Is a Postdoc Worth it? 233
Jim_Austin writes "In a very funny column, Adam Ruben reviews the disadvantages and, well, the disadvantages of doing a postdoc, noting that 'The term "postdoc" refers both to the position and to the person who occupies it. (In this sense, it's much like the term "bar mitzvah.") So you can be a postdoc, but you can also do a postdoc.'"
Postdoc Required Everywhere (Score:3, Informative)
Unfortunately, for my field, a postdoc is required for just about everything outside of industry. Even teaching position at community colleges want postdoc. And since there is a flood of people with them already, they can be picky and get them.
To me, the increasing use of them is a sign of oversupply of interested people and not enough 'real' jobs for them. We are beginning to see very long postdoc times (during which the postdoc isn't actually rolling in money...)
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As you said, it looks like an oversupply of interested people. If I were you, I'd try to get into a different field or industry.
Re:Postdoc Required Everywhere (Score:5, Informative)
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A postdoc to teach at a community college?
Our local community college is staffed with M.S. and M.A. (and no PhD's or postdocs).
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Looking around recent appointments at my own institution and at the career progression of a good number of friends who did PhDs at the same time as me, across most of the physical and biological sciences, you don't get academic positions without 4 to 7 years of postdoctoral research experience. (There are exceptions to this at both ends of the scale but they are either brilliant/lucky or unlucky/slow at taking the hint.) Since a post-doc appointment is usually 1 or 2 years, this is either a continual proces
I'd do a postdoc (Score:5, Funny)
if you know what I mean.
Re:I'd do a postdoc (Score:4, Funny)
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Let the person dream [just like the postdoc they want to do]
My experience (Score:5, Interesting)
Now I'm left wondering if tenure is even worth the struggle at the end. Bear in mind, tenure in Australia is not a "secure job for life" as people in the US seem to think it is. We're actually having a lot of difficulty convincing newly minted grads to come and do PhDs when they see all the junior faculty are deeply bitter, cynical and exhausted. But hey, I build robots for a living, so I tell myself when I see those same grads getting jobs that pay more than mine does with zero years experience..
Uncertainty is the killer (Score:5, Informative)
I'm doing a postdoc right now, and while I don't mind the 60 hour weeks, the uncertainty is what gets at me. After a long education one basically becomes a vagabond, drifting from university to university, never knowing where one will be working in 3 years' time. And the last year of each postdoc is spent writing applications for other places. In my home country, there are 1-2 available permanent positions every decade or so in my field, each of which typically has more than 100 applicants from all over the world. Getting one of those is pretty unlikely, to put it mildly. So I'll have to choose between permanently moving far away from friends and family, or leave my field of research. Unless I'm better than all the 100+ other applicants.
The postdoc situation is a symptom of there beeing too little resources invested in science compared to the number of people who want to do science. Instead, society is investing resources in things like moving imagniary money around really fast (yes, high frequency trading and other finance is a big employer of drop-outs from my field - they can emply more people, and pay much higher salaries, despite their detrimental effect on society). Yes, I am a bit bitter.
Re:Uncertainty is the killer (Score:5, Interesting)
The career progression for early career researchers is crap at best. Governments and funding bodies have come up with all sorts of ways of making it sound like a good thing (e.g. the EU likes to have "Human Resources Mobility") but that doesn't make up for the gnawing "I don't know how we are going to pay the bills in a couple of months time" feeling.
It's even worse if you have a partner who is also playing the same game. If your contracts don't end at the same time, moving to a new country to take up the next position is really difficult. If they do end at the same time then the financial uncertainty is multiplied. Data show that the partners of male academics have a fairly typical spread of occupations, while female researchers have a disporportionately high representation of academics for partners. It appears that this is one of the significant contributors to female researchers giving up on this for the bad joke it is (they are obviously brighter and see that it's more sensible to get out) and why there can have been quite good gender balance at PhD level for many years but there is still poor gender balance at academic level including amongst recent appointees.
I can understand the "bitter" feeling. Been there, done that. Now I have a permanent position, I'm starting to shed that... I'm actually thinking about doing science again rather than just writing job applications about the projects that I'd love to do but can't. I'm starting to relax, I'm certainly a lot less stressed and as a result I'm being much more creative and doing much better science too. At some stage, I'll realise that I've replaced the job application treadmill with the grant writing treadmill... but one step at a time.
Chin up, old chap... you'll get there.
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No, it's a symptom of far too many people wanting a comfy job in an ivory tower where they never really have to achieve much.
Wow, best description of a postdoc position I've ever heard. Not like our hard working and underpaid CEO's, are they?
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Yeah like find a treatment for AIDS that saved millions of lives like my thesis advisor did. And on the side invented the science of protenomics. Clearly such people are just looking for a comfy job.
Fucking Idiot.
