Posts tagged with benefits.

The real world has cookies

Jennifer Gardy, June 12, 2009 at 10:23 AM

I've finally done it. After spending most of each year since 1984 on some sort of educational campus, I've broken free. Twenty-five years after shuffling shyly into the kindergarten classroom, lunchbox tightly in hand, I've at last left school behind and joined The Real World (still clutching a lunchbox, though - sharing your cookies on the first day is a cheap but effective ploy to win friends. Oreo, anyone?).

I won't get into the specifics of my new job; suffice to say that it requires getting a pile of vaccinations and that if there's ever an Ebola, bird flu, or zombie outbreak, yours truly will be the first to hear about it. The important thing, though, is that I'm no longer a postdoc doing research at someone else's beck and call. I'm now an independent researcher able to chart my own course through the scientific waters and hoping said course won't take me into the path of a large iceberg.

I was going to devote this entry to a discussion of the things I was going to miss most about the campus environment - the protracted holiday break over Christmas, the foraging for free food, the fact that you could show up pantless to work and nobody would take much notice - but I realized that I'm not really going to miss the campus very much at all. Sure there are a few lab traditions it would have been nice to bring to my new home - shutting down at 4 p.m. on Friday for socializing over beers, taking a sunny afternoon off for a group BBQ - but after 13 straight years on campus, the list of things I won't miss eclipses the few things I will.

I won't, for example, miss the overcrowded buses in winter, each red-eyed, drippy-nosed rider harbouring more germs than the pole at the Lusty Beaver Cabaret. I won't miss the increasingly grim prospects for on-campus dining, a field whose entrants include roughly 20 permutations of the same establishment, each christened with a different name but all selling the same overpriced soggy sandwiches. And I certainly won't miss spending 95% of my lunch break standing in a queue of 100 people all waiting for said soggy sandwich.

I won't miss the constant battle for office space, even though the two years I spent sharing a converted walk-in freezer with 2-4 other people were some of my most productive. I won't miss evacuating the building for a fire alarm or bomb threat two or three times a week during exam season, when some student's Plan A of studying for the exam fails and they resort to their felonious Plan B. And I won't miss evacuating the building for a hazmat incident two or three times a year when that same student, now working in a lab, does something stupid and spills a noxious chemical. Which they wouldn't have done had they studied for that exam years before.

I won't miss overpriced parking and overpriced food, underfunded buildings and underestimated traffic. I won't miss getting older while the students stay the same age. I won't miss worrying about paycheques, worrying about benefits, worrying about tax status, and having to redo all my pay and benefits and forms every time my funding changes. And I won't miss those blue maintenance vans that'll run you down any chance they get.

Yes, you sacrifice a little freedom and a little whimsy when you join The Real World, but it's not the lifeless bureaucracy that some make it out to be. It's actually rather fun. I get to wear a little swipey security pass around my neck with my picture on it, people have parking spots with their names on little signs, and I've got a patch of real estate all to myself that's twice the size of my old freezer.  And plants! The Real World has plants! I've got whiteboards and a mesh chair and business cards and three computers and my own phone line and a door that locks and four whole windows in my office and a coffee table in my office and DID I MENTION THE PLANTS? My God, the plants! And a paycheque! And benefits! And vacation time! And massages! AND THERE ARE A HUNDRED PLACES TO EAT LUNCH! IT'S ALL SO WONDERFUL!

Okay. I've only been there a week and a half. Maybe in a year or two or 10, I'll have found something to gripe about. But for now, I'm pretty jazzed. I've spent 13 years at university and it's finally, finally paid off. I'm doing what I love to do in a place I always wanted to work surrounded by people who are equally excited about their research and I can't wait to see where it takes me.

So take heart, students and postdocs of the world - one day this, too, will be yours. Until then, toil away through those fire alarms and chemical spills, face the long lunch lines, and ride that bus and douse yourself in Purell afterwards. Then, when your training is complete, your free food instincts have been honed, and you have become a Well-Rounded Individual,  come join us in The Real World. We have cookies.

Tagged with benefits, postdoc, academia, job, paycheque, researcher, independent, leaving | Comments (33) |

Who's got it better: the postdoc or the caged zoo animal?

