Lucky you guys...! I had to be in my industrial company's office between 8h00 and 17h00 and get cracking on my PhD between 18h00 till sometimes 23h00 for the past half a year on half a salary as cited above!
Regarding ETH, here it is possible to see what the gross annual salary is for doctoral and post-doc students (from 60% to 100% employment level): http://www.aveth.ethz.ch/sg/regelung_en.html
The question is only if one must work on the specific project or one can suggest something being a postdoc? I went thru the list of advertised positions in the above link but I could not come across anything close to my speciality area i.e. Power Electronics, Industrial Electronics and Variable Speed Drives and Motion Control.
Anyone here who has been working in similar field?
Wow, that's exactly where I went. You know what they say ABB stands for : Andere Bezahlen Besser. If you have a good boss who sees potential in you you can get promoted. Unfortunately my first two bosses at ABB didn't and I got knocked around a fair bit, for example ideas that were actually mine being attributed to my boss. Or I got told off for coming in 20 minutes late although I'd worked till ten the night before. And all sorts of lame and untenable criticism was leveled against me in my reviews so that I wouldn't be considered for promotion and the salary raises were a real pittance. Some of the excuses included coming in late, not tidying my desk enough and supposedly being too friendly with blue collar people from the Balkans (my boss was convinced they were lazy and out to cheat the system and made sure they felt it). I am grateful that I now have a boss who is much fairer and has given me a fair chance. So I am quite happy where I'm now. But I sure have seen the nastier side of ABB and it's something I'm not forgetting in a hurry.
Also the transition from the ETH to ABB was a bit like swapping 21st technology technology for 19th century makeshift tools. Somehow all the software they use is years behind. When I first came to ABB (this was 1996, so before my PhD) they didn't even have email yet. This was quite a shock as at the ETH we had been using email for years and I'd even made my first homepage. At the ETH I had been used to working with computers with a graphical interface such as Macs and Suns. At ABB I was dumped into an environment of dreary machines running DOS and some primitive version of Windows which basically reuired you go into command line mode for anything that was slightly out of the ordinary. At the ETH we had used Matlab and Simulink and such things to help us with our maths. At ABB they told me to make do with Excel, because that was what everybody else used. I tried to convince my boss that email was useful for communicating and he told me it was a silly gimmick that would never catch on. This guy was on the advisory committee for future technologies so it gave me real confidence that the company was in good hands. He's still there by the way.
This depends very much on the department, but a lot of post-doc people I ran into couldn't speak a word of German.
best thing is to try and find out what projects are running or starting. So if you know somebody inside the institute that helps (this is how I got my PhD position). If you don't, arrange to talk to the professor and say you're interested in doing a post-doc and explain your fields of interest and it may be that he can tell you, we have noting right now but this and this is coming up and you might be interested.
Buddies of mine who stayed at ETH for their PhDs in Maths and Physics earn(ed) the kind of figures indicated in 81joe81's post. Over the past three years I've been damning daily the day that I decided that I wanted to do a PhD abroad...
This is exactly my sentiment. When I came first time to ABB, the environment I have been exposed to seemed to be not very conducive with people somehow reserved. An exception here is international people who somehow offset this gap and they could easier break ice with the newcomers. Luckily my project manager is quite open-minded and creative. There are also prospects for career as project manager or project leader in the future but it requires at least few years spend on the duty. So it might be worthwhile being patient.
My major concern is however the fact that I started right at the bottom and I have to climb up the corporate ladder, whereas colleagues who have just got graduated from the varsities and do not have any industrial experience, we all are given the similar tasks. Mine were somehow related to soldering and helping testing subassemblies of the main system to name a few.
In the past I used to work for small companies in SA and there was exposure to vast experience in hardware and software design. We used to learn on the job how to use OrCAD or Protel for schematic capture and layout, how to program the DSP processors and integrate H&S. then we would put everything together test and commission it in the field. Although it was quite intense and time consuming job yet not very well paid, however experience wise it was great. For example my project would be to build entire 7.5kW variable speed drive with all the hardware and control system design and house keeping SMPS to name a few...
Here we just complete the tasks and work on elements of entire puzzle. The reason I would consider academic work is the fact that there are more intellectually stimulating projects and publishing with conferences. This is something that I miss from my PhD years.
Exactely my point. I believe, that is how it even works globally. Sometimes the institute has got funds from government grants, industry and etc. and they search for the people to work on relevant topics. They ask the prospective candidate if he has got any proposal and then they budget and plan.
Maybe I should contact a few profs from ETH and send my CV thru with cover letter?
Just for info, I work on my PhD at UNIL: 85% National Fund, and 15% for Unil. My 'brut' income is 3950.-/month, but what's left after deductions is 3442.50.-
National Fund pays a lot less than University, so it's much better if you can get a full-time assistantship. But they're very very difficult to get, at leat in human sciences and arts!
Hi. I am a PhD stduent at ETH, and I am going to teach and to be financed by the national fund - there is a table below which describes precisely my salary.
My partner might start a PhD in linguistics at the University of Zurich, does anyone know how much she might be paid for it? She is going to have a chat with the profs concerning it, but it could be nice to have the info in advance.
Ohhhhh you work at University of Lausanne? Can you tell me whether any of their International Relations courses (undergrad) are taught in English? Their website search engine doesnt seem to work!