On trainees, money, and diversity

Tags

diversity, funding, hiring, SciSpend

Money — it’s the crux of just about everything we do in science.  Want to bring in a new student or staff member? Money.  Want to do field or lab work? Money. Want to go to a conference? Money. It’s one of the things we expect scientists to be good at (and which is also a full-time profession in and of itself).

I get particularly cranky when I see money used as a barrier to diversity.  I’ll explain with two examples that have recently piqued my interest.

The first is something I’ve discussed before – paying staff. I highly recommend Auriel Fournier’s post on the same topic.  For me, it boils down to a simple axiom: no money = no staff.  You’ll note this is similar to the currently accepted adages “No money = no gas”, “No money = no lab analyses”, and “No money = no milk for the tea room”.  As we approach the (northern) field season’s peak time for hiring, I find it particularly frustrating when I see “opportunities” that are entirely volunteer, or even pay-to-work junkets.  That just ain’t right.

The second is something that’s come up on Twitter recently – spending one’s own money “for science”, by which I mean incurring expenses for one’s research/job and not being reimbursed.  This post by Edd Hind lays out the terrible logic, and the damning evidence.

In both cases the result is the same – science becomes only possible for those who have financial means. And that typically means white men. We need more diversity in science.

I don’t think the ideas I’m advocating are all that radical (we should pay people a decent wage for their work, and they should not have to pay for work-related expenses). And while they alone won’t solve the problem of under-represented groups in science, they’ll go a long way to making it a slightly more even playing field.

If you’re a PI – budget for your staff just as you would your lab ethanol or conference travel. Give your trainees travel advances if they’re going to incur large bills over a short period (e.g., a field season). Learn about central pools of money from the department, faculty, or graduate student union to cover conference travel, training, etc.

If you’re a trainee – discuss funding for staff and supplies with your supervisor. Seek reimbursement for costs incurred, and advocate for advances rather than reimbursement (or direct purchasing by the department/university). And know your department’s/university’s financial regs for reimbursement (or pots of money for conferences); your PI may not be up to speed on these.

If you’re an administrator – push for appropriate financial measures so that trainees aren’t out of pocket. Look at having a central pool of funding for things like conference travel (as a grad student, I got 1 conference/year covered this way).

And don’t just assume that because you could cover the cost that others could as well.

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Combatting the overabundance of reference letters

Tags

grad students, hiring, jobs, reference letters

There is a beast that, though incredibly abundant in the world of science and academe, is one for which I have yet to really figure out its purpose.  The reference letter.

It’s a usual box to check when committees put together requirements for job applications, grants, or grad school admission.  But I’d argue that not only do reference letters not really serve the purpose they may have in the past, but that they can actually be detrimental.

Though relatively nascent in my research career, I think I have sufficient bona fides to call for a massive reduction in the ubiquity of reference letters.  Apart from reviewing several grants that require such letters, I sat on a graduate admissions committee for two years, during which time, I probably read well over 150 letters of reference for 50-60 candidates.

Now, before I take an axe to the tradition of the “ol’ ref lett”, I should say that they do have a limited place in our academic world – as letters of support from organizations for large grants (>$10k), or in perhaps the final stages of a job competition.  I think a standard referee form is far more effective at communicating what a free-form letter attempts to do when read by a committee member.  But more on that later.

 

Break out the thesaurus

I bet the thesaurus function in Microsoft Word receives no more use than when writing reference letters (except, perhaps, when writing grant applications).  Is Candidate X a supreme leader in their cutting-edge cross-disciplinary field? Is the application of Student X endorsed unconditionally, unreservedly, and wholeheartedly?  Academia is know for its buzzwords, but they come out in full force in letters of reference.  I think Rebecca Schuman has hit the nail on the head when she calls them “hagiographic novellas of the absurd“.  Was that student grant application for $1000 really the best thing a faculty member has read in the last year? Last 5 years? EVAR?! Probably not.  But reference letters seek to elevate the everyday to the exemplary, the mundane to the magnificent, and the typical to the unprecedented (as in “without precedent”).  They are replete with hyperbole which, in my view, makes them disingenuous, especially to those who don’t (or choose not to) play the game of inflationary language. Or the use of “code words” is overly interpreted (“She wrote that he was ‘excellent’, so that means he’s probably just average“).  But these letter are written hyperbolically because that’s just what’s done.  As a reader of these missives, some by luminaries in the field, and well-respected researchers, I can’t help but feel a little twinge of something that leaves a sour taste in my mouth. This proposal certainly isn’t the best thing since sliced bread, and they probably know that, so why write as though it’s the next barn-burner by G. Evelyn Hutchinson, Joan Roughgarden,  or EO Wilson?

