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By the time you read this, I will be a post-doctoral research scientist. What is a "post-doc"? Why should anyone care? Post-docs -- over 30,000 strong in U.S. science and engineering -- are many of today's active scientists, and will be (they hope) tomorrow's leaders in academia and industry. Yet their responsibilities, aspirations, and frustrations are not well understood or documented.
With that thought in mind, I recently conducted an Internet-based quantitative and qualitative survey of current post-doctoral scientists. The results of the survey are outlined below; a complete summary follows this article. The twenty-five survey responses from three continents and a wide variety of disciplines give some anecdotal insight into the life of the post-doc -- and, importantly, how this peculiar position has changed in the past few decades.
Post-docs are Ph.D. recipients who undertake additional training in scientific research. But why? Nobel Prize winner Peter Medawar, in his Advice to a Young Scientist (Harper and Row, 1979, pp. 14-15), explains:
Because the newly graduated Ph.D. is still very much a beginner, a new migratory movement has grown up in modern science.... This new movement is the migration of 'postdocs'.... Senior scientists welcome them because they are likely to make good colleagues; for their part, the postdocs are introduced to a new little universe of research.
Medawar proclaims the post-doc movement circa 1979 to be "an unqualifiedly good thing." This impression is not shared today by many of the post-docs who participated in the survey. A Virginia-based atmospheric scientist states that post-doc positions "are a method used by industrial, government, and university research labs to extract Ph.D.-level work without paying Ph.D.-level prices." David Binder, a biochemist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, has a "very understanding" advisor but views "the current situation in most post-docs to be very, very exploitative." Even a West Coast geologist with "the dream post-doc" notes that "some laboratories have a high rate of success for their post-docs...; for others, it's like entering a Roach Motel." Although a large majority of post-doc respondents are partly or totally satisfied with their current positions, doubts remain about the true purpose of having post-docs in the first place. This mixture of current satisfaction and future shock is captured in the remarks of Martin Schub, a high-energy physicist at the University of Minnesota: "Post-doc jobs are a great training ground, but they train you for jobs that are impossible to get."
Schub's trenchant assessment highlights the changing assumptions surrounding the post-doc. It was often true in earlier decades that the post-doc position was a temporary training ground for a select group of future academic faculty. Some post-docs today perceive themselves to be in a metaphorical waiting room or a "holding pattern," stalling until they can land a faculty position. A Midwestern biochemistry post-doc observes, "All three of my mentors... either did no post-docs or did very short ones and then immediately moved on to faculty positions. Today, [this] is almost impossible for the majority of scientists out there," due to the lack of academic faculty positions. Robin Burke, a visiting assistant professor in computer science at the University of Chicago, notes that "post-docs are a relatively new phenomenon in computer science. Even people I know who graduated five or six years ago would not have considered a post-doc, but now they are very common."
Combined with lengthening Ph.D.s, the result of the current job situation is a cadre of highly trained thirty-something post-docs, often with families. This, too, is in contrast to the stereotype of the very young, unattached, and hypermotivated post-doc of decades past. Nevertheless, 42 percent claim to work on post-doc-related activities more than fifty hours per week. Post-doc salaries are adequate for physical scientists, but are depressed for biological scientists. Forty percent of the survey respondents reported salaries above $40,000 per year; however, a majority of the respondents with salaries below $30,000 per year were in the biosciences. The implication is that post-docs are perhaps somewhat better-paid than is generally recognized (cf. Rethinking Science as a Career, Tobias et al., Research Corp., 1995, p. 71). However, this finding must be tempered by three observations: 1) many post-docs are situated in expensive locations; 2) post-doc positions are often limited to a period of two years or so; and 3) in some cases this salary represents the primary income for a family of three or four persons. Placed in this perspective, some post-docs' financial anxiety is understandable, particularly given their uncertain future job market -- 56 percent reported that their current positions were threatened to some extent by budgetary cutbacks.
