8 ms·

I couldn’t move for a postdoc and shouldn’t have been penalized for it

67 points by rossant 3y ago

j7ake 3y ago
If you have to postdoc after your PhD it means your field is saturated. Move on to a growing field or start your own. In the “better” fields, top phds go to faculty positions directly after graduating. We need to stop treating all fields as equal, some are clearly stagnant while others are booming.
- ProjectArcturis 3y ago
  >start your own This doesn't seem like realistic advice to recent college grads.
  - j7ake 3y ago
    Going down the professor route isn’t realistic advice either for most recent college grads.
vpastore 3y ago
[dead]
low_tech_love 3y ago
It’s complicated. Most people in academia are overworked, and will jump at any opportunity to easily justify a decision with some kind of well-accepted, easily-identifiable “weakness”. This might save them a couple of hours of work they would have to spend trying to identify other, better (but harder) arguments. There are simply too many papers to read and review, too many students to supervise, too many applications to judge, and too many things to write. The system rewards conformism and predictability, not real reflective hard work. When you review an application like this you are not really thinking “what is fair for this student/position?” Instead you are thinking “what will my peers think of me when they read my review?” And “How can I get the most with the least effort?” It’s sad but it’s the truth.
ProjectArcturis 3y ago
My scientific career was crippled when I didn't move for a postdoc. The supply/demand imbalance is such that only those with absolutely immaculate track records will be given a chance at doing top-level science.
- etrautmann 3y ago
  That does seem to be true unfortunately in my experience with neuroscience.
  - Racing0461 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - DANmode 3y ago
      Based on...
      - Racing0461 3y ago
        i mean pure science. its most psychology than chemistry. (assuming thats what op meant by top level)
GianFabien 3y ago
Postdocs are only superficially about the research. Early career researchers are considered to be a fungible resource, definitely under-paid and teased with the typically unattainable possibility of tenure. The majority of academics relocate several times during their career.
adamsb6 3y ago
> I didn’t mention my other reasons for wanting to stay in Minnesota because it wasn’t the reviewers’ business; normally, employers aren’t allowed to ask about spouses or children. My interview training at Big Tech forbade me from even asking about the candidate's trip to campus because the answer could reveal a disadvantaged socioeconomic status. But universities behave as if employment discrimination laws don't exist. At least they're starting to be held accountable, see this case from the University of Washington: https://www.washington.edu/news/2023/10/31/university-takes-action-after-faculty-hiring-process-inappropriately-used-race-as-a-factor/ https://www.washington.edu/news/2023/10/31/university-takes-...
- elashri 3y ago
  In this case it wasn't even a university who did that. It is reviewers at the national science foundation. The largest federal funding agency in the US.
  - jjtheblunt 3y ago
    Larger than DARPA?
    - otteromkram 3y ago
      Funding, not funded. From Wikipedia: > With an annual budget of about $8.3 billion (fiscal year 2020), the NSF funds approximately 25% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and universities[0][1]. Note: That budget is ~$10 billion for FY24. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation [1] https://new.nsf.gov/about https://new.nsf.gov/about
      - robotresearcher 3y ago
        DARPA is a funding agency. It employs only admin and program management people, only about 300 of them, and spends around $4B a year, dispersing most of it to universities and third party labs. It’s leaner than the NSF, which employs five times as many people and has a budget only twice as large. Probably NSF has a large number of small-dollar grants to track compared to DARPA.
contrarian1234 3y ago
in Asia there is no culture of moving institutions and it has some really bad long term effects There is a lot more nepotism as people rather take on someone they know and have worked with locally than risk on someone from outside that they know less well They struggle with international and interinstitutional collaborations bc they only have a trickle of outsiders. I know for instance in China some researchers never attend international conferences. The whole environment is very incestuous They still manage to do great research, but they have trouble promoting their ideas in the community and getting outside input
- elashri 3y ago
  Maybe there is another reasons to why some never attend international conference that peers in other countries like EU and US doesn't have. Visa issues and lack of travel funding. I know a lot of researchers in the US who never went into an international conference although they are on average the best funded compared to other countries. And they don't have to suffer for visa appointments that can take months and you can get it after the conference very commonly.
kevinventullo 3y ago
Relatable, though I didn’t write a blog post about it. I simply left academia for an essentially unrelated role in tech. Facebook solved the two-body problem that number theory couldn’t.
nsagent 3y ago
I commiserate, since I too started my PhD later in life, but luckily I don't have any kids and my wife can work remotely. I'm moving for a postdoc right after the Spring semester ends. I understand why the bias against not moving exists, but interestingly, despite the supposed taboo, lots of programs self-hire for faculty (at least in CS) [1]: > 7.4% of professors have a Ph.D. from the same university that they are teaching at. MIT in particular has a high rate of self-hires, with 36% of their professors having MIT Ph.D.s themselves. It makes me wonder if this is a case where prior wisdom has not caught up with modern practices. [1]: https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/#cs-faculty-composition-and-hiring-trends https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/#cs-faculty...
- sib 3y ago
  >> 7.4% of professors have a Ph.D. from the same university that they are teaching at. MIT in particular has a high rate of self-hires, with 36% of their professors having MIT Ph.D.s themselves. When you believe you're the best, you are probably going to be biased to hiring internally... It's more likely that $RANDOM_UNIVERSITY wants to hire from MIT than the other way around.
