Over at Neurotopia, the Evil Monkey is offering advice on how to earn extra money in graduate school:
The key to more than mere culinary survival in graduate school is to volunteer for research studies. I took part in more projects than I could count. Some don’t pay squat. I once spent 2 hours a day for ten days sitting in front of an infrared tracking system that monitored shifts in my visual search patterns and movements of my finger as I followed a dot around a screen. I made about 100 bucks for that. At the time, I thought it a princely sum. Then I discovered where the real money was: in pain.
That’s right. Pain. If you want to make money being a lab rat, seek out the pain studies. Furthermore, seek out pain studies that involve imaging the brain with a radioactive tracer. You’re looking at a minimum of 250 bucks for an hour or two of your time.
A friend of mine did something pretty similar when he was in grad school in international relations. On one occasion, he spent a day as a test subject for a new anti-nausea drug, which involved taking the test substance, and then periodically being given something that was supposed to induce nausea. You really don’t want to be part of the placebo group for that one.
If you have a low pain threshold, though, or, like me, a bone-deep loathing of all things medical, this may not be an option. In which case, you might want to look into the less gross option I used as a grad student: standardized tests.
You can’t make money by taking standardized tests, of course, but you can get paid for giving them. Just about any university in the country will be a designated test center for all those bubble-sheet tests– SAT, GRE, MCAT, GMAT, and the rest of the alphabet soup– and those tests need to be proctored. And the test companies pay surprisingly well.
One of my friends from Usenet, back in the day, was in the psych department at Johns Hopkins, which ran the standardized tests for Baltimore. They had an email list of people they would send notices to whenever a test was coming up, and I managed to get on the list. Every couple of months, I’d get email asking for people to proctor some test or another, and how much they would pay.
The rates varied a bit from test to test, and depending on what job you were doing. It was usually $100-$150. I think the highest rate was for reading the instructions for the MCAT, which was something like $175. That’s a nice extra bit of money, if you’re living on a grad student stipend.
You did have to work for it, but the work was pretty mindless. For most of the tests, you just checked people off a list as they came in, then handed out the test papers, and read the instructions. Then you could read a magazine for an hour or so, until it was time to collect the papers.
The MCAT was more work, because they’re exceedingly paranoid– we had to fingerprint people as they arrived to take the test, and assign them seats. When we collected the papers for each section of the MCAT, not only did we need to count the exam books to make sure we got them all, we had to count the pages in each of the books.
On the bright side, though, you got to see a bunch of future doctors teetering on the edge of a complete mental breakdown. I was always sort of tempted to mess with their heads further (“I’m sorry, this ID picture doesn’t really look like you. Do you have anything else?”), but I’m too nice.
Really, about the worst part of it was having to drive to Baltimore early on a Saturday morning. But that was a small price to pay in order to gain beer and pizza money for a month.
So, if you’re in grad school, I recommend asking around to see if you can get on the list for test proctors. It’s decent money for dull but easy work, and you don’t need to get stuck with needles.