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Fuck you. You don't know anything about science or macadamia.
FTFY... (or at least I tried to the best of my knowledge)
(grin)(ducks)
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So, welcome to the real world then
where uncertainty rules.
be glad you get 3 years in between.
I've worked in government, industry, and now academia each for about a third of my adult life. Believe me when I say that the uncertainty in academia is much, much greater than in the others. There are rewards, obviously, or people wouldn't do it at all, but security is not one of them. By comparison, the other sectors are much safer.
Of course, if you're one of those people who thinks "academics don't know anything about the real world," this probably won't get through to you.
Re:My experience (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm on my fourth postdoc, eleven years after graduation. Honestly, I don't even aim for a faculty job any more. That train left the station long ago.
So why do I do it? Fairly long working days (but so are industry jobs), and no secure future of any kind. But the pay is decent, at least here in Japan, and I do get to work on things that interest me a lot more than I'd do outside academia.
Still, left to decide by myself I would have left a few years ago already. The uncertainty is really the big issue, and I often feel I'd prefer even a language-teaching or convenience-store job if it came with job security. But my wife points out that we're not hurting for money, and doing what I love is not a chance that will come again. So better to rowk in research while I still can and while it's still fun. Hard to argue with that.
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Glad you got the work, but I'd think FEA has lots of direct industry applications. What about more esoteric, but still important, areas?
Re:My experience (Score:4, Insightful)
On the other hand, if you're brimming with ideas and an excitement to get stuck into them, then by the end of your postdoc prepare for some disappointment. Surprise! You didn't get another postdoc!
No matter how good you are, there are topics that don't get you through. There is pure bad luck which means you don't get through. I don't know what it's like in other fields, but in my field, you're looking at approximately 25% max of PhD students from good institutions are able to find a postdoc. Are 75% of them willing to leave or useless? Nope. Many of them are either or both of those, but many are simply unable to find a job in academia. Then at the end of the first postdoc, about 50% of those who have survived, and perhaps more, are shown the door. Were these people who weren't "brimming with ideas" or unwilling "to get stuck into them"? Nope. Of course, some were, but most of the others are just victims of shitty fucking luck. Not enough jobs, not enough brown-nosing, not enough slurping at a pointless seam of nothingness which is currently fashionable for no apparent reason (I'm looking at you, cosmology. Braneworlds? Endless permutations on inflationary model-building, which is a field that was dead in 1989? Endless studies into higher- and higher-order statistics of inflation when we can't even see a fucking bispectrum on the CMB? Horava-Lifshitz gravity? Seriously? Fuck off is this shit important), not enough "networking", and -- far more important than any of that -- plain bad timing and bad luck. Then of the people who did get that second post-doc, 50% of them don't make a third. Probably more. I don't know about your field, but in mine, you need a third postdoc which may or may not be a five-year fellowship / tenure-track. In many cases the fourth fellowship is the tenure-track. The days of going from PhD to junior faculty are very long gone. And in the meantime, you've put your personal life under serious strain, which is frequently terminal to any relationships that were in it, and earned peanuts.
On the other hand, so long as you can either make relationships work or aren't fucked about them, it's the perfect job. The working culture - outside of the US, where they seem to expect you to piss blood for peanuts - is lovely. If you deliver the results (in the form of publishable papers), no-one gives the slightest fuck where you are or what you're doing. Not in the department for three weeks solid? So long as you didn't have a meeting set up with your employer, no-one will care or, indeed, notice. Taking a three-month research visit to Berkely? Not only will no-one care, they'll even pay for you to do it. Don't feel like working more than three hours today? Not only will people not notice if you go home and play Call of Duty, they'll actively encourage you to, because there's nothing more useless than a knackered postdoc unable to work. What's the point in that? They can't do anything creative, they can't even focus on the maths. If they stop publishing, that's when it's an issue.
It's basically horses for courses. If you like traveling, by which I mean constantly moving country, and if you don't care about money, and if you like the idea of the job freedom that comes with a postdoc - and genuinely care about the work, because otherwise you really are wasting you time - it's the life of Reilly. On the other hand, if you've even the slightest hankering for stability, you're going to be very unhappy for a very long time, and if you're the kind (like me, and I've been on both ends of the luck, and it's offended me when I've won out at least as much as when I've lost) to get pissed off with the crapshoot nature of it it's probably better to go into industry where at least everyone knows it's a political game and no-one gives a fuck. Academia is in some ways a horrible place where many people genuinely do give a fuck but have no power to change things for you, and the rest are egotistical pricks with an astonishingly inflated sense of their own achievement.
(Probably myself included.)
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Good description of a science/engineering post-doc. Produce and no one asks any questions. That part is great.