  - karmakurtisaani 3y ago
    Can confirm this. Attended the University of Northern Bumfuck, did not get hired by MIT.
- jltsiren 3y ago
  Self-hiring is not a taboo, as long the candidate has experience from somewhere else. The usual expectation is that PhD + postdoc + first faculty job should involve at least two universities. Exposure to different ways of doing things leads to better research and makes the department less likely to develop an insular culture. Postdocs are usually expected to move to a different institution, because most institutions don't have that many people working on the same topic. If you keep working with your former PhD supervisor, people may question whether the merits you claim are truly yours and not your supervisor's.
vlaxx 3y ago
The importance of cross pollinating you postdoc and grad degree is to prove the worth of your degree. If you can be accepted at multiple places it is a good indicator that you know your stuff and your institutions are putting out good candidates. I have met plenty of PhDs shouldn't have been awarded them. Often because they were good at filling out paperwork and being liked by the right people.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  It really isn’t that hard to get a PhD…well you put in the hard work, you’ll get the degree. You don’t need to be a genius, and the training/experience you get from a PhD program is useful. Someone using their phd to brag about their superiority is dumb, the best researcher I know only has a masters (I have a phd and I’m not as good as he is). On the other hand, I don’t think their are many PhDs out there that don’t deserve their degree, just that there are misunderstandings about what the degree means.
- jmcgough 3y ago
  > The importance of cross pollinating you postdoc and grad degree is to prove the worth of your degree Regardless of the intent, it's a fairly arbitrary way to weed out candidates without actually evaluating their strength, and the actual outcome is hurting women or people from a lower socioeconomic background. The schools you went to should be a lot less important than your publications.
  - patrick451 3y ago
    There is no reason for this to hurt single, childless women disproportionately. We should not be coddling women for their choices in homelife. Nobody is forcing them to start families.
  - otteromkram 3y ago
    > and the actual outcome is hurting women or people from a lower socioeconomic background. Can we get a source on this claim? My dodo brain remembers something like women earn more college degrees than men[0], especially at the postgraduate/terminal level. [0] https://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id=72 https://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id=72
bruce511 3y ago
It's interesting to see how attitudes have changed in my lifetime. I suspect this is just a case of "the old way" peeking through because it hasn't formally been updated yet. My father wore a tie pretty much his whole career. I don't own a suit, never mind a tie (despite similar jobs and status.) He worked to a strict time schedule, I arrive and leave when it suits me. Obviously he never "worked from home". I guess he might have moved city had a "job promotion required it" (but I'm not sure - he liked where he was.) By contrast my current employer treats location as fungible. When a replacement CEO was appointed, and she happened to live in a different city (where we have an office) she just works out of that office. So I kinda get both the "you must move" logic (it's no big deal,company men do it all the time - and in academia it exposes you to new thoughts) while also seeing this thinking as out-of-time ; a relic of former eras. Of course it sux, but in this case still a happy ending. If that thing doesn't want you this thing does. Sometimes things take time to change, an academia, which likes tradition, is seldom leading the way. (Which is its own irony given that -students- want nothing more than to "change the world".
- returningfory2 3y ago
  To be clear, the problem in the article is not quite the location per se (although the author tries to make it about that because it makes their position more defensible). The problem is that they were proposing to continue their research in the same university as their PhD. Which is generally considered not ideal. If they wanted to work at another university in Minnesota it would have been fine.
  - bruce511 3y ago
    I agree with your point. Assuming of course that there is another university, with the necessary requirements to support the proposed work, within commuting distance. I'm not that familiar with Minnesota, or the author's current city, or the preponderance of research universities in the state. (Setting the boundary as Minnesota though seems to cast the net quite wide.)
porompompero 3y ago
After PhD plus postdoc in the same institutional cluster, not even the same institutions, I felt the infuriating need of moving. "What’s so essential about moving?" Growing.
spoonjim 3y ago
Life doesn’t work like that. You’re born without a left arm and guess what, professional basketball player isn’t for you. You have to live in Minnesota? OK. But don’t expect others to change their criteria because of that.
- caddemon 3y ago
  If someone missing a left arm managed to get really good at baseball, they could still play. A one armed dude lighting it up on the field would be drafted, because objective results. Of course this is highly unlikely because it handicaps skills related directly to baseball, but it's not completely impossible for a pitcher or DH. The Minnesota example is not comparable, because the ability to do good research is not inherently impacted by staying at one institution, and the grant evaluation is directly penalizing the staying part rather than indirectly. I can't speak to whether the university or this guy's research were actually any good, but it hurts science to have such rigid proxy judgements.
  - toast0 3y ago
    Jim Abbott only has one hand, but does have two arms. He pitched in MLB for ten years, and threw one no-hitter. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Abbott https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Abbott
    - doctorwho42 3y ago
      Cool, and Id imagine if the author has indicators that they have the experience, knowledge, and background to become the top researcher in their field they would have no problem getting funding.
