Thinking about post-docs - edited

There's quite a bit of discussion around at the moment (as there often is) about post-doctoral positions, and I've a variety of comments/posts sort of fermenting around the topic, but none of them want to really shape up. So, instead, here is a rather mixed brew of thoughts and comments from my perspective.

what is my perspective?
I am a product of the UK system. That means that there was no 4 year undergrad, 2-3 year Masters, 5-7 year PhD. Three years of intense undergrad with minimal formal 'liberal arts/general education' elements but huge 'optional' ones (arguing over new testament Greek in a bible study, singing Handel and having access to a copyright library, not to mention friends taking degrees in a wide variety of subjects who were just as geekily enthused about their new discoveries as I was by science and were happy to share, all count, OK?) and straight into a PhD (since I wanted to go into a field closely related to my undergraduate discipline and had a good grade, no Masters was required), which consisted of three years of research on a general topic that was broadly set by my PI, but with some freedom to determine how it developed - no classes, no TA-ing or RA-ing, no taking part in other projects or doing scut-work, just learning about science and doing science. In this system, a post-doc not only makes sense, it's probably necessary - if you consider post-doc broadly as a fixed-term or rolling contract position undertaken in a university setting between completion of the doctoral degree and obtaining a post with a continuing/indefinite contract, then they have quite a lot of antiquity - I've read of plenty of scientists from the early twentieth century who undertook such positions, indeed probably more who did (whether that post was what we'd consider to be a visiting professor, demonstrator/lecturer/other kind of label for casual teaching, researcher, assistant, whatever) than who didn't.

I chose to do a post-doc, and I did not have personal ties that made it problematic
I wanted to do a post-doc. I wanted to go somewhere different whilst I was NOT tied by the many family and personal commitments people cite. I stand firmly by the assertion at, whilst I have no doubt you can stay in one system and indeed one university, one lab, throughout your career and make a success of it, for most people who have the opportunity, getting some breadth of experience is a Very Good Thing. Going abroad - well, it was great. it was awful. I had a major depressive episode, I had constant IBS, I had two tooth abcesses. I learnt a huge amount, I made a couple of great friends, I would do it again if I had a do-over (although I would now go and demand anti-depressants rather than just blaming myself for being feeble).

It worked out for me
I am one of the 'lucky ones' (though so far this month I don't feel lucky at ALL). I got a faculty job, at a respectable but not brilliant university, one where I am able to apply for grants in my own name (and get REJECTED in my own name, again and again and again. Even when I run my ideas past Semi-Deity Professors and get told they are innovative, original, exciting, important - I don't get funded, because there isn't enough funding to go round all the innovative ideas). I have had some graduate students - most of whom, however nice and clever they are and however hard I work to be the sort of fair, open-minded, helpful mentor a supervisor should be, cost me dearly in time, in emotional stress, in lab resources - there is no doubt in my mind that I would get more work done (measured by papers, grants etc. etc.) with a single skilled assistant than with multiple graduate students. I say to them, there is almost no chance of you becoming an academic. I say, yes, it has some good aspects. It is hard work, it is thankless, it is poorly remunerated in comparison with most of your equally-educated peers. It is fun, and exhilarating, and frustrating, and and and. That holding a PhD is often a negative on a c.v., it can make you be seen as over-qualified or likely to be bored or just 'not like us'.

Why do so many scientists, who are supposed to be good at reading the evidence not listening to the hype, seem to believe that PhD + post-doc = Faculty job (in the type of university they choose)?
No-one ever told me I'd be pretty much promised employment in my field at the end of my studies, and I was advised very clearly that the likelihood of getting an academic job was very very small. That was also pretty clear to me, just from the numbers (I'm a scientist, I look at data, OK?). At every stage, I asked myself one question: if at the end of these x years you have to begin again and train as an accountant (or work in a supermarket), will you regret having spent the time studying/doing this/carrying out this research? I had reached the point where the answer was going from 'of course' to 'maybe not'. In my last post-doc, I had set a deadline. I had come up with two alternative plans - a 'going sideways' plan (which used my academic skills in a rather poorly-paid non-academic area coupled with a steady income from a less interesting but minimal-retraining-required part time job) and a 'retrain, refocus' plan, and even attended a couple of seminars on the one and found out about job shadowing and career development loans for the other, although my 'walk away date' was still some time off (I had about 18 months to go when I started this job). This job came up; I didn't need either plan; I don't know what would have happened or how I would feel. But I do feel a mix of irritation-at and pain-for the naivety, the bitterness, of those I run into who believe that the system owes them a job, that they were promised it would work out (and irritation too with the stupid people who told them it would be like that).