Given the shifting assumptions of the post-doctoral situation, how have individual post-docs' goals changed over time? Fifty-six percent of the survey respondents recalled planning to become university professors when they entered graduate school; in each case this was his or her single aspiration. Today, only 29 percent aspire to university professorships, with current preferences being split among a wide variety of jobs. About 1 percent chose "post-doctoral researcher" as a desirable career goal.
Some post-docs hear the clock ticking because many academic institutions prefer to hire only young post-docs as assistant professors. One solution is to consider "bailing out" of academic science altogether. Bernie Housen, a geologist at the University of Minnesota, provides this analogy: "I am piloting a plane, and this plane is running out of gas.... I am trying to find a safe place to land before I crash. How long do I try, before I 'punch out' and hit the eject button?... Now add my family [wife and two children] to the plane as passengers. Should I eject with them earlier than I otherwise would?"
The "dream post-doc" on the West Coast is "more or less certain I am leaving science," as is a NATO post-doc in physics at Oxford University in England. A University of Colorado mathematician is "still trying to figure out if all this effort will pay someday or if it will always be an enormous waste of time. In the meantime I am saving and preparing myself for the big 'scape: an MBA." Finally, a University of Michigan biologist laments, "I don't need any more training to become a college professor, I need a place to practice my craft.... I have reached the conclusion that I do not want to advise Ph.D. students -- which I previously considered a very desirable goal -- because it would be unfair to them to bring them along in a system within which they cannot find a job."
The traditional image of the post-doc position has been that of the inviting entryway into permanence and prominence as a scientist. For some today, this image has been replaced by the uncertainty and sterility of a waiting room. It is impossible to gauge how much of the current impression is based on true experience and how much is indistinct malaise. Even survey respondents with excellent positions and prospects found it difficult to give the post-doc Medawar's "unqualified" seal of approval. Perhaps the most concrete conclusion to be made is that today's post-doctoral researcher faces circumstances undreamt of by his or her Ph.D. advisor - which are leading to personal and professional decisions that the academic community has yet to fully comprehend or affirm.
John Knox is pleased to be a post-doctoral research scientist at Columbia University through the NASA/Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
During the early months of 1996 I posted a survey of post-doctoral research scientists on three electronic bulletin boards: the Young Scientists' Network (YSN), the Network of Emerging Scientists (NES), and Wx-Talk, a meteorology newsgroup. A total of 25 responses were received from North America, Europe, and Japan spanning fields from biochemistry to physics to computer science to geology to chemical engineering.
The sample size is extremely small, given the estimated 30,000+ current post-docs in the United States I believe the results are nevertheless valuable, for the following reasons: 1) it is extremely difficult to find any recent numerical survey of post-docs in the available literature; and 2) my impression of the results is that they are fairly representative of the overall post-doc situation. This impression is based on the fact that the overwhelming number of respondents were not disaffected whiners -- there was one horror story and a couple of totally positive experiences, but the rest were generally carefully reasoned and nuanced responses. Over 75% of the respondents had been post-docs for less than three years, so the sample is not in any way dominated by frustrated older post-docs. In addition, no more than 25% of respondents were from any one discipline, so there is at least some representativeness of the sample. Comparing the response versus NSF statistics on the distribution of post-docs by discipline (see Numerical Results, question #1), it is clear that the physical sciences are over-represented and the biological sciences are under-represented. This is an artifact of the sampling method -- YSN, for example, was cofounded by physicists.
This survey gives us a somewhat-better-than-anecdotal view of the life of the post-doc. Even with its limitations, it corrects at least one misimpression in the literature: Tobias et al. in Rethinking Science as a Career (p. 71) state that the average yearly pay of any post-doc in the sciences tends not to exceed $25,000. The survey results refute this claim in general, although it is closer to the truth for bioscience post-docs. Other results of note are the self-reported changes in career aspirations from grad school to today, and the remarkably high level of personal satisfaction conveyed by the post-docs.
