Help for finding Post-Docs

Image Processing Lab

There was an old Chrome extension that allowed you to share bookmark folders, but it seems to have disappeared. Here is the next best option.

This is a list of websites to help you find post-docs and post-doc funding. It will likely fall out of date quickly as I likely won't keep looking into post-docs.

General Help
National Postdoc Association
Entering Job Market
PhD Ladder
Small Pond Science - Targeted towards the move to liberal arts
NIH Loan Repayment - Apply for loan repayment while working as a post-doc
Escaping the Ivory Tower - I guess this isn't a helpful resource for pursing a post-doc

Search for jobs/positions
APA Post-Doc Exchange
NIH Project Reporter - search for T32s granted in last 2 years
NINDS T32 Fellowships - Other sections grant T32s great place to start

Programs/Fellowships
Ford Fellowship
Penn-Port
Penn Biomedical
Duke Center for Decision Science
OHSU Psychology Residency
IRACDA General
UCSF-IRACDA
UCSD-IRACDA
Emory-IRACDA
Stanford-IRACDA
NC-State Faculty Diversity
Consortium for Faculty Diversity
Berkeley Diversity Fellowship
NINDS Diversity

Career Trajectories

Early in my PhD studies a mass e-mail was sent out to PhD students from researchers at the Northwestern University recruiting PhD students to take place in a study on the training and aspirations of current PhD students. The study was a longitudinal study that included in depth interviews every one to two years to assess current training and aspirations with follow-ups to assess whether those aspirations changed and whether training experiences affected aspirations. Every so often I try to find what has come from the study and in searching recently stumbled across this report from the Welcome Trust on how PhD students choose their careers. If you skip to the end of the report for the conclusions and thinking points, they sound eerily similar to the suggestions from the recent report from Post-Docs and a working group on PhD education. 

MORE CAREER ADVICE AND SUPPORT DURING THE PHD

1. Help with planning careers and making grants applications to aid the transition to next stage.
2. Continue and enhance current networking opportunities. Access to information about different sorts of careers within and outside academia, provided early in the PhD.
3. For those who are struggling during the PhD, a system of mentoring with other scientists and researchers in the field would be welcomed, and could help give them a wider perspective

DEVELOPING NEW INNOVATIVE APPROACHES TO CAREERS IN, OR WITH, ACADEMIA

1. Considering the opportunities for research posts which involve academic research, but are not solely based in academia. This might include jointly-funded research posts in institutions, or industry sponsorship of research posts.
2. A range of flexible technical scientist roles. Scrutinize the PI role and see if this can be broken down and split into more than one role, for example one focusing on project management, the other on laboratory work.
3. Allow scientists to take up part-time or temporary research related roles, such as project management and managing a research budget, at different times in their careers to allow for more family-friendly work and regular hours. PhD experience – knowing how academia works and how to communicate with academics – would be invaluable for such roles.

CHANGE TO ACADEMIC CULTURE AND WORKING PRACTICES

1. Remove funding criteria which require PhDs to relocate and consider research into the extent to which moving around benefits the scientist or the science outputs.
2. Institutions to learn from family-friendly innovations and systems in other sectors that enable people with children to pursue careers, for example challenging the notion that long hours equate to productivity.
3. Potential for fewer academic funding awards, but for longer time periods.
4. More investment in staff and career progression, in line with what is common in other industries, so that PhDs can realistically plan their careers.
5. Institutions should find ways of incorporating new academics more into the ‘corporate world’ of the university, potentially through guaranteed teaching posts over time.
6. Effective ‘line management’ could be valued more in academia. This may involve training for senior scientists as well as juniors, plus incentives in the university system so that coaching, support and mentoring can be increased and valued.
7. Create awareness and raise the profile of a range of role models who have come to successful science careers through a variety of different routes and backgrounds. Challenge the prevailing opinion, evident in this study, that the Principal Investigator is the main and only career option for newly qualified post-doctoral researchers.
8. Women could also benefit from seeing more female role models following careers in academic research. This would be particularly valuable if accompanied by information on their backgrounds and how they have overcome any challenges.
9. Ensure that there is good communication and dialogue about working benefits that do exist within academia (often more comprehensive than those that exist in other sectors), such as maternity leave provision and the options for working more flexibly within academic research.
10. More information and research is needed on whether moving posts or institution, if pursuing a career in academic research, is actually of long term value to researchers. As science becomes more international, virtual technologies are helping to forge collaborations without the requirement for face-to-face contact.
11. There is a perception that it is a ‘requirement’ for a researcher to have moved posts to successfully apply for a certain grant; if this is a myth, then funders need to better communicate this.
12. Challenge the ingrained perception that working in industry equates to intellectual constraint while academia means intellectual freedom. One participant told us that new biotech companies offer legitimate opportunities to publish, but that academics do not necessarily know about. Knowing more about the world of industry may help early career scientists weigh up all the opportunities open to them to remain in science.

