So far these comics seem to describe the life of a post-doc accurately. I’m glad to have time to put my thesis into publishable form, and I’m glad to have the time to find another job. I’d like to be faculty member somewhere. Being a post-doc is well worth it for these activities.
My question is whether there is any value in being a post-doc other than the extra time to publish your thesis and the extra time to find a faculty job? From my PhD experience, it took several years to put together high quality publishable work, and for a journal paper, the time from submission to publication can be a year (e.g. for one of my published journals this time took 11 months). It is hard to think I will be getting valuable publications out of even a two year post-doc. One can be a post-doc for “training”, but this idea doesn’t completely make sense to me.
Any thoughts from anybody who is a post-doc or considering being a post-doc would be appreciated.
I am also a postdoc. I love PhD comics, but I find these two to be very inaccurate for my life as a postdoctoral fellow. But, I think that the benefits (and the lifestyle) of a postdoc really depend primarily on the length and type of postdoc that you get. If you are a postdoc that works directly for a scientist to help them get their work out, then it’s probably less independent. I found a postdoctoral fellowship where I was explicitly told that I was allowed to do whatever I wanted, and I don’t work for anyone in particular - I chose my mentors and I choose the projects I want to do. So I really have found myself moving towards independence; I don’t work with any graduate students, and I am already nearly finished putting my thesis into publishable form just 6 months in (but then again, I prepared my thesis in such a way as to make it easy to do this when I came into the postdoc).
I am working on new projects; given the timeline and where I am I imagine that I’ll have a few at least submitted before I hit the market in August/September. I also chose this postdoc with the knowledge that I could do it for 3-4 years if I wanted to, as several of their postdocs have stayed on as soft-money research associates or gotten some other kind of funding to remain in place. Right now that’s actually my plan, to stay for a third and possibly fourth year. I like my town and I love my mentors and my research center, and I want my next move to be semi-permanent so I’d rather hold out for the “perfect” academic job rather than take one and try to publish my way to a more desirable location.
But anyway, here are the additional values I have found in being a postdoc:
Learning grant-writing. This is something I only participated in peripherally in grad school, but this spring I’ll be writing my own grant in a grant-writing workshop for postdocs.
Taking the time to figure out what kind of professor I want to be. I wasn’t sure what kind of institution I wanted to be at, so I thought the time and the life as a postdoc would give me the space to figure out whether I wanted to focus primarily on research as a professor at an R1, or primarily on teaching, or whether I wanted a place that balanced both (this is my goal, actually).
Expanding my professional network. My postdoctoral mentors are senior scientists who know a lot of people in the field, and through them I have met a lot of other people. I have a whole new set of collaborators and folks who will keep their eyes open for me for jobs, write recommendation letters, and help me build a tenure case when the time comes.
Spending a little time recovering from the intensity of graduate school. My postdoc is as intense as I want it to be, and I have gobs of glorious time to focus solely on research - no teaching, no classwork, no dissertation. It’s been absolutely great! This time has been necessary for me to recenter and rediscover my love for research.
My postdoc is technically a training fellowship, but the “training” is basically the same kind of professional development a new assistant professor would do. I’m learning new statistical and research methodologies because that is the training component, but the training is also in grant-writing, in networking, in putting together conferences and research symposia, in planning independent research projects…basically in making the transition from a mentored graduate student to an independent scholar.
I agree with you on your point “4)”. My post-doc is helping me recover from grad school. I also agree on point “1)”, and I have received some training in grant writing…this has been meaningful.
It is interesting to hear about your experiences and how “independent” you are allowed to be. My post-doc is nothing like this. I am not nearly as independent as what you describe.
I am very tempted to try to do the exact opposite of this. Apply for positions as soon as one more of my journals is accepted. Try to get in some place “good enough”. At least at that point, I will have control over my research. At least in engineering, profs move from University to University regularly. Many profs move on after three to five years…even when they would have gotten tenure.
Do you have thoughts about why you think it is best to wait for the “perfect” job, rather than getting your foot in the door somewhere and trying to publish and build yourself up for a better job?