 

Time, please

If we suspend, for only a moment, my thesis, and believe that reference letters should be written at every opportunity, for even the smallest grant, or most meaningless application, the shear volume of letters is certainly a frustration on those asked to write them (predominantly faculty).  Having written only a few reference letters myself, I have taken great care to craft a letter suited to the person and the purpose of the letter.  Why, then, if a job advert elicits well over 100 applicants, should everyone provide two reference letters?  Fully 90% of these will, in all likelihood, remain largely unread by the people for whom they were written!  This is part of the problem that Schuman points out when she calls for a central CV clearinghouse.  Now, some organizations are pretty good here, and only request reference letters from those on a long-list (or even on a short-list) for a job, or finalists for grants.  But I’d hate to think of the person-hours put in writing reference letters that wouldn’t be read because the candidate’s application was rejected early on.  It surely must be years.

 

Yes, we’re all individuals!

In their wonderfully satirical film on the foundation of religion The Life of Brian, Monty Python cast member Graham Chapman plays a reluctant messiah.  After the hoards of followers literally follow him home, he attempts to impart a little wisdom:

Chapman: You don’t need to follow me. You don’t need to follow anybody. You’ve got to think for yourselves. You’re all individuals

Crowd, in unison: Yes! We’re all individuals!

The point is, I hope, self-evident.  Reference letters perform a similar function, and after reading a good many of them, I think I can summarize 95% of them as “<Candidate X> is an excellent candidate for <position>, and would be a valuable addition to <department>”, or “I can think of no one more deserving of <award> than <Applicant Y>, who is a <superlative> researcher.”  If the purpose of reference letters is to help a hiring committee or granting agency to make a decision, they sure don’t help.  Rarely, a letter stands out, or is written by someone I know of, and who’s opinion I respect.  But if it’s written by Dr. <Lastname>, Ph.D. from the Department of <Discipline> at the University of <Location>, I have no basis for trusting it beyond what’s written (see also my first point above, and how hyperbole can erode that trust).

 

Moderation, or write reference letters responsibly

I alluded to some possible solutions above.  First, don’t make reference letters required for everything under the sun.  If it’s a small grant or student award, would a signed standard statement of endorsement not suffice?  Do all the applicants for a job need to provide two or three reference letters, or just those that make it to the short-list?  Does someone applying to a M.Sc. program need two letters of reference when a standard form where referees are asked what quintile/decile the candidate fell in their classes/supervised students, and to confirm a few factual statements to reduce applicant fraud?  And when letters of reference are required, perhaps they will be more revered as outlets for genuine feedback, and not rife with overzealous, exaggerated superlatives.

Would tenured faculty be hired today? A proposed experiment

Tags

academic job market, hiring, jobs, postdoc, search committees

There’s been much discussion of late concerning Peter Higgs’ assertion that, were he a newly-minted PhD today, he likely wouldn’t have been hired.  Yes, that Peter Higgs.  You know, the Nobel laureate for whom the Higgs boson is named?  Since 1964, he’s published fewer than 10 papers.

Fast-forward just a few weeks, when Rebecca Schuman posted that a search for a tenure-track job in pre-1900 English literature was going to interview candidates on 5 days’ notice at the Modern Language Association conference in Chicago.  She pointed out that not only was this logistically and financially impossible for many who are on the job market (postdocs and early-career researchers generally don’t have much disposable income to purchase last-minute flights and hotels), but that it signalled the devastating way in which the academic hiring system is broken.

To be clear, I don’t think this particular problem is found that frequently in the sciences (at least in Canada).  I’ve been to two interviews, both of which were paid for by the interviewing department, and both of which gave me at least 4 weeks’ lead time.  But this aspect is tangential to today’s subject.

In a rebuttal, Claire Potter at The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s Tenured Radical blog put forth many reasons for the short notice, and generally took issue with Schuman’s original assertions.

Today, Schuman argued that Potter’s view was skewed by her position – as a tenured full professor – and took to analysing the following hypothetical question: would Potter, with her CV at the time she was hired in 1991, be competitive for a job today?  Her conclusion: No.

But I want to step back from these two cases, and propose something that would both be useful, and (at least in my opinion) blindingly obvious.  But then again blinding obviousness has never stopped scientists before.

Let’s take the CVs of n (maybe 10) postdocs (or others on the academic job market), and the CVs of n tenured faculty at the time they were hired (but with dates changed & updated) and present them to a series of fake search committees.  Who would be short-listed? Interviewed? Hired, even?

