Job Depressions

The recession we're in is definitely bad news for academic job seekers... while certain private, well-endowed universities (and UT) can maintain their growth and attractive packages if they choose to... the most state schools are stuck with shrinking state tax revenues, and many private schools are instituting hiring freezes. Some schools are already laying off untenured faculty, so it's not as if already having obtained a job is a guarantee of security for young scientists.

There has been substantial sturm und drang on some senior postdoc blogs, especially in their comments, about this job shortage. And while no one's perspective will be one-size-fits-all, here's my two cents on why it shouldn't matter if one postdocs for a couple extra years. Inherent in this are things like "there is never a right time to have a child," that none of us got into science for the high salaries, and that scientific discovery is what makes one want to get out of bed in the morning.

When I started grad school, my professional goal was to get an academic job without doing a postdoc. I didn't see the value in spending post-PhD years not working towards tenure. It was a perspective of a twenty-two year old who had spent the vast majority of her life in school, and who was itching to get control of her future.

My very wonderful primary PhD advisor repeatedly told me that postdocing was the best time in your scientific life. You've got research independence, you have flexibility and freedom to pursue a wildly different path in your next postdoc, and you're shielded from the demands on your time that accounting, teaching and meetings impose on you. My co-advisor only spent two years postdocing before taking up her R1 job, and she wishes she had done another postdoc with a particular husband and wife academic team at a non-US institution. Essentially, she had accepted a job offer before she realized which lab she really wanted to apprentice in.

What both of my advisors successfully convinced me of was that as long as I am working on what I want to be working on in science, it doesn't matter what my job title is. There's a great confidence in feeling that you're in control of your scientific research, and that it's a journey. When you're explaining your research plan during a job interview, and you say that this is the work you're going to do in the next five years... it's clear that you don't need this particular job. Or any particular job. That you have a dedication, a unique research perspective, and you'll bend any position you take into one that will let you do what you want to do.

If you are a postdoc who is unhappy with your current position, then leaving that postdoc is likely a good call. Hopefully after you have submitted or published much of your work from that lab. If you are in a postdoc where you don't feel fairly independent, that is probably not a good postdoc to be in and it's probably not helping you build the skill set that would need for running your own lab.

That's a very broad stroke appraisal that doesn't address many of the specific problems being discussed in blogs. Such as how to entice mentors to publish good manuscripts their postdocs are generating. Or how to convince a mentor that publishing in a journal that's not C/N/S is worthwhile. Or how to find a supervisor who will actually be a mentor. These are variations on trying to cope with ones current postdoc, but it should be said that postdocing in and of itself isn't the enemy. Some advisors are, the perspective of some fields on postdocs as competent slave labor definitely is a problem.

I do understand that there is a limit to the number of years a person can postdoc before their CV looks a bit stale. However, I have seen older candidates and people with more than six years of postdoc experience get great tenure-track jobs. These people have spent their postdocs working on what they know is an important research thread... even if others don't always agree. They publish well-reasoned papers on experiments others wouldn't have thought to do. They waited for a number of their papers to get noticed, and waited for their ideas to change what hiring committees thought were important.

I was recently asked by a science journalist to talk about my primary PhD advisor's approach to science for an article she was writing about him. The research accomplishments that I kept highlighting were all from his (6 years) of postdocing. He hasn't been sitting on his laurels as a tenured professor, but his revolutionary papers, so far, have been from his postdoc years. And, frankly, we all get tenure based on our tenure-track funding but our postdoc papers -- they are the ones that have had enough time to be well-known, or to be cited enough to help our h-indices.

There is a theme here of cream rising to the top, even if others don't realize early on that the person is cream (acknowledge their creaminess?). Will all current postdocs get TT positions? No, but then again, it's been a long time since that was the case... if it ever was. Some people prefer industry or policy jobs -- for some it was always the plan to go that route, others discover that is their passion, and some others may end up feeling like it's the best of a series of unappealing options. I don't think that non-TT jobs should be considered consolation prizes, and I think having a job you like or love is the goal. Some people realize that science isn't for them and some people aim for a level of success in science that probably won't happen for them. Almost all of us will fail to become endowed chairs at Harvard and most PhD scientists will fail to become tenured at R1 schools. But the people with good ideas, good communication skills and the stamina to survive the initiation rituals of science do succeed in having some kind of scientific career that makes them happy. At least in my discipline.

That was a lot more than two cents...