer: About $90k.

Let's play pretend.

If I were a student in, say, sociology or cultural studies women's studies or social anthropology, you know what I'd want to research? The phenomenon of women pushing for, helping to select, and possibly even helping to pay for an engagement ring, and then concocting some elaborate scheme in which they are "surprised" by an engagement and a ring that they know very well has been sitting in the sock drawer.

Am I the only one who thinks that's fucking bizarre? It's a bit like planning your own surprise party, and then when the guests jump out from behind the couch, you all have to pretend as if you had no idea.

In other news, the job -- the one in which I'm not a sociologist -- is going wonderfully. I could not be more thrilled, and there's ample evidence that the feeling is mutual.

Building a professional wardrobe (with pics!)

The advice I was given about dress for my summer job is "business casual, but you should wear a suit on the first day", suggesting that they lean to the business side of business casual.

I've been a graduate student for two years, and worked in research for four years before that. My business casual wardrobe is non-existent, so I've been doing a lot of shopping.

Here's what I've settled on:

1. Three of these wrinkle-free, tall stretch shirts from Eddie Bauer. At $5 extra for the tall, they're $54.50 each (but if these are half as great as my husband's wrinkle-free dress shirts from L.L. Bean, they're well worth the price).
   
2. These wrinkle-free chinos from Eddie Bauer at $54.50 (again, $5 extra for the tall!)
   
3. This lightweight wool twill suit from J. Crew in navy at $386.
   
    
4. This chino khaki suit from Banana Republic for $236.
   
5. This black and brown reversible dress belt from Eddie Bauer for $39.50.
   
6. The $60 J. Crew blouse that caused so much hand-wringing. It's not even wrinkle-free, but damn do I look good in it!
   
7. A $170 briefcase:
   

That's $1110 for two suits, three pairs of pants (if you include the suit pants), a belt, a briefcase, and four dress shirts! Luckily I have a good number of stylish pairs of business dress shoes, so at most I need another pair or two. Plus some dress socks, and possibly a necklace or two. All in all, that should run another $150 or so, for an approximate total of $1250. And that doesn't even include enough shirts to get through the week without doing laundry! And lucky for me that this is summer only, so I needn't worry about a nice professional coat or sweaters.

Could I have cut the price? Well, certainly. But two factors worked against me:

1. Time. I start work in exactly two weeks, but I'm not done with school yet! This week I have to give a presentation on my research this year, and then I will officially be done. This meant that I had to go with known quantities; while J. Crew and Banana Republic aren't the finest clothiers out there, I knew that I could order online and have a reasonably well-built suit show up at my door. I'm sure there are hidden treasures at JC Penney or Sears or Macy's, but I don't have time to play the order-and-return game to find them.
2. Sizing. As I discussed in detail here, I need tall sizing. Talls tend not to make it to the clearance rack, at least not in consistent sizing. For example, I couldn't get the black chino suit from Banana Republic because, even at regular price, you can see here that while they still have regular blazers in every size and petites in half the sizes, the only tall jackets left are size 2! (The same thing happens with shoes: tens are always sold out. I ask, "Why doesn't the store order more tens, if they know they'll sell out?" Response: "The manufacturer sends them in a batch, we don't get to pick sizes." So why doesn't the manufacturer throw in more tens?! Very frustrating. And Banana Republic has no excuse as they're both the manufacturer and the retail distributor.)

On the plus side, in between using http://naughtycodes.com/ and calling from the store to place an order, I managed to spend only $15 in shipping, including all the returned clothing that didn't make it into the final cut above.

The $60 white cotton shirt

Yesterday I did something I never thought I'd do: I spent $60 on a white, cotton work shirt. It's amazing how quickly costs ramp up when I refuse to compromise on two things:

1. Tall sizing. I'm tall. I want clothes to fit. I don't want to flash belly at work. 'Nuff said.
2. Relatively slim fit. Clothing makers don't seem to understand that tall does not equal weighing a quarter of a ton. Even when I buy tall clothing in my fairly average size (for tops I usually go either with a medium or a 12, depending on how it's sized) the cut seems to be adjusted for "Women's" cuts, as opposed to "Misses", even when I'm ordering a "Misses". I'd be perfectly happy to buy non-tall short-sleeved blouses from JC Penney, but they all have weird billow fits going on in the abdomen. I sometimes feel like I wandered into the maternity department.

So I know people often rationalize expensive clothing purchases with claims like "it's a keepsake" or "paying for quality is better in the long run", but those don't really work here. It's a white cotton blouse. Before long it'll have pit stains or I'll stain it beyond repair or the cleaner will ruin it. It's just a financial sacrifice I have to make as a tall person who wants to look professional.

Adjusting to life in the corporate womb

My summer job starts in very early June, and with the rush of finals, qualifying exams, and finishing up research papers, I recently realized I hadn't done anything to prepare for the logistics of moving to Summer Job City for three months.

"I might as well go ahead and book my flight," I thought, "before prices shoot up." So I did. I tried to balance price versus not leaving too early (maximize time with the husband) versus not leaving too late (minimize move-in stress) versus convenience for my in-laws (who will be picking me up from the airport). In the end, I found a reasonable round-trip ticket for $260 that has one layover in each direction.

But today I get an email from summer job telling me that, by the way, they'll be reimbursing us for travel costs to the job! 1. Sweet. 2. Why didn't you tell me earlier?! Maybe I should have guessed, but although I'm familiar with companies flying me out for interviews, I never imagined that they would pay for my travel costs to the job itself.*

I could get used to this sort of surprise.

And the more I realize how much money this company seems to have available to throw around, the more I really want knock their socks off this summer.

Updated to add: I do know that companies often pay for moving expenses; in fact, both my moves were covered by my new employer. But they never paid for my plane ticket, and I never got any sort of assistance for my summer jobs in undergrad.