Post-docs and Graduate Students of the World: topic
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Is the term 'post-doc' appropriate?
Matt Brown
Wednesday, 07 May 2008 12:58 UTC
Back in the early days of Nature Network, UK post-doc Paul Wicks raised the issue of whether ‘post-doc’ is a sensible term.
Why don’t we try and reclaim the word “researcher” to describe our job roles? Lecturers aren’t “professor students” or “post-postdocs” so why should our labels be attached solely to something we’ve already done (sometimes many years ago)? By extension why not call undergrads post-a-levellers? [An A-level being the UK qualification typically preceding a university degree]
Does anyone agree? And if so, is there a more appropriate term for such researchers?
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Replies
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‘Slaves’.
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Good idea, Henry.
:-)
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But what would you call students then, Henry?
I feel at some point this may become relevant:
And it suggests “slaves who don’t pay for the privilege” might be about right.
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I prefer the term “researchers”.
One possible reason for the term being prevalent, and if so, not one of which I approve, is those little drop-down menus that one is presented with when completing a survey or other online transaction, for which you have to state your job title.
When I was a researcher ;-), this kind of thing made me cross because there is so much overlap in it (one person could be three different things). So “post doc” might be a way by which the bean counters who create such forms in order to run auto-analyses distinguish groups of people. Funding agencies might find this convenient, for example.
If there is any truth in this speculation, it isn’t one I think has any justification, but it could partly explain the “stickiness” of the term.
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I’m a researcher too, but I’m not a post-doc (in that sense!). PhD students are also researchers. So I think calling post-docs “researchers” would just confuse matters.
I take a pragmatics approach. We all know what a post-doc is, so let’s use the term.
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Here for the punchline.
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I think you are right, Bob. I may prefer the term “researcher” but I agree with you that it isn’t as precise to call “everyone” researchers. And the pragmatic approach is usually the best, I think. (Remember all those people who wanted to change the calendar at the turn of the millennium—maybe for good reasons—but whatever they were, they weren’t pragmatic!)
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In the UK there is a distinction on salary scales between Postgraduate Research Assistants (PGRA) and Posdoctoral Research Assistants (PDRA). So the HR department will segregate those with doctorates ino a separate category of staff, this means the term is locked into University thinking/terminology. Manchester at one time started to call PDRAs research associates but that has (I believe) fallen out of practice.
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