7 ms·

The future of the postdoc

43 points by denzil_correa 12y ago

drethemadrapper 12y ago
I am perplexed by the so-called postgraduate studies and their reward systems. I completed my PhD (in my last 20s) in a second world country about few years ago and continued working as a faculty at a neighbouring university in the same country. I pulled out (or technically resigned) as a senior lecturer, when I couldn't endure being bullied any longer by my senior academics, who had only earned their "DTech" in their 50+ yrs of age. I am now working with a pretty new institution in a first world country and will be starting a Postdoc soon. Taking a look at the salary for the Postdoc, it's like I am back to the same rat race as a PhD student years ago. And I now have a family! The new job, though a permanent position, isn't a full-time; so, all employees are advised to look elsewhere. All effort to get into the industry proved abortive; and I saw that a number of my folks in the industry are earning 10-20k more than me (i.e. senior dev. vs senior faculty). Yet they don't have those fanciful postgraduate degrees. The postdoc opportunity, as for now, seems to be an avenue to get into a top-tier or well-established institution in the first world country though. The long and the short of it is that academics don't get rewarded like their peers in the industry. In addition, postdoc offers are just another way of being a student - call it a professional student. But I will console myself be calling it a consultant. The postdoc offer isn't that bad compared to others that I had. It includes travelling to another first world country for a year or more to complete the other part of my research.
- asmicom 12y ago
  I like the word "consultant".
dnautics 12y ago
Amazing. The solution of "give out less PhDs" is not even broached.
- bkcooper 12y ago
  Cutting back on PhDs generated would be a good idea, but is probably an even harder sell (so much cheap labor!) If postdocs are so prized, then one obvious solution is to reward them. Both the 2014 National Academies report and earlier reports urged US lab heads to consider creating senior staff scientist, or ‘superdoc’, positions. These would be higher-paid, permanent jobs for talented postdocs who have no desire to start their own labs. This type of thing becoming more common would fix a lot of academic career problems. I think it would also be a very good first step in actually reducing the number of incoming PhD students, since the productivity of such a researcher will usually exceed the amount of graduate student you could replace them with.
  - irremediable 12y ago
    So much this. I feel scientific careers suffer from a similar thing to technical careers: to progress, you're forced into management and away from the science/tech. There should be a track for people who don't want to do much management stuff, and just want to work on the stuff that got them going in the first place.
- chriskanan 12y ago
  As someone who had to work really hard to get into a PhD program, but now has a great job as a research scientist and is going to be starting a professorship in August, I have to disagree with giving out fewer PhDs as a solution. People that want to pursue careers in research should be allowed to get the necessary training. What we need is to have considerably better mentoring and training in jobs outside of academia during the PhD: science communication, industry, entrepreneurship, teaching, science policy advising, and consulting. I think a postdoc's value largely consists in improving one's credentials for academia, so only the few PhDs with a realistic chance of getting a professorship after their PhD should spend more than a year or so doing one.
  - dnautics 12y ago
    It used to be that there was no such thing as a postdoc, and you would go into a faculty position directly after your PhD. Obviously, you can claim sour grapes in my case, but - I finished up my PhD which was somewhat middling but I did accomplish some important things - and had two very productive postdocs in disparate fields. What I observed was, consistently, PhDs getting degrees that probably shouldn't have. About half of the PhD thesis defenses I went to at The Scripps Research Institute (consistenly ranked in top 5) were, in my opinion, undeserved, possibly including mine. The situation was somewhat worse at the University of Maryland where I did a postdoc. My second postdoc was at the Venter Insitute, where there were no PhDs; we had a grad student intern in my lab that my boss selected that couldn't get a simple molecular biology procedure to work. The undergrad with no lab experience that I trained did it 50 times in 1.5 months. The grad student got his PhD, and is now a postdoc at LBNL. Opinion aside, fact of the matter is that the academic system is broken for a simple, mathematical reason. There is an 'exponential growth' mechanism where you have professors with labs with, say, three postdocs, and four grad students (note that the grad students stay for longer than the postdocs). You can't expect to 'copy/paste' this tree indefinitely, even with a modest attrition rate, because ultimately this growth is unsustainable. You have to be willing to cull, and cull hard. Confounding factors include: an unwillingness to cull because it makes the program look bad; sometimes you have to grant the PhD because you're afraid the grad program will be sued (insert anecdotal story of a student who nabbed a nice severance including a trip to Albert Hofmann's 100th birthday party); PhDs being sold as 'the next step' for listless students who don't know what to do with their life next because all they know is schooling; PhDs having a 'social status' cachet; nationalistic measuring contests where countries try to project greatness as measured by how many PhDs they produce - aka race to the bottom. The 'jobs outside of academia' for PhDs has basically come about as a relief valve for this exponential process and now that relief valve has likely been saturated. That postdocs appear to be underpaid is a symptom of the market failure; there are too many of them around and so you can pay them less. Moreover, because so many crappy PhDs are produced, it becomes difficult to differentiate between them. This basically creates frustration for genuinely smart PhDs, and so they go into finance on wall street and cause stock market crashes by making the assumption that markets are normally distributed when they're actually levy distibuted.