Of course, the CVs wouldn’t necessarily have to be from real people, and should be anonymized based on gender, race, and other hiring biases.  In fact, this very thing was done to show that female scientists were less likely than their male counterparts to be hired as a lab manager, even with identical qualifications.  And yes, there’s more that goes into hiring someone besides their CV, but without a competitive CV, a well-written teaching philosophy or research plan won’t get you very far.

I don’t think there are many that would argue that the academic job market hasn’t changed in the last 10, 15, 20 years (which is when many of those on search committees were hired, if not before).  But as an ecologist (a discipline who’s motto should be “Quantifying the Obvious“), I think showing the numbers would sway many of those on the fence, especially if they are one of the Tenured Few.

And, I think that any critical introspection into the way that we, as individuals, “do science” can only improve things.  And by starting with the individual, hopefully things will scale up to the department, the discipline, and perhaps even the Academy™.

Finally, this isn’t just idle speculation.  I really think that someone with the required sociological bona fides (and research ethics board approval) should consider this question, even if the answer is staring us in the face.

How do I find a postdoc? A practical guide for biology & sustainability science

Tags

grad students, hiring, jobs, NSERC, postdoc

Finding a postdoc isn’t easy.  In fact, it’s probably the number 2 or 3 search term that brings people to The Lab and Field.  As much as I might lament the postdoc experience, it can also be a very rewarding part of an academic career (or a career destined for industry, government, the private sector, NGOs, or any other organization that does or uses scientific research).

But as a PhD students, I had no idea what a postdoc was, or where to find one.  I just knew that I needed to have one.

Fast forward three years, and two postdocs later, and I, along with a couple of other local postdocs, presented a workshop to graduate students today on how to find a postdoc, focusing mainly on ecology/biology, but also sustainability & social science.

We put together a resource of current programs, mostly in Canada, but also covering the US National Science Foundation (NSF), and some overseas programs.

The presentation is on figshare for all to see!

This is a workshop we’ll likely give again in the years to come, so additions, corrections, and any other input is welcome.

A postdoc isn’t for everyone, and it isn’t for every career path.  But for those going down the postdoc road, we hope our collective years and experiences can be beneficial.

Does where academics publish matter? Yes (but it shouldn’t)

Tags

hiring, jobs, open access, peer review, publishing

Looking back at the last year, I’ve had terrible luck with journals.  Earlier in my (brief) career as a publishing scientist, I had a pretty good sense of where a paper I was working on would end up – it fit with the journal’s mandate, was similar in scope to previously published works, and my coauthors agreed with my choices.

But in the last year, I’m not so sure.  I don’t think I’m aiming artificially “high” (whatever that means), and when I relay the editorial decisions to coauthors, they seem almost equally baffled.  Here are three examples:

• A natural history paper, but founded in theory, previous research, and high sample size, was rejected from a lower-tier organismal journal because it wasn’t sufficiently broad.
• A paper was rejected from a toxicological journal despite two positive reviews. We appealed the decision, it went out for review again, and one reviewer (note: not the Editor) thought it didn’t fit with the scope of the journal. Reject.
• A methods paper was rejected from a methods journal in part because the maths were too technical.

Now, before everyone thinks this is just sour grapes, let me explain why this is a problem. In total, these represent the time of 9 people, plus us authors.  Even 4-5 years ago, I’m almost certain that these papers would have been accepted after revision.  When authors have a harder time predicting the outcome of peer-review, it wastes the time of the editors, subject editors, reviewers, and authors. I’m not talking about “Let’s try this at Ecology Letters & see if it sticks”, but considered thought about where a manuscript a) would be presented to the target audience, and b) is likely to be accepted based on the authors cumulative experience with the journal (both as readers and as authors).

The result is a tendency (especially of grad students, post-docs, and other early-career researchers) to play it safe, since they can’t be bouncing a paper around 3-5 journals, each of which takes 1-4 months to review it (that’s almost two years in an extreme case, and something I’ve experienced.  Trust me, it’s not pleasant).

And when even positive reviews are no guarantee of acceptance (and the justification isn’t one of space in the journal), my journal-selecting confidence takes a hit.

True, there are journals like PLoS One that evaluate only on technical soundness, but as I’ve pointed out before, that starts to get pricey (and how many waivers will they grant before they start to catch on, or we reach a tragedy of the commons scenario?), and gets to the question: is publication just about (peer-reviewed) publication no matter where, or is it about reaching a certain group of people via a particular journal?  Have journals become so cosmopolitan in this online age that it doesn’t matter where you publish, as long as it’s indexed by Web of Knowledge or Scopus or Biological Abstracts?  Does that explain the rapid rise in predatory Open Access journals?  If publication without regard for the journal is the end goal, why are some journals viewed as “better” than others (by authors, readers, and more importantly for early-career researchers, by search committees)?

