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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.'"
Unfortunately, for my field, a postdoc is required for just about everything outside of industry. Even teaching position at community colleges want postdoc. And since there is a flood of people with them already, they can be picky and get them.
To me, the increasing use of them is a sign of oversupply of interested people and not enough 'real' jobs for them. We are beginning to see very long postdoc times (during which the postdoc isn't actually rolling in money...)
if you know what I mean.
My post-doc was the most grueling and difficult thing I've ever done. Two and a half years of crushingly long days, hard deadlines and uncertain future. I guess I got my faculty job out of it (and traded up to the same thing again for another 5 years before tenure review)... so I guess it's worth it?
Now I'm left wondering if tenure is even worth the struggle at the end. Bear in mind, tenure in Australia is not a "secure job for life" as people in the US seem to think it is. We're actually having a lot of difficulty convincing newly minted grads to come and do PhDs when they see all the junior faculty are deeply bitter, cynical and exhausted. But hey, I build robots for a living, so I tell myself when I see those same grads getting jobs that pay more than mine does with zero years experience..
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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No.
(Brought to you by a postdoc.)
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Have a concrete plan to feed yourself. Or save the schooling for retirement, after you've saved up enough to live on. Digging yourself a hundred thousand dollar hole isn't a great idea right out of the gate.
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They're talking about science and engineering postdocs in the article, not humanities. Science and engineering postdocs are paid, just not very well, and science and engineering graduate students are also paid as well as having their tuition covered, so the point about debt is moot. Grad school and such in these disciplines is mostly about opportunity cost (years in your 20s potentially squandered) and potentially limiting your future career opportunities depending on your field and/or continued desire to remain in the academy.
Postdocs aren't all bad. I'm convinced that the issue with academia is that everyone thinks they are outstanding. As a result, postdocs that have a rough time of it blame the postdoc, not themselves. In other words, I made a decent wage and had normal hours. YMMV.
He was a Ph.D, taught at University of Arkansas. Told me it definitely depended on the field, and that even a Doctorate in some fields (Business) was considered a bit questionable. But he said the number of people who get postdoc's is based on the number of people who A=(can't figure out what they want to do) + B=(can't find a job), more than C=(fields that need post-doctorates). So I looked at my dad, and quit at a Masters.
Gently reply
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.
There was an interesting editorial in Nature back in 2005 commenting on how postdocs earn barely more than a janitor at Harvard.
http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v37/n7/full/ng0705-653.html
With the economy having gone south and the inevitable funding cuts that has brought about, the situation is even worse now.
I moved halfway around the world for my postdoc (from Australia to the US), for a job that pays approximately half what I'd get in Australia. (Postdocs in the US are paid far less than Postdocs in Australia. Maybe that's why there are so many Postdocs in the US. They can hire more of them for the same amount of money.)
Sometimes, I do wonder what I'm doing here. And then I remember how I have a job that I absolutely love. That I can go home every evening looking forward to going to work the next day. And when I am reminded of that, I think how incredibly lucky I am to be doing what I'm doing. And if I have to accept lower pay and the lack of job stability as a trade-off, I am perfectly willing to do so.
This doesn't mean that I think Postdocs are getting a great deal, of course. We know we aren't. But we never got into this profession for the money anyway.
Knowing all that I know now, would I still have gone through all those years of grad school and gotten my PhD and moved halfway around the planet for a postdoc? Was it all worth it? I believe I'd say yes.
I'm doing a postdoc right now, and while I don't mind the 60 hour weeks, the uncertainty is what gets at me. After a long education one basically becomes a vagabond, drifting from university to university, never knowing where one will be working in 3 years' time. And the last year of each postdoc is spent writing applications for other places. In my home country, there are 1-2 available permanent positions every decade or so in my field, each of which typically has more than 100 applicants from all over the world. Getting one of those is pretty unlikely, to put it mildly. So I'll have to choose between permanently moving far away from friends and family, or leave my field of research. Unless I'm better than all the 100+ other applicants.
The postdoc situation is a symptom of there beeing too little resources invested in science compared to the number of people who want to do science. Instead, society is investing resources in things like moving imagniary money around really fast (yes, high frequency trading and other finance is a big employer of drop-outs from my field - they can emply more people, and pay much higher salaries, despite their detrimental effect on society). Yes, I am a bit bitter.
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.
