How poor are they that have not patience

"Thou know'st we work by wit, and not by witchcraft;

And wit depends on dilatory time."

3 days ago I got a skype job interview. It went very well. At the end, I was offered my dream job. It is not a professor position. Not anymore.

5 months ago, I lost patience. The following lines are a free translation of a post I wrote (in French) during this period on my own blog. I believe they are still relevant.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, a PhD allowed you to become a professor. Then, a well intended person invented the post-doctoral appointment. Great invention! Right after 5 years of PhD, made to prove yourself in research, and just before 5-6 years as an assistant professor, where you can prove yourself before being tenured, here comes the post-doctoral appointment, meant to prove yourself. The post-doctoral status is so weird that I have to explain what it is every time I talk with people outside academia. It is so weird that my employer gave me... a student ID. Sure, I will enjoy some rebates. But that tells a lot about how the administration sees us.

I trully believe that one more article would improve my CV. As well as one more class taught, or one more grant obtained. But it's an endless race. And the reasons are pretty simple. The number of PhDs and post-docs keeps growing on while the number of professor positions is stable. The competition becomes harder and harder. You need more papers than your neighbor. One more post-doctoral year makes you more competitive. But your neighbor does the same calculus. And both of you spend one more year, and one more, and one more until one is lucky... or renounces.

Here are some data to support this claim. Through a Nature article (in Aug 2007), I found these figures on the FASEB's website. The numbers are for biomedical sciences only but certainly apply to other disciplines.

First, let's have a look at the number of PhDs per year in the last decades:

In a 30 years period, the number of PhDs more than doubled (blame the women's liberation ;-)

Whereas the number of post-docs...

tripled in the last 25 years (because of women and foreigners... god damn liberals!!)

Note that I am not quite sure of the absolute number: the FASEB cites this reference where the above numbers correspond to the total number of post-docs in all disciplines, of which biomedical sciences are a half. But the argument remains the same.

On the other hand, as I said, the number of tenured and tenure-track professor positions remained stable.

Consequence #1: what do the PhDs do? More and more are moving to industry.

Consequence #2: the competition for professor position increases as well as the duration of post-doctoral periods. The following graph shows the percentage of PhD holders being post-docs 1-2 years after their PhD defense.

And this one is the percentage of post-docs 3-4 years after the defense.

From 1973 to 1980, the proportion of post-docs 1-2 years after the PhD doubles and stabilizes around 50% (hence the absolute number increases continuously).

From 1973 to 1997, the proportion of post-docs 3-4 years after the PhD quadruples (!!) and then decreases. Note that this decrease is relative, the absolute number of post-docs after 3-4 years remains stable around 5000 in these last 6 years (compare to 500 in 1973).

En 1973, out of the 75% of PhDs that were not post-docs, a good number were professors.

In 2003, out of the 50% of PhDs that were not post-docs, most went to the private sector.

I don't know the number of post-docs 4 years after the PhD defense. But the table 8 of this document indicates that 15% of the post-docs got their PhD more than 6 years before. The absolute number is around 1900.

With 42000 tenured and 12000 tenure-track professors (NSF numbers), we can evaluate the number of open positions to be somewhere between 2000 and 2500 each year.

Patience is therefore a key factor to land a professor position. The brightest and luckiest will go faster but, for everybody, the delay increases.

And for those who believe that this is a good thing for Science, I let you read this report written by a committee of Lords of the House of Commons. The abstract is pretty explicit:

"For many researchers there is no career structure and little hope of obtaining a permanent position. The research in our universities suffers in such a climate. Many researchers are either new in position or searching for their next contract. Research is left unfinished or unpublished. [...] Universities have deflected the [financial] risk onto the researchers; this bad management has added to the plight of contract researchers. In this respect, universities have failed their research workforce and the UK's science base. "

A kind of risk analysis

Thanks Mad Hatter for starting this blog and inviting me to post.

I've been thinking a lot about taking risks, so I'll make that my first post. One reason why the tenure-track is considered good is that it leads to a tenured position and that provides a certain amount of job security. There's also some freedom to pursue longer term projects (to a point). It is a relatively stable low risk career choice (not thinking about the heart-burn caused by the shenanigans that go on in academia here - that's another post).

Industry positions in large companies are also quite stable. There is less job security and less freedom to follow pet projects, but the salary is larger. You get paid more to absorb the risk of a lay off and your willingness to contribute to the profits of the company.

Positions in smaller companies and start-ups are less stable (unless your start-up is Google). Not to say there aren't people making a good living happily working for small companies. Just that there is little job security, even if you do fantastic work. An SAP programmer hopping from start-up to start-up is considered routine. A Ph.D. somehow seems to have more baggage to lug along (sigh).