Part of the solution lies in pre-print servers like PeerJ PrePrints and biorXiv, or refereeing services like Peerage of Science, or Axios Review.  But in this age of the engaged academic who’s tuned into the topic of ethics in scientific publishing, let’s take a hypothetical example.

I’m in environmental science, and let’s say that I have a paper on contaminants in birds that I want to publish in a “mid-range” journal (i.e., not Science, Nature, PNAS, etc).  I also want to deposit a pre-print in biorXiv, and don’t want to publish in an Elsevier journal.

Well, Elsevier publishes Environmental Pollution, Science of the Total Environment, Chemosphere, Marine Pollution Bulletin, Environmental Research, Ecological Indicators, and Ecotoxicology & Environmental Safety.

That leaves Springer journals (like Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, or Ecotoxicology), and some society journals like Environmental Science & Technology (published by the American Chemical Society, ACS), and Environmental Toxicology & Chemistry (published by the Society for Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, SETAC).

ACS doesn’t currently allow preprints, and Environmental Toxicology & Chemistry is published by Wiley, which hasn’t set a formal preprint policy yet.

But let’s not forget – the only reason this matters is because where academics publish (not [just] what they publish) is considered important by hiring, tenure, and promotion committees (among others).  This assertion isn’t just idle speculation by a grumpy postdoc, either – I will offer three examples.  In 2013, I was long-listed for a faculty position at a well-respected UK university. After I was eliminated, one of the search committee members approached me about collaborating, and I asked if he could provide any feedback on my application.  His response was that I hadn’t been short-listed because I lacked any papers in “high impact journals”, by which he meant PNAS, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Science, Nature, and their ilk.  A colleague in Australia was recently informed by the head of department that papers “published in journals with an impact factor < 4 don’t matter”.  Lastly, one of my own colleagues (a senior academic who sits on hiring and promotion committees) authored/coauthored >2 papers in PLOS One in a given year, and quipped that they wouldn’t be sending anything there for a while because “you don’t want everything just in PLOS”.

In a perfect world, the where is secondary (nay, completely irrelevant) to the what of academic publishing.  If no one cared where a paper was published,  we could eliminate the “aiming high” mentality that wastes everyone’s time, and I’d have everything on a preprint server, and submitted to exclusively open-access sources like PLOS, or PeerJ.

But for someone looking for work in research, my experience tells me this isn’t a good idea.  Change must come from those within who are making the decisions, even if they must be pressured to do so by those of us on the outside.

The never-ending search for an academic job does end… eventually

Tags

grad students, hiring, jobs, NSERC, postdoc

A while back, I asked for readers to contribute data on the number of applications and interviews they put in for faculty jobs (or equivalent, e.g., government scientist, full-time scientist at an NGO, etc), and now the long-awaited results.  Hang on to your seats, job-seekers (and hiring committees), here we go (and pardon my hastily-created figures).

Basic demographics

There were 63 respondents, and I didn’t collect data on age or gender.  Most respondents were biologists (54%) or ecologists (21%), and nearly all were in some field of science (hello, dear Science Policy reader!).

Of those, 27 (43%) were my fellow postdocs, 22 (35%) were tenured faculty, 5 were non-tenured faculty, and there were 6 graduate students (5 MSc, 1 PhD), 1 research associate, and 2 folks that have left academia (Post-Ac).  That said, my further analyses were restricted to postdocs and tenured faculty (which were the career stages I was most interested in to begin with), and I didn’t look at differences among fields.

Applications

First, off, the ever-present question looming over postdocs is “how many applications do I have to prepare?”.  Looking at tenured faculty responses, the median answer is about 8.5 (1st quartile: 4; 3rd quartile: 30), but there was obviously a huge range.

And how do postdoc respondents compare?  Well, by all accounts, we’re almost there! (median: 6.5 applications; 1st quartile: 3; 3rd quartile: 22).

If we (incorrectly, I might add) use the mean ± SD to compare with my NSERC postdoc exit survey, there are some interesting similarities.  The NSERC survey found respondents submitted 15 ± 20 applications.  Tenured faculty responding to my survey had 20 ± 24, and postdocs 16 ± 19.

It’s important to note that the number of applications isn’t really a good metric of the job market.  Some people are more selective in their applications.  The advice I got as a grad student was to apply for everything (I don’t necessarily think that’s a good strategy).  And as I’ve discussed before, job search strategies between Canadians and USians differ quite significantly, and likely owing to the sheer number of institutions in the US (>4000) compared with Canada (~100).

But let’s soldier on, shall we?

