the promised land, or more trackless jungle?

I shouldn't be doing this (because I should be working, because I try to keep out of these things, etc.), but all the discussion about the transition from post-doc to lecturer (UK terminology) has me itching to add my tuppence-worth, so here goes.

I'm going to use the term "post-doc" to refer to a research position where the holder has a PhD and some autonomy as a scientist (maybe even holding their own fellowship), but who is still using facilities and interacting within a group which is under the authority of a defined person (a 'PI' if you must - PI is a specific role in relation to funding from selected bodies to me, not a generic term for 'head of lab') and who is typically on a fixed-term or soft money contract. I will use "academic" to mean a member of the faculty of a university department whose duties involve research, teaching, administration and outreach (I think these last two are what US people call service?), who may be tt, probationary, tenured or continuing. This academic role is often seen as the goal, the do or die, of a post-doc's immediate career plans, the promised land of security, autonomy, and being-the-PI-dom.

YFS's entire blog is essentially about the challenges of trying to make this transition (and whether it's worth it) from the post-doc side. In a recent post she wrote:

I'm not sure the job I thought I wanted even exists anymore. These people I admired as role models had a completely different time "coming up", as it were. I can't really admire them so much when I think how they all did a maximum of 2 years as a postdoc. And I tend to block out this one fact: I have as much experience now as they had when they got tenure.

[my colour use and italics]

Myself, I would be surprised if the job that she thinks she wanted ever did exist (in the last 40-50 years, the length of time for which I have access to reasonable and multiple-sourced if somewhat quanlitative data and therefore feel able to comment). The reality of any job is not the same as how it looks from the outside, even from close to. I'm not claiming to read YFS's mind! But I know that the job, the multiple understandings of 'the job' of being an academic, which I had as a post-doctoral researcher was not the reality of the job. And I worked for mentors who were open about what they did, not secretive. I do not want to comment further on the 'I can't admire them because they only did 2 years or less as a post-doc' bit, because... well, my opinion about the stupidity of using 'time served' as a measure of worthiness isn't relevant.

The italicised section: I have as much experience now as they had when they got tenured: took my breath away. Time at the bench is... a luxury I rarely squeeze into my day. I would argue that YFS has one hell of a lot more hands-on research experience than any of these people had at the point of tenure. That this probably makes her a damn good scientist. But that it also means that her skill set, the experience she has had, is DIFFERENT, not EQUIVALENT.

Another angle on the transition comes from academics - propter doc and PiT are both closer to the switch and have commented on their experiences, and on how despite trying hard to prepare themselves whilst they were post-docs, they have still found the new role a shock. Lou also wrote a post from a post-docs perspective, watching young lecturers who seemed to be floundering, and wondered how they could seem to be so unclear about the differences between academic and post-doc, the new responsibilities they had to learn.

There are field differences and institution differences in how important your actual PERSONAL science is and to what extent being brilliant at it can 'save' you from other parts of the role. Though frankly if you feel you need to be saved from the rest of the role, you shouldn't be doing the job, because you will never be happy - how can smart, reflective people like scientists ever be happy knowing that they are rubbish at or hiding from part of the job that they're paid to do? (I'm assuming that we're talking about people who are not so bloody arrogant that they think that they are a speshul snowflake and none of the rules, the duties in the contract that they signed, actually mean anything for them, but about ethical, well-intentioned human beings).

Replying to a comment by PiT, YFS wrote:

My point is that I've been doing science, working at a bench, for as many years
as these guys were doing science, working as professors. I'm already the career
technician, if that's how you view it (but I don't view it that way at all).
Aside from teaching, I've done everything they do- the grants, the mentoring,
the papers, the university paperwork for safety clearance, purchasing equipment,
purchasing supplies, serving on committees, giving talks at meetings, setting up
collaborations, all of it. Teaching lectures is the only thing I haven't done.

And you know what? That probably makes her a better individual researcher for the equivalent age-point as the other guys. But that doesn't make her as ready for tenure as they were. Tenure is not about individual brilliance. And the academic role is not, so not, just about running the lab. I effectively ran a lab for a couple of years during my post-doc time, like YFS, and I learnt useful skills, from paperwork to purchasing to sometimes having to suck it up and mop the floor yourself if you want it done right.

But as an academic, the responsibilities are different - all those things need doing, but there is more to running a research group - anyone been in a BAD group? Then you know that having a GOOD group matters. And it doesn't happen by itself. People need to feel supported, be nutured, be considered - mentoring is important, but so is keeping everyone's paperwork in order, overseeing their training needs, making sure that communal duties are appropriately carried out (or are being appropriately supervised by someone else), having oversight on everything that's going on, planning ahead (especially for money, allowing for not getting grants funded etc. etc.), juggling needs and schedules - and learning to let ideas go all the time, to let go of research you love and not micromanage the person you've HAD to allocate it to because you no longer have the time to do it yourself, because you were successful in getting the funding and now have to facilitate the career of the person you can now pay. Letting ideas go with people when they leave. Resisting the urge to grab and hold.

