We’ve all received the phone calls from our alma mater universities and medical schools, calls asking to contribute to help out future classes of students. I tend to be sympathetic. It’s clear that we have a shortage of funding for medical research and education in this country, and so, I’ll help do a small part to defray the costs of educating the next generation.<\/p>\n
I really don’t ever say no. But, this week, it got absurd.<\/p>\n
Some administrators from my medical school had invited me to have coffee. The conversation started out about the recent successes of our MD\/PhD program, and how exciting it would be to expand the program. I figured I was asked to give some alumni perspective about how to recruit students or identify donors. <\/p>\n
Once again…famous last words.<\/p>\n
They then showed me a flyer regarding “Alumni Fundraising.” They had conceived of a plan to expand the program using alumni funds; they needed over $1 million from us. <\/p>\n
“We wanted to see if you had interest in contributing.”<\/p>\n
Wait. What? They had mentioned that they were looking for a certain number of “major contributors” (the wording was along these lines). I asked what that meant.<\/p>\n
“Oh, you know, $25,000 over 5 years. It’s really not that bad.”<\/p>\n
*deep breath*<\/p>\n
I then had to start from the beginning. “You know I’m still in training, right?” I explained that as MD\/PhD students, we receive a free medical education and stipend; the entire purpose of this funding is to spare us from being burdened by >$100,000 of debt, which then frees us to take lower-paying jobs in academia to pursue medical research. <\/p>\n
Furthermore, it is not a coincidence that we tend to choose lower-paying specialties on the whole, such as neurology, pathology or internal medicine. It’s not that we aren’t qualified enough to go into higher-paying specialties; these more common MD\/PhD specialties tend to give more flexibility to junior faculty to set aside time for research, since our clinical time does not bring in as much income. Conversely, in a clinical specialty which bills more in 10 minutes than the cost of a front-row seat to a Beyonce concert, there is more pressure for the department to keep its faculty doing clinical work; it becomes more costly to take a risk and have a faculty member spend precious time in the lab. <\/p>\n
And so. Based on our decision to become a part of the MD\/PhD family, we have forgone hundreds of thousands of dollars of potential future earnings; in academics, we tend to earn 1\/2 to 1\/3 the salary of our contemporaries in private practice. We also tend to delay child-bearing, given the 13+ years of medical training…so any leftover salary tends to be spent on daycare, then college savings, until our late 50’s. <\/p>\n
That then brings the pool of eligible donors with $25,000 to spare to the cohort of alumni over the age of 60. They should probably be saving for retirement, but let’s be serious, as doctors, we don’t retire. We just die at some point. So, that’s a small proportion of MD\/PhD alumni that they could try to reel in, but, good luck in tracking these people down. <\/p>\n
The administrators seemed disappointed that former MD\/PhD students did not appear to be the cash cow they needed to balance out the expenditure of the medical school. <\/p>\n
They did not, however, apologize for asking me to donate 1\/3 of my yearly salary to an absurd fundraising campaign. If anything, one of them asked me “Don’t you feel like you should give back?”<\/p>\n
*another deep breath*<\/p>\n
To put this in perspective, I am visibly pregnant, with upcoming daycare expenses for this child. I also already have a child in daycare. I make $65,000 per year, and will continue to be paid a fellow’s salary next year. And you are trying to guilt me into cleaning out my savings for *your* budget?! <\/p>\n
Of course I’d love to help! But the entire reason that I’m still in training, and will make a lower salary for the rest of my career, was due to taking the free medical school education<\/em> that the MD\/PhD program provided in the first place. <\/p>\n We need more federal funding for medical research in this country. Giving up a third of my salary as a “donation” cannot be the answer.<\/p>\n Defiant Bitch, MD<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We’ve all received the phone calls from our alma mater universities and medical schools, calls asking to contribute to help out future classes of students. I tend to be sympathetic. It’s clear that we have a shortage of funding for medical research and education in this country, and so, I’ll help do a small part … Continue reading “#FundraisingFail: When a trainee is asked to donate 1\/3 of her salary”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-94","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/defiantbitchmd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/defiantbitchmd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/defiantbitchmd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/defiantbitchmd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/defiantbitchmd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/defiantbitchmd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":126,"href":"https:\/\/defiantbitchmd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions\/126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/defiantbitchmd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/defiantbitchmd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/defiantbitchmd.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}