Interviews

Ah, the academic interview.  That glorious 1-3-day excruciating event during which your every move is critiqued silently (wait, you put butter on the scones before jam? Tsk tsk), and you over-analyze every decision (“Should I get the soup for lunch? What if I spill it on my one set of dress pants? Is it too expensive? Are we even having appetizers? Oh god!” was an actual thought I had at my first on-site interview.  Tell me that’s a healthy reaction).

But nearly-overpowering anxiety aside, how many times did tenured faculty have to go through this arduous process?  The median response was 3 times (1st quartile: 1, 3rd quartile: 5), and no more than 8.

And just like the job applications, postdocs are following close behind – median: 2 (1st quartile: 1, 3rd quartile: 4; max: 7).  So as a population, we seem to be “almost there”.

In the NSERC postdoc exit survey, respondents had 3 ± 7 interviews.  Converting my survey numbers shows faculty with 3 ± 2, and postdocs with 2 ± 2.  So it seems the NSERC respondents were considerably more variable (but then again, their range was 1-99, and I find 99 interviews to be a bit suspect).

What’s evident is that while a bunch of people are successful at landing a job on their first interview, most aren’t.  And again, this doesn’t account for job offers that candidates decline (for various reasons).

The Application:Interview ratio

This brings us to the main point of my original post – how many applications must one complete per interview?  If you recall, the NSERC group showed ~5 (which I thought was low).  Survey says …

Tenured faculty (who, let’s remember, started their jobs between 1 and ∞ years ago) submitted a median of 5 applications for every interview (1st quartile: 3, 3rd quartile: 7).  For comparative purposes, that’s a mean of 7 ± 7.  But also quite obvious is the long tail to the data.

And what about postdocs (75% of which were currently looking for work in this survey)?  We’ve submitted a median of 5 applications for every interview (1st quartile: 2, 3rd quartile: 9).

So it turns out that while 5 applications/interview is “average”, there’s a lot of variation.  The big question, though, is whether this is different between tenured faculty and postdocs.  A basic two-sample t-test says it isn’t (p = 0.96), and ditto for the less powerful non-parametric Wilcoxon ranked sum test (p = 0.70).  But insert the usual caveats of low sample size, and lots of confounding variables (age, gender, field, country, …) here.

The bottom line

A significant chunk of postdocs’ time is spent applying for jobs, and this process could be streamlined considerably.  And while some seem to land a faculty job with relative ease, it’s a slog for many others (submitting up to 80 applications in total, and >15 for every interview).   At the same time, though, the number of PhD job seekers is rising at a much faster rate than faculty jobs have been created.  My survey didn’t account for what kinds of jobs folks applied for, and there’s an increased awareness of “Alt-Ac” or “Post-Ac” jobs.  And it also includes applications for postdoc positions.

The postdoc career stage seems to be the pinch-point for academics in Canada.  And it’s very easy to get discouraged when so many applications (that take considerable effort) don’t pan out.  Part of the solution would be increased support for postdocs through NSERC and similar programs, and a reduction in the insane amount of duplication that goes into job applications.  Faculty search committees can also help, by not requiring letters of reference until the long/short-listing process, for example, which would save everyone time.

But lastly, and perhaps most importantly, it’s important for postdocs to have a good support network.  The job application process is fraught with giddy highs and depressive lows, all in a short period of time.  Whether this is a faculty member, other postdocs, labmates, friends, and/or family, having a group of people with whom you can share the exciting news about interview requests, or the crushing news that you weren’t short-listed will only help. The adage that “something will come up eventually” will start to grate on your nerves, but those who speak it mean well.  And what “comes up” might not be a tenure-track faculty job, though it can still be fulfilling.

So once more unto the breach, dear postdocs, once more.

 

UPDATE (1 Dec. 13) – check out this post, and the figures that show the career trajectories in science, and the significant amount of attrition.  <1% of those who start in science end up in the professorial route (though 30% might consider themselves “early-career researchers”). It also has considerable resources for non-academic jobs (ht Grant Jacobs)

How likely are you to get NSERC funding in ecology & evolution? (updated)

Tags

grad students, hiring, jobs, NSERC, post graduate scholarships, postdoc, tenure track position

Spoiler alert: not very.

Research costs money.  Whether it’s lab analyses, field work, or just paying people, research costs money.  It’s a lesson that every nascent B.Sc. graduate learns when they start asking potential supervisors.  “Do you have any funding?” the supervisors ask, “No”, the student replies. The chances that they’ll be able to join the lab are therefore severely reduced.

If we assume a 2-year MSc, and 4-year PhD, funded at minimum NSERC rates, that’s about $119,000 over 6 years.  Now, some of that could come from a variety of sources, including NSERC post-graduate scholarships (PGS).