I highly encourage those with greater training in sociological studies, and/or those with the ability to contact a wider and more diverse population of post-docs, to refine and repeat this survey. The numerical results follow below. My thanks go to National Forum for encouraging this work and to the survey respondents who took time out of their 40-70 hour work weeks to tell their stories.
John Knox
Ph.D. student, atmospheric sciences
University of Wisconsin-Madison
July 1996
Survey Response................1992 NSF Data
25%.....Physics........................8.1%
0%......Astronomy....................?[<1%]
0%......Chemistry.....................14.9%
9%......Geology........................?
8%.....Atmospheric Sciences....? [<1%]
8%.....Mathematics..................0.8%
17%....Engineering...................9.8%
0%.....Environmental Sciences..3.0%
4%.....Computer Science..........0.6%
16%...Biology..........................55.3%
0%.....Psychology....................2.2%
0%.....Agricultural Sciences......2.6%
12%...Biochemistry..................? [likely included in chem or bio]
87%..Yes
13%..No
42%..0-1
33%..1-2
17%..2-3
0%....3-4
4%....4-5
0%....5-6
4%....6-7
0%....7-8
0%....8-9
0%....9-10
0%....> 10
4%...Yes
96%..No
58%...University
4%.....College
30%...Government Research Lab
8%.....Industry
0%.....Other
24%...0-1
28%...1-2
24%...2-3
8%.....3-4
4%.....4-5
4%.....5-6
4%.....6-7
0%.....7-8
0%.....8-9
4%.....9-10
0%.....> 10
4%.....< 20
0%.....20-30
4%.....30-40
50%...40-50
28%...50-60
14%...60-70
0%....70-80
0%.....> 80
0%.....< $20,000
20%...$20,000-25,000
12%...$25,000-30,000
12%...$30,000-35,000
16%...$35,000-40,000
40%...> $40,000
85%...Research
6%.....Teaching
2%.....Advising
7%.....Other [usually computer administration-related tasks]
[#9 is an average over all respondents; 52% of respondents reported 100% of time spent on research]
50%....Yes!
26%....Sort Of
12%....Hard to Say
8%......Not Really
4%......No!
54%....No
46%....Yes
Of those who responded "Yes" and gave an estimate of the number of articles per year, the breakdown was:
25%....1 article/year
44%....2 articles/year
31%....3 articles/year
77%...No
23%...Yes [1 or 2 per year at most]
38%....Yes!
46%....Sort Of
0%.....Hard to Say
8%.....Not Really
8%.....No!
40%....Yes!
36%....Sort of
12%....Hard to Say
4%......Not Really
8%......No!
24%....Yes!
40%....Sort of
12%....Hard to Say
8%......Not Really
16%....No!
36%....Yes!
20%....Sort of
12%....Hard to Say
8%......Not Really
24%....No!
56%....University Professor [all 14 of these were single choices, no splitting]
14%....College Professor
0%......Post-doctoral Researcher
0%......High School Teacher
0%......Elementary School Teacher
6%......Government
0%......Nonprofit Organization
18%....Industry/Business
2%......Self-Employment
4%......Unknown
0%......Other
[44% of respondents split their choices between two or more categories]
29%.....University Professor [only 5 of 12 made this their only choice]
14%.....College Professor
1%.......Post-doctoral Researcher
0.4%....High School Teacher
0.4%....Elementary School Teacher
7%.......Government
2%.......Nonprofit Organization
21%.....Industry/Business
6%.......Self-Employment
9%......Unknown
12%....Other
17%.....Calvin and Hobbes
23%.....Dilbert
5%.......Doonesbury
31%.....The Far Side
0%.......Zippy
16%.....Unknown
8%......Other
See the accompanying National Forum article for most of the best quotable material. Contact John Knox for further information at jknox@giss.nasa.gov.
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