Science and engineering postdocs are paid, just not very well
Do a search on STEM postdoc job ads - $50k is considered very generous. No, you won't starve, some people get by on less (though usually in low cost-of-living places rather than the high CoL areas where the better universities typically are). $50k/yr is about $24/hr assuming 40 hr weeks, but that's a ridiculous assumption. A goof-off postdoc probably does at least 60 hrs/wk, so that's $16/hr if you were paid on straight time. Hourly workers are supposed to get time and a half for OT, so an hourly worker doing 60 hrs/wk would pull in $50k if they worked 60 hrs/wk and had a base rate of $13.74/hr. How long after high school to get a Ph.D.? It varies quite a bit, but say 8-9 years on average. No big deal. Personally I don't understand why, however lazy and unmotivated Americans are, there aren't more of them clamoring for postdocs, when for a little education they can rake in big bucks like that.
I recently finished a book where the author analyzes the entire process of getting a PhD in physics. For various reasons, it's not at all worthwhile. You will never be in a position to realize your dream of doing interesting research or becoming a professor. I'll let others describe the various problems, but they're fairly self-evident.
So let's think out of the box. Is there a way to do interesting research without the PhD?
It turns out there's a ton of interesting things being done by home experimentation nowadays. Actually, this used to be common - a gentleman scientist was someone with an independent income who tinkered with home research. Many had quite elaborate laboratories and discovered useful things.
If you want to be a researcher, you could approach the problem intellectually. Establish a steady income from which you can support yourself and family, allocate some time and money to setting up a lab, and do your own research.
Ben Krasnow built an electron microscope (!), and is experimenting with vapor-phase deposition of conductive traces. Robert Murray Smith makes graphene and conductive ink, Brad Graham built a rock disaggregator (which is, incidentally, totally frightening), Lindsay Wilson built an untrasonic drill, Timothy Ferriss is scientifically studying of nutrition, I am trying to detect dark matter (no link - sorry)
Lots of people are doing interesting research at home with a modest budget. If you can give up the big questions (Higgs Boson, Penicillin replacement, Egyptian archaeology), there's a wide swath of interesting areas just waiting to be explored.
From the "You should only care about money dept."
Umm, no -- from the be realistic about your life dept.
If you're independently wealthy and just want a Ph.D. in English lit. or art history, by all means, go for it and pay the $150k or whatever! If you're retired or have money to burn or whatever, I applaud your effort to become more educated. Seriously, I really do. I wish more people who had the means did such things with their money.
But as someone who actually has degrees in fields that are NOT considered "lucrative," because I deliberately decided to do something I enjoy, rather than earn the most money I could... I think I have plenty of experience to give advice here.
And being realistic is not the same as "only caring about money." If there were a higher demand for Ph.D.'s in the field you love, there would be more opportunities for "full rides" for graduate school in your field. If you aren't talented enough to get one of those, the chances that you will subsequently land a nice tenure-track job somewhere are very low.
I know people with Ivy League Ph.D.'s in the humanities who graduated half a decade ago, have a number of publications in top journals, have teaching experience, and they STILL can't find a decent tenure-track job. If you're paying $100k to get your crappy graduate degree from Upper Bucksnort University, you really think you have a chance?!?
I'm not trying to quash anyone's dreams, but you need to ask yourself what you're getting for that $100k+ investment, other than a boatload of debt.
By all means, keep the dream: go out and get a job, save up some cash, and then if when you're 35 or 40 or whatever, go back and get that Ph.D. with the money you saved -- if you still really want to. I admire people like that a great deal.
But shelling out for graduate school when it won't help you be able to do what you want to do anyway, and it could actually HURT your future by having crippling debt and branding you as "overcredentialed" as you try to find a realistic job.
P.S. Yes, I have a job in what I wanted to do, and no, I do not have any debt from graduate school. But I know a few people who do have ridiculous debt from graduate school, have no job or some crappy job that isn't anything that they ever wanted to do, and are struggling to get out of debt... there's no chance that they will ever get a decent academic job.
I did 4 years of Postdoc (in Japan). It was fun, in Japan the payment for Postdocs is ok, and i worked in a field i liked to work in since i was 16years old. I contributed to some publications (10 Impact points per year) and did some really nice experiments. To me it felt like playing with the most expensive lego bricks which i ever was allowed to play with. I had the priviledge to see parts of the world which i would not have dramt about when before my masters thesis. I met some interesting, peculiar, and exceptional people (coauthors from ~12 nationalities).
OTOH, it was hard work (>80h per week average, in critical times >400h/month), strange habits, uncertainity, and a lack of decent positions after it.
I got out of it, to a technical consulting company. I earn less than the people who started 10 years younger, but somehow doing a phd/postdoc kept me young and agile. I am now more or less resistant to stress (did not feel it since i started the job), am used to pick up new things at a high pace.