Ah, but after the post-docs, if no tenure-track position is obtained, you can stay in the academy by making a decision to accept an even more unstable position — the soft-money Research Professor! You can advise students, are awesome at your craft, and as long as you keep publishing or teaching, nobody asks any questions. But here's the rub. (1) You have to obtain your own support by writ
Betteridge's law of headlines (Score:5, Informative)
No.
(Brought to you by a postdoc.)
Post docs (Score:3, Interesting)
When I got my PhD.. (Score:2, Flamebait)
The people going the post-doc route either hoped to become faculty at a University somewhere, or were foreign nationals who needed a green card, and the universities were the only ones willing to do the paperwork. Then again, sometimes the Universities would string the post-doc along and only put in a half-hearted effort on the green card.
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Must depend on the field. In Molecular Biology you might get a low end industry job without a post doc. Anything else, not a chance. Kind of like medicine - while it's technically possible to get a job without a internship (essentially a one year post doc position) and a residency, you won't like the job (some Indian reservation in the badlands of West Nowhere).
YMMV of course. It would be interesting to break it down by major fields.
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Kind of like medicine
No. Go through the grueling years of residency any you're pretty much guaranteed a good paying job for life (for some specialties, it's spectacularly paid). Do you get that sort of certainty in molecular bio?
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"pretty much guaranteed a good paying job for life
no actually, you aren't.
The median payu for family practice is $138,000.00, before insurances and other costs, and you need to continue you education.
If you want to break it down to an hourly basis, you looking at 60+ hours a week pract, and anouth bunch of hours keeping current.
The could go up to 200K in 6 years.
And if something goes wrong, well then, good luck.
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The median payu for family practice is $138,000.00
Cite? It didn't take much effort for me to find a 2013 report:
Primary care physicians reported $216,462 in median compensation, and specialists reported $388,199 in median compensation [mgma.com]
Then there's the little question of job security. How many unemployed physicians are there?
My Dad Said No (Score:4, Interesting)
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You have a gross misunderstanding of what a career in academia is like. Unless your hobby includes teaching classes and writing grant proposals.
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Writing grant proposals is my hobby, you insensitive clod!
Yes it is. (Score:5, Interesting)
There was an interesting editorial in Nature back in 2005 commenting on how postdocs earn barely more than a janitor at Harvard.
http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v37/n7/full/ng0705-653.html
With the economy having gone south and the inevitable funding cuts that has brought about, the situation is even worse now.
I moved halfway around the world for my postdoc (from Australia to the US), for a job that pays approximately half what I'd get in Australia. (Postdocs in the US are paid far less than Postdocs in Australia. Maybe that's why there are so many Postdocs in the US. They can hire more of them for the same amount of money.)
Sometimes, I do wonder what I'm doing here. And then I remember how I have a job that I absolutely love. That I can go home every evening looking forward to going to work the next day. And when I am reminded of that, I think how incredibly lucky I am to be doing what I'm doing. And if I have to accept lower pay and the lack of job stability as a trade-off, I am perfectly willing to do so.
This doesn't mean that I think Postdocs are getting a great deal, of course. We know we aren't. But we never got into this profession for the money anyway.
Knowing all that I know now, would I still have gone through all those years of grad school and gotten my PhD and moved halfway around the planet for a postdoc? Was it all worth it? I believe I'd say yes.
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Seems pretty accurate (Score:2, Insightful)
Think of it as a year-long or two-year-long work contract. That's it. It's a way to get some experience, put food on the table, and figure out what the hell you are going to do when it ends. In my case it was 4 years of employment in a series of contracts before getting a "real job" elsewhere with some permanence to it. I enjoyed my time as a postdoc, but when other opportunities came up, I gave them my notice and left.
The article is sarcastic and funny mainly because some people put in all those years
Short version (Score:4, Insightful)
Long article to say: postdoc is a lot of work for low pay and iffy career prospects.
Well duh.
On the flip side, if you are doing it, chances are "a lot of work" is a plus not a minus. As Aldous Huxley said: "An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex." Yes, the pay is low but you get to use someone else's money to fund your research. If you want to worry about science and not administrative issues then postdoc days are the golden days.
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If you want to worry about science and not administrative issues then postdoc days are the golden days.
Who needs money? You can live on science!
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I did a five year postdoc. The money is not bad. Above poverty level. If all you do is go to lab, go home to sleep and go to the lab then this is plenty. If you you do _anything_ besides the above two then you are doing it wrong. I put in 100 hours per week for five years with no breaks or holidays and I have a good reputation and a faculty job now. I would have been happy with the former alone.
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Intellectual curiosity isn't really the deficit here. The problem is more one of security and mental health than job satisfaction.
Imagine doing your normal job (assuming your normal job isn't a post-doc position), but ALWAYS having a fixed-term hanging over you. In anywhere from four months to three years, you know that you'll be looking for work. Not work with a different client, or a different company down the street (trust me, it's NOT AT ALL like consulting!), but in a different state or country, whe
It IS! (Score:2)
If you like crippling debt and no better chances at employment. If you are going into the education field and hope to become a tenured professor, then you need to do it. Otherwise it's just pissing away your money and time.