laurent_du 3y ago
[flagged]
- loa_in_ 3y ago
  How can you defend choosing between living one's own life and science and not as a voluntary choice too.
bfung 3y ago
I'll take the other side: life's not fair and you can't have your cake and eat it too. Move for the postdoc if you really want it. (the article author got a better deal at the end anyways, imo)
mo_42 3y ago
> What’s so essential about moving? When I was doing my PhD, my supervisor always told me that scientists need to move around. It's somewhat of a tradition in academia even if few people understand the reason behind it fully (e.g., my supervisor did not I suspect). Academia is a really old institution and has evolved mechanisms to ensure its future. This is one of them I guess. I experienced the people there as a close-knit community. So, moving might counter this effect. The other reason that comes to my mind is signalling. If you're willing to move with your family, it's a strong signal that you take academia seriously. I guess every institution likes to have such people.
- doctorwho42 3y ago
  I am kind of sad such smart people on here are missing the forest for the trees. Moving institutions, historically, is about cross pollination of ideas. In physics this has been important because different institutions provide variations of how to 'think like a physicist'. On top of that, it allows for a mixing pot of lab culture and best practices. They even did a good job of pointing at this in the movie Oppenheimer, where he visits Germany and has a formative experience which changes the trajectory of his focus. It's very easy to 'do it by the numbers' and be repetitive in your work when you stay in the same institution. This is also the reason why 'sabbaticals' are still a thing, so professors will visit for a 0.5-1yr another institution or research hub for their field, which in theory happens every 7-10 years if the professor takes advantage of it.
- aaplok 3y ago
  > If you're willing to move with your family, it's a strong signal that you take academia seriously. Not really. It only signals that you consider your career and interests as more important than the ones of your entire family. Because this increases the selective advantages of narcissistic people, this is a pretty toxic signal to look for.
  - pvaldes 3y ago
    Moving means often that your wife or husband must sacrifice their own career. If your partner earns more than you is not a really smart strategy. In any case can be a very selfish move. Claiming that you must travel to be able to talk with other people in order to "complete yourself" (whatever it means) or to be exposed to the world is simply moronic in the age of internet. Just a fossil requirement of the old times where scientists were supposed to entertain their noble sponsors with the tales of their travels in the longer European winter, or to report them as part-time spies in different kingdoms. This means than the closer you live to the frontier, the better scientist you will be. Could find work at 2Km of home and earn some extra points in the checkbox of "had being humbled by the exposure to other cultures" that can be decisive later. But me... nope. The problem that I was interested in didn't required to cross a stupid frontier (that in fact does exist only in paper currently). I'm not the kind of good scientist that "travels"; I just worked at 1000 Km of home
Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
In Spain, staying at your alma mater used to be common (it's also a society where families are more tightly knit and people move less in all jobs in general, moving for a job is seen as undesirable for most people). But now there's a cargo cult in academia, Americans always move after the PhD so we should move as well, and not only to another institution but abroad. Most grant or position calls directly give points for having worked abroad, or even have a requirement of 2 years abroad or similar. This is absurd for various reasons. Firstly, what the linked post says. Secondly, if moving is so good, it should be reflected in general in the scientific production, you're already grading scientific production so there should be no need to consider that. Finally, since academic salaries in Spain are crap, this actually incentivizes many good researchers to stay abroad (they move due to the points/requirements with the idea of returning to Spain, but stay abroad due to better working conditions). In my case I'm a professor at my alma mater (although I did make short stays abroad, like maybe 1.5 years in total). But if I were in early career years right now, I probably wouldn't be able to do that due to the increasing mobility cargo cult (I would need to stay abroad for longer and in larger chunks of time). I'd probably have ended up permanently abroad or maybe in industry. Lately I start to see some (at the moment, minority) voices against this cargo cult from feminists, as moving can be especially taxing for women that want to be mothers, and feminism in Spain is quite strong lately. I hope this can lead to eventually scrapping that nonsense.
dehrmann 3y ago
> When I started my Ph.D., I knew that if I wanted to pursue an academic career, I would likely have to move someday > In the end, I decided I needed to find a way to stay in Minnesota. > The instructions clearly stated that applicants who proposed to remain in their current location had to justify their choice. I interpreted that to mean the research needed to be distinctly different from my dissertation So the author knew how the game is played, had a plan to not have to relocate, then got cute at executing that plan, knowing what the question likely meant, but ignoring it.
- hyperhopper 3y ago
  1. The requirements are fucked 2. The author knew the requirements were fucked, but now is acting surprised that that's the case
  - low_tech_love 3y ago
    Knowing how the game is played doesn’t mean agreeing with it, and anyway the game can be played in many different ways. The thing is that it shouldn’t be necessary to move if you are doing a good job and the project is good and your history is good. They should’ve been able to justify their decision based on more solid arguments, or not at all. The problem is that the competition is brutal, the bias is probably even more brutal, and any tiny argument that can help with a decision is going to be used (as long as it’s accepted by the community).