Then the search for post-doc funding begins, and as I’ve pointed out, the odds aren’t good.  And most folks will do 2, 3, or more postdocs before they land that most fabled of academic jobs: the tenure track position.

But the struggle doesn’t end there – research groups rarely fund themselves (unless you run analyses for others, but that’s another story).  In Canada, the main funding mechanism in ecology & evolution is the NSERC Discovery Grant (which run ~5 years, and average just under $30,000/year).

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Some back-of-the-envelope calculations

So what are the chances that a MSc student will go on to land a Discovery Grant & get their first renewal?  And is there a bottleneck in the system somewhere?

First, some assumptions:

• Grad students, and to a lesser extent, postdocs, are funded by a variety of sources, not just NSERC.  But there aren’t any data for those sources.
• NSERC only funds 1 year of a MSc, and 2-3 of a PhD so that any single grad student receives no more than 3 years of NSERC support (which is odd, when the minimum time is 6 years for a MSc + PhD, but that’s a tale for another day)
• NSERC also operates industry-  and government-funded postdoc programs for which there are no numbers (update: see comments for discussion of the industrial postdoc), and which are largely (if not entirely) funded by the industrial or governmental partners.
• For the purposes of this post, I’ll assume that postdocs that receive an NSERC PDF are either able to find another postdoc, or move into a faculty job.
• We have no idea what proportion of PDFs move into faculty jobs.  It’s probably > 50% (PDF, see table 7.1), so let’s be generous and assume that half of the postdocs get faculty jobs where they could apply for Discovery Grants.
• Yes, funding rates vary from year to year, but I’m going to use the most recent (2012 or 2013 depending on the program).
• Lastly, NSERC funding rates for the PGS-M (post-graduate scholarship – masters), and PGS-D (post-graduate scholarship – doctoral) are overestimates because it only reports on those applications that are sent to NSERC by universities. Unless someone from university admin cares to chime in with actual numbers, we’ll work with what we’ve got.

Ready? Hold on to those mortar boards, boys and girls – it’s going to get rocky from here on out.

We’ll start with a class of 1000 B.Sc. graduates who are all admitted to a MSc program to keep things simple (the transition probability is more likely ~25%, but higher for those who do a research-based honours thesis).

The success rate of the combined CGS-M and PGS-M programs is 53%.  Right there, that takes us down to 530.  We’ll assume that all of these funded students love research so much that they’ll go on to do a PhD.

These 530 prospective PhD students face a slightly tougher field, and only 44% of applicants are awarded a PGS-D.  That takes our theoretical group down to 233 people, or only 23% of our starting population.

Now, these remaining 233 newly-minted doctors all need to do a post-doc, and not surprisingly, this is the major choke-point.  The success rate of NSERCs PDF program was 7.8% last year, which translates to just 18 fellowships.  We’re left with under 2% of our starting budding professors.

Let’s assume that half of these are able to navigate the cut-throat academic job search, and land a tenure-track job – that’s 9 wide-eyed (and likely exhausted) faculty applying for their first Discovery Grant (DG).

Early-career researchers (ECRs) are judged a little more leniently in their DG applications, and the ecology/evolution evaluation committee (committee 1503 if you’re keeping track) funded 52% of ECRs (PDF, Table 7). That translates to 5 Discovery Grants in our population.

If you get a DG, you’re more likely to get it renewed in 5 years’ time, and Committee 1503 renews about 82% of applicants (PDF, Table 7).  So after 15-20 years, from the start of a MSc to submitting a tenure dossier, there’s a 0.39% chance of being funded successfully the whole way through.  That’s basically 4/1000.

Program	Success Rate	Number
Starting population		1000
PGS-M	0.53	530
PGS-D	0.44	233
PDF	0.078	18
Tenure Track	0.5	9
DG-ECR	0.52	5
DG-Renewal	0.82	4

As I said above, these are very rough numbers, but they’re based on what’s available.  There are other sources of funding (provincial government, federal government departments, private foundations, etc), but when one thinks of research funding in Canada, one thinks of the TriCouncil (the collective noun for NSERC, SSHRC, and CIHR).

At my only in-person academic job interview, I was asked by the department head and faculty dean what sources of funding I would use to support my research.  My default answer was NSERC.

What’s more, these numbers are generally going down.  NSERC-wide, the proportion of Discovery Grants to ECRs dropped from 77% in 2002 to 62% in 2012.  Renewals are down from 95% in 2002 (!!!) to 77% in 2012 (summary here; Table 2, PDF)

But what’s most important, I think, is that it’s obvious where the bottleneck is: postdoc funding.  NSERC rewards the training of “highly-qualified personnel” (HQP; grad students, postdocs, and technicians) in the Discovery Grant application process. But the postdoc funding available is in high demand and low supply.  I suspect another bottleneck occurs at the hiring stage, but there aren’t many data for that transition.

