Certainly not all in academia.
I had the following exchange with a well-placed person in the administration of a new “senior postdoc” program run by the INSERM. (In French, so I am paraphrasing.)
Me:
I have a great postdoc in my group. Because INSERM did not give me the money promised to recruit a postdoc, I have been paying her with U.S. NIH money since 2006.She came to my group right out of her Ph.D. at the University of Paris. She went for a month to our U.S. collaborator’s laboratory to learn a complex technique which she brought back and that led to an article on which she is first author.
For various reasons, it’s unlikely she will want to undertake a second postdoc abroad. But the senior postdoc program mentions that an “international mobility” is a criterion for selection. Is she still eligible?
Response:
She would have to be really good to get around that criterion. Could you send me her name so I could look at her publication record, especially those articles in first/last position?
My reply:
Here is her list of [nine] publications, since she has a pretty common name and you would not have found them on your own. I’m a foreigner originally. What’s so great about being abroad, if one has already gone to do a postdoc with the “triple mobility” criteria of changes in subject, institution and laboratory?
The unequivocal answer:
Mobility for a foreigner is not judged the same way, and of course moving between labs is important. The real problem in my opinion for your postdoc is the quality of her publications in all [two of] the laboratories in which she has worked.Her two first-author publications in good journals, Hum Mol Genet and PNAS, were only in 2008-2009.
If the two publications in 2003 were during her Ph.D., they’re fairly weak, as only one is a first author publication in a specialist journal. From 2004-2007, while she was in theory publishing with you [hey, I did say she arrived in 2006!] she has no first authorships. That will be interpreted as her willingness to collaborate but incapacity to appropriate a subject for herself.
Also, if this researcher has been with you for more than two years, she hasn’t got a snowball’s chance in hell, since the jury will favor postdocs who are moving to a new group to start a new research theme. The others can try to get a “charge de recherche” position [yes, the ones that are in such short supply that programs such as this have been added to try to relieve the pressure].
Hope that helps you in encouraging her to apply or not.
It certainly helped me but hardly the person who could have really used the help in the first place. I also think it’s quite unfair that she is being penalized for sticking with a subject with a Ph.D. advisor who did not ensure that she could get on later with her career, rather than being rewarded for choosing a postdoc lab that lets her show the stuff of which she is made.
That postdoc lab wasn’t even so good for her, really, because the project which she brought to fruition was a really tough nut to crack and it took two full years before she could publish it. And she said yes to a bunch of other collaborations. But don’t tenacity and intelligence count for anything?
We’ve got a little less than a year’s funding left for her. Is there no place in academia for scientists who slowly publish good quality science?
well, being me and slightly Eeyorish in my outlook – short answer, not really. Of course it depends on how slow and how good a journal you end up with (imho PNAS and Hum Mol Gen sounds like good journals to slow cook it in but I might be off?).
On a personal note the mobility is a strange thing. Back home in Sweden everyone talks about “mobility” as a good thing. Looking at where my peers are and where they have been though, I can’t say it seems to be a super thing to do. I could devide them into “those who moved away for a while and then moved back to the same department where they started their PhD” and “those who never left”. Of course, it is kind of crude and there are outliers but many fit in those two slots.
Over all it seems like post docing in general is getting tougher and tougher with the overall increase in PhDs and decrease in other markets…
This makes me sad Heather. It should be about good science and nothing else.
No, Heather, there isn’t. It’s a crying shame.
God, that’s awful. I hate this sometimes :(
What a bloody waste! Who are the idiots that make these decisions?!
Is there no place in academia for scientists who slowly publish good quality science?
In my very recent experience, apparently not
…He says in a blunt assessment of self-worth
Heather, your story struck a chord with me. There is an absolute fixation in Australia with landing a post-doc in a big lab (preferably in the US), and “parachuting” into a project that will generate a Nature/Cell/Science paper within 2 years… in fact grad-students are actively counseled in the best way to do this, it’s an incredibly cynical exercise.