Reading through the rest of the report is quite interesting. Many of the quotes from participants could have easily come from graduate students and post-docs that I've known. The sobering part of the report is that there is no end in sight. With stagnate demand for new faculty hires and an ever growing glut of PhD graduates and post-docs these issues are likely to get worse before they get better.

Addendum to Hyperopia in Acadaemia

Happy New Year!

In my second to last blog post of 2014 I wrote about two reports on the state of post-docs in science. The gist of the reports was that there is a glut of highly educated scientists and researchers who, without significant changes to our current scientific structures, will likely be unable to find jobs or promotions. Just two days later I found an article summarizing a Royal Society working group report in which they recommend giving a "clear statement" about the role of universities for managing the expectations of junior scientists. Dame Anthene Donald, the head of the working group noted that, "there should be proper dialog about what a PhD is for ... that it is not simply the first step in a logical career progression." Besides advice to students to prepare for jobs outside of the academy and advice to supervisors to warn and temper students expectations, the best piece of advice from the report suggests that universities should provide appropriate training in transferrable skills and arrange visits from people outside academia to outline alternative career paths.

Theses suggestions are certainly good, but perhaps not all that timely, nor perhaps as dire as it sounds. Although I don't remember many cautioning me to not start graduate school or to leave school once I arrived, even 5 years ago a number of people discussed how difficult the job market was. The report seems to presume that everyone that enters graduate school hopes to leave and try to become a researcher at a R1 research institution. I for one know that not everyone going to graduate school intends that as I myself entered graduate school with the explicit understanding with my dissertation advisor that I was training to work at a primarily undergraduate, teaching focused (likely liberal arts based) institution. Likewise, on the other side of neuroscience, many students training in molecular neuroscience planned to enter industry after graduating.

When I arrived in Canada for my post-doc, I found that there were a number of opportunities available to both graduate students and post-docs in neuroscience for training in business. The Mitacs Elevate Program allows post-docs to work in a company and pursue research. The Ontario Brain Institute offers more formalized training in management and entrepreneurial-ship through three programs. So while there may not be enough jobs in R1 institutions or in other schools in the academy, positions and opportunities are starting to outside the academy and with fair warning as the Royal Society suggests, graduate students can make preparations early in their career.

Hyperopia in academics?

Last week, the cheery state of being a post-doc was made even cheerier with the release of a new publication on the state of post-doc-hood. Others have not met this news with as bright of an outlook (here and here).
Here's a choice of two good songs to set the mood as we dive in -

Some of the most exciting tidbits from the report include:

• Postdoctoral appointments for a given researcher should total no more than 5 years (barring extraordinary circumstances)

• They suggest the cumulative term should be five years, meaning not stringing together multiple post-docs of at least 2-3 years.

• The title of ‘postdoctoral researcher’ should be applied only to those people who are receiving advanced training in research

• After 5 years, post-docs should either start a permanent position externally or be promoted internally to a staff position with a different and appropriate designation and salary.

• The postdoctoral position should not be viewed by graduate students or principal investigators as the default step after the completion of doctoral training (postdoctoral positions are intended only for those seeking advanced research training)

• Beginning at the first year of graduate school, graduate students should be made aware of the wide variety of career paths available for Ph.D. recipients

• The NIH should raise the NRSA postdoctoral starting salary to $50,000 (2014 dollars) - currently salary starts at $39,264 increasing to $54,180 (after 7 years of experience)

• Adjusted annually for inflation (currently 1.3% in the US)

• Appropriately higher where regional cost of living, disciplinary norms, and institutional or sector salary scales dictate higher salaries

• Benefits should be appropriate for level of experience and commensurate with benefits given to equivalent full-time employees including health insurance, family and parental leave, and access to a retirement plan

• Host institutions and funding agencies should take responsibility for ensuring the quality of mentoring through evaluation of, and training programs for, the mentors and postdoctoral researchers should be encouraged to seek advice from multiple advisors

• Just as graduate students are counted and tracked, postdoctoral fellows should be counted and tracked. Additionally the NSF should serve as the primary curator for establishing and updating a database system that tracks postdoctoral researchers, including non-academic and foreign-trained postdoctoral researcher

