The future of the postdoc

http://www.nature.com/news/the-future-of-the-postdoc-1.17253

by DrScump • 11 years ago

69 62 11 years ago

DrScump• 11 years ago

First posted back in April... original thread comments are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9334316

dnautics4• 11 years ago

12th year as a postdoc? While I don't think the postdoc system is working very well, this example is not the face of failure of the postdoc system. This example is a failure of market signals to overcome an individual's sense of entitlement.

Estragon• 11 years ago

Sense of altruism, more like it. I don't see the sense of entitlement in spending years in low-status, low-paying positions to research Alzheimer's.

dnautics4• 11 years ago

you stay in a postdoc because you think you're entitled to a professorial position. You could advance to a staff scientist position or move on to industry, or just do something else. If you've spent 12 years doing something, it means you were probably a bad experimentalist, really unlucky, or just bad at 'playing the game'. If you're in science and any one of the three above applies, you should quit. The market was trying to tell her that, she didn't get the message, even when her institution forced her out.

johncolanduoni• 11 years ago

Working hard while getting paid peanuts to have a shot at your goal in not exactly what I'd call entitlement. She obviously didn't expect the position to fall into her lap if she thought it was still worth working for it at year 11.

I'm not saying it's rational, but it's not like she threw a tantrum when she got turned down.

chrisseaton3• 11 years ago

Why does it have to be up-or-out? Not everyone can reach the top. What is wrong with working as a mid-level researcher for your whole career?

robotresearcher8• 11 years ago

The complaint is that the salaries and roles are very bimodal. You're either a postdoc with very low pay and few responsibilities or a prof with pretty good pay running your own lab. There are few roles in-between. There are some - soft money researchers - but these are not as common as they might be.

cperciva2• 11 years ago

In December 2014, a committee convened by the US National Academies released a report aimed at highlighting and improving the postdoc’s plight. The committee called for a hike in salaries, from the current recommended starting salary of US$42,840 to $50,000...

Hands up, everybody who would love to hire a scientist with a PhD for less than $50k/year.

danieltillett5• 11 years ago

Depends on the scientist. My personal experience is the best postdocs are more than 10x more productive than the average. Some post docs are worth $300,000 per year, while the bottom 20% are worth -$100,000 per year. The real problem is that everyone gets basically the same salary and as an employer you have no ability to pay more to the great postdocs.

cperciva2• 11 years ago

My point was that outside of academia we would laugh at any company which expected to hire a PhD and pay them under $50k/year.

parennoob3• 11 years ago

a scientist with a PhD for less than $50k/year.

There are several angles to this. Yes, a scientist with a PhD might be able to make way more than that in industry, and they are welcome to do so. Meanwhile, at public universities in the US anyway, taxes paid by the rest of us help to sustain PhDs through sometimes 7+ years of grad school with things like subsidized housing and free minimal/no copay medical and dental insurance plans.

So I'm not particularly worried if they don't immediately start getting paid at industry-par rates by the same universities. A lot of them do go into industry later and make a lot of money.

nagrom• 11 years ago

A reasonable number of my friends did particle physics PhDs in the States. None of them had their housing subsidised and one got very sick and had to sell her car to pay for her medical treatment so I don't think her health plan was great. I'm fairly certain dental wasn't included. And the ones I know worked 10-12 hours per day usually six days per week.

Some grad students do have better conditions from endowments that fund scholarships, but not many. And the supplementary work that they do as teaching assistants allow the taxpayer-funded undergrad programmes to run at a much lower cost than if they had to pay people actual wages.

There is an argument for saying that there's enough money in the further education sector - but the idea of grad students with cheap housing and great medical plans living off the taxpayers are not supported by any of the observations that I have made.

p4bl05• 11 years ago

There is one thing that is not mentioned in the article: very-short term post-docs.

For instance, I just started my first post-doc after having defended my PhD, but my contract only lasts for one year. This is not atypical, at least in France and in computer science, to have one-year post-doc. And since you can't do a post-doc at the same lab where you did your PhD, it means that in the course of one year you have to:

1- get to know a new domain or at least a new subject,

2- become proficient in this new domain or subject to the point you can publish something in a good peer-reviewed journal or conference,

3- apply for competitive faculty positions and/or another post-doc position (in which case, rinse and repeat, unless you get to extend your current post-doc for one more year, but that depends on external fundings that you have no control or effect on).

Of course 3 requires 2 which requires 1, which means that you only have something like a bit more than half a year to complete 1 and 2, otherwise your applications for your next position will seem weak ("you didn't do anything this year?").

It is really a horrible feeling to be urged to do science. Especially when you just finished your PhD, you have lots of ideas that you want to explore and being so short-sighted (one year term is really peanuts in science) is an atrocious feeling.

chrisseaton3• 11 years ago

Surely you'd be hired for a post-doc because your doctoral work was relevant to the project they were hiring for?

p4bl05• 11 years ago

In general yes (not so much in my particular case though), but even then entering a new research project, even if it is close to the one you were working on before still take some non negligible time.

But you are right, the time to complete step 1 from my comment may vary a lot and might be short in some cases I guess.

In my particular case, I did my PhD on "cryptographic implementation security against physical (side-channel and fault injection) attacks", and my post-doc is on "privacy as control". I chose to apply for this post-doc rather than take one of the few that were offered to me on my PhD topic, because it also interests me scientifically a lot, plus it interests me politically. On the one hand it may have been a bold (or stupid? we'll see that later :)) move career-wise, but on the other hand it was a good time to change topic, as it may be harder to do later when you are even more specialized. And that is not specific to me.

robotresearcher8• 11 years ago

1- get to know a new domain or at least a new subject,

pro-tip: don't accept a 1-year postdoc in a new domain/subject (unless you urgently need to get away from your old subject).

omginternets5• 11 years ago

Full disclosure: I'm a last year Ph.D student in cognitive neuroscience, and I'm neck-deep in post-doc applications...