Even to become one of NASA's top scientists you dont need it.
Be a Gentleman Scientist (Score:5, Interesting)
I recently finished a book where the author analyzes the entire process of getting a PhD in physics. For various reasons, it's not at all worthwhile. You will never be in a position to realize your dream of doing interesting research or becoming a professor. I'll let others describe the various problems, but they're fairly self-evident.
So let's think out of the box. Is there a way to do interesting research without the PhD?
It turns out there's a ton of interesting things being done by home experimentation nowadays. Actually, this used to be common - a gentleman scientist [wikipedia.org] was someone with an independent income who tinkered with home research. Many had quite elaborate laboratories [wikipedia.org] and discovered useful things.
If you want to be a researcher, you could approach the problem intellectually. Establish a steady income from which you can support yourself and family, allocate some time and money to setting up a lab, and do your own research.
Ben Krasnow [blogspot.com] built an electron microscope (!), and is experimenting with vapor-phase deposition of conductive traces. Robert Murray Smith [youtube.com] makes graphene and conductive ink, Brad Graham [lucidscience.com] built a rock disaggregator (which is, incidentally, totally frightening), Lindsay Wilson [imajeenyus.com] built an untrasonic drill, Timothy Ferriss [fourhourbody.com] is scientifically studying of nutrition, I am trying to detect dark matter (no link - sorry)
Lots of people are doing interesting research at home with a modest budget. If you can give up the big questions (Higgs Boson, Penicillin replacement, Egyptian archaeology), there's a wide swath of interesting areas just waiting to be explored.
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I am trying to detect dark matter (no link - sorry)
No link? At least say what type of detection method (and corresponding range of DM possibilities) you're using! Is there a particular section of parameter space that you think you can access that's not solidly covered by existing academic DM experiments? Sounds like fun in any case.
Of course, these days, even getting "a steady income from which you can support yourself and family" can be a difficult task --- landing a "dream job" professor position from "within the system" is hard, but so can be getting a t
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No link? At least say what type of detection method (and corresponding range of DM possibilities) you're using! Is there a particular section of parameter space that you think you can access that's not solidly covered by existing academic DM experiments? Sounds like fun in any case.
Nope, sorry - not this one. It's a "lottery ticket". It's looking for something that isn't forbidden by current theory, but unlikely to be true. It requires a careful analysis to see that it doesn't violate basic principles, so I don't want to be judged before I have data. My analysis might be wrong in any event.
If I get results, maybe. Publishing takes time and has no benefit.
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Make sure you publish if you get negative results, too --- that's just as important, and puts you on equal ground with all the mega-multi-million-dollar big dark matter experiments that also haven't found anything yet. Ruling out previously untested possibilities is a worthwhile task, and just about the most that any dark matter researcher can realistically hope for. And, if you think publishing "has no benefit," why are you doing this anyway? There's no monetary payback to the experimenter, but isn't doing
Re:Be a Gentleman Scientist (Score:4, Interesting)
And, if you think publishing "has no benefit," why are you doing this anyway?
a) The original reason people become scientists is to do interesting research. Publishing isn't as interesting as doing. (And scientific publishing has it's own style of nonsense.)
b) I'm working with a professional magician who's interested in effects that are based on science, but uncommon enough that people wouldn't recognize them as such (unrelated example [youtube.com]).
c) If I can find a measurable effect, it can be used to make products. This is more likely beneficial than publishing.
Email contact (Score:2)
Damn! I wish slashdot had a way to contact other users.
Drop me a note. If and when the experiment is finished (several months of data gathering) I'll let you know the results.
reolh at beddly dot com
(That's a temporary E-mail - I'll respond from a permanent address.)
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Everything you list was, at best, derivative.
Cool, but nothing new.
What NEW thing are being done by a lone inventory? hint: Nothing.
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A lot of funded science bypasses detail for novelty. Most of the things mentioned by GP were *tools* that could be used to analyze many things that a professional scientist probably could not get grant money for.
If you're talking cutting edge clean room produced nanodevices, of course not. If you're talking good science, then these guys have a shot at doing so, as long as they approach it methodically.
Derivitive or not (Score:2)
I suppose it depends partly on your definition of science.
Take for example this post [youtube.com]: a method for electroless copper plating which is easily in the realm of the home experimenter.
The video was not published in a journal, didn't have a write-up, and wasn't an accredited researcher - just some kid who thought things through, tried it, and it worked. I admire the presentation format - the video gives complete details of the process without a standard writeup (abstract/background/procedure/results/discussion).
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And I would argue that you don't even need to give up the big questions (trying to detect dark matter is really big).