I am not sure what your field is and it varies a lot from one area to the next but I can tell you what it is in physics and chemistry as that is where my expertise lies. I was a post-doc many years ago and I have seen a lot of post-docs at my university, Illinois Tech, and at Argonne National Laboratory where I have a lot of collaborators. Finally a soon to be family member has just moved from a post-doc position to a faculty job in August of 2015 (she is in Biology).
As a post-doc in the physical sciences you need to expand your research directions. It is important to do something a bit different than what you did for your Ph.D. Yes, you can publish your dissertation but you also need to publish as a post-doc. This is particularly important if you want a position as a faculty member.
I agree with @juillet that getting experience writing research proposals is important. If you have a chance to help your advisor do this, that is a real plus. You can try writing an NSF post-doc proposal on your own and if you are in the biological sciences, there are NIH programs to help post docs have funding when they move to a faculty position.
Finally, get involved in mentoring graduate students and possibly even teach a course on the side since it is important to demonstrate that kind of experience for your next position.
When you go for a faculty interview, you need to have not only a talk about your research as a post-doc but also at least one (sometimes they ask for two) research proposal that you can defend and which will form the basis for your first research proposals.
No, or at least not generally applicable thoughts. This is my choice and my personal decision based on my own preferences. I am tired of moving - I did undergrad, grad, and postdoc in three separate cities, and that was after a childhood spent moving around (I went to 9 different schools between K and 12). I am married, and I have to think about my spouse too, who does not want to move around with me all across kingdom come (I don’t blame him!). We want to have children in the next 3-5 years, and we want to give our children a place to grow up for a few years. I want to be kind of close to our parents, too, in a specific geographic region of the country (broadly defined, of course).
Plus, I am very happy in my postdoc. I love Postdoc Town; I love my mentors; the work is interesting and I am independent. I have fairly good prospects for remaining funded for the next 2 to 3 years should I wish. I can stay here for the short-term and be very happy until I find a great other place to be permanently.
Oh, and @xraymancs mentioned another benefit which I forgot, which was to plan your research agenda for the next 5-7 years. Job talks ask you what your next steps are, what you are going to write a grant on. At one of my postdoc interviews I was actually asked what was the next-next grant I would want to write - like the grant after the next grant (which I pre-emptively discussed in my job talk). Nobody cares much about your dissertation at all in this stage, at least in my experience - they want to know that it’s published and buried and that you’re leading to new things. Funding is everything, and I could feel myself being judged on the fundability of the projects I wanted to do - departments want to believe that a new assistant prof they hire is going to get grant money. Most of my work is NIH-funded. I thought that a good postdoc would give me the opportunity to plan the scope of my work - put together a coherent story about the kind of scholar I am and will be for the next 5-7 years (at least until after tenure!) and make some plans for the kinds of research projects I want to do next. Even in just the first 6 months it’s been tremendously helpful in that regard.
I don’t mentor graduate students or teach, but I did plenty of mentoring students and quite a bit of teaching in grad school. I am planning to reach out to some professors at my university to guest-lecture in some classes, but I’m also limited by my postdoc in how much teaching I am allowed to do.
I also wasn’t (and still am not) sure that I wanted to be an academic at all. I considered non-academic research work as well as non-academic corporate work like consulting. I did some research and found out that people often go into these types of jobs after postdocs, so I figured it couldn’t hurt and might help in a variety of different fields - particularly since my postdoc is in an in-demand area (applied statistics & research methods).
@xraymancs …fair enough. How long are post-docs in your area of Physics and Chemistry? Like I said, from submission to publication, my first journal paper took 11 months. Are universities in your field expecting post-docs to publish after 1 or 2 years?
Engineering post-docs vary wildly some are 3 or 4 years…some can be 3 or 4 months…it depends on when the post-docs find a faculty position. Engineering faculty I’ve talked to have radically different opinions on the value on necessity of a post-doc. I’ve heard everything from “Do it if you absolutely have to” to “I was a post-doc for 3-4 years, and you should be one too if you want to be a faculty member”.
