The Ideal Postdoc Duration: Get Out Before You Get Old
by
Here’s a good rule of thumb: if you can use the word “Decade” to describe your current graduate school or postdoctoral experience, it’s time to move on. In fact, our recent poll on optimizing graduate school found the ideal length to be significantly shorter than the dreaded D-word. However, grad school and postdoctoral experiences are not the same. In one situation, there are exams, committees and departments that (should) track your progress and keep you moving through the system. However, in the other situation there are far fewer administrative and departmental pressures to move on. In fact, it’s not uncommon for a postdoc to settle into a comfortable routine in which the days and weeks blend into months and years seemingly unnoticed. (Another rule of thumb: if you use the words “comfortable” and “routine” to describe your postdoc, you probably won’t be using the words “exciting new job” anytime soon.) At what point is staying in the postdoc doing more harm than good?
In our continued examination of the milestones along the research career pathway, we turn today to perhaps one of the most amorphous stages in our development. While certain factors like funding access may place restrictions on the duration of a postdoc, they’re rarely hard-stops. A postdoc is an important extension of our scientific training and due to the diversity in our experiences, it may be difficult to accommodate all situations with a standard length of time. For example, projects that require the development of a new system (assay, organism, knock-out, etc.) may be expected to take longer than those that plug-in to the existing expertise of the lab. Or individuals who switch fields from their graduate work may anticipate an extra year or two as a result of the learning curve they’ll face in their new discipline. And of course, there are a number of personal factors that may influence the postdoc duration such as having children, buying a house, or waiting for a job in the same city due to the two-body problem.
It’s also important to acknowledge that the eventual employment outcome of a situation also effects the ideal postdoc duration. For example, a lab that averages 7-year postdocs may actually be acceptable if they place 99% of the postdocs into their dream job. On the other hand, a 2-year postdoc that places 10% of individuals in the jobs they wanted may not seem like such a great deal after all.
While each of us can appreciate the variability inherent in each postdoctoral experience, we also know that at some point – regardless of the factors in play – we get a queasy feeling in our gut telling us “we’ve been here too long.” It’s the point at which we start to feel we’ve hit the point of diminishing returns. With every additional day, we think we may actually be harming our own prospects for career advancement and, if nothing else, we know we’re damaging our energy and enthusiasm for the research.
So how long should a postdoc be? What’s the length of time that provides the ideal balance between proper training and career advancement?
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Caroline Angelard
wrote on March 19, 2012 at 1:59 pm
Postdocs are some sort of transition before getting a post. I am not sure this period can really be comfortable. So in my opinion a postdoc should end as soon as we get a position!
Dr. 27
wrote on March 19, 2012 at 4:15 pm
I'd say that depending on the discipline, anything from 3-4 years, 5 being at the very top, in case you're securing funding or resources to start as PI ASAP.
alan@benchfly
wrote on March 19, 2012 at 6:01 pm
Yeah, the K99 Career Development award is a perfect example of what you're talking about. You apply as a postdoc and get funding that bridges the end of your postdoc and the beginning of your academic career- great deal. If you can land one, it certainly changes the game for your job prospects, but it would likely through you off of the "ideal postdoc duration" above.
@chrisadieni
wrote on March 19, 2012 at 4:40 pm
Great article Alan! A few things to say about it:
So, not to put words in Alan's mouth, but the way I read this is that you infer that grad school has a way of tracking your progress (via committee meetings, coursework, comprehensive exams, etc.) that tends to keep you moving forward in a timely fashion. I would say that, in theory, you should be moving forward faster in your postdoc than you did in grad school. I say this because in my first two years of grad school, the big drain on time during the Fall and Winter semesters was definitely the coursework I had to do- however little it might seem as compared to the undergrad course load, it is still a time drain. Then, there is the teaching assistantship. A major chunk of my grad school funding came from TAships that ran through the Fall and Winter semester, every single year. In fact, due to those two concepts alone, the only time in all of grad school where I could truly work uninterrupted were the Summer semesters; needless to say I spent my grad school years not quite working on my tan. Now, with regards to comprehensive exams, thesis writing and examination, meetings, etc., I can see how those were important and indeed even necessary. That said, I feel the same way about them as the coursework and TAing: in the end, they diverted attention away from research.
A postdoc, on the other hand, is supposed to be all-research-all-the-time (at least it was for me!). There are none of the interruptions that you would face in grad school. It should therefore take you less time in a postdoc to be as productive (or more) than you were in grad school. By those merits, I would hence argue that a postdoc should be of substantially shorter duration than grad school… at most, 50-60% of the time it took you to get through grad school.
Now there's another thing that I got the sense from a Facebook comment that Alan was going to mention in here, but I guess for one reason or another, didn't make it in. This is the murky situation of multiple postdocs (a situation I now find myself in, yay me!). Or, if you don't want to consider each step as a "postdoc" by specific nomenclature, then a "postdoc" here, a "research fellowship" there, a "visiting scientist" gig somewhere else; bottom line, multiple transient (3 years or less) positions but nothing that you would call permanent. How do you evaluate these multiple transient positions? Do you weight the time cumulatively? Do you focus exclusively on the most important/relevant/productive one and consider the others a sunk cost? And… in this day and age, what is the correct definitely for a postdoctoral versus non-postdoctoral position anyway; we're finding ourselves increasingly in a scientific world with shorter and shorter contract (or grant-limited) positions.
My two cents, anyway. Thanks again Alan for writing this!
alan@benchfly
wrote on March 19, 2012 at 5:57 pm
Chris, I think you're absolutely right that the postdoc should be a period of almost pure research, especially compared to the number of (required) distractions you mentioned such as classes and teaching. And based on the poll results thus far, you're spot on – and most people agree – that a postdoc should probably be about 50-60% of graduate school (avg grad school, 5 years; poll results for postdoc, 3 years; 3/5=60%).
The other point you bring up about multiple postdocs (or whatever they might be called) is a great one, but we intentionally held it out of this discussion to keep the issues separate. For this poll, we wanted people to focus only on defining a single postdoc. However, tune in next Monday and you might just find a discussion on multiple postdocs…
Thanks for the great comments!
Elaine
wrote on April 5, 2012 at 5:07 pm
I would think a 3 year post doc is pretty short. For my post doc, I would expect to complete and publish 2 big projects (almost there). Also these days, each figure should contain a through f (alot more work). To collect data, trouble shoot etc such experiments takes a considerable amount of time, not to mention learning new techniques. Don't forget writing manuscripts and completing reviews. To get to the next level after post doc, one should be able to apply for funding: take into consideration having enough preliminary data (i.e., most of the project completed), having the support and encouragement from your pier (not so easy to find), and the current funding climate (say no more)! These days, I would say if you get away with a 3 year post doc and you make PI, you're extremely lucky. 4-5 years is more realistic.