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Is a Postdoc Worth it?
Jim_Austin writes "In a very funny column, Adam Ruben reviews the disadvantages and, well, the disadvantages of doing a postdoc, noting that 'The term "postdoc" refers both to the position and to the person who occupies it. (In this sense, it's much like the term "bar mitzvah.") So you can be a postdoc, but you can also do a postdoc.'"
If grad school has at best a questionable return, how could a postdoc - indentured servitude, slavery - be any better an idea?
In plain English, it's cheap labor. As I understand it, once upon a time in America, somebody reasonably good who got their Ph.D. could move to a faculty position fairly quickly. Not tenured at first of course, but likely tenure track. When we started getting more Ph.D.'s than we needed, they invented the post-doc. String 'em along, get lots of cheap labor, and every once in a while give somebody a faculty position so the rest could dream. But hey, everybody knows we've got a STEM shortage, right?
Back in the 80's the NSF pushed for a big increase in student visas. They noted that it would probably push down the salaries of Ph.D.'s, though I'm sure that wasn't a motivation.
Think of it as a year-long or two-year-long work contract. That's it. It's a way to get some experience, put food on the table, and figure out what the hell you are going to do when it ends. In my case it was 4 years of employment in a series of contracts before getting a "real job" elsewhere with some permanence to it. I enjoyed my time as a postdoc, but when other opportunities came up, I gave them my notice and left.
The article is sarcastic and funny mainly because some people put in all those years of effort and mistakenly think a PhD or postdoc magically "graduates" into a real professor position eventually. Nope. You're entirely on your own to figure out how to make that happen, if ever. But after ~10 years of post-secondary education you better be able to take on a career challenge like that or you are guaranteeing you will be one of those 6/7ths that don't go on to be a professor. It's a tough path. It does work sometimes, but you have to focus on making your CV stand out from the others. A postdoc gives you time to do that if you are well-motivated and organized. The worst is if you are so intensely devoted to the short-term tasks of your degree and postdoc that you don't think about the longer-term goal and how to build towards it. You should be thinking about employment all the way through, otherwise you're in for a big shock at the end.
Long article to say: postdoc is a lot of work for low pay and iffy career prospects.
Well duh.
On the flip side, if you are doing it, chances are "a lot of work" is a plus not a minus. As Aldous Huxley said: "An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex." Yes, the pay is low but you get to use someone else's money to fund your research. If you want to worry about science and not administrative issues then postdoc days are the golden days.
You have a gross misunderstanding of what a career in academia is like. Unless your hobby includes teaching classes and writing grant proposals.
Yeah like find a treatment for AIDS that saved millions of lives like my thesis advisor did. And on the side invented the science of protenomics. Clearly such people are just looking for a comfy job.
Fucking Idiot.
On the other hand, if you're brimming with ideas and an excitement to get stuck into them, then by the end of your postdoc prepare for some disappointment. Surprise! You didn't get another postdoc!
No matter how good you are, there are topics that don't get you through. There is pure bad luck which means you don't get through. I don't know what it's like in other fields, but in my field, you're looking at approximately 25% max of PhD students from good institutions are able to find a postdoc. Are 75% of them willing to leave or useless? Nope. Many of them are either or both of those, but many are simply unable to find a job in academia. Then at the end of the first postdoc, about 50% of those who have survived, and perhaps more, are shown the door. Were these people who weren't "brimming with ideas" or unwilling "to get stuck into them"? Nope. Of course, some were, but most of the others are just victims of shitty fucking luck. Not enough jobs, not enough brown-nosing, not enough slurping at a pointless seam of nothingness which is currently fashionable for no apparent reason (I'm looking at you, cosmology. Braneworlds? Endless permutations on inflationary model-building, which is a field that was dead in 1989? Endless studies into higher- and higher-order statistics of inflation when we can't even see a fucking bispectrum on the CMB? Horava-Lifshitz gravity? Seriously? Fuck off is this shit important), not enough "networking", and -- far more important than any of that -- plain bad timing and bad luck. Then of the people who did get that second post-doc, 50% of them don't make a third. Probably more. I don't know about your field, but in mine, you need a third postdoc which may or may not be a five-year fellowship / tenure-track. In many cases the fourth fellowship is the tenure-track. The days of going from PhD to junior faculty are very long gone. And in the meantime, you've put your personal life under serious strain, which is frequently terminal to any relationships that were in it, and earned peanuts.
On the other hand, so long as you can either make relationships work or aren't fucked about them, it's the perfect job. The working culture - outside of the US, where they seem to expect you to piss blood for peanuts - is lovely. If you deliver the results (in the form of publishable papers), no-one gives the slightest fuck where you are or what you're doing. Not in the department for three weeks solid? So long as you didn't have a meeting set up with your employer, no-one will care or, indeed, notice. Taking a three-month research visit to Berkely? Not only will no-one care, they'll even pay for you to do it. Don't feel like working more than three hours today? Not only will people not notice if you go home and play Call of Duty, they'll actively encourage you to, because there's nothing more useless than a knackered postdoc unable to work. What's the point in that? They can't do anything creative, they can't even focus on the maths. If they stop publishing, that's when it's an issue.
It's basically horses for courses. If you like traveling, by which I mean constantly moving country, and if you don't care about money, and if you like the idea of the job freedom that comes with a postdoc - and genuinely care about the work, because otherwise you really are wasting you time - it's the life of Reilly. On the other hand, if you've even the slightest hankering for stability, you're going to be very unhappy for a very long time, and if you're the kind (like me, and I've been on both ends of the luck, and it's offended me when I've won out at least as much as when I've lost) to get pissed off with the crapshoot nature of it it's probably better to go into industry where at least everyone knows it's a political game and no-one gives a fuck. Academia is in some ways a horrible place where many people genuinely do give a fuck but have no power to change things for you, and the rest are egotistical pricks with an astonishingly inflated sense of their own achievement.
(Probably myself included.)
I believe you are doing what we all should be doing.
Find our niche. Do it for yourself. Build your own dream - not slave away at minimum wage building someone else's dream.
This wage-slave thingie is as bad as prostitution.
My respects to you, Sir.
You provide a service to the community that is far more valuable than most.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
I'm on my fourth postdoc, eleven years after graduation. Honestly, I don't even aim for a faculty job any more. That train left the station long ago.
So why do I do it? Fairly long working days (but so are industry jobs), and no secure future of any kind. But the pay is decent, at least here in Japan, and I do get to work on things that interest me a lot more than I'd do outside academia.
Still, left to decide by myself I would have left a few years ago already. The uncertainty is really the big issue, and I often feel I'd prefer even a language-teaching or convenience-store job if it came with job security. But my wife points out that we're not hurting for money, and doing what I love is not a chance that will come again. So better to rowk in research while I still can and while it's still fun. Hard to argue with that.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.