I can only say: i did it, it was fun and broadened my view. My PhD and postdoc thought me that persistence in following something you want to do leads to success. I managed to get rid of my attenton span problems. I quit as postdoc when it stopped being fun and when i did not see decent positions around, i left science. I dont regret having done my postdoc, i did not regret for a single day leaving it.There was a time when a very different path in my life would have been very possible. I proably also would not have regret it.
Remarks: you have to have a compatible partner or risk a series of relationships. IMHO the only point where i really seen from behind could have spent some attention on. I also saw people not being able to handle the pressure. I saw people doing postdocs until they where older than 40 because they became too anxious or to incompetent in other things to leave. I saw people fuckign up their lifes for good. People not good enough to get any decend publicaitons, but valuable in the lab, hoping that the professor who kept them forever in a dependent relationship would give them the life-long position as assitant. I habe seen people growing old faster than they should and people breaking down. I have heard of people becoming so fristrated that they sabbotaged the co-workers experiments.
So my advice is: do it als long as you do it for fun. Dont get addicted.
I need another hint.
Your post describes exactly why I went into Engineering. Its the thing I seemed I was programmed to do since I came out of my mama's womb. Everyone seems like they have this thing for what they find fun to do. Designing electronic gadgets is mine.
A stint in Aerospace removed a heck of a lot of drive out of me. Applying modern management methods to artistic types burns them out damn fast.
Currently, I am working in another little startup. If I had any significant bills to pay or had a family to support, I would be in dire financial straits. I would earn more spendable money being a greeter in Wal-Mart, but I would not enjoy standing eight hours a day robotically saying "Welcome to Wal-Mart" to everyone as well as inspecting every shopping cart that tripped their Sensormatic EAS system.
Sitting in a cubicle trying to implement my designs is not my idea of fun. I am a lab rat. I hate cubicles. I hate ties and dress codes. I hate meetings - if you have anything to say, drop by for a chat - but this thing of requiring me to drop everything and show up somewhere at a fixed time is ridiculous. Its a bad design. Kinda like me memory-mapping I/O ports right in the middle of a memory space currently used by a memory chip.
That was my greatest disappointment when the new wave of management overran the small business I used to work for. Thank goodness I was paid well there before the management coup because we had a lot of successful products to sell. I do not know a single one of the creative types that were able to stand up to the modern management methods. But the stockholders seemed to love them. Pure case of "tragedy of the commons" if you ask me. Destruction of our future product stream for a short term benefit of hyping the sales and profit of our existing line. It seems only people overly concerned with profit, and not design quality, rank that as being so damned important.
I would say if someone else is paying for your study, go for it. A lot of corporations - especially in the Military-Industrial Complex - justify their bid on the amount of credentialed and degreed personnel they are placing on the customer project. Whether or not these people are internally driven to do the technical part of the job seems to be of little importance to the management team. They want certs to sell.
If you are thinking of getting into debt for this, please oh please think twice. My own experience shows there is a terrific glut of very highly qualified "do-ers" out there already. The de-industrialization of America has left cadres of engineering types left over from the hey-days of the 60's on the streets.
As America, banker to the world, transitions from a manufacturing based economy to a service based economy, it seems to me the best jobs are to be found in services catering to helping others comply with government mandates. Every new law passed mandating compliance with some government requirement is a gold-mine for those prepared to assist existing businesses in complying with it. Legalized extortion. While the government holds the gun on the business, you go for their wallet.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
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]
Do that many people pay for their PhDs? I'm not paying for mine; I wouldn't do it if I had to (racked up enough debt from law school).
Well, not that many pay FULL-PRICE. According to the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS), about 86% of doctoral students received some form of financial aid, grant, assistantship, stipend, etc. in 2007-08. If we restrict this to Ph.D. students only (and exclude the field of education), that number rises to 91%.
I'm sure buried in all the statistics on that website, you might be able to find numbers that tell what percentage of tuition, etc. students actually ended up paying. But at least 9% of Ph.D. students in the U.S. apparently are paying for their degrees without ANY financial assistance whatsoever.
I don't know how many students have to pay at least some tuition, or don't get adequate stipends or pay from assistanceships to live on. I imagine it must be at least double that figure, and maybe a lot more.
So, it's not the majority of Ph.D. students, but there is a not insignificant number of such people out there. And among other graduate students (especially master's degrees), the numbers are much higher.
To try and put this in perspective: adjusted for cost of living (OECD comparative price levels), the salary for a post doc position in Norway equals $48k a year in the US. For the UK, which also pays well for postdocs, it's $47k. Other European countries have lower postdoc salaries, e.g in Italy a post doc at IIT (which is a well funded national laboratory) pays the equivalent of $37k.
Ergo, at $50k, US postdocs are on par with the best paying countries in Europe.
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