DanAndersen 12y ago
Given the state of affairs for postdocs, how should we interpret claims of a "STEM shortage"?
- noobiemcfoob 12y ago
  On one hand, it appears this article is talking about it trying to keep these postdocs in academia (noting the statement in the article of equal numbers of NYU postdocs leaving academia following the position cutting). Ignoring that, as someone involved in a group with 4 open positions that have been open for the better part of a year, the shortage is there. It's not so much that there is a shortage of people capable of applying who "kind of" meet the requirements, but truly capable engineers in this field who could pick up the work required are definitely in short supply, PhDs or no.
  - bkcooper 12y ago
    Ignoring that, as someone involved in a group with 4 open positions that have been open for the better part of a year, the shortage is there. It's not so much that there is a shortage of people capable of applying who "kind of" meet the requirements, but truly capable engineers in this field who could pick up the work required are definitely in short supply, PhDs or no. If the need for these positions to be filled is sufficiently low that your group can be that picky for almost a year, it would seem demand is pretty low, thus poor evidence for a shortage.
  - tjradcliffe 12y ago
    This is not a shortage of people, it's an unwillingness or inability to raise salaries to the point where your group is attracting the people it wants. I appreciate that the ability to pay people enough to attract them is a problem that is very difficult for institutions and organizations to solve, but living on a sub-standard salary with no job security and few career prospects (how many tenure-track opportunities are expected to open up in the next five years for the people who would fill those positions?) is a difficult problem for highly skilled post-doctoral candidates to solve, too.
    - 12y ago
6stringmerc 12y ago
Article touches on some realities that I've witnessed first-hand, such as a starting salary of US$42,840, which, let's be honest, doesn't really go up that much over the course of 3, 5 or 10 years. Maybe $10k more after 10 years. These are, mostly, people who took out loans to achieve a PhD in a true STEM field...you know, the EXACT professional area that a great number of political / economic / intellectual "leaders" say we need to further support. Yet there's the persistent decline in NIH funding, money going to "safe" research topics (as in, no room to grow the field, just backing winners), and the looming shadow of arrangements where publicly funded research is channelled into private or otherwise "protected" areas. The glut of post docs is basically the symptom of this disease that is ruining a professional, highly skilled field. According to the article, the recommendations put forward recently are similar to the ones mentioned 15 years ago - so, the problem was ignored then / kicked down the road - and now we're on the cusp of a gigantic pile of non-performing student loans because there's no work to be had to earn an income and repay the loans that were taken out in pursuit of work. It's really too bad. This is no easy conundrum, not at all. What's the best advice? If you're looking into bench science as a career, DON'T. Become a veterenarian. Go into geriatric nursing. Basically do anything but try to make a living in science, because it's simply not worth trying anymore.
- searine 12y ago
  > people who took out loans to achieve a PhD in a true STEM field Most graduate STEM students have tuition reimbursed and are paid a stipend. There is still a glut of post-docs though, and 42K isn't a living wage for a 30 year old person with that kind of skill.
  - 6stringmerc 12y ago
    Wait, what? I understand that there is a stipend to working in a lab while as a student (akin to being a TA), but while obtaining a PhD in a top program, I highly doubt tuition is reimbursed, and that still doesn't cover living expenses in a major metropolitan area. I mean, if you can name a Top 25 university from each San Fran, Boston, New York, Atlanta, Baltimore, and Dallas that consistently provide PhD students tuition reimbursement and a stipend that enables a modestly reasonable quality of life, I'd really be interested. I'm a little tongue in cheek here but bear with my skepticism.
xb 12y ago
I was a Life Sciences PhD student for 6 years and started a postdoc, but then jumped ship and became a software developer for a non-science company. My salary is more than 2x as high as what I was making as a postdoc, and 3x greater than what I had been living on as a grad student. The salary thing is huge. From my point of view, research science was becoming a luxury/hobby profession of people whose spouses make a lot of money or who are independently wealthy. The only two solutions I see are either funding for NIH and basic sciences drastically increases (my preferred solution), or there is some breakthrough which makes biotech and life sciences industry more profitable and able to hire all the entry level PhDs. Notice how the engineering and physics PhDs make up only a small fraction of the donut chart? That's because those folks graduate with skills that are desirable to industry because they can translate into profit. The biotech industry does not need smart and inexperienced idea people. The biotech industry prefers very senior level scientists with proven track records of profitability, and worker drones who have bachelors or masters degrees who are not on the scientist track.
- IndianAstronaut 12y ago
  When I started my bio PhD, people were looking at me in puzzlement when I started spending more time programming and doing math. Now that I am in the software industry, a lot of them are asking me how to get a job. >From my point of view, research science was becoming a luxury/hobby profession of people whose spouses make a lot of money or who are independently wealthy. Up through the 19th century, this was primarily the case. Of course back then there was a lot of low hanging fruit as compared to now.
- will_work4tears 12y ago