Why don't my students believe me when I tell them that?
But I say this, and I say it, yet my own students don't seem to believe me. I regularly tell my students about the challenges, point out the poor job market, show them articles, discuss alternative careers, encourage them to think about options and take opportunities to try things out. Yet KhakiWearingStudent, SeniorStudent and OverseasStudent all seem to believe they will become academics at the moment. KhakiWearingStudent remains convinced that he will be more employable with a PhD because, as he says, "I'll've studied longer and I'm learning so much!" (this might be cute if it wasn't so scary... and if he wasn't older than me). SeniorStudent, who said she was interested in my field's equivalent of a 'Pharma-job' when asked during her studies and at her interview, now says that she 'has to' get a faculty job - which is nonsense, as there are plenty of other options - and seriously, I wouldn't have taken her on as a post-doc if I'd thought she saw it as a means to a faculty job only - because we all know she's probably going to be disappointed (I hope she's just being a little over-happy about having finished the thesis??). TalkyStudent, thank heavens, already has a nice industry job and is very happy with her prospects, and OverseasStudent has better reasons than most for believing she can get a higher ed job in a few years time (in her home country higher education is growing hugely, she speaks the key local languages like a native thanks to a 'mixed' family background, and her near-native fluency in English and two other European languages on top, plus the fact that she'll have published in the English language science media, will make her pretty employable) - and at the moment also has sensible alternative plans if things don't work out or she changes her mind.

Isn't it the same in other professions?
I am in no doubt that there are excellent people, some of them "better than me" for whatever definition of better or more deserving, who did not get a faculty position or who works somewhere where they lack even basic research facilities, have huge teaching loads etc. etc., and others who are "not as good" who have more prestigious ones and easier work lives (one of my colleagues teaches one and a half modules, in one semester, every year, and has 50% of a lab tech all for them all the time at no cost on their grants. That, to me, counts as easier). Getting a job has a large element of luck to it. I absolutely believe that. Even if you know the right people etc. etc. there still has to be an opening! This is the way of the world - how many acorns germinate, become seedlings, saplings, find a canopy gap and become a tree? How many administrators and junior civil servants work long hours in lower management for decades, never making it to the dizzy heights of mega-bonuses and directorships? How many people with law degrees end up making partner in a big company doing criminal work? Leaky pipelines are, it seems to me, far more common than the opposite in this world.

I think a post-doc is usually a Good Thing
A few years, or an independent fellowship - I think that's great. The confidence boost of starting a project knowing what you are doing (so unlike the PhD!), the chance to recover from the stress of writing the PhD and to reflect on what to do whilst being paid (not a lot, but more than a grad student, and usually just about a living wage even in a large city) to do something you know how to do, exposure to different places and ways of working - all of these things make a post-doc worth doing in its own right even if no job comes of it.

Secondly, in my experience, faculty members who didn't do post-docs but came straight from their PhDs tend to struggle with the job - and are far more likely to have at least one of the irritating traits of over-confidence, arrogance (or talkign themselves up all the time), inability to ask for help OR inability to do anything without being told to do it, and really, really irritating on the subject of the One True Way to do something (either the way of their supervisor, or the OPPOSITE of that, depending on their experiences...). Not all of them. But a lot of people, and I include people from systems where they finish their PhDs in their early 30s for whatever reason rather than wierdos like me who submitted aged 24, mellow and mature as scientists most remarkably after a couple of years of just doing science. NOT of trying to learn the new and thankless tasks of PI-ing, but of doing science... and a post-doc is a great place to do that.