67 points by rossant 3y ago

If you have to postdoc after your PhD it means your field is saturated. Move on to a growing field or start your own. In the “better” fields, top phds go to faculty positions directly after graduating. We need to stop treating all fields as equal, some are clearly stagnant while others are booming.

ProjectArcturis 3y ago
>start your own This doesn't seem like realistic advice to recent college grads.
- j7ake 3y ago
  Going down the professor route isn’t realistic advice either for most recent college grads.

vpastore 3y ago

[dead]

low_tech_love 3y ago

It’s complicated. Most people in academia are overworked, and will jump at any opportunity to easily justify a decision with some kind of well-accepted, easily-identifiable “weakness”. This might save them a couple of hours of work they would have to spend trying to identify other, better (but harder) arguments. There are simply too many papers to read and review, too many students to supervise, too many applications to judge, and too many things to write. The system rewards conformism and predictability, not real reflective hard work. When you review an application like this you are not really thinking “what is fair for this student/position?” Instead you are thinking “what will my peers think of me when they read my review?” And “How can I get the most with the least effort?” It’s sad but it’s the truth.

ProjectArcturis 3y ago

My scientific career was crippled when I didn't move for a postdoc. The supply/demand imbalance is such that only those with absolutely immaculate track records will be given a chance at doing top-level science.

etrautmann 3y ago
That does seem to be true unfortunately in my experience with neuroscience.
- Racing0461 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - DANmode 3y ago
    Based on...
    - Racing0461 3y ago
      i mean pure science. its most psychology than chemistry. (assuming thats what op meant by top level)

GianFabien 3y ago

Postdocs are only superficially about the research. Early career researchers are considered to be a fungible resource, definitely under-paid and teased with the typically unattainable possibility of tenure. The majority of academics relocate several times during their career.