  My sister recently finished a postdoc and her and her husband moved to the SF area (Mountain View), and quickly realized she couldn't do another one (that limit mentioned in the article I'm gathering). She's not had any luck finding a job in her niche (Virology), and I suggested she hop on a bootcamp type training for software development. She's right there where it's hopping, she could pull it off (she's smarter than I am and I manage). She's fallen off the face of the earth I guess. I've tried contacting her a few times over the last month or two and never get a response. Maybe she's busy doing just that. Hopefully, the way she was talking finding an Industry job with her PhD is hard.
ylem 12y ago
I would support the "superdoc" idea--but I also think that in some fields, we need to allow graduate students (and postdocs) a certain amount of time for career development. If someone wants to do a PhD in physics because they love it, but wants to pick up some CS or finance courses along the way to hedge their bets, we should encourage that...
mcmancini 12y ago
At what point did the system go awry? When did postdoc go from being a training position to cheap labor? Was it with the doubling of the NIH budget?
simonster 12y ago
One problem is that being a PI no longer seems to mean what it used to. For a PI, productivity is writing grants and getting other smart people to do research and write papers. While it may vary from field to field, I've worked for several PIs who have fantastic funding and are great at marketing their research, but don't have the knowledge to reproduce their own labs' experiments. My impression is that, for many successful scientists, the career arc goes something like: - Get really good at doing science as a graduate student and postdoc. - Become a junior PI, spend most of your time selling your science, and train your graduate students and postdocs for a few years. You need to keep up with the literature to know what to do next, but you rarely have time to perform experiments yourself. - Become a senior PI. Now your lab is established, and you can hire half a dozen knowledgeable postdocs to teach the others in your lab. As your field advances, you need to keep up enough to sell the discoveries your lab has made to grant review panels, but you don't actually have to know how to do the science. That's for those below you. There are some clear exceptions. Some PIs really do know how to do everything. Some PIs even keep running experiments while also writing grants and running a lab, although that's not necessarily an easy task. But for most PIs, the arc above seems to be the way it goes. You take the brightest, most talented scientists, and once they reach they become really knowledgeable, you turn them into professional grantwriters. I'm not sure what the solution is, but I feel like there has to be a better way. To start, maybe we should think about limiting lab size, so that your lab seeks to maximize the productivity per employed scientist rather than the total amount of funding that you can obtain. Without so much pressure to accumulate funds to grow their labs, perhaps PIs could spend less time writing grants and more time running labs. Also, with smaller labs you can afford to hire more PIs and give a career path to more of the postdocs that you are "training."
- bkcooper 12y ago
  I liked your post and agree that this is a really fundamental problem. However, I disagree with this: Also, with smaller labs you can afford to hire more PIs and give a career path to more of the postdocs that you are "training." That would probably be better for the postdocs, but I think it would have a negative impact on the overall production of new science. A PI who runs a big lab with a proven track record of success is going to be a better investment most of the time. Splitting the labs up also means that even more people are exposed to the type of grantwriting inefficiencies that you describe above. What I like about the superdoc idea is that right now (modulo some pretty rare positions) science feels like "PI or bust." I think there are lots of people who can make useful scientific contributions but probably shouldn't be PIs. Figuring out something for these people would be good for them and (IMO) good for the system.
untilHellbanned 12y ago
You shouldn't need to be doing a Master's, PhD, postdoc, or have tenure to do science and succeed. The problem is the credentialing. The impossible task is to get rid of all the fuddy-duddy decision makers (including the vast majority of postdocs themselves!) who buy into the system because... "I suffered and made it, so that's what these whipper-snappers should do too!". note: I have PhD from a top tier university and will soon be a professor at another top tier university. And yes, I badly want things to change and to be to able to hire high school kids or soccer moms but won't be able to under the current system.
noipv4 12y ago
I have finished my 5 year postdoc in bioinformatics, writing mainly 10K lines of C/C++, setting up big-data servers with commodity hardware, for two projects. 1 got published in Nature Methods, one in Nucleic Acids Res. I have no intention to continue in this system in a deeply financially distressed state and am looking for good ideas going forward. Opening a lab and writing grants is out of question for me.
kleiba 12y ago
The Germans have a simple and efficient system: you can only be employed as a graduate researcher at a University for 6 years. If you get a PhD, the time increases to a total of 12 years. If you make it to professor (full, not assistant or associate) in that time, you'll get hired for life. If not: goodbye. Oh, you worked as a lab assistant while studying to get a food in the door / gain some experience / pimp your CV? Tough luck: if you did that for more than 10 hours per week, this time is counted toward your 6 (or 12) years. This beautiful regulation comes by the beautiful name of the Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz.
- detaro 12y ago
  Which makes sure that shortly after lecturers have their content fine-tuned they either a) become professors and suddenly (have to) care about other things than teaching and/or b) they have to leave (either because they become professor somewhere else or because they didn't at all)

