Canadian government postdocs: revived (well, sort of)

Tags

government, postdoc, postdoctoral fellowship, postdoctoral research pilot program, visiting fellowships

I wrote before about the demise of the Visiting Fellowship program, which placed postdocs in Canadian government research labs, and used NSERC as a middleman (middle-agency?).  Recently, the employment practices around this arrangement, particularly whether postdocs were entitled to benefits.  An employment tribunal reasoned that they were, and the program shuttered (though all current VFs were fine through the remainder of their tenure).

Now, it comes to my attention that an open-ended competition for the Postdoctoral Research Pilot Program (PRP) has been posted on the Government of Canada jobs site.  My guess, and those of some informed government colleagues, is that this is the replacement for the old VF program.  But there has been no announcement, no information page, nothing.

Some other interesting queries… all government jobs are classified based on the broad category and salary scale.  Two important ones for our purposes here are RES and EG.  RES is a Research Scientist, and there are 5 levels (RES-5 being the highest). EGs are scientific technicians, with EG-7 being the highest level.  How are PRPs to be classified?  The old VF program scaled salary to n% of the entry level RES-1 (I think it was 85-90%).  If the new PRPs are to be classified (and they would be, as government employees), an entry RES-1 seems most likely.  This is huge, as the base salary in 2013 (the last year of the current collective agreement) is $53,161 (link; search for “SE-RES-1”).  That’s a big improvement on the $49k of the VF program.  It’s even bigger if it includes benefits, which are quite significant in a government job (pension, medical/dental, etc).  So the actual cost goes up considerably.

Where will this new money be found?  Previously, the VF program paid postdocs from their immediate supervisor’s operational budget.  I wonder if the benefits side of things will be similarly covered, or whether that comes from higher up in the department.  And what about unionization? RES positions are represented by PIPSC, and the current agreement is up for renewal.  Granted PIPSC isn’t known to strike as often as the other major federal government labour union (PSAC), but who knows what the future will bring.

One last, yet troubling, word.  The advertisement linked above excludes two of the most science-heavy departments: Fisheries & Oceans Canada, and Environment Canada.  Sources have told me that there continues to be no internal / government postdoc option in these departments, and no indication that one will be appearing soon.  With an already limited pool of postdoc funding, the loss of the VF program, and unavailability of the PRP in all departments puts further strain on PhD graduates in Canada, and especially those who want experience in the public service.

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Future of Visiting Fellowship postdoc program in doubt

Tags

NSERC, postdoc, visiting fellowships

I was slightly alarmed to see this post indicating that NSERC’s Visiting Fellowship in Government Labs (VF) program had come to an end.  This is (was?) a program administered by NSERC whereby postdocs were placed in Canadian federal research labs for up to 3 years.  The government department (so, Environment Canada, for example) ponied up the money, and NSERC acted as the middleman.

I was a VF from 2013-2014, and had I not found work, I’d still be there.  In an era when finding postdoc funding is particularly challenging in Canada, the VF program was very valuable – applicants just had to find a supervisor in government with the cash.

So when I heard about the supposed demise, I got in touch with a few of my contacts from my days in government to see what the deal was.  At one department, supervisors were effectively told that the program was over without any context.  But at another federal science department, there was a bit more information presented.

According to my anonymous government contacts, the whole issue began when a VF challenged their employment status.  Because VFs are paid directly from NSERC, this person argued, they should be receiving benefits as well, and treated as fully fledged employees.  They took their case to the Canada Revenue Agency, who arbitrates on such matters, and the CRA ruled that VFs are employees of NSERC.  As result, NSERC pulled the plug.

It’s unclear right now how this affects current VFs who are part-way through their position. At present, the application, and program information are still posted on the NSERC site.

 

But what I think is important to note is that according to my contacts in three federal science departments, this caught everyone off guard.  The researchers in these departments, and yes, even some of their managers, see the importance of the VF program, and are actively looking for solution; it’s just unclear what that solution will be.

 

It’s very easy to decry this as another example of the current government’s general attitude towards science, but it’s better to look at the evidence presented.  The decision to stop the VF program was made by NSERC for employment/labour reasons.

 

The NSERC post-doctoral fellowship (PDF) program remains in place and unchanged.  And for now, it’s one of a dwindling number of postdoctoral research opportunities in Canada.

How I ended up with an alternative academic job

Tags

altac, jobs, postdoc

Astute readers might notice that the frequency of new posts has tailed off lately.  This isn’t reflective of any change in my interest in blogging, or want for post ideas (trust me on this one), but is caused entirely by the fact that I’m changing continents in a month.

