<p>I know that undergrad is about 4 years, obtaining a PhD takes anywhere from 4-6 years on average, but how long does it take for a physicist to step out of postdoctoral work and into an assistant professorship? It seems like if you want to go into academia now a days, you spend like...10 years doing postdoctoral work with the prospects of maybe landing an assistant professorship. Oh, and also, can you raise a family while trying to become an assistant professor? Seems like it is impossible to even have a wife under postdoctoral conditions, considering the time put into the job and the little output of money.</p>
<p>If i’s all too much for you in terms of timing of everything and you’re daunted by thinking about how much more you have to go before becoming an assistant professor at ripe young age of 40… don’t bother with the academia :)</p>
<p>How often do postdocs land an assistant professorship in their early to mid thirties? Also, do government research jobs require previous postdoctoral work? And how about math PhDs: do they have an easier time obtaining an assistant professorship than physicists?</p>
<p>My H got his tenure track Asst Prof position in 1986 at the age of 28 (he took two one year post-docs following his PhD.) He’s a full professor in mathematics.</p>
<p>Wives are expensive? And they don’t like it when you work hard? (Somebody’d better tell my husband.)</p>
<p>In biology, the typical track is something like 5-6 years as a grad student, 3-5 years as a postdoc, then an assistant professor job. An assistant professor may start around age 35, but might not get his/her first major grant for a few years after that.</p>
<p>Wow OP, that is some good stuff. Most young families are dual income, which means the wife would likely have her own career. Postdoc salaries, though meager by comparison to other doctoral degree holder standards, are still higher than the median salary for the country.</p>
<p>As family planning goes, I have known to grad students who have had children while in grad school. I have known dozens of postdocs who have had children while postdocs. Universities tend to have enlightened work life policies including cheap childcare, generous maternity leave, parental leave for adoptions, great vacation policies and a flexible working environment. </p>
<p>I think your question was ‘how many postdocs do people tend to do before getting a tenure track asst prof position?’ 2-4 years worth of postdocs with outliers at either end. The postdoc training period is not unlike clerkships for pharmacists, fellowships for physicians or **** jobs for MBAs.</p>
<p>Maybe the OP is not American? When DH was in grad school, all the American non-grad student wives worked, while few, if any, of the international ones did. Granted, this was a long time ago, but these cultural differences may still exist.</p>
<p>Everything always gets more complicated (and distracting) when you get married and have children – it doesn’t matter whether you’re a grad student or the CEO of a major corporation. You simply do what you have to do.</p>
<p>On a related side note: The postdoc and tenure process tends to be tougher on women because the majority of housework and child raising still falls on them despite gains in household duty sharing; many universities are considering changing their tenure rules because of it. Shirley Tilghman, the president of Princeton, is very outspoken on this matter. She doesn’t think a woman should have to choose between starting a family and getting tenure.</p>
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<p>I’d say that’s still true of the people I know which are married.</p>
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<p>Two very different numbers indeed. This is interesting. I think I’ll have to ask some professors of mine about their honest opinions. One of my favorite professors has crossed the postdoc stage and is on track to be tenured (basically guaranteed, just a matter of time), but he is truly one of the rising stars of his field. I think he got his position in early 30s. </p>
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<p>Having a family might be what actually is expensive, and to be honest that is what I myself wonder about – clearly it is too early to do so, but one still does wonder. As another note, I anticipate two individuals with very academics-minded attitudes may find it easier to understand each others’ career situations 
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<p>I am wondering, however, how many will vouch for this 2-4 years of postdocing prior to the tenure-track position business? Mollie say 3-5 in her field, which is similar. 5 is a decent amount of time, but more bearable than, say, 7-10.</p>
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<p>If age 27 is roughly when one can expect a PhD, and then an average of 4-5 years is around how long one should postdoc before getting tenure, then in fact this eats up a large part of a woman’s prime time for having a child. I have heard the number 35 given as a rough upper bound in terms of women having healthy kids. So this whole thing is actually a little worrying to me. What are universities doing to change things? </p>
<p>And not to mention, it is hardly inconceivable to me that a decent number of men with academic inclinations would have spouses with similar inclinations, so it would take quite a bit of juggling and incredible discomfort to start a family during this stressful period. At least so it seems. Does the following apply to tenure-track positions, or postdocs, or both:</p>
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<p>One of the (female) graduate students in my lab thinks that graduate school is probably the best time to start a family, because nobody really cares if you delay your thesis by a year, whereas eyebrows will be raised if you have a seven-year postdoc (in bio) or don’t publish a bunch of papers a few years into your assistant professorship. Also, if you have a baby during graduate school, then your child is a reasonable age by the time you start your faculty job. I can’t say I think she’s wrong.</p>
<p>But two of the former postdocs in my lab have recently gone on to become assistant professors at top departments, and both have children. One just had another baby during the early years of her faculty position, actually. Their opinion is that there’s never a good time to start a family in academia, which means that any time is fine, and you might as well just dig your heels in and deal with it.</p>