43 points by denzil_correa 12y ago

I am perplexed by the so-called postgraduate studies and their reward systems. I completed my PhD (in my last 20s) in a second world country about few years ago and continued working as a faculty at a neighbouring university in the same country. I pulled out (or technically resigned) as a senior lecturer, when I couldn't endure being bullied any longer by my senior academics, who had only earned their "DTech" in their 50+ yrs of age. I am now working with a pretty new institution in a first world country and will be starting a Postdoc soon. Taking a look at the salary for the Postdoc, it's like I am back to the same rat race as a PhD student years ago. And I now have a family! The new job, though a permanent position, isn't a full-time; so, all employees are advised to look elsewhere. All effort to get into the industry proved abortive; and I saw that a number of my folks in the industry are earning 10-20k more than me (i.e. senior dev. vs senior faculty). Yet they don't have those fanciful postgraduate degrees. The postdoc opportunity, as for now, seems to be an avenue to get into a top-tier or well-established institution in the first world country though. The long and the short of it is that academics don't get rewarded like their peers in the industry. In addition, postdoc offers are just another way of being a student - call it a professional student. But I will console myself be calling it a consultant. The postdoc offer isn't that bad compared to others that I had. It includes travelling to another first world country for a year or more to complete the other part of my research.

asmicom 12y ago
I like the word "consultant".

dnautics 12y ago

Amazing. The solution of "give out less PhDs" is not even broached.