For the last 31 months, I’ve been a postdoc in some program or another.  It’s been simultaneously the most exciting, and most anxiety-inducing experience of my life.  Professionally speaking, being a postdoc has brought the highest highs and the lowest lows.  Yes, lows lower than my first paper rejection, or when I got a red-ink-dripping draft back for the first time, and highs higher than being admitted to a PhD program, or even graduating as a bona fide Phiosophiae Doctor.  And I can announce today that it’s coming to an end.

It should come as no surprise that postdocs (and the closely-related “adjunct” or “sessional” lecturer) are fairly ignored (dare I say neglected?) in the career progression that starts at 17 or 18, and continues, well, for some time thereafter for those pursuing a career in research.  There’s not much funding, and what funding is available has success rates so low they rival the interest rate on the tens of thousands of dollars we often have in student loans.  That’s not to say it’s a living wage, though.  But as others have shown, the search for an academic job does eventually end, sometimes with success.

I keep a folder of bookmarks for a large number of job sites (yes, I still haven’t deleted them), and every Saturday, I would right-click, “Open All”, go grab some tea, and spend anywhere from 10 minutes to 2 hours filtering through, checking out, and generally lamenting the state of my job search.  Throughout my Ph.D., my supervisor and I never really had what I would call a realistic talk about jobs.  “Apply for everything” was his advice, but to someone in the narrow-minded mentality of “academia or bust”, that meant applying for jobs at universities that, shall we say, stretched my abilities.  It wasn’t until I was a postdoc spending hours each week being scared, depressed, and anxious that it hit me – Yes, Virginia, there really is a Santa Ph.D.’s aren’t just for academia.

Perhaps it’s the circles I travel in on Twitter, but this point has been made abundantly clear by many (and much more eloquently than I could do).  When I wrote one of most frequently visited posts on Lab & Field just over a year ago (“What’s a Ph.D. to do?“), several folks got in touch by email and Twitter to either a) commiserate, or b) mention their own successes outside the ivory tower.  That’s when I started adding non-academic job sites to my Saturday.  I applied for a few (mostly in data analysis), but never heard anything positive.

About 8 months ago, a friend of mine alerted me to an upcoming job posting where he worked (it was one of the sites I check every weekend, so this wasn’t “inside information”).  At the time, I was driving across Canada (well, about 4500 km of Canada), so I shelved it until I got back.  I applied in October, had a 30-minute Skype interview in November, and in December, I was invited for a day-long on-site interview.  I flew over in January, and in February, I was offered a job.

So while this might sound like an academic interview, at least on the surface, it’s not.  I’ll not be working at a university.  Or as a government scientist.  Starting on June 1st, I’ll be a (full-time, permanent) Senior Conservation Scientist for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).  The RSPB is a charity, and Europe’s largest environmental NGO.  It’s supported by dues-paying members (the “Society” part of the name).  It has a staff of 1300 people, and operates more than 200 nature reserves in the UK.  And just recently, it launched the RSPB Centre for Conservation Science, of which I’ll be a member.  In particular, I’m in the International Research part of the Conservation Science Department.  My beat – avian and biodiversity conservation in the UK Overseas Territories, particularly Tristan da Cunha/Gough in the South Atlantic Ocean, and Henderson Island, in the Pitcairn Islands of the South Pacific.

This would be where I would add a paragraph or two about how I knew that a career in a university was never in the cards, not matter how many times I applied, and that I sought out an alternative academic (or “altac”) career by design.  Except that wasn’t the case.  Even up until 6 months ago, I still had my eyes set on a faculty job.  I suppose I didn’t choose the altac life, the altac life chose me.  But I’m glad it did.  And I wish I had known more about non-academic careers when I was a grad student and a new postdoc.

 

In the spirit of making things better for those who follow, if you have questions about altac careers (and environmental NGOs in particular), I’ll do my best to answer (though I’m sure I can be a bit more authoritative in my answers once I’ve been there a bit).

 

I’ll continue to do the things I enjoy (working on [avian/marine] conservation issues, doing field work, visiting strange islands, enjoying tea), and that includes blogging here.

So carry on – I’ve got 4 8 12 a few boxes of books to pack up.

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.

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).

It’s the postdoc life!

Tags

postdoc

If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll see that I’m fond of the hashtag #postdoclife when discussing certain aspects of my work.  Well, today a colleague asked if it was prompted by the number “It’s the hard-knock life” from the musical “Annie“.