What we need is a mark-recapture study to generate a population viability analysis (PVA) where we can estimate the “survival” of each “age class” (career stage), and estimate the “transition probability” (success rates) between career stages.

But until that happens, we can at least be honest with the young researchers we interact with.  As a grad student, I always assumed that it would be tough, but not impossible to land a faculty job, and get my own research group off the ground.  Now, I’m not so sure.

UPDATE: as others have pointed out on Twitter, Discovery Grants aren’t the be-all and end-all.  There are other sources out there, and we need to make grad students and postdocs aware of them.  But NSERC is often used to leverage funds from other granting agencies, and is more likely to be unfettered (i.e., not tied to a specific project).

Meet Flow Clearwater

Tags

ephemera, hiring, sexism

I am a bibliophile.  This should come as no surprise to those who know me.  The printed word (and the printing, curation, and ultimate fate of said words) is something I find fascinating.  I’m convinced that were I not a biologist, I’d likely end up working in a library.

Spending so much time in libraries (and with friends who work / spend a lot of time in libraries) means I get to see some neat stuff.  Whether it’s bound journal volumes from the late 1800s, or the latest volume to come in the library, I’ll stop and take a look.  That’s how I learned about the Arctic Expert Test.

Last week, a colleague showed me an issue of the trade publication Water Well Journal from 1973.  And this advert on page 7:

The “journal” is a trade magazine (and is still published), but as far as I can tell, the Mustang Well Supply Corp. of Bellaire, Texas no longer exists.

We all knew that sexist adverts were out there for cars, alcohol, clothing (and previously, tobacco), but well screens?  Apparently so. And boy is this a doozy!  No doubt if one scoured the pages of Nature and Science of the past, there would be similar adverts (or at the very least, a biased representation of white male scientists).

So let’s all have a good chuckle about the past, but remember that there are still pay differences between male and female academics today (not to mention sexism in hiring).

 

Casting a wide net

Tags

academic job, chronicle of higher education, hiring, jobs

Terry over at Small Pond Science recently argued that many PhDs weren’t exploiting the job market to its fullest, applying only for jobs that show up in Science, Nature, etc., and viewing other position as “below” their (self-perceived) standing.  The comments section gave some other concrete examples of searches cancelled because of too few qualified candidates, or searches with only 5-6 candidates that would even be considered.

That’s not been my experience.  As I wrote in the comments, I don’t think I’ve ever applied for a job advertised in Science or Nature because the job either shows up in one of my other searches, or it was obviously not a good fit.

I have a routine, and it’s been this way for the last 3ish years.  I tend to do the job search rounds on Saturday mornings with my mug(s) of hot tea (or a whole pot – I know, living on the edge), and CBC Radio 2 in the background while everyone else is still asleep.  After reading Terry’s post, I wondered about others’ search strategies.  Like many other practical skills in academia, how to search for a job is rarely taught explicitly, and is something that we all sort of figure out on our own.  No doubt, many of us have reinvented the wheel, and developed the same strategies (which we thought were ours, and ours alone).

So here’s mine.  My search is tailored to what kind of job I want, and where I want to work.  For example, I’m not seeking a position in the US, so I don’t check in on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s job listing (though when I did up until a few years ago, there were regularly 40-80 jobs listed each week in “biology”).

Probably my main source of academic job adverts are from two e-mail lists: University Affairs (daily), and jobs.ac.uk (weekly).  More often than not, there’s nothing of interest, but for mainstream jobs at most Canadian (and British) universities, these are probably the most comprehensive.

My main Saturday Morning Job Search consists of just over 60 websites (as of last Saturday) that span the range from academic, government, non-profit, Canadian, and international.  I’ve put the full list below.  If there’s enough interest, and folks find it useful (and other readers have other sites that they check), I’d consider making it a separate page on the blog, so let me know in the comments, via Twitter, or e-mail.

There’s a few Canadian universities (those that I have an active interest in working at, for various personal and professional reasons; not to say that others aren’t on the radar, bit I catch them in other searches), federal and provincial government listings, a few international opportunities (mostly in Europe), and a smattering of non-profits, or those that cover non-traditional academic jobs (e.g., museums, zoos, academic publishing).  There’s also the job board on the Ornithology Exchange (and the BirdJobs-L listserv), but since that tends to be, by and large, for US jobs, I don’t check them that often.

