I earned exactly the same when I was 35, 20 years ago. My colleagues and I used to joke that our pay was matched to our age. It was like that for a while - we earned $3.3k when we were 33, $3.4k at 34, and $3.5k at 35.

Luckily after 35, things got much better.

But hey, that was 20 years ago. Now I heard new graduates are already commanding $3k - $4k as starting pay.