adamsb6 3y ago

> I didn’t mention my other reasons for wanting to stay in Minnesota because it wasn’t the reviewers’ business; normally, employers aren’t allowed to ask about spouses or children. My interview training at Big Tech forbade me from even asking about the candidate's trip to campus because the answer could reveal a disadvantaged socioeconomic status. But universities behave as if employment discrimination laws don't exist. At least they're starting to be held accountable, see this case from the University of Washington: https://www.washington.edu/news/2023/10/31/university-takes-action-after-faculty-hiring-process-inappropriately-used-race-as-a-factor/ https://www.washington.edu/news/2023/10/31/university-takes-...

elashri 3y ago
In this case it wasn't even a university who did that. It is reviewers at the national science foundation. The largest federal funding agency in the US.
- jjtheblunt 3y ago
  Larger than DARPA?
  - otteromkram 3y ago
    Funding, not funded. From Wikipedia: > With an annual budget of about $8.3 billion (fiscal year 2020), the NSF funds approximately 25% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and universities[0][1]. Note: That budget is ~$10 billion for FY24. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation [1] https://new.nsf.gov/about https://new.nsf.gov/about
    - robotresearcher 3y ago
      DARPA is a funding agency. It employs only admin and program management people, only about 300 of them, and spends around $4B a year, dispersing most of it to universities and third party labs. It’s leaner than the NSF, which employs five times as many people and has a budget only twice as large. Probably NSF has a large number of small-dollar grants to track compared to DARPA.

contrarian1234 3y ago

in Asia there is no culture of moving institutions and it has some really bad long term effects There is a lot more nepotism as people rather take on someone they know and have worked with locally than risk on someone from outside that they know less well They struggle with international and interinstitutional collaborations bc they only have a trickle of outsiders. I know for instance in China some researchers never attend international conferences. The whole environment is very incestuous They still manage to do great research, but they have trouble promoting their ideas in the community and getting outside input

elashri 3y ago
Maybe there is another reasons to why some never attend international conference that peers in other countries like EU and US doesn't have. Visa issues and lack of travel funding. I know a lot of researchers in the US who never went into an international conference although they are on average the best funded compared to other countries. And they don't have to suffer for visa appointments that can take months and you can get it after the conference very commonly.

kevinventullo 3y ago

Relatable, though I didn’t write a blog post about it. I simply left academia for an essentially unrelated role in tech. Facebook solved the two-body problem that number theory couldn’t.

nsagent 3y ago

I commiserate, since I too started my PhD later in life, but luckily I don't have any kids and my wife can work remotely. I'm moving for a postdoc right after the Spring semester ends. I understand why the bias against not moving exists, but interestingly, despite the supposed taboo, lots of programs self-hire for faculty (at least in CS) [1]: > 7.4% of professors have a Ph.D. from the same university that they are teaching at. MIT in particular has a high rate of self-hires, with 36% of their professors having MIT Ph.D.s themselves. It makes me wonder if this is a case where prior wisdom has not caught up with modern practices. [1]: https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/#cs-faculty-composition-and-hiring-trends https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/#cs-faculty...

sib 3y ago
>> 7.4% of professors have a Ph.D. from the same university that they are teaching at. MIT in particular has a high rate of self-hires, with 36% of their professors having MIT Ph.D.s themselves. When you believe you're the best, you are probably going to be biased to hiring internally... It's more likely that $RANDOM_UNIVERSITY wants to hire from MIT than the other way around.
- karmakurtisaani 3y ago
  Can confirm this. Attended the University of Northern Bumfuck, did not get hired by MIT.
jltsiren 3y ago
Self-hiring is not a taboo, as long the candidate has experience from somewhere else. The usual expectation is that PhD + postdoc + first faculty job should involve at least two universities. Exposure to different ways of doing things leads to better research and makes the department less likely to develop an insular culture. Postdocs are usually expected to move to a different institution, because most institutions don't have that many people working on the same topic. If you keep working with your former PhD supervisor, people may question whether the merits you claim are truly yours and not your supervisor's.