I like my field (but I'd rather like to be left alone in it to commune with nature, thanks)
My reading makes me realise that my discipline is really rather pleasant. Most of the PIs I know, have worked with or for, are human, not monsters. Most of them mean well, are good at some things and bad at others, and have genuinely good intentions to do impartial science and be good leaders. Even the people who really, really stress me out have redeeming qualities. Maybe it's the relative lack of funding, linked to a lack of medical relevance. Maybe it's the kind of people who go into it (it attracts people with relatively wide interests, generalists rather than specialists). Yes, there are arrogant clever-clogs super-stars at a few Big Name Universities, yes, there are unhappy post-docs, yes, there are politics. But it's nothing like as bad as the fields in which some bloggers, especially in the 'biosciences', are stuck. I'm glad I followed my passion rather than the sexiest, money-getting-est discipline, and I'm glad I've got a range of interests such that when one area isn't working, I have lots of others to think about.

Does anyone get a permanent, secure job?
Tenure does not offer security. There is no security. People get fired, companies go bust, people get sick of their work or they get ill or become a carer. Lives CHANGE. We have here no abiding city. It's amazing how often people sacrifice so much in their personal lives, take so much emotional abuse trying to survive and fit into a toxic environment, fighting impossible battles... YFS wrote about how little time she has to do science because she spends her time trying to run the lab, teach her juniors, 'help' her PI write grants - it sounds wretched. It sounds a little familiar - I reckon a day a week of my time in my first, North American post-doc was spent doing that sort of thing. I have to admit I rather enjoyed it...* despite the effect it had on my science... but my boss was a disorganised, unfocused and over-worked but essentially decent human being, so our two situations were nothing alike. Why do we keep believing it will all work out?? Why do I do exactly the same thing in my current post, just as a mid-career academic (13 years in, 24 to go if I retire at the 'official' age, I think that counts as mid-career) rather than as a post-doc? Why DO people want to believe the world is different, that it is stable not changing and chancy, fair not blindly stochastic or entropic?

*I like to be needed, to be useful. That is more rewarding - and more long-term comfortable - than being some kind of star expert (there's always pressure to live up to a star billing). I never wanted Captain Kirk's job - all that being-in-charge, public-face-of, responsibility stuff? So. Not. Me.

Edited to add a sort of summary, things that came to mind after pressing post:
1) I think my main confusion with 'other systems' is why people need to spend so long in grad school, being students - not being 'adults', paying fees to a university, living on 'student stipends', taking out debt... (it just seems excessive). We get to similar places by say age 35 or 40, agreed - but 6-8 years as a student (undergrad, masters if necessary/wanted, PhD) seem like plenty, if the post-doc is (as I would argue) a maturing, independence-developing phase enabling the person to go on to whatever they choose in a better state than when they finished their PhD.
2) A PhD is an end in itself. For academics, for a 'full faculty job', I think a (relatively short - sub-5 year on average) period of post-doctoral research is good, even necessary, preparation. For those who are researchers at heart, not academics, I wish there were more career opportunities - not least because their search for a regular paycheque sometimes leads them into academia and they make lousy colleagues (although often they're very nice well meaning people).
3) 'employability', general transferable qualifications that attract an employer rather than triggering warnings, probably peaks with a general taught master's degree at the moment. PhD makes you odder, and it's important to be able to dress post-doccing up in ways that make it a fixed-term job (which it often is - most post-doc positions funded by PI's grants are jobs in which someone is hired to carry out certain research tasks, not to do whatever they fancy) when looking for jobs outside. My second (short) and third post-doc stints were definitely of this type, as they involved research tasks with the same sorts of parameters and on the same sorts of questions as the type of non-academic specialist roles I was applying for alongside faculty jobs - so I could (and did) argue that the fact that I did them in a university and published academic papers was not what was important - the nature of the work, the reports to the funders, the working to deadlines and in teams, were all what I would do in industry, it just so happened that my workplace was a university.

Quote of the day:
[frustrated Dr Labrador, bewailing inability of students to complete simple task the simple way]: there's no point making the instructions idiot-proof, because they just keep inventing better idiots!