I admit it wasn’t, but the idea (and startling similarities, at least in the stereotype) were amusing.  So I present, for your enjoyment, tongue planted firmly in cheek:

(watch the video if you aren’t familiar with the song)

It’s the postdoc life!

It’s the postdoc life for us!
It’s the postdoc life for us!

‘Steada tenure,
We get term!

Submitted papers,
They get ditched!

It’s the postdoc life!
No position to speak of, so,
It’s the postdoc slog we know!

“Student” status,
‘Steada staff!

Crappy office
‘Steada good!

It’s the postdoc life!

Don’t it feel like the grants are always failin’?
Don’t it seem like there’s never any light!

Once a day, don’t you wanna throw the towel in?
It’s easier than puttin’ up a fight.

No one’s there when your papers get trashed!
No one cares if you succeed or crash!
No one dries when your eyes get wet an’ weepy!

From all the cryin’ you would think this position’s a sink!
Ohhhh!!!!!!!
Rejected paper life!
Lack of interviews life!
Crappy office life!
No personal life!

Tenure track we never see
Tenure track, what’s that? A dream?

No one cares for you a tad
When you’re in postdoc land!

Yank the grant app from the boss
Just a jabbing sense of loss
No prestige, and not one perk
I love you, NSERC!

(whistle) Get to work!
(whistle) Make that figure!
(whistle) I said get to work!

It’s the postdoc life for us!
It’s the postdoc life for us!
No one cares for you a tad
When your in postdoc land!
It’s the postdoc life!
It’s the postdoc life!
It’s the postdoc life!

Suggestions for additional verses are welcome in the comments.  You’ll note that some lines remained unchanged.

Post-postdoc?

Tags

alternative academic careers, hiring, jobs, postdoc

Wow.

My recent missive on the dismal prospects of early-career researchers has, evidently, struck a nerve.  Since I posted it on Thursday, over 550 people have read it, it’s been tweeted and retweeted, and a couple of folks contacted me by e-mail.  This is by far the largest response to any post I’ve had, and the message is clear: I’m not alone.

But after the weekend, one thing has become abundantly apparent: there are some alternatives out there that, for whatever reason, aren’t really discussed in the hallowed halls of the academy.

I spent just over 10 years as a student in university between undergrad and two graduate degrees, and with one exception in a fourth-year course on field ecology, the options generally presented were a) med school / dentistry school / other professional health-related program, and b) grad school leading to a career as an academic.  I don’t necessarily blame my professors – after all, it worked for them.  But following the glut of hiring in the mid 1990s, things have slowed down, NSERC’s postgraduate and postdoctoral wages have declines in real terms, and retiring ecology professors aren’t being replaced (or are being replaced by other subfields, like anything-omics).

Now, I haven’t given up totally on landing an academic job, and I’ll continue to apply for them during the next 18 months (which is the extent of my current foreseeable funding).  But there are some other options that I’m going to start paying attention to a little more:

 

Consulting

During my undergrad (and parts of grad school), consulting was derided as selling out to “the man” and something you did only as a stop-gap measure until a “real” job came up.  As Jeremy from Dynamic Ecology pointed out in his comment, this isn’t the case.  Private landowners, NGOs, and increasingly, government agencies and departments, all want their own evidence to counter assessments provided by resource extraction companies.

 

Entrepreneurship

Jennifer over at From PhD to Life wrote a post (startlingly close to when I wrote mine!) about what she, as a humanities PhD, actually wanted to do: run her own business.  Freelancing is tough work, and has little job security, plus all the added stresses of being self-employed, but it can be highly rewarding.

 

Start to build a community

Postdocs are an odd bunch.  We’re not quite staff, but certainly not students.  Our tenures are often short (usually a couple of years), and there are few “Postdoc Associations” (though see CAPS-ACSP if you’re a postdoc in Canada) that keep us in touch.  Ethan Perlstein wrote earlier this year about “Postdocalypse Now”: the shell shock of realising that a tenure-track job might not actually work out.  I find myself in the same boat.  At the end of his piece, he writes:

So what’s next? As the shell shock begins to wear off and more and more thwarted post­docs emerge from their bunkers, I hope we can take com­fort and inspi­ra­tion from each other by shar­ing our jour­neys. Younger trainees can ben­e­fit from our peer-to-peer men­tor­ship. And prac­ti­cally speak­ing, we can start to mobi­lize and brainstorm new ways to do the sci­ence we love out­side of tra­di­tional aca­d­e­mic (or even industry) settings.