Combine that with dragging your family half-way around the world to live on a (single) subsistence wage, then trying to break back into the system at home from the outside, and you have a nightmare.
Plus, Darren, the Australian government only wants to fund research that will (a) cure cancer in five years or (b) make fifteen squillion dollars and preferably (c ) both: and then you realize that no matter how fucking mobile you are (seriously. Do not question my mobility) that the only way to get a job in New Zealand is to be a member of an immigrant race that ate the indigenous peoples and people wonder why (a) I remigrated back to the UK and (b) left science.
Pah.
Tell me about it, I spent the best part of Friday night (yes, I know) writing a section on the “translational potential” of a research proposal, and describing how the outcomes of the research would benefit the economic development of the state etc.
Don’t get me wrong, applying research to improve the lot of cancer patients is a worthy goal in in itself, but there needs to be some recognition that not all research is going to make money or cure a disease.
Darren: but there needs to be some recognition that not all research is going to make money or cure a disease.
you mean like all the research to the background and basic research so you can find the mechanisms???
It’s so much harder to explain why but my guess is that in a few years the inventions will have decreased so maybe people will see the correlation between “non directly translational related research” and “cures for diseases in the long run”.THen again, that is a mere hope I have…
Cynical. Yes, that’s the word. Since everyone seems to know what we want when we are recruiting people, advisors (like me!) have an obligation when they take people on to enable them as far as humanly possible to publish quickly, along those cynical criteria that Darren evoked. I really am grumpy that her Ph.D. advisor would have sunk this young woman before she essentially even started.
Enablers are really not rewarded in this system. I have yet to be personally responsible for a Cell/Science/Nature paper, but I have made legitimate and significant contributions to Nature Genetics papers. Why is it that such papers don’t seem to count at all, except as part of a sort of large cloud in addition to first/last authorships? Not everyone is getting thrown freebies; that work takes time, and makes the significant papers in prestigious journals happen!
If hiring committees only hire scientists who can make good managers as well (of people, projects and their own ambitions), I maintain that non-managerial but good scientists still have their place and contributions to make by allying themselves with the former in a kind of mutual symbiosis.
Asa, you might be interested in this editorial by Sharon Begley of Newsweek, in which she asserts with some supporting evidence that traditional academia is bad for [translational] science. That is, biomedical science is still not translational enough. I suspect that her opinion is a majority one…
Indeed.
Not everyone is getting thrown freebies
That sums up the ‘ultimately, you have to be bloody lucky’ bit of it all.
Great comments in that thread – I hadn’t seen “Despite their lack of official recognition, informal networks can provide effective ways of learning, and with the proper incentives actually enhance the productivity of the formal organization.” Actually! Imagine that!
Enablers are really not rewarded in this system
My ex-boss in Australia recognised this fact and was very supportive using “soft money”, a short-term solution at best in the Australian funding climate but better than nothing.
Steffi, there is no doubt that being in the right place at the right time plays a huge role in being a successful scientist. BUT, it takes a certain amount of intuition, skill and risk taking to a) recognise such an opportunity when it arises; and b) make the most of it.
For those of us still working towards our PhD, it seems grad school is quite a bit more forgiving of scientists who slowly publish good quality science
Whether this is a good or bad thing, though, seems debatable since the next two rungs in the academic ladder (postdoc, tenure-track PI) strongly measure success by how fast/how much/how high quality you can publish.
And really do we have much choice but to play the game?
Darren, agreed (of course!) – but for many, I would add being in the right place at the right time AND without responsibilities towards a family… which is sad and just highlights how reckless (in a way) one has to be to single-mindedly pursue a career in science that may not actually ever come to fruition (…). Check out the ratio of active to ‘non-active’ researchers in this particular thread: 5:3. Bloody disturbing. I know it’s a discussion we’ve had many times over around here, but it won’t go away – and we really have to drop that attitude that someone who does not go on in science has ‘not made it’ or ‘dropped out’, please.