Jennifer Gardy, January 22, 2009 at 11:36 AM

 

I was watching a program the other night called "Escape-Proof Zoos", something about how engineers are designing habitats that provide enriching environments for zoo animals whilst implementing enough safety features to avoid any unfortunate tiger versus tourist conflagrations. (In a completely gratuitous sidebar, not unlike this one, the program also featured a segment on rambunctious mink sex, which made me thankful I am a bioinformatician and not a mink sexologist).

Partway through the program, it dawned on me that "escape-proof zoo" was a rather fitting description for the life of a grad student or postdoc at the lab. We commit ourselves to spending a specified number of years in a sort of academic indentured servitude, from which there are very few ways out. During those years, there are more than a few parallels we can draw between our lives and that of Boris the Zoo Bear. Boris performs for his trainers on command; we perform for our supervisors on command. Boris is expected to loll about his enclosure, looking industriously beary for visitors and offering up the occasional snarl; we are expected to loll about our enclosure, busily working, analyzing and writing, lest the department head or any of our funders stop by unexpectedly. Boris's pen smells; our workbenches are a little ripe, too. Boris's keepers give him raw meat to keep him interested; ours toss the odd free pizza in our direction in an effort to do them same.

Boris, I would argue, probably has it a lot better than the average postdoc. Sure, his enclosure designers put up a big moat to keep him in forever - he'll never see the Eiffel Tower at night, never cheer on his team at a football game waving a big paw-sized foam finger, never munch on a delectable overfed tourist - but at least while he's in there he gets regular meals, vet checkups and fang-cleanings, and a large ball with treats hidden inside.

We get squat.

Most freshly-minted PhDs are excited to begin their first postdoc as it means a jump in salary - on the order of a $15,000-30,000/year increase over what a grad student is paid - and, at least at my university, you're now considered the F-word: faculty. The excitement of more money and a faculty parking pass is short-lived, however.  

As with grad school, postdocs are expected to apply for funding from external agencies to cover the majority of our salary, rather than relying on university-administered grants our supervisor already holds. Virtually every postdoc is successful in obtaining a sizeable amount of external money, which is often topped up slightly - maybe $5,000/year or so - by one's supervisor. These funds are then disbursed by the university's payroll department in the form of biweekly paycheques. Don't think that the fact that the university pays you means that you're an employee, though!

In fact, many universities have a policy stating that unless a postdoc's salary includes at least $X,000/year (at UBC, it's just over $15,000) from university-administered funding - not external funding that the postdoc found themselves - they are not a "true employee" and are thus not entitled to any benefits - no health care, no dental, no access to employee services, no maternity leave.   

This is tremendously unfair for a number of reasons, but perhaps you've already picked up on the two most significant. First, what postdocs want and what supervisors want are mutually exclusive. The postdoc wants enough university money to cross the magical $15k threshold, whilst the supervisor wants to keep that money for other purposes and have the postdoc fund themselves.  Both desires are valid, but guess who comes out on the losing end?

Second, this system hurts the best postdocs the most. Pretend for a moment that Doc and Dopey are both new postdocs. Doc had fantastic grades in grad school, is great at writing funding proposals, and was assigned a cutting-edge research project to work on. Dopey, on the other hand, had good grades, writes good enough proposals, and is working on something a little less glamorous. Their supervisor decides that Doc will be paid $35,000/year and Dopey will receive $30,000. Doc obtains an external fellowship worth $30,000, and the supervisor tops her up with $5,000 of lab money. Poor Dopey's fellowship application is rejected, though, so her entire $30,000 salary is paid out of lab money. This, however, puts her over the "true employee" threshold, so Dopey gets her $30k/year, full benefits for her and her family, and keeps getting paid while she goes off and gives birth to little Dopey Jr. Doc, meanwhile, ends up spending her extra $5k in salary to subscribe to a private health-care plan for her and her family and decides to put off having a baby until she gets a job in the real world.

A postdoctoral fellowship is a necessary evil in most areas of academia, something you're obliged to do if you want to work in research, so most postdocs grudgingly accept the fact that for the next few years of their life, they'll be stuck envying Boris the Zoo Bear, with his free vet checkups, maternity leave, and regular meat deliveries. At least we can take consolation in the fact that we can eventually escape from the zoo (more on that next week) and that, while Boris may have a relaxed and carefree lifestyle, his big fuzzy butt doesn't have a faculty parking pass.

Tagged with benefits, pay, parking, faculty | Comments (25) |