Yeah - perhaps the unique and unfortunate constraints of an academic track, where it's heavily penalized to not move locations for Phd, then postdoc, then professorship. Similar but not as severe for my wife in Medicine, where you have to move after MD to Residency, then fellowship, then physician job.
Yeah the competition for those professor jobs is pretty fierce. Don’t you basically have to do a postdoc to be considered for a tenure track position in the States these days (unless you are some prodigy)?
Of course. It's just that fairness is often given as a reason, especially since the accommodations often might be unfair in other professions, but were meant to counteract specific unfair problems.
For example, spousal hiring could be seen as nepotism; in the case of Goeppert-Mayer, it famously wasn't allowed because of that. Yet outside of a handful of major cities, the local university is often the only place in the area someone can have a strong academic career, and academic careers often involve moving, so for a couple to both have academic careers, they often need to find a university willing to hire them both, and to search for positions together, something that is very difficult, especially when in different fields, unless the university has procedures to handle it. Add to this that academics often have social lives within academia, and this can become a very common difficulty.
I don't understand how you can go from being a postdoc to being a professor. That seems to really diminish the value of the title 'professor' to me, if people can get it as basically their first permanent academic job.
This is why it has become normal to do 3-7 years of postdoc research positions before being considered for a tenure-track faculty position, even for those from elite universities.
If we're talking "top 5" in the context of graduate programs for a given discipline it's likely not as rare as you'd think.
I can see the PhD glut and general awfulness of academia (do postdocs and adjunct until a tenure-track opens up) pushing people from even high ranking programs into teaching at a CC.
This is especially true if they're married or have an SO: It's hard to convince your partner to uproot their lives so you can work at some tenure track position at some no-name college in the middle of nowhere... or forgo tenure and get paid slightly less and have the option to actually live near family/friends/partner's career.
And this does not include postdocs. CS is unusual that some people can go straight from grad school to professorship - I've seen it happen many times - but most sciences require at least one postdoc. I can't speak for engineering.
Only in fields where there’s no demand for their skills outside academia, like English literature or History, or vastly more supply than demand, like most of the sciences. Fields like Economics or Computer Science have post docs but they’re not normative. Most people who end up with tenure track jobs never do one.
Hehe, well aware of those. After my (first) postdoc I managed to get hired in a supportive role (in a whole new field, pretty exciting). If I hadn't managed that, I definitely would not be in academia anymore.
Your wife is on tenure-track and Kariko was on a lower track designed for postdocs, researchers, leading to research assistant/associate professor, etc. Kariko was treated badly on the track she was on——a track that doesn’t require stringent filtering. So your comment is not that relevant.
The real problem with being put in a unique position to do important work is that you're under the gun to do important work.
But so are you as a professor, at least up to tenure. I agree it is a double edged sword. It is intuitive that a research community prefers to evaluate someone before offering him a tenure-track job.
PS The ratio postdocs/asst.prof can vary a lot. For example it was much lower than 10 in all of the departments I worked at, though not far from it in Europe.
This is curious as post docs were sorta training positions in ancient times, picking up additional skills to make an academic or commercial hire more likely. For example, do a synthetic PhD and p-doc in a natural products group. Or mix computational and lab groups. Hence stipends and eased tax rules.
If it’s just a job and not training, then the profs can reject more candidates if they wish. People in jobs are expected to hit the ground and start running sooner, which might keep people from getting a slot. Still have to publish to show progress, and skimping on that will hurt future prospects.
Bottom line, if you want a “job” get out of academia.
I'm sure your advisor had an awesome experience, but there majority of postdocs don't get tenure-track positions and end up regretting doing a postdoc.
There's a whole structured career ladder between those two roles. I guess it takes most people at least a decade after they finish their last post-doc before they become a professor. During that time you have fellowships, lecturerships, readerships, with increasing pay and responsibilities.
That is a very field-dependent experience, and probably unusual even in your field. In many STEM fields, there is essentially zero chance of obtaining a TT position directly after PhD.
What’s the stigma against postdoc in the US? I don’t get it?
In the UK a postdoc is the first job after your PhD. You obviously aren’t going to get a professorship for a couple of decades, and will be too junior for a lectureship as well, so you have to do something in between. What do you do if not a postdoc?
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