Presumably they're people who don't have student loans.
For grad students it's acceptable to live very cheaply. Split a 5 bedroom house and pay dirt cheap rent. Typical salaries are around $30k/yr, if you spend 600/month on rent that's $7k, $300/month on food is another $4k, a few thousand on taxes, and you're left with $15k to spend on random stuff. $5-10k of that can easily go towards travelling. You can fly round trip to almost anywhere in the world for $1k.
Freelove wrote:
gdm wrote:The med student's already forking out a couple hundred grand for school, what's a few thousand more? Loans are pretty easy to come by.
The biggest perks of a Ph.D are (1) that you have a flexible schedule, and (2) you get to travel to potentially interesting places for conferences or other work functions. With (1), you can take a week off and make it up later by working extra hard. In practice almost nobody works extra -- even if they're sitting at a desk for 80hrs/week, they're futzing around on facebook and Letsrun most of that time. Perk 2 means you can get a free flight to various places, and that's often the biggest cost of a trip.
I know a lot of Ph.Ds, and they're all solidly middle class (some upper-middle), no trust fund. Rich kids are smart enough to know that there's no money in a Ph.D, and for most people it's a dead-end job. If I had a trust fund, why would I bother working on a Ph.D?
Maybe it's just a function of what I study, but the PhDs I know are almost all fairly wealthy foreigners (mostly Asian). They'll also make good money when they graduate.
No, not just what you study. I'm an English PhD from a top 20 university and I (and my collegues) also also travel a lot. Most of us have parents who earn 400+ K a year.
If you know these people then why not ask them as opposed to anonymous people on LRC? Or do you not really know them and are basing a lot of this off of assumptions? It just seems odd that if you know person X and person Y, then perhaps you might know a little more about their lifestyles and how they are able to live them the way they do. Perhaps they are fortunate enough to tack vacations on to research related travel (conferences, field work, etc...).
If the money is coming from their parents (a likely source), then choosing how it is spent is their prerogative. Perhaps the parents genuinely want them to be able to travel and see the world while they are young. I don't see how spending money someone gave you is wrong unless of course there were stipulations placed on receipt of that money and its use. There is also the off chance that they have won some prestigious scholarships out there. I have a friend who won a very prestigious scholarship during the 2nd year of his PhD to the tune of $50,000/year for three consecutive years. Granted he used a good chunk for research, travel and networking to land himself in the position he is in now, but he also did have plenty left over.
Also, as someone who just finished his PhD and did not vacation internationally, I would be jealous if I know other grad students who were doing what you described for purely entertainment reasons. I'm not saying it's wrong, as I would do it myself if given the opportunity, just that it sucks sometimes to watch others live it up so to speak when you are not able to. But, we all have things to be grateful for in our lives and some are not as measurable as others. For example, I live in Canada in a cold region and am just accepting now that the next 5-6 months will be full of blocked driveways from snow plows, plugging in my vehicle every night, snow shoveling core workouts that I didn't plan, treacherous commutes, and no vacation plans... but, I do enjoy my job and fiance.
As a PhD student in stats, I had a full ride plus a 30K/year stipend. I also managed to bring in about 20k/year consulting on the side. And I had money saved from working before grad school.
Grad school was easy compared to my job, since profs were used to teaching people who didn't really know how to apply statistics. So I could have vacationed even when classes were in session if I wanted to. While writing My dissertation, I spent a summer in Latin America and a year in another city to be near friends. I skied every winter.
Life was never so easy before or since.