I wrote five or six lengthy, angry comments, but kept sounding like the nutter on Richard’s bus, so I probably need to sit down and have a proper think and write in my own blog about it at some point.
Steffi, I know all about family responsibility. My wife left a very well paid job at home when we moved here “for my career”?, combine that with keeping my little daughter from her adoring grandparents/aunties etc and I have a fairly heavy load on my shoulders. Having to spend 50+ hours a week working doesn’t help either. If I don’t get a good paper out of what I’m doing soon, I’ll be skewing the ratio further towards the “non-active” side.
The system is highly geared to select for selfish, even reckless behaviour. Get a room full of big name scientists together and you will see bigger egos than a similar gathering of pro-athletes, politicians or even rock stars. Something has to drive them other than fame and fortune! I saw a great mock recipe for purifiying a successful scientist a few years ago, frightenigly close to the truth but still very funny, I’m trying to dig it out.
I was referring more to an “opportunity” in the form of a serendipitous observation or experimental result, rather than a particular position or specific job.
Steffi, it’s quite sad to read your lines. I’ve increasingly seen that high publication indexes doesn’t go hand by hand with quality, and that quality papers are not necessarily judged as so if there is no sufficient article’s load… a paradox indeed, and a very unfair situation… sad!
PS: And what about… “Mobility for a foreigner is not judged the same way”… I just don’t get it!
See I take a slightly different view of this. You’re talking about jobs at the top of science for this postdoc, the best fellowships and the best opportunities. Well, that is an extremely competitive place and whether its right or not, will favour those who can/are willing to jump through all the hoops of mobility and ‘real life’. That’s the system, it probably isn’t fair but that’s how it is until we change it.
But there are probably still jobs in academia, not every postdoc needs to steam directly to the top institutions, to the top academic jobs, to running a lab like their previous supervisors. They still have a whole career in front of them in which to make an impact. If your postdoc is of the ‘slow but great science’ variety, there is no reason to suggest that she can’t be an academic, just not immediately in the most heavily competitive institutions.
I don’t agree with the system, but I don’t believe that all is lost quite yet.
@Darren: I wish you so much luck(!), as well as anyone else who sticks it out. It’s a lot of pressure. There is a very difficult to define cut-off point where you have to decide which way to go, not least because at some point, changing careers may just not be as easy – there are completely different skills to be learned outside of academia, and ‘having a PhD’ doesn’t automatically get you as far as it maybe used to, at least in my experience.
And you’re painting about the right picture of ‘big name scientists’ :)
Anyway, on a positive note: maybe we can get to the point where active and non-active scientists play together like professional musicians do with passionate ‘amateurs’? I mean really: let’s get jammin’!!
@Katherine – I agree in theory, and in particular, in the U.S. – I only know well the U.S. and French systems, and anecdotally some Canadian, English/Scottish and German career possibilities for scientists.
The problem for my postdoc is that for her to find a job as an academic, she will need to choose to be an expatriate. There are far fewer possibilities for biomedical scientists here than in the U.S. or Canada, anyhow. First, the education system is far more rigid and codified, so there are not multiple models with multiple niches. Jobs are posted at a national level and there is a national job application process. There are two speeds: junior or senior professor. For full-time scientists, there are two speeds within “academia” as well – but not in much contact with students – researcher (like me) or director. Recently, there have been added a few of these non-permanent researchships, but as you can see, there are not many and they are somewhat frowned upon as taking away money that could be used to make permanent positions. It is near to impossible to get a budget and include a line for a postdoc salary, as you can do on NIH grants, although with the new ANR system, at least it is now possible. But I have no ANR grant, and the budgets are a tenth what they can be for an R01.