bkcooper 12y ago
Cutting back on PhDs generated would be a good idea, but is probably an even harder sell (so much cheap labor!) If postdocs are so prized, then one obvious solution is to reward them. Both the 2014 National Academies report and earlier reports urged US lab heads to consider creating senior staff scientist, or ‘superdoc’, positions. These would be higher-paid, permanent jobs for talented postdocs who have no desire to start their own labs. This type of thing becoming more common would fix a lot of academic career problems. I think it would also be a very good first step in actually reducing the number of incoming PhD students, since the productivity of such a researcher will usually exceed the amount of graduate student you could replace them with.
- irremediable 12y ago
  So much this. I feel scientific careers suffer from a similar thing to technical careers: to progress, you're forced into management and away from the science/tech. There should be a track for people who don't want to do much management stuff, and just want to work on the stuff that got them going in the first place.
chriskanan 12y ago
As someone who had to work really hard to get into a PhD program, but now has a great job as a research scientist and is going to be starting a professorship in August, I have to disagree with giving out fewer PhDs as a solution. People that want to pursue careers in research should be allowed to get the necessary training. What we need is to have considerably better mentoring and training in jobs outside of academia during the PhD: science communication, industry, entrepreneurship, teaching, science policy advising, and consulting. I think a postdoc's value largely consists in improving one's credentials for academia, so only the few PhDs with a realistic chance of getting a professorship after their PhD should spend more than a year or so doing one.
- dnautics 12y ago
  It used to be that there was no such thing as a postdoc, and you would go into a faculty position directly after your PhD. Obviously, you can claim sour grapes in my case, but - I finished up my PhD which was somewhat middling but I did accomplish some important things - and had two very productive postdocs in disparate fields. What I observed was, consistently, PhDs getting degrees that probably shouldn't have. About half of the PhD thesis defenses I went to at The Scripps Research Institute (consistenly ranked in top 5) were, in my opinion, undeserved, possibly including mine. The situation was somewhat worse at the University of Maryland where I did a postdoc. My second postdoc was at the Venter Insitute, where there were no PhDs; we had a grad student intern in my lab that my boss selected that couldn't get a simple molecular biology procedure to work. The undergrad with no lab experience that I trained did it 50 times in 1.5 months. The grad student got his PhD, and is now a postdoc at LBNL. Opinion aside, fact of the matter is that the academic system is broken for a simple, mathematical reason. There is an 'exponential growth' mechanism where you have professors with labs with, say, three postdocs, and four grad students (note that the grad students stay for longer than the postdocs). You can't expect to 'copy/paste' this tree indefinitely, even with a modest attrition rate, because ultimately this growth is unsustainable. You have to be willing to cull, and cull hard. Confounding factors include: an unwillingness to cull because it makes the program look bad; sometimes you have to grant the PhD because you're afraid the grad program will be sued (insert anecdotal story of a student who nabbed a nice severance including a trip to Albert Hofmann's 100th birthday party); PhDs being sold as 'the next step' for listless students who don't know what to do with their life next because all they know is schooling; PhDs having a 'social status' cachet; nationalistic measuring contests where countries try to project greatness as measured by how many PhDs they produce - aka race to the bottom. The 'jobs outside of academia' for PhDs has basically come about as a relief valve for this exponential process and now that relief valve has likely been saturated. That postdocs appear to be underpaid is a symptom of the market failure; there are too many of them around and so you can pay them less. Moreover, because so many crappy PhDs are produced, it becomes difficult to differentiate between them. This basically creates frustration for genuinely smart PhDs, and so they go into finance on wall street and cause stock market crashes by making the assumption that markets are normally distributed when they're actually levy distibuted.

DanAndersen 12y ago

Given the state of affairs for postdocs, how should we interpret claims of a "STEM shortage"?

noobiemcfoob 12y ago
On one hand, it appears this article is talking about it trying to keep these postdocs in academia (noting the statement in the article of equal numbers of NYU postdocs leaving academia following the position cutting). Ignoring that, as someone involved in a group with 4 open positions that have been open for the better part of a year, the shortage is there. It's not so much that there is a shortage of people capable of applying who "kind of" meet the requirements, but truly capable engineers in this field who could pick up the work required are definitely in short supply, PhDs or no.
- bkcooper 12y ago
  Ignoring that, as someone involved in a group with 4 open positions that have been open for the better part of a year, the shortage is there. It's not so much that there is a shortage of people capable of applying who "kind of" meet the requirements, but truly capable engineers in this field who could pick up the work required are definitely in short supply, PhDs or no. If the need for these positions to be filled is sufficiently low that your group can be that picky for almost a year, it would seem demand is pretty low, thus poor evidence for a shortage.
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  This is not a shortage of people, it's an unwillingness or inability to raise salaries to the point where your group is attracting the people it wants. I appreciate that the ability to pay people enough to attract them is a problem that is very difficult for institutions and organizations to solve, but living on a sub-standard salary with no job security and few career prospects (how many tenure-track opportunities are expected to open up in the next five years for the people who would fill those positions?) is a difficult problem for highly skilled post-doctoral candidates to solve, too.
  - 12y ago

