Posts tagged with postdoc.

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) |

Where have all the postdocs gone?

Jennifer Gardy, February 2, 2009 at 10:33 AM

 

It's a postdoc bloodbath around here.

 

No, the university did not read my last entry and send a covert strike force to pick us off one by one, lest we foment a postdoc revolution led by an angry Boris the Zoo Bear. Rather, it's just the circle of life. Cue Lion King soundtrack.

 

There are, by my count, 13 postdocs/research associates in my lab (the geography nerd in me wants to point out that those 13 come from ten different countries - our lab is like "It's a Small World" without the boats and singing). It so happens that six will be departing in the coming months. This mass exodus has nothing to do with circumstances at the lab - the beer fridge is still full, the endless stream of cakes keeps coming, and the money keeps rolling in*. It's just that for about half the crowd, it's time to move on.

 

A postdoctoral fellowship is meant to allow freshly-minted PhDs the chance to pursue pure research, generally unencumbered by teaching duties or other bureaucratic obligations. It is a learning experience as much as a PhD is - you're expected to focus on a topic at least slightly different from your PhD work and to develop the skills required to be an independent investigator - forming and managing collaborations, writing grants, supervising people, and so forth. After N years of this, where N varies according to your field (in the biological sciences, it's typically 3-5), you're considered to be a mature enough scientist that you can be trusted to carry out your own research without doing something untoward, like diverting the funds from your equipment grant to set up a grow-up or using your lab's resources to clone people's dead pets as a side business. Given that an individual postdoctoral fellowship can last anywhere from a few months up to about three years, it usually takes about two fellowships to truly develop as a researcher (and to extirpate any desire to copy Fluffy and Fido for profit).

 

So where does one go once you're a mature researcher who's left their dog-duplicating days behind them?

 

Most people assume - incorrectly, I might add - that most science PhDs go on to set up labs at universities or related research institutes, where they spend the remainder of their days trying to obtain funding for their research projects, lecturing the odd undergraduate, and cultivating some sort of odd behaviour to differentiate themselves from the department's other boffins. In the biological sciences, at least, only about 25% of PhDs follow this route (a figure which is decreasing as the number of us who end up with PhDs because we refuse to get off campus steadily rises).

 

The other 75% of expired postdocs go ply their talents in some other area. Many go to industry, where they exchange their freedom to pursue any line of inquiry they desire for a steady job, nice benefits package and occasionally a company car. Some opt for the government route, while others choose to work in "science infrastructure" -  working as journal editors, managing funding agencies, or handling any of the other non-research tasks that are necessary to keep scientific progress plodding steadily forward.

 

Does opting for one of these other tracks make one a failure as a scientist? Hardly. There is a common misconception that anyone interested in science must surely want to run their own lab someday and do research all day long. In fact, there are many postdocs that are passionate scientists, but find other scientific career options to be more appealing - running a science centre, editing a high-profile journal, setting government science policy, or banging out columns on what academics do all day for newspapers.

 

There's a place for everyone in the sciences, and where you ultimately end up after your training depends upon your interests. If you do have your eye on the Principal Investigator route, however, I suggest you start developing that one unusual habit that will set you apart from your coworkers now. Have some absurdly high-waisted pants made up, take to changing out of your gym clothes in front of your office window, or insist that you be addressed as Dr. Fluffypants von Sciencehead.

 

And with that, I'll leave you for this week. Our lab is about to throw a send-off for Dr. Rainbowbutt McSupercloner and there's free beer.

 

*In case any concerned readers were wondering about the effect of the federal budget's Genome Canada-sized hole on my lab, which is partially funded by GC, this fiscal oversight does not mean that our lab staff is packing our belongings into cardboard boxes and turning in our keys as we shuffle sadly out the negative pressure doors for the last time, with only their "whooooosh" and "thump" to mark our departure. My boss and leading genomics researchers are not descending upon Ottawa looking for a bailout, and food bank lines across the country are not going to see a sudden rise in lab-coated techs looking for a box of KD. We're doing all right, but thanks for asking.

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