In order to achieve these suggestions, the overall conclusion of the report appears to be that we need to reduce the number of post-docs. In particular, it appears that the authors suggest overhauling graduate training so that PhD students begin training for non-research careers in graduate school and only PhD students who want to run their own R1 lab should pursue post-doctoral training. These changes would then change the post-doctoral experience so that is no longer a (supposed) broad training for a wide range of careers and no longer a period of soul-crushing disillusionment of the research experience where training scientists decide to (or are forced to) pursue other career options. By reducing the number of post-docs, the remaining future R1 PIs could receive higher salaries during their training. Another reason to reduce post-doc positions, besides paying them more, is that there are not enough jobs that they are training for:

"New faculty posts have not kept pace with the number of postdoctoral scientists in training, so there are, at least in some fields, far more postdocs than available research jobs"

That quote was quite interesting to me, so I decided to take a look at the current state of hiring in my own field. I found job postings for psychology faculty positions at one of, if not the most comprehensive wiki of aggregated tenure-track openings in psychology. Before diving in, I realize that it may not list every job available since it is focused on jobs in the US primarily, Canada secondarily and then elsewhere.

A total of 657 positions posted across the different areas of psychology.



657 positions sounds like a lot of jobs, for just one year of hiring, but let's dig into those numbers a bit. These 657 jobs represent all areas of psychology, from across the US, Canada and other international locations. A given scholars background will likely limit them to less than half of these positions (unless they have a clinical degree and studied social neuroscience from a developmental perspective in which case they may be able to apply for 70% of positions). After limiting yourself to the positions in your area of psychology, you must now limit yourself to the ones you are actually qualified for. The positions on the wiki include all types of colleges and universities from primarily undergraduate and teaching focused schools to R1, research focused schools. Without teaching and mentoring experience (or a desire to teach), you're ruled out from the teaching schools, while without independent funding and multiple high profile first author papers, you're ruled out from the research schools. After you've found your area of psychology and your niche of school type, in order to apply to all of the remaining positions, you must be willing to move anywhere. If you'd like to have some choice in where you live, you may find yourself with few options. Let's look at an example. If you are interested in teaching at a liberal arts college in Minnesota, Wisconsin or Iowa and have a background in cognitive neuroscience, there are 7 jobs you can apply or approximately 1% of the available jobs. If you want to be more selective and only want to live in Minneapolis/St. Paul, there are 2 jobs available.

Now let's think about the competition for that job. According to a recent survey by the APA, 9564 PhDs were awarded in the US in psychology (in 2009/2010) which is about 14.5 PhD graduates per open position this year. However, another report states that approximately 47% of psychology PhD graduates go on to complete post-doctoral training. If we take the 5-year max for post-docs suggested by the report about, that means we have a total post-doctorally trained pool of psychology PhDs of about 22,475, who together with the recent grads would make up 42 times (talk about "hyper-competition") the number of open positions.  This is not to say someone has a 2.4% chance at attaining a tenure track job as the estimated chance is way higher (like 3 - 5 times higher).

Another interesting report on the issue comes from post-docs themselves who organized a conference in Boston back in October, called the Future of Research Symposium. The report is an amazing read with a ton of fascinating links to other research studies and on-line discussions about the state of science, the academy and research.

The broad conclusions of the report are similar to the previous report:

1. We recommend increased connectivity among junior scientists and other stakeholders to promote discussions on reforming the structure of the scientific enterprise.  

2. We advocate for increased transparency. This includes the number and career outcomes of trainees, as well as the expectations of the balance between employment and training in individual postdoctoral appointments.  

3. We call for an increased investment in junior scientists, with increased numbers of grants that provide financial independence from Principal Investigator (PI) research grants, and increased accountability for the quality of training as a requirement of funding approval.

But before we view these conclusions as unrealistic, one of my favorite quotes on this topic came from a Boston Globe article, where Professor emeritus Henry Bourne says of the recommendations from these reports:

“I suspect that many scientific leaders and some institutions will applaud this document but promptly work to negate its rules. And they will succeed in doing so, with ridiculous ease. The reason is simple: It is clearly not in the interest of established investigators or their institutions to pay postdocs more and give them good jobs after their so-called ‘training,’ ” 

Or represented graphically: 

Jorge Cham - PhDcomics

After reading through the issues raised here and through the links, one may think academia is acting shortsightedly, or myopically, but in reading through everything, oddly enough, its the ones who are in it for the long haul who make it to the position to be myopic. The people who made it, are the ones who trundled and worked and grinded through 4 years of undergrad, 2 years of masters, 4 years of PhD, 5-7 years of post-doctoral training, and 6 years of probationary untenured work finally achieve job security at the young age of 39-41 years old (about half of the average American life expectancy) and reach the top of the pyramid.

Edit: 1/16/2015 Brian Kurilla from GeekPsychologist recently reported slightly more optimistic chances for obtaining employment after graduation.