What I find a shame is that there are so few of these non-permanent postdoc survival positions, that they are held to exactly the same difficult standards as the permanent positions for which they were supposed to relieve the competition somewhat.
@María José – I interpret this to mean that they were probably more forgiving that I stayed in France for my postdoc after my Ph.D. because I already had been through rotations in a number of U.S. labs as part of my early doctoral training. I’m still not convinced by the inferiority complex the French seem to have in that if a French postdoc did not go live in an English-speaking country and publish in English-language journals during that time, that scientist will never make it on the international scene and therefore be of no use to the French scientific establishment or to science in general. But it’s another debate.
Yikes. And people wonder why I went into industry (will probably still have to move though, eventually :( ). Two of my best friends both did their postdocs after a major move to Calgary, and only one has had a job at a time (I swear they keep switching) since because they alternate moving between her Canada and his Germany. They still aren’t sure where they’ll be able to settle. The mobility that is expected from the science community is becoming a bit over the top. Also, in today’s modern world, with the collaboration that is becoming possible, will we still be required to move? I know nothing replaces the lab work at 7 pm with the really motivated scientists, but some of the conversations and the thought process does not have to happen in person…
I guess the answer is definitely not…
but here’s to hoping that Katherine is right and that there is still some hope.
Isn’t this short post almost Hemingwayan in its depiction of the futility and desperation of vita scientifica? Great post!
It’s no secret that every professor nowadays has 20-30 graduate students and maybe just as many postdocs in his/her career. Consequentially, of someone claims that every deserving postdoc gets a job, this means that person thinks that about 1 of ~60 (if professorships remain constant) is deserving. These 1.6% would be even less than the 2.2% that Nature and Nature Genetics think is a good funding rate:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7198/full/453958a.html
http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v40/n5/full/ng0508-485.html
So I guess it depends on your assessment of ‘deserving’. But, cynicism aside for a moment, it doesn’t take an Einstern to realize what incentives you create when chances of succeeding drop to such levels.
Why not require that for every postdoc a PI hires, one of his/her previous ones has to move into a permanent position?
Hi,
Ambitious proposal, I guess the problem is that without more funding the system couldn’t support so many new PIs and alternatively far fewer post-docs would mean much slower progress. Since many PIs/lecturers don’t have sufficient time for the many jobs they have to do, and end up sacrificing their research to teach or both of those for administrative duties, I think there is clearly a case for being realistic and employing more…now we just need to persuade universities to front up with the money!
Career development fellowships (at least in the UK) were designed to lead post-docs to become PIs but that doesn’t seem to necessarily happen. Here some people finishing career development fellowships don’t get lectureships and find themselves unemployable as post-docs!
@Björn: thank you, I guess. I wish I didn’t have such a subject to discuss. I wish I knew of other places for her to go in France, to help her attain alternative professional goals that are consistent with her personal ones.
every professor nowadays has 20-30 graduate students and maybe just as many postdocs in his/her career.
Your numbers come out to somewhat fewer than one of each a year. That sounds about right to me on average. Having struggled mightily and still highly conscious of the lucky combination of circumstances that got me where I am, I had already adopted your suggestion to the point that a former employee has to at least get another satisfactory position before I will take on another. Permanent is a bit hard to ensure, although it’s the gold standard.
In my brief experience as a PI, I have already observed that not everyone is cut out to do the same thing as me. Some would probably be better although with a different style – I am thinking of my current postdoc, and my PhD student in the end – and some would not. Here I am thinking of two former postdocs, one of whom is in a second postdoc although I am certain he would do better as a “research engineer” or even in a medical laboratory – but there are no bridges that lead in that direction – and the other one is very happy in industry.
So far, I have only taken additional “masters of science” degree students (usually doctors) who do not want to continue right away into a Ph.D., because I believe it’s at the point of earning a Ph.D. that one needs to face future employment prospects clear-sightedly. So I have no students lined up next year. And I always ask a prospective student where they see themselves in five years.