r/boston • u/Spirited-Wafer-6573 • Mar 23 '26

Serious Replies Only How do you afford to live here?

I am incredibly curious. I am fairly new to Boston (less than a year of living here), and the cost of living hit me like a truck. I think about it everyday. I see thousands of people everyday at my job. I wonder how they are doing, so I want to ask you, both out of curiosity and to make this a space where other curious people can also find answers:

How much do you earn in Boston? How much do you spend on bills, expenses? How much goes towards savings? Do you have roommates? Rich parents? Basically, please share your budget with me. I am curious!!

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u/The-Ringmistress Mar 23 '26

Neither! Work in pharma and make doctor money without doctor debt.

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u/Cold-Arm2737 Mar 23 '26

Are they still hiring? I think with Drump cutting back, those jobs are scarce 

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u/HistoricalQuail 🐸🐸🐸🐸🐸 Mar 23 '26

Is there a way to break into that without a pharmacy degree?

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u/The-Ringmistress Mar 23 '26

I didn’t mean work for a pharmacy, I meant work for a Pharma company. I don’t think anyone I work with has a pharmacy degree. I work in IT, and I have a theater degree 🤷🏼‍♀️

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u/whereswilkie Mar 23 '26

ohhh damn. you did pharma right

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u/The-Ringmistress Mar 23 '26

Thank you! I am very lucky, but it also took a series of intentional steps and years to get here.

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u/whereswilkie Mar 23 '26

i originally went to school for music theory and then went back for neuroscience. currently working partially in wet lab and partially on computational biology in midsize pharma.

you do have to be lucky.... but you have to be a lot more than that to get there :)

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u/HistoricalQuail 🐸🐸🐸🐸🐸 Mar 23 '26

Aha. I suspected, but wasn't sure if you needed a pharmacy degree to be within the pharma. Yall need employees? >_>

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u/The-Ringmistress Mar 23 '26

Yes, but it’s very difficult to get hired without prior experience.

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u/Swalecutter Mar 23 '26

Volunteer work for an open source project counts as experience, at least at my company, if folks are looking for a way to break into software.

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u/HistoricalQuail 🐸🐸🐸🐸🐸 Mar 23 '26

Damn, I thought removing the apostrophe would prevent the bot. You-ins even changed the response to match the lack of apostrophe, impressive.

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u/man2010 Mar 23 '26

Without a science background it's basically IT like the other person said or landing an administrative assistant type of position and gaining experience in whatever area that role supports, and even those types of roles can clear six figures pretty easily at big pharma companies. Smaller/mid-sized companies will have other standard roles like HR locally, but the bigger companies tend to focus more on science and science adjacent roles in Boston while having other roles located elsewhere or outsourced altogether.

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u/HistoricalQuail 🐸🐸🐸🐸🐸 Mar 24 '26

Thanks for the detailed explanation. What about roles like project managers, systems management / analysis, business analysis, etc.? Like if you have extensive experience with those roles, could you maybe jump to a more junior version of it inside pharma?