In physics, a post-doc usually lasts about 2 years, at the most 3. For an experimental physicist who wants to move into a faculty position, one post-doc is the average. For theoretical physicists, it is more like 2 post-docs before getting a shot at a faculty position.
I do think that engineering is different. It is likely that the average number of post-doc positions before getting a faculty position is less than one. I think it pretty much depends on the market for engineers with Ph.D.s. I think that there are a lot more engineering positions for engineering Ph.D.s while physics Ph.D.s can take good industry jobs but they will likely move away from physics as a career when they do so. This would lead any physicist who wants a career at a university to stay with the post-doc track to stay in the field while it is quite common to see engineering come from industry to a faculty position.
As for publications, yes, it is expected that you can get at least one good publication in a 2-year post-doc by the time the position is over, more can come later.
I’m actually in the social sciences, but in a social science field where doing one postdoc for 1-3 years is pretty standard before netting the most prestigious jobs in the field (faculty positions at R1 universities and elite liberal arts colleges). Virtually all of my friends and colleagues in the same field went on to postdocs directly after grad school, as opposed to faculty positions. On the other end, though, doing more than one postdoc is not common - generally the people who do it have a specific reason like geographic constraints, a need to improve performance that wasn’t fulfilled in the first postdoc, the desire to develop some specific skill, etc.
AS for publications, in my field it is expected that you will publish during your postdoc. The trend that I have seen (having perused CVs of people in new or newish faculty jobs) is that they publish some of their old work during the postdoc, work that they brought with them that’s either from their dissertation or other projects they worked on during graduate school. During the first year of the postdoc, that’s mostly what you see. During the second year of the postdoc there’s more a mix of old and new work, or exclusively new work.
I think the important thing is evidence of pushing forward. Search committees won’t expect all of your new work to be published in one year; but having some manuscripts submitted/under review and some in preparation is considered good policy. But I think that’s why it’s an increasing trend (in my field, at least) for people to take a third year of a postdoc. The first year is spent turning the dissertation into papers while beginning new projects; the second year is spent writing up those new projects, maybe writing a grant; the third year is the job market year. That way you can have 2 years of accomplishments on your CV rather than just one.
My mentors say that a good goal for their postdoc is 2-3 new publications over the course of the 2 years.
Someone once said that a postdoc could be a stepping stone or a parking place. I think there is great value in adding to your co-author network. It is great to better develop your publishing and grantwriting skills before you hit the tenure track.
@xraymancs The number of post-docs on average before getting a faculty position in engineering is still greater than or equal to unity. In that regard it isn’t all that much different from physics. I think the major difference is that there are just more fallback options in industry for engineers who give up on the faculty route. I know of only one recent Ph.D. in engineering who got a professorship without a post-doc, and it was a visiting professorship, so it wasn’t tenure-track (though he later got upgraded, luckily).
@jack63 Of course you shouldn’t take PhD comics to be gospel. It’s funny because, like any other satirical outlet, it is an exaggerated version of the truth.
@boneh3ad…This is an interesting observation. Recently I know of nobody in Michigan engineering that got a tenure track position right out of the PhD program. 8-10 years ago…sure there were a number of students who did this that I’m aware of. Things were different 8-10 years ago. PhDs took longer and funding was less stressful. PhD students could just sit on almost automatic RA funding for an extra year doing nothing but writing journal papers.
The thing with PhD comics is that… Sure, it is funny when it is exaggerated truth. It is not so funny when it is exaggerates something that was true 10 years ago (when its author got his PhD), but is no longer true.
Well a lot of it is still, at the very least, true-ish. However, it has been my experience that the quality of post-doc positions vary greatly, so you simply can’t use PhD comics as a broad brush. I’d say that based on recent experience (last 6 years), PhD comics as a whole is still probably 80% relatable to me.
That’s my opinion, of course, and based on a relatively small sample size.
Well to be fair, my older colleagues and professors that I know have said it wasn’t always that way. It may just be a generation gap of sorts. It seems that most professors just like their jobs too much right now to leave or retire and there isn’t enough money being pumped into education to hire all that many new professors.