Hi everyone,

Does anyone have any idea about the standard salary for assistant professor position at ETH Zurich?

Hi, I'm also looking for such figures! Any answers?

I don't expect this Swiss Salary Calculator will help, but one never knows.

For assistant professors: 144'588 (min) - 258'854 Fr. (max)
for extraordinary profs: 174'068 - 238'333
for ordinary profs: 203'512 - 267'777

link:
http://www.rechtssammlung.ethz.ch/pd...rdnung_eth.pdf

Jeepers, creepers.......... they could almost move into the Dolder on these salaries

Go for a walk up the hill there some-time...definitely some professors living around that area...

Why do ordinary profs earn more than extraordinary profs?

If you were Swiss you would already know, but since you are not Swiss and do not know, you will not get what the Swiss Profs get until you are in the club.

ordinary = chaired professorship, extraordinary (ausserordentlich) = unchaired

But you knew that...

bit of a long hike uphill from here................

An extraordinary professor is a bit like an associate professor in the US, while an ordinary is a full professor. (but not all full professors in the US are "chairs").

A salary of CHF200k in Zurich doesn't necessarily allow you to buy a house.
Living costs in Zurich are astronomically high. The numbers sound high, but in my opinion the exchange rate is skewed. Expensive is also child care, and pension fund contributions, if you enter Switzerland at some advanced age. You have to retire here at 65, and before that you have to pay in your pension fund budget, otherwise you have no income at age 66. If, for example, you enter Switzerland at age 42, you will probably be asked to pay the equivalent of two brutto annual incomes into the pension fund system. That would be something you could ask the ETH to contribute for you, but it is not necessarily working that way.

An assistant prof in the ETHZ earns roughly the same as in the US, in terms of buying power, living quality, social benefits, child care, etc..

In addition, tenure track is a different beast in every institution. In some institutions, it is a rewarding good thing. In other institutions it is a time-limited ultra-stress-full employment without (almost) any chance of prolongation. The ETHZ is probably somewhere in the middle.

Isn't "assistant professor" simply a glorified post-doc? When I was doing my PhD in Bern, one of the department group leaders called all his postdocs "assistant professors" for some reason.

No.

An assisant professor is exactly that, a junior professor, with tenure-track.

OK, so it's just a difference in terminology then. The assistant profs I knew didn't have tenure.

They are trying for tenure. That is what tenure-track means.

Not really. Postdocs are on temporary contracts to do research guided by a professor (normally). They really don't have a lot of other responsibilities. This varies by professor, but my old PhD advisor used to say that it was the last chance you had to have no responsibility and still do great research.

Asst. profs (normally) are tenure-track, meaning they have to write grants and bring in money, set up labs, create their own research, manage PhD students, etc.

Again, all this varies by department and/or university but this is, in general, the responsibilities of each.

I understand that, it's just this prof called his Postdocs assistant profs, when they quite obviously weren't.

With crappy wages and no thanks, he had to try and bolster their feelings somehow...

I think that's it precisely.