Those Happy Golden Postdoctoral Days

Subtitle:

Happy Postdocs : Not An Oxymoron

Disclaimer: I have no direct experience with postdocs in biomedical or other life sciences fields. My point of view derives entirely from experiences in the physical sciences.

Context: In the physical science academic niche with which I am familiar, postdoctoral fellowships are desirable, respected positions. Doing a (successful) postdoc gives the additional experience needed to make the transition from being a student to being a professor at a research university.

My experience: Aside from a few harassment issues I could have done without, I was happy as a postdoc. I enjoyed the responsibility, respect, and higher salary, and, although I had a lot of freedom in my research as a grad student, I felt even freer as a postdoc because I finally had the time and ability to develop some of my own research ideas at a more intellectually satisfying level.

Nevertheless, being a postdoc is not 24/7 good times. To help examine some of the pros and cons, let's compare the professional lives of postdocs and assistant professors:


Job security: Although some postdocs (or equivalent positions) have a contract of a similar duration as that of an assistant professor before tenure evaluation, postdocs live with more uncertainty about whether all these years of training will lead to the career they want. Although most postdocs who do well in my field ultimately get a faculty position if they want one, you never know. And, more typically, postdoc contracts are only for 1-2 years. Assistant professors may have some anxious years before tenure evaluation time, but they can achieve job security with tenure. Assistant professors clearly have the advantage in this respect.

Salary: Assistant professors typically make more than postdocs, although the difference narrows for more senior postdocs. In addition, assistant professors with significant postdoctoral experience can typically negotiate a higher starting salary, so the postdoctoral years 'count' in determination of future salary.

In what might be a rare situation, a former postdoc of mine recently took a pay cut (to $48k) when moving to a teaching position at a small university. He wanted a teaching-focused job, but was worried that the lower salary would make life more difficult for his family of four (his is the only income), but, when he asked me for advice, I said that I hoped he would take the job anyway because of the career opportunity and potential future job security. He did, and so far he is doing fine and is very happy in his new job.

Assistant professors in general have an advantage over postdocs with respect to salary, but not in all cases.


Benefits: In my field, health insurance benefits are typically similar for both postdocs and professors, but situations vary from institution to institution regarding whether the institution/PI contribute to retirement benefits. Some institutions make no retirement contributions for postdocs or assistant professors in the first year or two; some contribute to the retirement funds of assistant professors but not of postdocs; and others contribute to both. I am currently contributing to the retirement fund of a postdoc, as are many of my colleagues for their postdocs, so it certainly does happen. This factor works out about equally for postdocs and assistant professors in the institutions/departments with which I am familiar.

Independence: This one varies a lot. Many of us had a lot of independence as postdocs to pursue the research we wanted, but others are mostly/entirely confined to doing a project conceived and directed by a PI. Assistant professors have freedom to take the lead on research projects, although with that freedom comes a lot more responsibility (and management tasks) than postdocs typically have to deal with.

I think this factor is comparable for postdocs and assistant professors. There are certainly very controlling PIs who restrict the independence of postdocs, but there are also assistant professors whose research topics are constrained by various factors.

Time: Many of us think back on our postdoctoral experiences as the time in our academic careers when we had the most uninterrupted time to focus on research. One colleague of mine says that, for him, being a postdoc was even better than having a sabbatical (without the career anxiety, I suppose) because the professional service expectations and time spent managing grants and people was so much less.

According to that postdoc world view, postdocs are fortunate because they are not afflicted with the stresses of being a student (exams, classes) and typically doesn't have to do the same kind of professorial time management feat of balancing research, teaching, advising, managing, service etc. As a postdoc, you may help mentor grad students or undergrads in a research group, and you may also manage your own grant and start to be asked to review manuscripts and reviews, but all of this ramps up to a higher level when you become a professor. That's part of why spending time as a postdoc is a good transitional experience between being a student and a professor.

As a postdoc, I definitely felt anxious about the future. There were very few academic jobs in my field at that time, and I was very aware that I might not get one of those few.

Nevertheless, I was doing what I wanted to be doing. I enjoyed the intellectual freedom and the unrestricted time to think and write and do research. I was relieved to be taken (a bit) more seriously as a scientist than I had been as a grad student, and I enjoyed starting to gain visibility and build connections in my field. I was not ready to start a faculty position at a research university directly after finishing my PhD, but my postdoc time, followed by a teaching position, gave me the experience I needed once I was fortunate enough to get a tenure-track job.

Postdocs win in the 'time' category.

Summary: Being a postdoc has its stresses, even in the best of systems, but there are also very positive aspects of being a postdoc. Many faculty take seriously their jobs as mentors of postdocs, and many postdocs use well their year (or two or three) of research experience to launch their subsequent careers.

Happy postdocs exist. That fact doesn't help those who are in a postdoctoral form of hell; some fields clearly need to reform their postdoctoral systems. Nevertheless, I think it is important to present a positive case for postdocs, at least in some of the physical sciences, and to stop equating all postdoctoral fellowships with all the worst aspects of academia.