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Lots of people are doing interesting research at home with a modest budget. If you can give up the big questions (Higgs Boson, Penicillin replacement, Egyptian archaeology), there's a wide swath of interesting areas just waiting to be explored.
Is it time to start jump start style funding scientific research? It's a sad sick statement amount our governmental priorities, but it may be the only way to get knowledge into the world without a company or government claiming ownership.
In natural sciences - YES! (Score:2)
Why scientists do postdocs (Score:2)
Most of the ones I've known (from when I was in grad school and then from when I worked at a major biotech) do postdocs in order to build their research portfolio. If you want to a faculty research (not teaching) position in science, you need publications. These require research. Research requires time and money and in this day and age, the time typically spent in grad school is not enough to do a lot of top-quality research. And, grad school time is often spent teach undergrads, doing coursework, etc
Post Doc in STEM is the capacitor/buffer (Score:3)
When the economy gets hot, and you ditch mesh generation altogether and jump to computational electromagnetics. While doing the jump be careful not to collide with the Computational electromagnetics PhD jumping to mesh generation ;-)
For Fun/Experience? Yes! For Money? No! (Score:5, Interesting)
I did 4 years of Postdoc (in Japan). It was fun, in Japan the payment for Postdocs is ok, and i worked in a field i liked to work in since i was 16years old. I contributed to some publications (10 Impact points per year) and did some really nice experiments. To me it felt like playing with the most expensive lego bricks which i ever was allowed to play with. I had the priviledge to see parts of the world which i would not have dramt about when before my masters thesis. I met some interesting, peculiar, and exceptional people (coauthors from ~12 nationalities).
OTOH, it was hard work (>80h per week average, in critical times >400h/month), strange habits, uncertainity, and a lack of decent positions after it.
I got out of it, to a technical consulting company. I earn less than the people who started 10 years younger, but somehow doing a phd/postdoc kept me young and agile. I am now more or less resistant to stress (did not feel it since i started the job), am used to pick up new things at a high pace.
I can only say: i did it, it was fun and broadened my view. My PhD and postdoc thought me that persistence in following something you want to do leads to success. I managed to get rid of my attenton span problems. I quit as postdoc when it stopped being fun and when i did not see decent positions around, i left science. I dont regret having done my postdoc, i did not regret for a single day leaving it.There was a time when a very different path in my life would have been very possible. I proably also would not have regret it.
Remarks: you have to have a compatible partner or risk a series of relationships. IMHO the only point where i really seen from behind could have spent some attention on. I also saw people not being able to handle the pressure. I saw people doing postdocs until they where older than 40 because they became too anxious or to incompetent in other things to leave. I saw people fuckign up their lifes for good. People not good enough to get any decend publicaitons, but valuable in the lab, hoping that the professor who kept them forever in a dependent relationship would give them the life-long position as assitant. I habe seen people growing old faster than they should and people breaking down. I have heard of people becoming so fristrated that they sabbotaged the co-workers experiments.
So my advice is: do it als long as you do it for fun. Dont get addicted.
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OTOH, it was hard work (>80h per week average, in critical times >400h/month), strange habits, uncertainity, and a lack of decent positions after it.
I can imagine no scenario where that would be worth it at any point in my life. In my 20s, I would have missed out on so many memories. And after that I doubt I'd have the energy for that kind of rigor. Said a friend of mine about a guy who build an entire house by himself, "life's too short to work that hard."
Whats Old is Doc again. (Score:2)
__END__
=head1 Postdoc
Embedding Perl's Plain Old Documentation in your source as a particularly perverse take on self documenting code.
=cut
blame the faculty (Score:3)
As a former government oversight scientist, I can also say that the minimum recommended salary for a scientist with a PhD is significantly higher than the average postdoc salary. The government has tried many methods to increase postdoc pay, but the established professors and academic administrators push the salary down. I used to work with a few guys to convince their universities to allow them (allow!) to pay the higher standard government rate for grad students and postdocs, but there is tremendous and extraordinarily depressing pressure from academia to keep those salaries low.
you can also do a postdoc (Score:3)
Anyway, on the serious side, postdoc jobs mean one thing: working for food. But, there are much worse places to do that than at some university's research lab, so at least you might be at a nice place to be exploited while you figure out a). where to go to actually make some money and then leave, or b). that you can't actually get a job where you could make money so you get stuck. Problem is when one gets to be a postdoc at 27-28 years of age - calculating with 5 years university and 3-5 years until the phd degree, which is pretty normal -, and realizing you're just starting to - eventually - earn some real money, with some friends having got to well-paying positions during those 3-5 years you've spent for that degree.
Especially since there are now companies who actually don't want to hire phd's based on some weird philosophies. Go figure.
Re:Horse already left the barn (Score:5, Informative)
...