I think a large part of the issue has to do with government policy as it relates to science. I notice that many politicians reason in terms of "producing more science" as if it were a commodity good that should be produced and exported en masse.

The problem, then, is that the current academic system actively encourages people to pursue academic careers without disclosing the reality of the situation. They push masses of people through undergrad, then grad school, then post-docs, until the end of the line whereupon most people hit a huge brick wall.

I'm all for promoting research in STEM fields, but simply upping the quota of Ph.Ds won't cut it. As far as the U.S. is concerned, I think this has more to do with turning a blind eye to the dismal state of public education than anything else. It enables politicians to say "we trained 200% more scientists", while conveniently omitting the following truths:

1. Virtually none of them will be employed in the sciences at a level that warrants a doctorate.

2. For all the chest-puffing we do, we still get humiliated by the rest of the civilized world in terms of education.

3. Those people actually employed in research positions in American universities are majority foreign.

gaius4• 11 years ago

actively encourages people to pursue academic careers without disclosing the reality of the situation

Sure, but everyone including a freshman undergrad is an adult and the odds of ever becoming a tenured professor are public knowledge. No-one can realistically complain that they just didn't know.

omginternets5• 11 years ago

The point isn't that they're unaware. The point is that it's irresponsible to push people towards academic careers without attempting to separate those who are interested in science from those who are also good candidates for tenured positions.

I've always known that the academic market is saturated. I still don't know what it actually takes, in practice, to penetrate.

I contend that this guidance failure stems from a policy that aims to inflate certain non-informative statistics.

More to your point, however, I think you over-estimate the quality of the information going around. Every college professor will tell you it's difficult, but they'll also guide you based on their experience from 30 years ago.

stared• 11 years ago

Did you know the odds? I didn't. Actually, I thought that they were much higher, because I based it on the data from current old professors.

Quite the opposite - both countries and departments/professors actively advertise the odds as much higher.

eli_gottlieb• 11 years ago

You're missing the import of the Profzi Scheme (http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1144): the lower levels of the pyramid are necessary. Graduate students and post-docs aren't really independent researchers pursuing their own ideas, and basically never have been. They're (highly educated, scientific) laborers who work for a boss.

By most metrics, a system in which most of the actual work is done by low-paid laborers with long hours - who are then thrown out as soon as they've got experience and tribal knowledge! - is not only an abusive system but a stupid and counterproductive system.

hudibras3• 11 years ago

"3. Those people actually employed in research positions in American universities are majority foreign."

Even if this was true (which I doubt), that just reinforces the article's contention that postdocs aren't paid enough: the jobs are only attractive to foreigners, while Americans have other options.

bsilvereagle• 11 years ago

Anecdotally, ~50% of the faculty in my department at a large American public university are foreigners. I've been told, but not verified, that if you count dual-citizens, that number gets closer to 65%.

collyw• 11 years ago

Getting a visa to work in academia seems to be way easier than for private sector jobs. (I have ben working in academia in Europe and many people I know finished their PhD's and do postdocs in the states. One friend has changed to working in a company, but says it took nearly a year to get the paperwork sorted).

robotresearcher8• 11 years ago

Another explanation:

More than 95% of people in the world are not American, and good American universities have access to the top talent. If the US is doing a competent job of hiring the best people then the majority of these researchers will not be American-born.

nonbel2• 11 years ago

I found a major problem is that many people graduating with PhDs in biomed suffer from the misconception that rejecting the null hypothesis somehow allows them to conclude their favored explanation is the correct one.

This is a widespread, top-to-bottom, worldwide error. I was trained to think this in grad school, surrounded by people who thought it, and have read innumerable papers by those who pretty much explicitly write that down and publish it.

Since rejecting the null hypothesis is much easier than coming up with and deciding between multiple research hypotheses, these people appear to be much more productive (when measured in publication output) than those who try to do it right. I tried, and no longer believe it is possible to do a good job in the current academic environment.

It is just not possible to compete with people who only reject a null hypotheses and skip everything else, not according to the metrics being used to assess performance. It's a race to the bottom.

nonbel2• 11 years ago

There is another problem with this null hypothesis focus as well. The literature simply does not include the information required to really develop and test quantitative models (do a good job). Instead, nearly every claim is of the form "A makes B higher/lower". But this is not the type of information we need, it is near useless!

Here is an example of someone trying to figure out whats going on, but being unable to really check. The information required to constrain the parameter values is not being reported in the literature:

"Although the signals that transduce the external cues to the GTPase network are becoming clear (21), most of the chemical parameters remain unknown. Because many of the reaction coefficients in Fig. 1 B are also unknown, we allocated a number of possible parameter sets to qualitatively analyze the kinetics of these reactions." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1366631/

Here is another, we don't even know how many cells are in the human body to within 8 orders of magnitude, let alone how quickly they are supposed to be dividing (which is related to mutation rates), etc. How can you expect a cure for cancer in the absence fundamental quantitative data like this:

"First, we noticed that these data were typically mentioned in the literature without citing a reference; second, we observed wide ranges among data reported by different sources, ranging from 10^12–10^20." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23829164

The future of the postdoc

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