11 Responses to “Plight of the Postdoc Revisited”

1. 1.   Anthony McCarthy Says:
   August 20th, 2009 at 6:12 am

   I know a post-doc with a degree in biology who got a job three years ago, as a fire fighter. He seems pretty happy with it.

2. 2.   Scicurious Says:
   August 20th, 2009 at 8:58 am

   The worst thing is that, because you have a PhD, people think you’re overqualified for a lot of jobs! Little do they know that education is negated by our lack of experience with the real world.

3. 3.   Sheril Kirshenbaum Says:
   August 20th, 2009 at 10:14 am

   Sci brings up an interesting and valid point.

   Candidates with PhDs are sometimes passed over in the hiring process outside of the ivory towers–sometimes simply because they are considered ‘too qualified’ and may ‘expect too much money.’

4. 4.   TomJoe Says:
   August 20th, 2009 at 10:25 am

   I did a 16 month (yes, you read that right … 16 months) Post-Doc before landing myself a full-time government scientific research position (even turning down a tenure-track academia position in the process), doing exactly what I was trained to do as a graduate student (microbiology and molecular biology). Part of the problem is, either programs/mentors are not showing their students/Post-Docs where all the jobs are (you know, look to industry and government as well) or the graduate students/Post Docs are not taking their own careers into their hands as much as they should be.

5. 5.   Sorbet Says:
   August 20th, 2009 at 10:34 am

   My friend is a theoretical physicist and has been doing post-docs for eight years because she hasn’t found a position yet, and she is actually pretty good. For a long time the only other option for theoretical physicists was to become a quant in finance, but now…

6. 6.   Benjamin S. Nelson Says:
   August 20th, 2009 at 11:38 am

   I was on the executive of the York University strike in Canada, which ended in February. We were teaching assistants and contract (“adjunct”) faculty, demanding job security for the contract faculty members. Most of us were either masters students or doctoral students that are disgusted by the shift away from tenure-track appointments in North America.

   Of course, the university didn’t bargain, and the Toronto media largely ignored the message, so we were legislated back to work by the provincial government. But at least somebody tries to fight the tide every so often.

7. 7.   Walker Says:
   August 20th, 2009 at 12:41 pm

   demanding job security for the contract faculty members

   The problem isn’t job security for contract members. Yes, they have renewable contracts, but so does everyone else on the planet who is not in tenure track job. And if they do good jobs, they generally get to keep those jobs forever because the full faculty never want to teach those classes.

   No, the real problem is how little adjuncts are paid. That is just criminal.

8. 8.   Walker Says:
   August 20th, 2009 at 12:44 pm

   My friend is a theoretical physicist and has been doing post-docs for eight years because she hasn’t found a position yet, and she is actually pretty good.

   Your PhD has a time-limit on it. The faculty hiring bar gets much higher the longer you are out. Yes, you can get a job 8 years out, but you essentially have to do something that revolutionizes the field.

   Sometimes, you just have to move on.

9. 9.   Marc Says:
   August 20th, 2009 at 12:47 pm

   The stats in the article are a bit odd, and it’s difficult to extract from them what’s actually going on. In the physical sciences the norm for faculty is now 1-2 postdocs, typically 5 years past PhD, but this is almost always (75%+) of the time followed by tenure. Systems which hire newly minted PhDs as professors all suffer from one of two severe issues: very low tenure rates (see the humanities) or stacking up unproductive deadwood (see many European countries, like France, for examples of what happens when you award almost instant tenure at an early age.) I therefore don’t see the small number of faculty hires to young scientists as a problem; a more relevant one (which is quite real) is the proportion of PhDs who eventually get faculty jobs.

   I can’t speak to the biological sciences at all, but they seem organized around a very different setup – large grants, a pyramid structure with many people working with a single faculty member, and so on.

10. 10.   Sorbet Says:
    August 20th, 2009 at 2:32 pm

    8: There was no problem per se with my friend’s record; she had won awards in grad school and had several publications in Phys. Rev. etc. But the job market is just inherently thin for highly theoretical fields, where being very good is seldom not enough and you have to be extraordinary.

11. 11.   Plight of the PhD | The Intersection | Discover Magazine Says:
    August 23rd, 2009 at 9:30 pm

    [...] starts before the tribulations of a postdoc*… [...]