Have a concrete plan to feed yourself. Or save the schooling for retirement, after you've saved up enough to live on. Digging yourself a hundred thousand dollar hole isn't a great idea right out of the gate.
...
They're talking about science and engineering postdocs in the article, not humanities. Science and engineering postdocs are paid, just not very well, and science and engineering graduate students are also paid as well as having their tuition covered, so the point about debt is moot. Grad school and such in these disciplines is mostly about opportunity cost (years in your 20s potentially squandered) and potentially limiting your future career opportunities depending on your field and/or continued desire to remain in the academy.
Re:Horse already left the barn (Score:5, Informative)
Science and engineering postdocs are paid, just not very well
Do a search on STEM postdoc job ads - $50k is considered very generous. No, you won't starve, some people get by on less (though usually in low cost-of-living places rather than the high CoL areas where the better universities typically are). $50k/yr is about $24/hr assuming 40 hr weeks, but that's a ridiculous assumption. A goof-off postdoc probably does at least 60 hrs/wk, so that's $16/hr if you were paid on straight time. Hourly workers are supposed to get time and a half for OT, so an hourly worker doing 60 hrs/wk would pull in $50k if they worked 60 hrs/wk and had a base rate of $13.74/hr. How long after high school to get a Ph.D.? It varies quite a bit, but say 8-9 years on average. No big deal. Personally I don't understand why, however lazy and unmotivated Americans are, there aren't more of them clamoring for postdocs, when for a little education they can rake in big bucks like that.
Income percentiles in America (Score:2)
Do a search on STEM postdoc job ads - $50k is considered very generous. No, you won't starve, some people get by on less (though usually in low cost-of-living places rather than the high CoL areas where the better universities typically are). $50k/yr is about $24/hr assuming 40 hr weeks, but that's a ridiculous assumption.
I'll agree with you that 50k is not much for someone with a STEM education. However, most people get by on less, as 50k is in the 56th percentile for incomes in America.
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I got my MS, and I worked in "Industry" for about 12 years getting raises up to just under the $100K mark, then the company tanked.
We worked with a research lab, they hired a revolving door of post-docs doing crazy technical stuff that I could probably pull off if I put some effort into it - I enquired about possibly taking over when the current one left - I had no concept that you could get your PhD and continue your "education" for years afterwards and still command the princely sum of just $30K/year...
Ne
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The first is that you get a lot more freedom than as a PhD student (or a junior employee in a corporate R&D lab). You start to be able to set your own research agenda. This depends a lot on ins
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At the national lab level, STEM postdocs don't make *less* than $60k/year
So raise it from $13.74 to $16.48/hr. I'm still not impressed.
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Really? Then how do I know several that make well over 60k? How did I know postdocs 10 years ago that made 60k?
With the right skills in the right area, yes, you can make that at a good research university. One in the midwest with decent cost of living even.
Heck, NIH funded postdocs start at over $39K, with 0 years of experience. Work in a competitive area and your boss will throw in money above that.
http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/funding/policies/nrsa.htm [nih.gov]
Re:Horse already left the barn (Score:5, Informative)
Ergo, at $50k, US postdocs are on par with the best paying countries in Europe.
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I've always viewed academia as an "inside/outside" proposition, you're on the outside until you've got tenure, which usually requires a PhD, political connections, and a death in the current "inside" population. As long as you're outside, you're dirt, to be used to support others as they take their great strides toward, well, whatever it is they do, as long as they keep the grant money flowing.
The "inside" never held enough allure for me to pursue it seriously, it's much more fun to sit on the industry sid
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Ok, you've reinforced my point.
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Well, not if the alternative was starting a very successful business.
I agree that years in your 20s potentially squandered sounds a lot like nonsense though. As if getting a 'real job' somehow guarantees your time is spent meaningfully.
Re:Horse already left the barn (Score:5, Interesting)
A stint in Aerospace removed a heck of a lot of drive out of me. Applying modern management methods to artistic types burns them out damn fast.
Currently, I am working in another little startup. If I had any significant bills to pay or had a family to support, I would be in dire financial straits. I would earn more spendable money being a greeter in Wal-Mart, but I would not enjoy standing eight hours a day robotically saying "Welcome to Wal-Mart" to everyone as well as inspecting every shopping cart that tripped their Sensormatic EAS system.
Sitting in a cubicle trying to implement my designs is not my idea of fun. I am a lab rat. I hate cubicles. I hate ties and dress codes. I hate meetings - if you have anything to say, drop by for a chat - but this thing of requiring me to drop everything and show up somewhere at a fixed time is ridiculous. Its a bad design. Kinda like me memory-mapping I/O ports right in the middle of a memory space currently used by a memory chip.