So, consider this, and my other post, a small contribution to the codex of the post-postdoc world.

What’s a PhD to do?

Tags

hiring, jobs, NSERC, post doctoral fellowships, postdoc

I graduated with my PhD in ecology in the fall of 2011, and was one of the lucky 9% of applicants to be awarded an NSERC post-doctoral fellowship.  My current position comes to an end in 5 months, which means I’ve beating the bushes for more funding for salary since last September.  The academic job market in Canada for early-career researchers is, in a word, abysmal.  Most universities employ only one or two researchers who use birds as their study organism (regardless of whether the researchers call themselves “ornithologists”, “population ecologists”, “behavioural ecologists” or some other moniker).  So until these individuals start retiring, there’s little hope for landing a term, let alone tenure-track, appointment.  Of the 10 or so academic jobs for which I was even remotely qualified in 2011-12, I received one interview (which was noted as being extraordinary), and no job offer.  This year to date, it’s been another 10 applications, and 2 government exams, but still no bites.  So postdoc-ing it is.

A major source of postdoc money for ecology in Canada comes from NSERC.  In 2012, the success rate of the 1254 applicants to NSERC’s post-doctoral fellowship program was 7.8%.  That’s 98 NSERC-funded postdocs, of which I classified 11 as ecologists.  To top it off, NSERC has revised its guidelines so that individuals may only apply once in their career for an NSERC PDF (which itself falls only a few years after reducing the funding for masters students in the PGS/CGS-M program to 12 months).  The end result will be PhDs putting off their NSERC applications for a few years until all those PhD papers are out, and ultimately making it harder for recently-minted doctors of philosophy to apply for fear of brutal competition from later early-career researchers.

There’s the Banting Post-doctoral Fellowships program, a prestigious award, of which 70 are awarded annually among the three Canadian funding councils (NSERC, SSHRC, and CIHR).  Last year, 21 of these were to NSERC applicants, of which one or two could be considered ecologists.  Not great odds there, even if one’s application is endorsed by the university (can be < 50% of institutional applicants).  I was one of the “lucky” ones, after spending a month putting together an application that my university endorsed.  The result: ranked 146/180, with 23 fellowships awarded.

Well, there’s always the NSERC Industrial R&D Fellowship (IRDF).  Researchers in my field have often paired with a non-profit research-based NGO.  At least they could up to 01 December 2012, when not-for-profit organizations are no longer eligible to be host organizations for IRDF fellows.  There are not a lot of companies doing work in ecological research that would quality to host an IRDF position.

Finally, there’s the Visiting Fellows in Government Laboratories (VF) program.  What’s not readily apparent is that NSERC provides no funding for this program at all – the salary and research costs must be borne by the government supervisor out of his/her base research funds.  Finding an extra $47,000 per year is no small task, especially with overall reductions to government research funding at Fisheries & Oceans, and Environment Canada, and the increasing trend of using contracts.

I was a recipient of an NSERC post-graduate scholarship during my PhD, and now I hold a post-doctoral fellowship.  NSERC has invested over $140,000 in my training and development as a scientist and contributing member to the Canadian research community (this is not counting any input from my supervisors’ NSERC Discovery grants, for example).  By the time the various research costs of a MSc, PhD, and one year of a post-doc are thrown in, the overall amount easily doubles, if not triples.

My research has no direct possibility for commercialization, and doesn’t affect economic policy – it’s basic and applied research in ecology, and conservation.  A 2009 survey by the Canadian Association of Postdoctoral Scholars (CAPS) found that half of all respondents were paid from their supervisors’ research grants, while only 18% received their salary from the Tri-Council funding agencies.  Given that the mean NSERC Discovery grant in Ecology & Evolution is about $28,000 per year, being paid by one’s supervisor isn’t a viable option for most postdocs (or, in fact, most faculty).

Times are tough for post-doctoral ecologists in Canada.  That’s not to say that times aren’t though for other research disciplines – I’m sure it is.  But with unprecedented global ecological change, urgent conservation needs for Canada’s biodiversity (especially in the Arctic, where working is already expensive), and a reduction in government’s scientific capacity, something’s got to change.

So for the interim, it’s looking like piecemeal contract work, prolonged employment uncertainty.  I don’t pretend like I’m the only one facing the situation of a brutal job market, reduction in postdoc funding opportunities, and gutting of federal scientific research, but it sure does hit home when I have to find a way for my 6-year-old laptop to keep chugging along a little longer