What does it mean to be a postdoc? It’s a job for naïve dreamers, who think they’ll be the exception in a funnelling career structure. It’s a choice for fools, who don’t realise they can get the same job satisfaction and double the salary elsewhere. It’s a job for pushovers, who tolerate unequal power structures and a total lack of accountability for senior academics. It’s a role only the brightest, sharpest thinkers can pursue. It’s a calling, a vital step in a life committed to learning and science. It’s a perfect job, which allows for complete self-determination and intellectual freedom.
It is absolutely none of these things. It’s a job, and like all jobs there are upsides and downsides which balance out differently for different people in different situations. If you are considering the postdoc track, then you’ve probably weighed these out for yourself already. By the time I’m done on my new project, I’ll have been a postdoc for a decade. I’ll have done three very different jobs. First, a centrally-funded postdoc fellowship at a public sector research institute, where I had to assist on existing projects while also developing new ideas, seeking funding, and executing them. Second, a grant-funded postdoc on a large, ongoing research project. And now, a funded research fellowship focused on my own research questions.
I think when I was searching for my first postdoc job, I had a fluffy and maybe even idealised view of what it would be like. Like a PhD, I’d get to work on all stages of research from conceptualisation through to report-writing; there would be formal but mostly informal training; I’d have more responsibilities to go along with the better pay; I’d have more collaborations, and be involved in more papers, just not as first author; I’d supervise or mentor some more junior people; and at the end I’d be totally equipped and a wonderful candidate for a lectureship.
Was this accurate? Definitely not in full, but certainly in part — and different parts for different jobs. Personally, I tend to build up quite detailed and unfounded expectations before I start something. Once my rigid expectations are thwarted by actually doing the job, I’m generally quite happy to bump along, make the most of it, and — against my nature — try to turn things to my advantage. I could write a whole volume on being a postdoc but if there were one piece of information, of realism, that I would impart to myself, it’s this: a postdoc is a job. Jobs suck! You have to do what your boss wants. Your pay is never going to reflect the full value of your labour. The best you can hope for is a job that you mostly enjoy doing on most days, and if it really sucks or it just isn’t giving you what you want, you can move on.
Let’s expand.
I wouldn’t say any of my postdoc jobs sucked completely, but they all had their sucky aspects. The first job sucked because it’s hard to get work funded, so naturally there was a gap between the questions I worked on, and the questions I wanted to work on. The second job sucked because the research questions and paradigms were defined well in advance of me showing up, so I couldn’t steer things towards my personal interests. The new job sucks because I have so much administrative and project management responsibility and nobody to delegate to. Expecting a postdoc — or any job — to be all upside is a recipe for disappointment; the trick is to find one where the downsides aren’t too bothersome.
What a job entails is usually defined by bosses’ needs and priorities. This means that if you’re a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed PhD grad, with oodles of your own ideas, you might have to compromise or put these aside if they’re not what your PI wants (or not what they promised their funder or employer). It also means your salary probably won’t match what you could get in a different sector, because universities/funding agencies are mostly publicly funded and anything that’s publicly funded needs to be run on a shoestring (with the exception of senior management salaries and flashy new buildings, of course).
A postdoc is a job, and since we are expected to have jobs, you might as well get one that you like. For me, I like that my postdoc jobs have always run the gamut from empirical precision to creative thinking. I value the flexibility to apportion my time differently day to day, and week to week. I like moving around and working with new people. It’s quite nice to have a job where I get to learn new things and face new challenges. I have to do tasks I don’t always enjoy, but usually in service of something I value. I have disagreements with colleagues, collaborators, and PIs about things like the content of papers or analytic approaches, but this is the nature of group science.
It’s a bit simplistic to say that the only reason to do a postdoc is to stay on the track to a faculty job. It’s a big part of my reason for doing so, but my experience isn’t universal. Some people want to work permanently in academic research because they like the flexibility and don’t necessarily want to head their own labs; funding availability can make this tough but many people manage to make it work. Others might want to do a postdoc to flesh out a particular skill, to confirm whether or not they like working in research, or to recover from their PhD and plan their next steps while getting paid to work do familiar tasks in an environment they know well. If you know what your needs are, and either your current job or postdoc jobs in general aren’t fulfilling those needs, you can always hit the bricks.
Acknowledging that a postdoc is a job and that all jobs suck does not mean tacitly accepting all the structural issues of academia; from strict hierarchies and tolerance of bullies with big grants, to adverse scientific incentives, undervaluing of labour, and entrenchment of precarity. It just means that you shouldn’t be hard on yourself if you don’t enjoy every moment of being a postdoc, if pursuing this “calling” isn’t leading you to easy academic success, and if you would like to be better compensated but don’t think you should have to move sectors for it.
What does it mean to be a postdoc, then? It’s not a life of asceticism, drudgery, and oppression, nor is it a guaranteed path to prestige, glory, and a well-paid speaking circuit. It’s something you might enjoy doing for what it is; that you might like for the familiarity having just come out of a PhD; that you might be pursuing with rational expectations of transferring skills to other sectors while holding out hope for a faculty position. It’s a job.