I started following the job market almost as soon as I started my PhD (in part because some postdoc jobs are advertised in these places), and I’ve been actively applying for jobs for almost 3 years now.  I’m fairly confident that I’m not missing much for which I’d be both qualified and interested.  Hopefully one of these days, something will work out.

Current Saturday Morning Job Search sites:

General

• Society for Conservation Biology (filtered for jobs in Canada)

Canadian Universities & Colleges

• Mount Allison University
• Acadia University
• Dalhousie University
• St. Francis Xavier University
• University of King’s College
• University of New Brunswick
• Memorial University of Newfoundland
• Concordia University
• McGill University
• Bishop’s University
• Western University
• University of Saskatchewan
• Campion College
• University of Regina
• University of Calgary
• Quest University
• University of Victoria
• University of Lethbridge
• Huron College
• Association of Community Colleges of Canada

International

• British Antarctic Survey
• WWF International
• BirdLife International
• Royal Society for the Protection of Birds
• Joint Nature Conservation Committee
• International Union for the Conservation of Nature
• Centre for Ecology and Hydrology
• United National Environmental Programme
• Norwegian Institute for Nature Research
• Natural History Museum (UK)
• EU Academic Jobs
• Norwegian Polar Institute

Non-University Canadian organizations

• Canadian Museum of Nature
• Royal Ontario Museum
• Royal BC Museum
• WWF Canada
• LGL Ltd.
• NRC Research Press
• Bird Studies Canada
• Wildlife Conservation Society–Canada
• Council of Science Editors
• Environmental Careers Organization–Canada
• WorkCabin.ca
• Oxford University Press–Canada
• University of Toronto Press
• University of Alberta Press

Canadian Federal & Provincial Government

• Public Service Commission of Canada
• Parks Canada
• Government of Nova Scotia
• Government of Prince Edward Island
• Government of New Brunswick
• Government of Ontario
• Government of Manitoba
• Government of Saskatchewan
• Government of British Columbia
• Government of the Yukon
• Government of the Northwest Territories
• Government of Nunavut

De-ologising and the fate of focal species

Tags

ecology, hiring, jobs, ornithology, tenure track job

When I started grad school, and people asked what I did, I said I was a field ornithologist.  Then in my PhD (which was still very heavily focused on birds), I dubbed myself more of a population ecologist.  Now that I’m searching for a job, I’ll call myself whatever the advert wants me to call myself.

But this is part of a trend towards the shame of calling oneself an ornithologist, a mammalogist, an entomologist, or a marine botanist.  We’re afraid to let the organisms we study define us in large part because of the shift away from organismal biology to conceptual biology.  There are far more job adverts for population ecologists than ornithologists.

Some universities have taken this to the extreme – Queen’s University, for example, offers no taxon-specific courses.  And there’s something to be said for the study of environmental physiology, or behavioural ecology, or adaptive morphology since it can often result in a broad education.

But there’s also something to be said for the study of birds, mammals, insects, and algae, and their unique characters.  For those of us in the field, many of our research questions are, in reality, driven by the field techniques we know.  If you want to catch 50 adult puffins, I’m your man.  Give me 3 days, and you’ll get your sample.  But ask me to catch 10 voles, or 25 wasps, or 18 trout, and I’m as useless as coals to Newcastle.

That’s not to say that I’m not interested in various broad concepts.  I’m fascinated by mate choice, foraging ecology, nutritional ecology, migration, demography, and life history theory – I just apply these to the system I know best: birds.

The folks over at Arthropod Ecology gave a pretty optimistic run-down of how to land a tenure-track job in entomology, which sparked a lively back-and-forth on Twitter with them, and Terry from Small Pond Science as it relates to academic labels, and hiring.

Regardless of what I call myself (population ecologist, foraging ecologist, demographer), I likely won’t get an interview at a department that has one other person who uses birds as their model species.  It doesn’t matter if they study Neotropical migrants and forestry practices, and I’m all about seabirds as central-place foragers – in the eyes of the search committee, we’re both “bird people”.

True, a department wouldn’t hire two behavioural ecologists, but they’re also not likely to advertise for a 2^nd behavioural ecologist.

How many faculty could supervise students equally well if they are working on ants, seaweed, elk, and chickadees?  Probably not many.  How many faculty have published on such a variety of focal species?  Probably fewer.  We all have our favourite system / taxonomic group in which we know how to work.

Hiring committees need to see beyond the means by which we accomplish the ends of our research.  If a department wants a population ecologist, it shouldn’t matter if I study populations of African wildebeests, rockhopper penguins, Atlantic salmon, parasitoid wasps, leaf-cutter ants, or crayfish.  But in some cases, it probably does come into play, for better or for worse.