That was my greatest disappointment when the new wave of management overran the small business I used to work for. Thank goodness I was paid well there before the management coup because we had a lot of successful products to sell. I do not know a single one of the creative types that were able to stand up to the modern management methods. But the stockholders seemed to love them. Pure case of "tragedy of the commons" if you ask me. Destruction of our future product stream for a short term benefit of hyping the sales and profit of our existing line. It seems only people overly concerned with profit, and not design quality, rank that as being so damned important.
I would say if someone else is paying for your study, go for it. A lot of corporations - especially in the Military-Industrial Complex - justify their bid on the amount of credentialed and degreed personnel they are placing on the customer project. Whether or not these people are internally driven to do the technical part of the job seems to be of little importance to the management team. They want certs to sell.
If you are thinking of getting into debt for this, please oh please think twice. My own experience shows there is a terrific glut of very highly qualified "do-ers" out there already. The de-industrialization of America has left cadres of engineering types left over from the hey-days of the 60's on the streets.
As America, banker to the world, transitions from a manufacturing based economy to a service based economy, it seems to me the best jobs are to be found in services catering to helping others comply with government mandates. Every new law passed mandating compliance with some government requirement is a gold-mine for those prepared to assist existing businesses in complying with it. Legalized extortion. While the government holds the gun on the business, you go for their wallet.
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I worked for a little company, we ran on Federal grant money. We spent 90% of this money getting the product cleared for marketing by the FDA, basically using our Federal grant money to fill out Federal paperwork. It's a grand scheme.
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They're talking about science and engineering postdocs in the article, not humanities. Science and engineering postdocs are paid, just not very well,
I could be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure the definition of "postdoc" includes some sort of pay. (I suppose there might be some strange European situations where you only get room and board, or something....) I've never heard of a postdoc in the humanities that didn't pay something. In fact, many postdocs in the humanities (Mellon fellows, etc.) pay as well as postdocs in the sciences, though they tend to be more competitive. Some humanities postdocs may pay very little, but if you're not getting paid
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From the "You should only care about money dept."
Re:Horse already left the barn (Score:5, Informative)
From the "You should only care about money dept."
Umm, no -- from the be realistic about your life dept.
If you're independently wealthy and just want a Ph.D. in English lit. or art history, by all means, go for it and pay the $150k or whatever! If you're retired or have money to burn or whatever, I applaud your effort to become more educated. Seriously, I really do. I wish more people who had the means did such things with their money.
But as someone who actually has degrees in fields that are NOT considered "lucrative," because I deliberately decided to do something I enjoy, rather than earn the most money I could... I think I have plenty of experience to give advice here.
And being realistic is not the same as "only caring about money." If there were a higher demand for Ph.D.'s in the field you love, there would be more opportunities for "full rides" for graduate school in your field. If you aren't talented enough to get one of those, the chances that you will subsequently land a nice tenure-track job somewhere are very low.
I know people with Ivy League Ph.D.'s in the humanities who graduated half a decade ago, have a number of publications in top journals, have teaching experience, and they STILL can't find a decent tenure-track job. If you're paying $100k to get your crappy graduate degree from Upper Bucksnort University, you really think you have a chance?!?
I'm not trying to quash anyone's dreams, but you need to ask yourself what you're getting for that $100k+ investment, other than a boatload of debt.
By all means, keep the dream: go out and get a job, save up some cash, and then if when you're 35 or 40 or whatever, go back and get that Ph.D. with the money you saved -- if you still really want to. I admire people like that a great deal.
But shelling out for graduate school when it won't help you be able to do what you want to do anyway, and it could actually HURT your future by having crippling debt and branding you as "overcredentialed" as you try to find a realistic job.
P.S. Yes, I have a job in what I wanted to do, and no, I do not have any debt from graduate school. But I know a few people who do have ridiculous debt from graduate school, have no job or some crappy job that isn't anything that they ever wanted to do, and are struggling to get out of debt... there's no chance that they will ever get a decent academic job.
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Re:Horse already left the barn (Score:4, Informative)
Do that many people pay for their PhDs? I'm not paying for mine; I wouldn't do it if I had to (racked up enough debt from law school).
Well, not that many pay FULL-PRICE. According to the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study [ed.gov] (NPSAS), about 86% of doctoral students received some form of financial aid, grant, assistantship, stipend, etc. in 2007-08. If we restrict this to Ph.D. students only (and exclude the field of education), that number rises to 91%.
I'm sure buried in all the statistics on that website, you might be able to find numbers that tell what percentage of tuition, etc. students actually ended up paying. But at least 9% of Ph.D. students in the U.S. apparently are paying for their degrees without ANY financial assistance whatsoever.
I don't know how many students have to pay at least some tuition, or don't get adequate stipends or pay from assistanceships to live on. I imagine it must be at least double that figure, and maybe a lot more.
So, it's not the majority of Ph.D. students, but there is a not insignificant number of such people out there. And among other graduate students (especially master's degrees), the numbers are much higher.