<p>I mean, it varies very much. In my field people generally do one postdoc (2-3 years usually) before they get an assistant professor position. I know in the sciences it’s not uncommon for people to do 2 or 3 postdocs before getting a position, but it’s also possible to have only one or none at all. It’s all variable – it just depends on who else is on the job market that year and what your profile looks like coming out of graduate school. Most people are younger than 40 when they get an assistant professorship – I’d say early 30s, most of them.</p>
<p>I don’t see how it’s impossible to have a wife under postdoctoral conditions. A lot of people are married in graduate school, and post-doctoral positions usually pay around $40,000 in the sciences and social sciences. And she can’t work too?</p>
<p>I’ve also had that having children during the dissertation phase is the best time, for the same reasons. But I’ve more widely heard that there is no one good time, and you kind of have to suck it up.</p>
<p>In terms of flexibility, I can see that graduate school would be a good time – professors have said that in math at least, after one is done with qualifying exams there’s a huge degree of wiggle room, which can only be good. I guess that would of course involve being married by roughly midway through graduate school, which, while possibly not unusual, isn’t by any means the norm. I think “having to suck it up” about does it. </p>
<p>Having a wife would be no problem, and yes she could work fine, but having a child is much more of a challenge, from what my folks have told me at least, than merely having a wife. Depending on the kid, one spends sleepless nights and may feel like a zombie half the time, and it’d at least seem to me less than ideal to have one’s future in academia seem to depend on work done during this time. While there isn’t any particularly good time, perhaps, I don’t see how that would prevent there from being notably bad ones.</p>
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<p>Since you seem to be experienced, I’d like to ask a question (open to all of course). Just for sake of argument, say one gets a postdoctoral position at School A, which is somewhere one would especially like to have a full time position. And let’s say one gets a more stable, say tenure-track (in my language one step beyond the postdoctoral fellow stage) position at School B, which is less attractive to one than School A for whatever reason. Any encounters like this – what does one do? Would decisions for or against the School A’s and School B’s generally have a huge effect on when one settles down, or is this a fantasy scenario that doesn’t really occur too often?</p>
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Well, that’s the point, though – that you can effectively not do work during that time and just delay graduation by a year or so. You do the “real work” before the baby and after the baby sleeps through the night.</p>
<p>Mollie is right. My husband went directly from PhD to assistant professor in 1986, but we delayed having a child until he had been in his new position for a couple of years. Although financially it was better to wait, the professional demands made it tougher. He had far more time and flexibility as a graduate student than he did as an assistant professor. In fact, he had to give a final exam in the middle of my labor. :)</p>
<p>To paraphrase my mother, if you wait until you can afford children or until you have the time to raise them, you’ll never have children. Unfortunately, that’s life.</p>
<p>I second what belevitt said about enlightened policies. At my college, the mother or father gets a semester’s paid leave for the birth or adoption of a child. In a couple of cases in my department, the faculty members had nannies so the new parents still came into the office regularly to get their research done. Such leaves also stopped the tenure clock, meaning the faculty member had an additional year to get research done. I would also reiterate that while post-docs are the norm in the sciences, they are rare in humanities and social sciences.</p>
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<p>I’ve been married to a government research physicist for more than 30 years. DH does basic research at one of the National Labs and we have many friends in both academic and government physics (SNL, LANL, NREL, LLNL, ORNL, NRL, AFRL, etc) research communities in the US. </p>
<p>Permanent research positions in government labs require a postdoc if you’re interested in basic research. Hiring for applied research positions can be a bit more flexible, particular if you’re willing to do weapons-related work and your thesis pertains directly to the field you’ll be working in. However almost all the recent hires I’ve seen have all been either post docs or professors who have fled academia.</p>
<p>As far as hiring for government positions go–no difference between math and physics from what I can see. (Unless you’re some sort of freaking genius in computer encryption/quantum computing and willing to work for the NSA. He had a job months before his thesis even went before his defense committee this spring.)</p>
<p>And every research scientist I know (both male and female) had a working spouse to help support the family while in grad school or post doc-ing. Most of the couples had children in their 30’s or even in a couple of cases their 40’s–after the scientist’s career was settled. One female physicist did buck the trend and dropped out of her doc at MIT, worked, raised 2 kids to elementary school age, then went back to grad school in her mid 30’s–and kicked the asses of all the 20 somethings in her classes. (Of course, by then she had a working spouse to support her since her DH had finished his doc and was a assistant prof. Two body problems are messy.)</p>
<p>How many hours per day and days per week does a typical post doc in sciences usually work?</p>
<p>EDIT/PS: I just want to let you all know that I am far from this stage yet; however, I would like to know what I will be jumping into. I definitely know that it is tough while you are a postdoc, but I just want to know some of the basics for curiosity’s sake. :)</p>
<p>Depends on the lab. </p>
<p>I read in Nature a few years ago that the average postdoc in the sciences in the US works fifty hours a week. From my perspective, that sounds like a substantial underestimate.</p>