The term is used more and more: Early Career Researcher/Scientist (ECR for short). You’ve no doubt heard it in more than one context I’m sure, and it never means the same thing twice. So it got me thinking, am I an Early Career Scientist? By what metrics? And most importantly, what challenges do we face at this stage in our career? So in the next few paragraphs, I’ll try to give you a glimpse into ECR struggles through the admittedly biased lens of my personal experience, with a series of common topics heard around the water cooler in the postdoc aisle.
The odds. To set the stage, let’s talk numbers. Statistics are actually hard to come by on the subject, mostly because self-reporting is the only source of data and efforts to gather it have only recently begun. My question was: what is the percentage of PhD graduates who eventually end up in a tenured faculty position in academia? I did not find the answer. There are problems in posing the question this way. Firstly, “eventually” isn’t a well-defined time period. Some get a position within 2 years of graduation. Others take over 10 years, sometimes after going back-and-forth between academia and industry. A great resource is the Survey of Earned Doctorates, a report published NSF in 2016. The first number that jumped out to me is that the number of PhD awarded in the US has gone from a little over 41,000 in 2000 to over 54,000 in 2014, with the biggest increases in STEM fields. America is producing PhDs at an accelerating rate, amd it remains unclear whether that is in response to a demand in terms of qualified jobs, or in response to the ever-increasing need for manpower in research projects. According to the same report, 29% of graduates in Physical Sciences have job commitments in academia when they graduate (40% have job commitments at all). Most of those commitments are postdoctoral positions and I can only imagine this number goes down as years pass. Whichever way you look at it, the odds are not ever in our favor. The never-ending job search. Postdoctoral appointments are the epitome of a temporary. People will tell you this is the time to write all the papers and do the research that will define you as a scientist. It is the only time in an academic career when you have no other obligations but to work on your research. And while this is true on paper, in practice you are also in a fixed-term position with typically very little chance of turning into anything resembling job security. So you need to think about the next position, often before you even set your things down in your shiny new office. As I was packing to move to NAU last year, getting ready to start my new job, I was applying for no less than 4 positions (other postdocs starting a year from then, and tenure-track positions). I routinely spend a significant portion of my time looking for job advertisements, writing letters of motivations, research and teaching statements, and in general just looking ahead instead of focusing on current projects. There is also this unspoken rule in academia that you don’t hire internally for permanent positions. Grad students don’t tend to stay as postdocs, and postdocs don’t stay as faculty. It is frowned upon. There is something to be said for expanding your horizons and learning new skills by changing research environments. But it does mean that you are always looking for the next place to call home. Gods forbid you actually like the place where you live now. Grant writing. A large part of what makes a successful academic is the ability to secure funding for yourself and your research ideas. And the postdoctoral position is the time to learn those skills. To me this is where the biggest paradox exists. Because most research universities and institutes do not let postdocs be PI (Principal Investigators). I will never understand the reasoning behind this. In most cases, postdocs are the ones actively writing proposals, even when their supervisors is the PI (either for technical reason or because it is their idea). We are the work horses of many research groups, with all our free time and lack of administrative responsibilities. And we NEED to write those proposals if we want to be successful in our careers. NAU offers the possibility to petition to be a PI or Co-I on a case-by-case basis - which is great, most places don’t – but why that is even required is beyond my comprehension. Extra paperwork, hassle and barriers for everyone involved. I pledge here and now to find out what possible reason there is for this and to place the considerable administrative might I will one day hold as a valued faculty member to advocate for all-inclusive PI status for all postdocs at whatever institution I end up. Alternative options. I believe one of my biggest criticism of my graduate program (largely gained in hindsight) is the lack of discussion of alternative career paths. Based on the numbers presented above, and the undeniable fact that the majority of PhD recipients will not find an academic position, it would just make good sense to include alternatives to academia in a graduate curriculum. Doctorates are highly-skilled workers (it says so on my VISA) and are in fact highly sought after by industry leaders. It is easy to see why such discussion doesn’t happen at a university. All the people you learn from have not had to deal with that choice. They are successful professors with brilliant careers. They usually have no idea what the alternative looks like. The same thing happens at the postdoc level. In my opinion, it should be reframed with a skill-based approach, as opposed to focusing on specific research. If you present a postdoc as a stepstool where you can put your research skills in practice, learn to write successful proposals, and develop specific skills, then its usefulness needs not be limited to becoming a professor. I strongly believe it is important to be honest with graduate students and postdocs about their options, and to rethink graduate and postgraduate positions, first as a job (yes, PhD students are in fact paid workers and should be seen as such), and also as a learning environment, with larger applications than academia in mind. I have no choice but to finish this post with a strong rebuke of the previous paragraphs, lest I appear as a bitter hypocrite. For all the struggles and difficulties that an academic career presents, and all the aforementioned topics, there is nothing I would rather do than what I am doing right now. Love of science is why we all embark on what is statistically a losing quest. I love my job, I love academia, and I love being a researcher, clearly ranking job security below work satisfaction on my personal scale. I just also happen to believe we can do a few things to improve what is by most accounts a challenging environment. Here’s hoping I will stick around to implement change for future generations.
2 Comments
9/3/2019 06:16:46 pm
It seems like when you are studying in graduate school, everyone is looking sharply to you. They are setting a bar high and their expectations are higher than usual. The result of this would be your desire to keep up and try to hold on to that pressure as much as possible. Nothing is wrong if you are going to use it as your motivation, but you need to be driven because of your own goals, not because of the pressure that you carry on your shoulder. it will always be better to do your thing while you enjoy it.
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About the Author(S)The contributors to this blog are the students, faculty, and other researchers in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Northern Arizona University. If you have any suggestions, or would like to contribute to this blog, please email mark.salvatore@nau.edu for more information. Archives
January 2019
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