vlaxx 3y ago

The importance of cross pollinating you postdoc and grad degree is to prove the worth of your degree. If you can be accepted at multiple places it is a good indicator that you know your stuff and your institutions are putting out good candidates. I have met plenty of PhDs shouldn't have been awarded them. Often because they were good at filling out paperwork and being liked by the right people.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago
It really isn’t that hard to get a PhD…well you put in the hard work, you’ll get the degree. You don’t need to be a genius, and the training/experience you get from a PhD program is useful. Someone using their phd to brag about their superiority is dumb, the best researcher I know only has a masters (I have a phd and I’m not as good as he is). On the other hand, I don’t think their are many PhDs out there that don’t deserve their degree, just that there are misunderstandings about what the degree means.
jmcgough 3y ago
> The importance of cross pollinating you postdoc and grad degree is to prove the worth of your degree Regardless of the intent, it's a fairly arbitrary way to weed out candidates without actually evaluating their strength, and the actual outcome is hurting women or people from a lower socioeconomic background. The schools you went to should be a lot less important than your publications.
- patrick451 3y ago
  There is no reason for this to hurt single, childless women disproportionately. We should not be coddling women for their choices in homelife. Nobody is forcing them to start families.
- otteromkram 3y ago
  > and the actual outcome is hurting women or people from a lower socioeconomic background. Can we get a source on this claim? My dodo brain remembers something like women earn more college degrees than men[0], especially at the postgraduate/terminal level. [0] https://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id=72 https://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id=72

bruce511 3y ago

It's interesting to see how attitudes have changed in my lifetime. I suspect this is just a case of "the old way" peeking through because it hasn't formally been updated yet. My father wore a tie pretty much his whole career. I don't own a suit, never mind a tie (despite similar jobs and status.) He worked to a strict time schedule, I arrive and leave when it suits me. Obviously he never "worked from home". I guess he might have moved city had a "job promotion required it" (but I'm not sure - he liked where he was.) By contrast my current employer treats location as fungible. When a replacement CEO was appointed, and she happened to live in a different city (where we have an office) she just works out of that office. So I kinda get both the "you must move" logic (it's no big deal,company men do it all the time - and in academia it exposes you to new thoughts) while also seeing this thinking as out-of-time ; a relic of former eras. Of course it sux, but in this case still a happy ending. If that thing doesn't want you this thing does. Sometimes things take time to change, an academia, which likes tradition, is seldom leading the way. (Which is its own irony given that -students- want nothing more than to "change the world".

returningfory2 3y ago
To be clear, the problem in the article is not quite the location per se (although the author tries to make it about that because it makes their position more defensible). The problem is that they were proposing to continue their research in the same university as their PhD. Which is generally considered not ideal. If they wanted to work at another university in Minnesota it would have been fine.
- bruce511 3y ago
  I agree with your point. Assuming of course that there is another university, with the necessary requirements to support the proposed work, within commuting distance. I'm not that familiar with Minnesota, or the author's current city, or the preponderance of research universities in the state. (Setting the boundary as Minnesota though seems to cast the net quite wide.)

porompompero 3y ago

After PhD plus postdoc in the same institutional cluster, not even the same institutions, I felt the infuriating need of moving. "What’s so essential about moving?" Growing.

spoonjim 3y ago

Life doesn’t work like that. You’re born without a left arm and guess what, professional basketball player isn’t for you. You have to live in Minnesota? OK. But don’t expect others to change their criteria because of that.

caddemon 3y ago
If someone missing a left arm managed to get really good at baseball, they could still play. A one armed dude lighting it up on the field would be drafted, because objective results. Of course this is highly unlikely because it handicaps skills related directly to baseball, but it's not completely impossible for a pitcher or DH. The Minnesota example is not comparable, because the ability to do good research is not inherently impacted by staying at one institution, and the grant evaluation is directly penalizing the staying part rather than indirectly. I can't speak to whether the university or this guy's research were actually any good, but it hurts science to have such rigid proxy judgements.
- toast0 3y ago
  Jim Abbott only has one hand, but does have two arms. He pitched in MLB for ten years, and threw one no-hitter. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Abbott https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Abbott
  - doctorwho42 3y ago
    Cool, and Id imagine if the author has indicators that they have the experience, knowledge, and background to become the top researcher in their field they would have no problem getting funding.

laurent_du 3y ago

[flagged]

loa_in_ 3y ago
How can you defend choosing between living one's own life and science and not as a voluntary choice too.

bfung 3y ago

I'll take the other side: life's not fair and you can't have your cake and eat it too. Move for the postdoc if you really want it. (the article author got a better deal at the end anyways, imo)

mo_42 3y ago

> What’s so essential about moving? When I was doing my PhD, my supervisor always told me that scientists need to move around. It's somewhat of a tradition in academia even if few people understand the reason behind it fully (e.g., my supervisor did not I suspect). Academia is a really old institution and has evolved mechanisms to ensure its future. This is one of them I guess. I experienced the people there as a close-knit community. So, moving might counter this effect. The other reason that comes to my mind is signalling. If you're willing to move with your family, it's a strong signal that you take academia seriously. I guess every institution likes to have such people.