At the same time, you are doing this in little snatched pieces of time. Even if you seem to have several nothing-but-research days a week, it won't often work out. There are meetings, and lots of interactions, and other duties - service, reachout, teaching, oh lord the teaching and the associated responsibilities and the need to support undergraduates and prepare material and take the time to teach well and accomodate the huge energy drain of 'performing' a class in front of 10-300 people, to tune your classes to the group's needs and responses. Yes, you can restrict teaching to just giving research-type lectures on something you already know regardless of what the course is actually on (and of course by not bothering to update them so you have less work in later years), to refusing to have any contact outside of class except in a tightly defined office hour, and in some places you can dump a lot on your TAs. You won't be a good teacher, you won't grow as a teacher, and you won't get much respect from your colleagues, but maybe that doesn't matter if you're a research star... (<--sarcasm).

And it accumulates. It takes years and years for even a small project to actually be completely finished, published, presented and out of your hair. Every new student or person who joins your group, every collaboration, becomes part of a network which never quite goes away - that's cool, but they keep needing stuff from you - energy, time, attention, a reference, a suggestion, to show you their new graph... You get stuff back, but it's not an even trade, especially in the early years of each person's work (which is when they are actually in your building, your office, your life).

For me, the responsibility of being the person with whom the buck stops was an unexpected challenge. Suddenly, I became the one who had to know the answers to questions, and who had to live with errors for years and decades. There was no-one to back me up, not locally at least. And... I had become one of 'them'. I am no longer really part of my group, however much I try to act like it and create an atmosphere like it, however much I want to pretend that I am. I am the person who says yes or no. Permits the thesis to be submitted for defending. Has to take action on disciplinary or interpersonal problems.

The stakes are higher. My failure to secure funding isn't just about me and my job, it's about other people, directly and indirectly. I've gone from having ONE boss to having dotted-line, unwritten-manual links to all sorts of people who all have different agendas. From being responsible for my own projects and my own time within a defined framework to having a calendar filled in by others, central timetabling, committees etc. etc. yes, I have flexibility, it's one of the joys of the job. But... quarts don't go into pint pots. And flexibility on the part of others means that the job list is never, ever fixed. Priorities come and go, things constantly change.

Overall I like being an academic. I wanted to be one, and I was right - it fulfills parts of me that post-doc didn't. But it didn't give me the freedom I hoped for, the intellectual life and security to think and respect and access to adoring, hard-working minions (even when I'm paying their bloody salaries they think they have all these rights, they argue, they take weeks to do stuff that I needed urgently, they ignore the priorities we spent weeks agreeing, they can't even fill out a booking sheet and stick to it, wah wah whinge whinge... you know, all the same complaints I had about my academic bosses when I was a post-doc!). It's hard. It's stressful. It's inconsistent and turbulent and challenging and exhausting and you can never do enough, be enough, give enough to keep everyone happy (simple answer: don't try. But this is very hard psychologically, because in science we are used to being precise, and to carrying on until the data is fully sufficient, the paper is published). Running a lab is only a fraction of the role, and in many ways is the only part of it that I saw or understood fully as a post-doc looking at academics.

It's not the promised land, folks. It's a challenging, frustrating, exhausting, exhilerating career, if by career you refer to a mad and mostly out of control high-speed ride on a rollercoaster. You'll long for the bench, and your carefully honed pipetting skills will become rusty, and new gadgets will come along constantly, and you'll never ever be on top of the literature. It's a different kind of challenge - post-doccing only gives you some of the skills, even if your mentor is superb and you have planned training (which is not normal. Us mentors are human, and BUSY, and only have a finite amount to give). It may not be for you. If post-doccing is a perfect fit for you, then being an academic probably isn't. Colleagues who take up faculty jobs as a route to a regular pay cheque tend to be unhappy - or of course to obliviously cause unhappiness in those around them who have to deal with the fall out of their bad teaching, sloppy committee work, micromanaging lab control-freakery... or in the worst cases both. There are good reasons to have termination points along the path - although I think that they are generally ineffectively managed and used in the departments I know.

It's a pity that there aren't many career options in academe which offer an alternative to the academic, tenure-track kind of route. But... how would they be funded? The university has a job to do, and it gets money to do that job. These posts have to contribute to that mission... there is only capacity for a small number of super-technicians or permanent researchers in universities, in industry, in national research centres. There is only capacity for a certain number of lecturers. And PhD/post-doc skills open so many other doors.