how much do marine biologists get paid this is actually a tricky question to answer because
it's extremely variable which is true of many answers when you're talking about science careers
so as you might guess you get paid a different amount depending on your experience so if you
are an undergraduate for example working in a research lab you often don't get paid you're
often voluntary so for the first several jobs I had as a scientist helping other researchers do
their science I did it all for free I volunteered and what I got out of that was experience that
was good for me for later job opportunities but eventually I did start getting paid this was many
years ago so it probably doesn't help to tell you how much I got paid but it was not a whole
lot sort of close to minimum wage in the US and once you get out of that stage and you get into
graduate school many graduate programs actually do pay you that's often a misconception about
going into Sciences professionally you often don't have to pay for graduate school you get
paid to go to graduate school and in exchange for that money that you're being paid you will either
teach or do research or oftentimes a combination of the two of those things and that compensates
for the money that you're being paid to tool if it's basically a stipend and that amount can be
also highly variable I can tell you from my own experiences and through friends of mine
I think it's safe to say at this point that it's around twenty to thirty thousand US dollars a year
for many PhD programs that I'm aware of master's programs it's often much more challenging to get
funding oftentimes I know students will often take out loans to help pay for their master's degree
for PhDs that's far less common and then once you finish getting a master's degree or getting a PhD
again the job that you get and how much that pays you is can be highly highly variable I can say
that on the traditional academic route so if you go through graduate school you end up the PhD and
you want to work at a university as a professor starting out as a tenure track professor you're
usually going to be making over 70 thousand US dollars a year but that can be highly highly
variable again and over time you can accrue more and more income as you get promotions and
you get more and more experience more and more publications you eventually get tenure you get
paid more and more each of those rungs so it's not at all uncommon in the United States for a
scientist that's a professor at a university to get over a hundred thousand US dollars per year
in salary so that's a decent amount of money you can do a lot with that each year so I would argue
in general if you're really worried about money and you're thinking about pursuing a career in
marine biology really any science you should stop and think about why you think you need a lot of
money because this career offers lots of perks that many other careers that may pay a lot more
don't offer for example by applying for grants and getting additional money to go fulfill my
dreams to go do research and French Polynesia or Mexico or Southeast Asia I'm actually getting a
lot more sort of income although its not actually income for me it's paying for the research paying
for the travel and all the equipment and all of the nuts and bolts that go into actually making
that research a reality I don't count that as income then scientists generally don't count
that as income it's not it's not part of their living they're not paying for their housing and
their food for that generally speaking so there's a lot more to this career than just what is your
salary I guess maybe a more appropriate question is how free are you to do what you want to do
and I think many scientists that have successful research careers are very free to get more money
and do what it is they want to do so it's a little challenging to dissect this too much
from a strictly salary perspective which you might often do for other career tracks like
going into medicine or law or something like that science a little bit different