doctorwho42 3y ago
I am kind of sad such smart people on here are missing the forest for the trees. Moving institutions, historically, is about cross pollination of ideas. In physics this has been important because different institutions provide variations of how to 'think like a physicist'. On top of that, it allows for a mixing pot of lab culture and best practices. They even did a good job of pointing at this in the movie Oppenheimer, where he visits Germany and has a formative experience which changes the trajectory of his focus. It's very easy to 'do it by the numbers' and be repetitive in your work when you stay in the same institution. This is also the reason why 'sabbaticals' are still a thing, so professors will visit for a 0.5-1yr another institution or research hub for their field, which in theory happens every 7-10 years if the professor takes advantage of it.
aaplok 3y ago
> If you're willing to move with your family, it's a strong signal that you take academia seriously. Not really. It only signals that you consider your career and interests as more important than the ones of your entire family. Because this increases the selective advantages of narcissistic people, this is a pretty toxic signal to look for.
- pvaldes 3y ago
  Moving means often that your wife or husband must sacrifice their own career. If your partner earns more than you is not a really smart strategy. In any case can be a very selfish move. Claiming that you must travel to be able to talk with other people in order to "complete yourself" (whatever it means) or to be exposed to the world is simply moronic in the age of internet. Just a fossil requirement of the old times where scientists were supposed to entertain their noble sponsors with the tales of their travels in the longer European winter, or to report them as part-time spies in different kingdoms. This means than the closer you live to the frontier, the better scientist you will be. Could find work at 2Km of home and earn some extra points in the checkbox of "had being humbled by the exposure to other cultures" that can be decisive later. But me... nope. The problem that I was interested in didn't required to cross a stupid frontier (that in fact does exist only in paper currently). I'm not the kind of good scientist that "travels"; I just worked at 1000 Km of home

Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago

In Spain, staying at your alma mater used to be common (it's also a society where families are more tightly knit and people move less in all jobs in general, moving for a job is seen as undesirable for most people). But now there's a cargo cult in academia, Americans always move after the PhD so we should move as well, and not only to another institution but abroad. Most grant or position calls directly give points for having worked abroad, or even have a requirement of 2 years abroad or similar. This is absurd for various reasons. Firstly, what the linked post says. Secondly, if moving is so good, it should be reflected in general in the scientific production, you're already grading scientific production so there should be no need to consider that. Finally, since academic salaries in Spain are crap, this actually incentivizes many good researchers to stay abroad (they move due to the points/requirements with the idea of returning to Spain, but stay abroad due to better working conditions). In my case I'm a professor at my alma mater (although I did make short stays abroad, like maybe 1.5 years in total). But if I were in early career years right now, I probably wouldn't be able to do that due to the increasing mobility cargo cult (I would need to stay abroad for longer and in larger chunks of time). I'd probably have ended up permanently abroad or maybe in industry. Lately I start to see some (at the moment, minority) voices against this cargo cult from feminists, as moving can be especially taxing for women that want to be mothers, and feminism in Spain is quite strong lately. I hope this can lead to eventually scrapping that nonsense.

dehrmann 3y ago

> When I started my Ph.D., I knew that if I wanted to pursue an academic career, I would likely have to move someday > In the end, I decided I needed to find a way to stay in Minnesota. > The instructions clearly stated that applicants who proposed to remain in their current location had to justify their choice. I interpreted that to mean the research needed to be distinctly different from my dissertation So the author knew how the game is played, had a plan to not have to relocate, then got cute at executing that plan, knowing what the question likely meant, but ignoring it.

hyperhopper 3y ago
1. The requirements are fucked 2. The author knew the requirements were fucked, but now is acting surprised that that's the case
- low_tech_love 3y ago
  Knowing how the game is played doesn’t mean agreeing with it, and anyway the game can be played in many different ways. The thing is that it shouldn’t be necessary to move if you are doing a good job and the project is good and your history is good. They should’ve been able to justify their decision based on more solid arguments, or not at all. The problem is that the competition is brutal, the bias is probably even more brutal, and any tiny argument that can help with a decision is going to be used (as long as it’s accepted by the community).