Posts tagged with faculty.

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) |