6stringmerc 12y ago

Article touches on some realities that I've witnessed first-hand, such as a starting salary of US$42,840, which, let's be honest, doesn't really go up that much over the course of 3, 5 or 10 years. Maybe $10k more after 10 years. These are, mostly, people who took out loans to achieve a PhD in a true STEM field...you know, the EXACT professional area that a great number of political / economic / intellectual "leaders" say we need to further support. Yet there's the persistent decline in NIH funding, money going to "safe" research topics (as in, no room to grow the field, just backing winners), and the looming shadow of arrangements where publicly funded research is channelled into private or otherwise "protected" areas. The glut of post docs is basically the symptom of this disease that is ruining a professional, highly skilled field. According to the article, the recommendations put forward recently are similar to the ones mentioned 15 years ago - so, the problem was ignored then / kicked down the road - and now we're on the cusp of a gigantic pile of non-performing student loans because there's no work to be had to earn an income and repay the loans that were taken out in pursuit of work. It's really too bad. This is no easy conundrum, not at all. What's the best advice? If you're looking into bench science as a career, DON'T. Become a veterenarian. Go into geriatric nursing. Basically do anything but try to make a living in science, because it's simply not worth trying anymore.

searine 12y ago
> people who took out loans to achieve a PhD in a true STEM field Most graduate STEM students have tuition reimbursed and are paid a stipend. There is still a glut of post-docs though, and 42K isn't a living wage for a 30 year old person with that kind of skill.
- 6stringmerc 12y ago
  Wait, what? I understand that there is a stipend to working in a lab while as a student (akin to being a TA), but while obtaining a PhD in a top program, I highly doubt tuition is reimbursed, and that still doesn't cover living expenses in a major metropolitan area. I mean, if you can name a Top 25 university from each San Fran, Boston, New York, Atlanta, Baltimore, and Dallas that consistently provide PhD students tuition reimbursement and a stipend that enables a modestly reasonable quality of life, I'd really be interested. I'm a little tongue in cheek here but bear with my skepticism.

xb 12y ago

I was a Life Sciences PhD student for 6 years and started a postdoc, but then jumped ship and became a software developer for a non-science company. My salary is more than 2x as high as what I was making as a postdoc, and 3x greater than what I had been living on as a grad student. The salary thing is huge. From my point of view, research science was becoming a luxury/hobby profession of people whose spouses make a lot of money or who are independently wealthy. The only two solutions I see are either funding for NIH and basic sciences drastically increases (my preferred solution), or there is some breakthrough which makes biotech and life sciences industry more profitable and able to hire all the entry level PhDs. Notice how the engineering and physics PhDs make up only a small fraction of the donut chart? That's because those folks graduate with skills that are desirable to industry because they can translate into profit. The biotech industry does not need smart and inexperienced idea people. The biotech industry prefers very senior level scientists with proven track records of profitability, and worker drones who have bachelors or masters degrees who are not on the scientist track.

IndianAstronaut 12y ago
When I started my bio PhD, people were looking at me in puzzlement when I started spending more time programming and doing math. Now that I am in the software industry, a lot of them are asking me how to get a job. >From my point of view, research science was becoming a luxury/hobby profession of people whose spouses make a lot of money or who are independently wealthy. Up through the 19th century, this was primarily the case. Of course back then there was a lot of low hanging fruit as compared to now.
will_work4tears 12y ago
My sister recently finished a postdoc and her and her husband moved to the SF area (Mountain View), and quickly realized she couldn't do another one (that limit mentioned in the article I'm gathering). She's not had any luck finding a job in her niche (Virology), and I suggested she hop on a bootcamp type training for software development. She's right there where it's hopping, she could pull it off (she's smarter than I am and I manage). She's fallen off the face of the earth I guess. I've tried contacting her a few times over the last month or two and never get a response. Maybe she's busy doing just that. Hopefully, the way she was talking finding an Industry job with her PhD is hard.

