 Hi everyone, it's Monica Wahee here with some data science career advice for you So I made a blog post where I said I could write your peer-reviewed article for four thousand dollars Which is kind of like saying I can sell you a bicycle for one dollar It sounds impossibly cheap because typically you will pay between ten and twenty thousand dollars To have one of these teams write your peer-reviewed article for you So in the blog post I broke down a typical budget for a consulting project If you use a public health statistics and research consulting company to write your peer-reviewed article for you Then I explained how using my approach. I eliminated a lot of tasks on the budget That's my strategy for getting my price down from ten to twenty thousand dollars to four thousand dollars But then I realized that a lot of my LinkedIn learning learners and other people who follow my accounts are Probably trying to apply for those jobs at those public health research consulting companies Maybe they are even thinking of being managers at one of these companies So for you I decided to make this video to provide more detail on what to expect If you are part of one of these teams and in the process, I'll be able to explain Why these teams cost so much Let's start with an assumption and that is whenever you do an analysis and write a peer-reviewed paper Certain tasks always need to get done no matter what So the consulting team is being hired by a customer company. So the team is serving the customer That means the team needs some sort of project lead to interface with the customer also the team needs scientific oversight But then you have to think of all their operational work. There's lots of paperwork involved IRB applications, data documentation, writing the manuscript, writing emails to set up meetings, lots of organizing of the team So someone has to do that and of course someone needs to be dealing with the data and doing a statistical analysis So what public health research consulting companies do is split these tasks up into three different positions One two three These are the kinds of positions that you can get if you are willing to prepare yourself with the proper background and apply Let me go through them with you. Let's take the first batch of tasks, which is leading the project and providing scientific oversight This role is a lead epidemiologist or lead researcher role These people almost always have a doctorate like a PhD or a DRPH Which is why I don't qualify for this job because I don't have one of those But you will see both men and women in these roles These roles are expensive. They cost the customer over a hundred dollars per hour and some of them take home salaries That are pretty high. They are at least on par with academia You can make a serious career out of being a consulting lead epidemiologist on projects There's usually one lead researcher per project, but they will often want to get outside expertise to weigh in So they will interface with other researchers at the customer site or with their own consulting group Just as part of their job They deal with the customer at a high level because they only spend a few hours on every project compared to the other two roles Okay, now let's move on to talking about the second role. This is the project coordinator role This is the role that does most of the work having to do with putting the manuscript together and making the final product That involves paperwork writing and organizing. This is a very typical role for newly graduated MPHs especially women Why? Because even though this job requires the most skills and is the most critical to the success of the project It is seen as like a woman's job. So it is treated with profound disrespect These are the cheapest people on the project. The customer often pays less than a hundred dollars per hour for this role So you know the people in it make much less Usually there is one project coordinator per project But they are expected to adeptly manage multiple projects at a time and somehow succeed at having Everything magically come together on all of them. As you can see, this is a hard job with low respect low pay and Very little protection, especially if you are working on site So this is seen as a stepping stone job Rarely does anyone choose to do this job as a career long term Well, it's a good job to get experience. The problem is that no one teaches you how to do anything So if you don't magically already know how to be a project coordinator when you get there you quickly and spectacularly fail Okay, let's move to the last role, which is the data intensive role They normally call this the statistician role, but really this person does a lot of data management as well as statistics Someone who calls themselves a data scientist could do this role provided. They know their statistics well enough Most of these people only have a master's degree But they cost almost the same to the customer as a lead epidemiologist over a hundred dollars per hour They may be assigned to a project to be the only statistician on it Or there may be a team of statistician if it's a data intensive project And this is the kind of profession that either you like it or you don't If you like bopping around from project to project then maybe this job is for you But if you try it and you don't really like it It also makes a good stepping stone job as part of a long-term statistical or data science career Okay, now that you know all about these roles and what they do Let's estimate why it costs so much to have a team like this developing your peer-reviewed manuscript Let's start with the epidemiologist This person has few hours overall on the project But let's make it easy on ourselves and estimate a monthly cost for this person on a long-term multi-month project Let's say this person was devoting on average 10 hours per month to a project at a cost of at least a hundred dollars per hour To the customer already we are up to $1,000 per month And this is a low ball estimate the cost actually may be higher Especially if the researcher is well known in the field that is the topic of the manuscript Okay, now remember the project coordinator does most of the work on the manuscript, so they have a lot of hours Let's assume for our calculation that they devote 40 hours a month to a project That would be about one entire work week per month But depending upon the project it could easily be more and remember these people are undervalued So let's assume they cost the customer only seventy five dollars per hour Even with low balling this person's hours and cost we still end up paying three thousand dollars per month for their services Okay, now let's make an estimate for the last role the statistician role Now for the statistician like with the project coordinator the hours can get high as well However, the problem with the statistician role is that it is very costly to the customer almost as costly as a lead epidemiologist and If you have a very data intensive project They could be devoting as many or even more hours than the project coordinator to the project Depending upon the month and the timeline But let's low ball this estimate and assume 40 hours per month like the project coordinator at a hundred dollars per hour This is four thousand dollars per month for the statistician So imagine you have a project that will take maybe four to six months to go from data to manuscript draft as You can see on the slide when you add everything up You could be paying as much as eight thousand dollars per month or even more depending upon the data intensiveness of the project At this rate a four month project is already thirty two thousand dollars Even cutting that in half is high and think of all the time It takes just to get these people to meetings and to edit a draft and to be on the same page While you are paying for the expertise and the convenience You are also really paying through the nose for this team to mess around with meetings and Communication and trying to get the statistician and the project coordinator on the same page You know the drill lots and lots of overhead Which brings me to my point which is that this is kind of set up is fine If you are rich like the government or like one of these wealthy research institutes But if you are a regular person You don't want to be paying for all these meetings for the statistician to try to explain to the project coordinator What they did with their model so she can write about it and so on who wants to pay for all those painful conversations anyway So I can do the same thing that these research teams do and I can do it for a lot less I can do the whole project for four thousand dollars and it usually takes me about a month at the most So what's my trick? I do all three roles. I basically can just do all of it So I do that that way. I don't have to have meetings with myself and you don't have to pay for them It's just you and me baby and I'm transparent We set up a draw box and I share all the files with you no playing footsie hide the data games And if I'm doing something you aren't familiar with I just teach it to you That's why having teaching skills and consulting skills and one person is so helpful I admit one advantage that the public health research consulting companies have that I don't is More than one person working there Like I can take your project from data to draft in about a month But then I can only really do one project at a time I don't have a lot of bandwidth and also you'd be surprised at the amazing number of subjects I know just check out my Google scholar profile page I'll link you to it in the video description and if I don't know the subject you can just teach it to me That's how I wrote all these other papers So what are you waiting for if you have $4,000 burning a hole in your pocket? And you have a burning desire to get your peer-reviewed paper done Email me or connect with me on LinkedIn and we'll schedule a Skype call to meet for a free consultation I Made this video to help you understand why these consulting teams Costs so much and how I work with the customer tech cut the costs and streamline the research If you are interested in learning more about these different consulting positions Maybe even trying one of them. You'll want to watch my video that goes more in-depth about each role And if you are thinking of hiring one of these teams like you work at an organization That contracts with these kinds of teams You'll want to watch my video on what to look out for when hiring these teams and how to get the best bang for Your buck with them. I'll link you to those in the description. I Hope this video opened your eyes to some points to ponder in the world of public health research consulting Thanks for watching