Science writing has been a topic of discussion frequently. Probably if the position is in a large company it will be more stable than smaller companies. Science writing positions in academia tend to depend heavily on grants. So one has to always look for the next position to be on the safe side.

Coming to alternative faculty posts, academia always had temporary assistant professors, instructors, and adjunct faculty. The primary tasks in these positions are still teaching/research/service in varying ratios, just as in the traditional tenure-track. The difference is that there is little job security in these temporary positions. I wish these positions are given the same respect and stability that regular faculty positions automatically get (more in another post).

There are also temporary faculty positions where the job expectations are different from the usual teaching/research/service. These can be highly individualistic. There isn't much stability though and too much depends on the whims of the PI. Having held one such position I can offer some general suggestions with the benefit of hindsight:

• Get as many details about job expectations as possible. If you are told you have to do what it takes, be careful. You could end up doing some tedious and time-consuming work that won't add anything to your resume, or worse. It would make finding the next job difficult.


• Ask how you will be evaluated and what kind of promotion you can earn.


• Negotiate in advance how much research time you will get (unless you don't want it). If you are told you can do research on your own time, realistically evaluate if you will be able to do any research at all. Same goes for teaching.


• Negotiate in advance when your position will be renewed. I know someone who had to ask her PI every month from January till July before finally getting the letter of renewal.

Perhaps we could use this blog as a forum to lobby for more stability in these alternative faculty positions.

Same Old Shit

I wasn't going to post again this soon because I didn't want to hog the airwaves, so to speak, but I just have to write about this before my head explodes.

DrugMonkey wrote a post on Nature's recent not-so-objective review of PLoS. It's a great post, but in the process of venting his spleen on the Nature article, DrugMonkey also decided to take a dump on scientists who chose alternative careers as journal editors.

Geez d00d, do you understand that one of the biggest knocks on the GlamourMagz is the fact that the editorial decisions aren't being made by respected senior (active, working) scientists? Instead of a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears punks who opted for publishing jobs because they were barely hacking it as postdocs, never mind barely making it as junior faculty?

And here is part of the comment I made on that post:

I happen to have worked with one of those "wet-behind-the-ears punks" before he became an editor. He was a fantastic academic scientist and his taking an editorial position had absolutely nothing to do with lack of ability to hack it in academia.

Seriously, it's because people make sweeping judgmental statements like this that grad students and postdocs have to turn to anonymous blogs to get information on non-academic tt careers.

Now I'm not saying that there aren't incompetent scientists who end up in alternative careers because they couldn't hack it in academia. In fact, I have occasionally worked with incompetent scientists who I have wished would opt for a different career. Preferably something that did not involve me. But these sorts of assumptions really fucking piss me off.

I should point out, however, that DrugMonkey has been kind enough to link to us and add us to his blogroll. And I, for one, am appreciative of the number of people he has sent our way. So I'll assume this one rant was an aberration and not representative of DrugMonkey's general views on people who choose alternative careers.

If it's Pittsburgh, it must be Wednesday

Well, I guess it's my turn to do the introduction thing. As a preface, let me say that not only is this my first post on this blog, it's also my first post ever, on any blog, anywhere. Yes, I'm a noob. Please educate me on blog-iquette (woohoo! I coined a word!) as necessary.

So, the short life story: I have a Ph.D. in geochemistry, which I earned in 2005 from Cornell University. (My mother was very proud.) Before that, I got a B.S. in geology from the University of Delaware.

About two-thirds of the way through graduate school, I became aware (thanks to a long series of unpleasant events that I won't detail here) that I had, in fact, very little interest in becoming a professor or researcher--at least in geochemistry. (For the record, 2/3 of the way through is a VERY bad time to figure this out. It's far enough in that it's silly to change direction, especially if you have funding; and it's far enough from the end that you have the prospect of a year and a half of not really enjoying what you're doing to comfort you at night. I don't recommend it.) I thought what I actually wanted to do was teach high school. I had become involved in several outreach/teaching activities as a grad student, and they had gotten me into classrooms and in front of kids, and I really enjoyed it.

Unfortunately, this was also right around the time that the No Child Left Behind act was starting to bare its teeth, and I didn't think I'd be able to get a teaching job without certification. And getting certification either meant paying for another 2-3 years of graduate school, or committing to teach for 3-4 years in a high-need public school while also working 25 hours a week earning my degree. Neither of these options appealed to me, so I started exploring other options.