ylem 12y ago

I would support the "superdoc" idea--but I also think that in some fields, we need to allow graduate students (and postdocs) a certain amount of time for career development. If someone wants to do a PhD in physics because they love it, but wants to pick up some CS or finance courses along the way to hedge their bets, we should encourage that...

mcmancini 12y ago

At what point did the system go awry? When did postdoc go from being a training position to cheap labor? Was it with the doubling of the NIH budget?

simonster 12y ago

One problem is that being a PI no longer seems to mean what it used to. For a PI, productivity is writing grants and getting other smart people to do research and write papers. While it may vary from field to field, I've worked for several PIs who have fantastic funding and are great at marketing their research, but don't have the knowledge to reproduce their own labs' experiments. My impression is that, for many successful scientists, the career arc goes something like: - Get really good at doing science as a graduate student and postdoc. - Become a junior PI, spend most of your time selling your science, and train your graduate students and postdocs for a few years. You need to keep up with the literature to know what to do next, but you rarely have time to perform experiments yourself. - Become a senior PI. Now your lab is established, and you can hire half a dozen knowledgeable postdocs to teach the others in your lab. As your field advances, you need to keep up enough to sell the discoveries your lab has made to grant review panels, but you don't actually have to know how to do the science. That's for those below you. There are some clear exceptions. Some PIs really do know how to do everything. Some PIs even keep running experiments while also writing grants and running a lab, although that's not necessarily an easy task. But for most PIs, the arc above seems to be the way it goes. You take the brightest, most talented scientists, and once they reach they become really knowledgeable, you turn them into professional grantwriters. I'm not sure what the solution is, but I feel like there has to be a better way. To start, maybe we should think about limiting lab size, so that your lab seeks to maximize the productivity per employed scientist rather than the total amount of funding that you can obtain. Without so much pressure to accumulate funds to grow their labs, perhaps PIs could spend less time writing grants and more time running labs. Also, with smaller labs you can afford to hire more PIs and give a career path to more of the postdocs that you are "training."

bkcooper 12y ago
I liked your post and agree that this is a really fundamental problem. However, I disagree with this: Also, with smaller labs you can afford to hire more PIs and give a career path to more of the postdocs that you are "training." That would probably be better for the postdocs, but I think it would have a negative impact on the overall production of new science. A PI who runs a big lab with a proven track record of success is going to be a better investment most of the time. Splitting the labs up also means that even more people are exposed to the type of grantwriting inefficiencies that you describe above. What I like about the superdoc idea is that right now (modulo some pretty rare positions) science feels like "PI or bust." I think there are lots of people who can make useful scientific contributions but probably shouldn't be PIs. Figuring out something for these people would be good for them and (IMO) good for the system.

untilHellbanned 12y ago

You shouldn't need to be doing a Master's, PhD, postdoc, or have tenure to do science and succeed. The problem is the credentialing. The impossible task is to get rid of all the fuddy-duddy decision makers (including the vast majority of postdocs themselves!) who buy into the system because... "I suffered and made it, so that's what these whipper-snappers should do too!". note: I have PhD from a top tier university and will soon be a professor at another top tier university. And yes, I badly want things to change and to be to able to hire high school kids or soccer moms but won't be able to under the current system.

noipv4 12y ago

I have finished my 5 year postdoc in bioinformatics, writing mainly 10K lines of C/C++, setting up big-data servers with commodity hardware, for two projects. 1 got published in Nature Methods, one in Nucleic Acids Res. I have no intention to continue in this system in a deeply financially distressed state and am looking for good ideas going forward. Opening a lab and writing grants is out of question for me.

kleiba 12y ago

The Germans have a simple and efficient system: you can only be employed as a graduate researcher at a University for 6 years. If you get a PhD, the time increases to a total of 12 years. If you make it to professor (full, not assistant or associate) in that time, you'll get hired for life. If not: goodbye. Oh, you worked as a lab assistant while studying to get a food in the door / gain some experience / pimp your CV? Tough luck: if you did that for more than 10 hours per week, this time is counted toward your 6 (or 12) years. This beautiful regulation comes by the beautiful name of the Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz.

detaro 12y ago
Which makes sure that shortly after lecturers have their content fine-tuned they either a) become professors and suddenly (have to) care about other things than teaching and/or b) they have to leave (either because they become professor somewhere else or because they didn't at all)