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Saturday, March 07, 2015

Get a job as a dissertation writer

Jerry Coyne has found a posting for a job in Toronto [see Dissertations for sale!]. You can see the original at: Dissertation Writers wanted for Work from Home Position. It's suitable for retired professors and post-docs who can't get any other job.
We are a medium sized, cloud-based consultancy headquartered in New York, but with consultants spread across the globe, from Asia to South America. We primarily handle Academic Consulting for Doctorate level clients, and we currently have several job openings in the Academic Research department.

Job responsibilities:
Your main responsibility will be to assist our clients in conducting the research needed needed to complete their theses, dissertations, or journal articles, and then writing drafts for portions of those documents, such as a Literature Review, Introduction or Discussion chapters.

The job will involve communicating with clients by email and by phone to understand their specific needs, provide suggestions on how to improve their research, and finally write a draft of the document itself. It will also involve engaging in ongoing discussions with clients after the first draft, and revising/rewriting the document to our clients' satisfaction.

*This is strictly a work-from-home position*, and any applicant should view this as a strong incentive.

Please note that this is a *full-time position*.

Requirements:
- Applicants must possess a meticulous nature and an extremely high attention to detail.
- A very positive and upbeat attitude (particularly as relates to phone calls and email communication with clients).
- Native English speakers only.
- A 4-year college degree is an absolute must, preferably from a well-known university.
- Ghostwriting or Technical Writing experience is desired, but not a must.
- Tutoring and/or research experience is also a bonus.

Compensation:
Compensation for the successful applicant is very generous. As we expect very few applicants to have directly applicable work experience in this field, there will be an extensive training program before the candidate is taken on in a more permanent capacity. Training will be paid, at USD 4,000/month, and is projected to last 3-4 months. Following successful training, pay will be USD 85,000 - USD 100,000/year.
I've chaired quite a few Ph.D. exams for humanities students and I reckon I could bang out a pretty good thesis in a few months.

As for journal articles, the ENCODE Consortium could hire me for $8000 per month.


5 comments :

Veronica Abbass said...

"*This is strictly a work-from-home position*, and any applicant should view this as a strong incentive."

Why should any applicant view working at home a strong incentive?

Please note that this is a *full-time position*.

Based on the job description it sounds like a 24/7 position. Does the applicant get to ignore email after a 7.5 hour day?

Jonathan Badger said...

"Why should any applicant view working at home a strong incentive?"

People with small children who want to still work without putting the kids in daycare all day for starters. People who want to live in city A but take a job in city B for another. Not that this particular position seems like a good one, but telecommuting in general is very attractive for a lot of people.

Veronica Abbass said...

This notice appeared on the job posting last night:

"This job posting is no longer available on Indeed." http://is.gd/kbt7xM

Michael A. Phillips said...

It's a scam at both ends I think. It says training "will be paid" but it doesn't say by whom. Probably the applicant is expected to pay 4 x $4000 in order to get a salary that will never appear. Who really thinks they can make $100k/year writing articles and theses? Who are the clients that will shell out this much money to have someone ghost write for them?

There are plenty of scams that offer unrealistic salaries to work from home. You just need to pay for the training course first. It's a bit like the Nigerian widow scam. Just pay the wiring fees and she'll deposit millions of her late husbands fortune in your account. This scam has the added twist that you can't easily go after them since you will have signed up to do something unethical or illegal in the first place, so you can say goodbye to your training fee.

This ad will disappear and reappear later somewhere else. They don't need many desperate post-docs to fall for it to turn a profit. As we see a continued decrease in faculty positions due to funding cuts and increasing masses of PhDs with no job prospects, this kind of scam will become more common. A sad sign of the times.

Unknown said...

Indeed there's lots of scams (especially on the web) now but once I did take such a risk though it was only editing job. Surely one won't get paid as much as the client is paying. You'll be lucky enough if you get half of what he paid but I doubt anyone can make $100k a year just by writing. It isn't physically possible. When I was freelancing for DissertationWriter, I could get up to $10 per page (and that was for editing). Assuming for writing from scratch one would get twice as much, we have $20. And in order to earn $100k one has to write 5,000 quality pages - impossible in a year. At least I couldn't do it unless I just copy paste and paraphrase. Still, even that is a lot of work. And dissertation isn't about paraphrasing. So, yeah, that ad is probably a scam.