As you might imagine, I had a rather hard time exploring those avenues. The university career services center was--to put it politely--less than useful for someone not seeking a job in business, marketing (no offense, CAE), or industrial research. My advisor was, if not negative, definitely not particularly helpful. So I turned to the Internet. (Where else?)

I started looking for jobs with museums, universities, textbook companies, pretty much anything that would let me do pre-college education without state certification. I sent out the requisite million resumes. The only response I got was from an educational content developer. They offered me a job as a science editor, and as I had at that point been looking for a job for a year or so and had had not so much as a nibble from anywhere else, I took the job. Three years later, I am still here.

The company I work for is a vendor. That means that other companies hire us to do work for them. Most of the companies we work for are educational publishers of some kind; almost all focus on the K-12 market. We've done work for the big basal publishers, and also for lots of smaller companies. We do all sorts of products, from text books to teacher guides to lab manuals to high-stakes tests and test prep. Our company works in all disciplines; I work in the science department. The department is currently quite small, so we all pretty much have to do everything; although my degree is in Earth science, last week I was writing life science questions, and this week I'm working on a teacher guide for physics.

If there is one thing I can say about my job, it is that it is never predictable. This is, I think, a function both of the type of company I work for and of the type of work I do. Because we work entirely on contract, we are never really sure how much work we will have in the future; therefore, things tend to swing from feast to famine with alarming rapidity (although, because NCLB's science requirements are now coming into effect, it's been more in the "feast" mode lately). And because I'm one of only a few editors in the department, I'm never really sure what I'm going to be doing next.

I'd say the job has its ups and downs. I'm fairly confident now that, although I enjoy the work, this particular industry is not a great fit for me. I think my first instincts in grad school--that I'd like to work in informal education, such as in a museum--were probably right; I'm currently keeping my eyes and ears open for other job options.

I guess that's about it (you should see the LONG life story...) for my background. Looking forward to your comments...

(And for those of you questioning the title: Yes, I live in Pittsburgh. Yins should visit, n'at.)

Another day, another introduction

First of all, many thanks to Mad Hatter for setting up this blog, and for inviting me to post on it!

I feel like my "alternative career" might be "professional blogger", since this is now the third site I contribute to. Unfortunately I'm yet to make a single penny from blogging, so you get to hear all about my real-life alternative career instead.

(An aside: this post will include several links to my main blog, since I've written a few career-related posts and it makes more sense to link to them than to write everything all over again. I promise to keep the cross-linking to a minimum in future!)

What is my career? Well, I'm not quite sure yet. Ideally I'd like to be a freelance science writer, but my current job can be very intense and I usually come home too knackered to face a blank piece of paper. So rather than focusing on the future, here's a quick run down of the story so far.

I was born and raised in Northern England. I started off wanting to be a vet, but an excellent high school biology teacher got me interested in genetics and I've never looked back. After a genetics degree in Newcastle and a PhD in Glasgow, I found my way to a postdoctoral position studying human endogenous retroviruses and genome evolution in Vancouver, Canada. (See my post "Why I Got Into Science" for a more detailed version).

I started my postdoc with the knowledge that I didn't want to be a PI (my reasons are in my post "Why I Got Out of Research"). That gave me the freedom to choose such a self-indulgent research project, rather than something that was less interesting to me but more likely to attract grant funding. It also allowed me to treat my postdoc research as just a job, rather than my whole life. I'm a work-to-live kinda gal, not a live-to-work-er.

I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do after my postdoc, but I knew that I enjoyed writing about science more than actually doing it. I was lucky enough to have a head of department who had one foot in industry and one in academia, so I set up an appointment with him when I had a few months left on my postdoc contract. I took some writing samples and asked for his advice as to what careers were out there. And... he offered me an interview at his biotech spin-off company!

I met with the heads of R&D, Business Development, Sales, and Marketing, and Marketing was clearly the best fit. I was promised technical writing for flyers, minireview articles, product manuals, advertising etc. I ended up as a Product Manager, responsible for all aspects of my products' launch and advertising.

As it turned out the job wasn't the best fit for me, but my two years in industry left me with a lot of very useful skills and, perhaps more importantly, more diverse contacts than you'll make in academia (there's a future post right there). And my marketing experience looked great on my application for my current job - a grant / manuscript / whatever writer for a large academic department.

I'm really enjoying my new job, and I have a guaranteed salary until November 2009. At that point, if they like me they'll try to find the money to keep me. Another downside of academia, but if my two years in industry taught me anything, they taught me that I'm not really cut out for industry. So fingers crossed and maybe I'll get my chance at freelancing after all! I can freelance my way to the unemployment office... just as I become a Canadian citizen.

Sweet.