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Dodging a Postdoctoral Bullet

In general, I am not a particularly sadistic person; at least, no more than the average professor. Every once in
 a while, though, as I am mulling over a potential blog post topic, I think to myself "This one is going to freak out the [select one or more: undergrads, grads, postdocs, assistant professors, associate professors, professors, administrators, adjuncts, social scientists, reptiles]", and then I do the post anyway. With a few exceptions, I don't deliberately try to upset anyone, but there are certain topics (letters of reference, tenure, interviews) that lend themselves to freak-outs among certain segments of the academic population.

Today's
target topic: postdocs, as told from the point of view of a supervisor of postdocs.


First, some context: In my field, postdoctoral researchers are well respected, are paid a decent salary with benefits, have a lot of independence, and typically spend 1-3 years in this position before moving on to another job: a faculty position, a job in industry, a researcher position at a national lab or a government agency, or something else entirely.


Postdocs can be hired in a number of different ways. In my case, I can either acquire funding and then seek a postdoc, or I can identify a postdoc candidate (possibly when one contacts me) and then one or both of us can seek funding for a project.

Sometimes I get e-mail from postdoc candidates or I meet one at a conference. Some of these possibilities are interesting enough to pursue further.

You would think that it is easy to identify excellent postdoc candidates -- or, at least, easier than trying to guess which applicants to graduate school will succeed and which will not -- but it is surprisingly difficult. For example, I have supervised apparently promising postdocs who never published anything, or did so only under torture (or if I wrote most of the paper). How did they get a PhD in the first place? Did their advisers write their thesis and/or papers and not happen to mention this in the recommendation letter? One wonders.

I have been thinking about this recently because a few times in the past year I have had semi-close calls with postdoctoral aspirants who seemed quite promising, but on further inspection turned out to be much less so. If I hadn't happened to find out some information that is not typically included in a reference letter, I might have ended up with a(nother) disaster postdoc.

Some of you may be thinking: What if this so-called "information" about these prospects was wrong? What if these were really talented people and you denied them a career opportunity for no good reason? These are valid points, but be assured that I wouldn't dismiss a person based only on a vague rumor from someone I didn't know.


Example 1: A postdoc candidate e-mailed me, I wrote back asking some questions to get a better sense for what his ideas and interests were, and he responded a while later.

There were some possible red flags in his e-mails. For example, when writing to a potential postdoctoral supervisor, it's probably not a good idea to complain about how much work you have to do and how busy you are and why you took so long to respond. Why would I want to work with someone who easily whines and may already be having difficulty managing their time?

But these were little, ambiguous red flags, not big, obvious, glow-in-the-dark ones. Perhaps he was just trying to convey how industrious he is, and it didn't occur to him that he would seem to be complaining and incompetent. Maybe he thrives on being extraordinarily busy and is actually intensely intellectually engaged in his thesis research but just didn't express this clearly. I was willing to overlook the apparent whining and not over-interpret at this stage.

There was enough that seemed possibly promising in his academic background, so I wanted to know more about him. I asked a longtime, trusted colleague (and supremely nice person) who knows this student well, and, after a bit of reluctance and vague hmmming, he sighed and told me about this PhD student's bad attitude, laziness, apathy, poor quantitative skills, and marginal qualifications even to be a graduate student. There were also apparently some ethics issues. If I just went by my correspondence with the postdoctoral candidate and his CV and even the reference of his main adviser, I would never have known he was such a (potential) disaster.

Perhaps in the course of getting more than one letter of reference, some of this information would have come to light anyway, but I decided not to pursue this opportunity any further.

Example 2: A finishing PhD at Prestigious University with exactly the right background and interests for someone who could be a happy and productive member of my research group introduced himself to me at a conference. We had a brief chat that established that we had some mutual research ideas that might be the nucleus of a future proposal, and agreed to talk more. In the meantime, I casually mentioned this person to some people I know well at his current and past academic institutions, and every single one said "Hmm.... well.... there are some things you should know..." (there followed long -- but consistent -- lists of strange, unpleasant, disturbing behavior that resulted in great disruptions of research efforts by the student and everyone else in his immediate surroundings). Another dead end.

I know there are excellent postdocs out there -- I have even worked with some -- but it is not safe to assume that anyone who makes it through a PhD program and who wants to pursue an academic career is automatically well suited for postdoctoral research. And it can be very difficult to predict this just based on a written application or even a conversation or exchange of e-mail with the candidate.

I have brought postdoc candidates to campus for interviews in the past, but the applicant pool is typically international, and therefore some of the interviews are by phone or Skype, which is convenient, but not the same as spending a day or two with someone.

Letters of references are also not as candid as they should be. I know that various candidates for various positions spend a lot of time worried about their letters of reference, but 99.76% of such letters are positive. It is rare to find one containing the information that my colleagues divulged to me in person in the examples above.

Certainly we have to be careful not to ask the opinion of someone who is unobjective, uninformed, and/or vindictive, and we need to filter information for bias or personal views on issues or characteristics unrelated to a candidate's qualifications for a job (e.g., being female, having young children etc.), but candid, accurate information can be a life-saver for me and the rest of my research group, so that we don't spend large amounts of time and money on someone who cannot or will not be a productive member of the group.

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