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I think the point about debt was moot because most science and engineering grad students don't have debt. I know I don't and I don't know anyone who took out loans for STEM grad school.
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I think the point about debt was moot because most science and engineering grad students don't have debt.
I don't know the stats, but I'd bet that a lot of science and engineering graduate students have debt from undergraduate loans... but I'm guessing that's not what you mean.
I know I don't and I don't know anyone who took out loans for STEM grad school.
Congratulations! You must not know anyone who went to a crappy school or did their graduate degree part-time!
According to the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study [ed.gov] (NPSAS), which is admittedly a bit out of date since the most recent stats are from 2008, roughly 75% of graduate students in engineering and science fields received some
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Everyone I know in STEM that paid is a foreigner. I'm in the Bio field. All U.S. born grad students in the universities I'm familiar with had their tuition paid and received a stipend from the university or a training grant they were on. They didn't make a lot, but none paid for classes at all.
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Science and engineering postdocs are paid, just not very well, and science and engineering graduate students are also paid as well as having their tuition covered, so the point about debt is moot.
It's not moot at all. Many of those grad students will have built up $100k of debt from their *undergraduate* degree, and depending on the type of loan may even build up more from interest while it's deferred in grad school. When they graduate, they will now be a postdoc barely able to start paying off that debt.
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Postdocs, in any field, are fine if you don't have another job and want to work in academia. Just don't expect too much and keep the CVs going out. Publish.
Then you stand a pretty good chance of getting a decent job. It can apply to the humanities - my field - as well as science, engineering and math.
I did a postdoc way back when, last century, and it led to a pretty lucrative career. Good enough for me to retire at an age young enough that I still can enjoy playing Need for Speed Rivals and Batman Arkh
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Try to find people who exemplify whatever success you are seeking in your own field, and ask about their experiences. (Of course there's always a slim chance you'll break the mold...)
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So many of the generation before me never went to university, they might have picked up some experience in the military or other practical OTJ training, and just worked up their reputation in the field.
Good luck pulling that off in post 1990s North America.
Re:Horse already left the barn (Score:5, Insightful)
If grad school has at best a questionable return, how could a postdoc - indentured servitude, slavery - be any better an idea?
In plain English, it's cheap labor. As I understand it, once upon a time in America, somebody reasonably good who got their Ph.D. could move to a faculty position fairly quickly. Not tenured at first of course, but likely tenure track. When we started getting more Ph.D.'s than we needed, they invented the post-doc. String 'em along, get lots of cheap labor, and every once in a while give somebody a faculty position so the rest could dream. But hey, everybody knows we've got a STEM shortage, right?
Back in the 80's the NSF pushed for a big increase in student visas. They noted that it would probably push down the salaries of Ph.D.'s, though I'm sure that wasn't a motivation.
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"String 'em along, get lots of cheap labor, and every once in a while give somebody a faculty position so the rest could dream."
It is worse when the postdoc is at the same place as the Ph.D. The incentive is that one sees a "jump" in salary from one stage to another (a grad student making 25k becomes a postdoc making 50k, who in turn becomes a "research professor" or assistant professor without tenure making 75k). By the time the person realizes the missed opportunity cost and lack of good prospects in the
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There never has, nor will be, a shortage of mathematically and scientifically minded individuals.
If people who can earn Ph.D.'s in math or science are a dime a dozen, then why the demand for lots of visas for grad students and postdocs?
They drive the economy, and can do it mostly single-handedly.
Then you'd think they could earn a decent living doing it.
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Look a few posts up - that was my original point.
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I've got a great idea for a new online game: "Droll humor or actual idiot - you decide".
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Find our niche. Do it for yourself. Build your own dream - not slave away at minimum wage building someone else's dream.
This wage-slave thingie is as bad as prostitution.
My respects to you, Sir.
You provide a service to the community that is far more valuable than most.
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Wow. In Molecular Biology in the late 80's (before I bolted into medicine), post docs were making 35K tops. Wonder what it is now, but I don't think it's anywhere near 95K. Hell, that's more than my professor made.
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It does when you get that job with nearly $200,000 in debt hanging over your head. $4000+ a month student loan payments make that $95K a year salary look like peanuts it forces you to live as if you were making $40K a year. And if you are screwed and end up working in insane places like California, DC, or NYC for that paltry $95K you are living in a slum as housing prices are criminally high.
No student loan debt from grad school (Score:2, Informative)
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We don't need rational actors in America. What we need are people willing to work hard for delayed gratification (possibly postmortem). Just ask anyone like Tom Friedman. Then follow Tom's example - marry a billionaire.
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The phrase basically translates to "child of the commandment" (or "subject of the law" according to some rabbis), so it's grammatically correct to refer to the celebrant as "a bar mitzvah".
Re:Depends.... (Score:4, Funny)
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