Do as I say, not as I do: advice for foreign post-docs in the US - part I

I have been in the US for nearly four years to do my post-doctoral training, and now that we're almost moving back, I feel that I have a lot of useful information to share with the internet. Even though 90% of my readers are in the US, I hope that there are enough people out there that can benefit from the things I've encountered. And maybe it's useful for USians as well. Because with many things, I realize now that I could have done things differently, hence the title.

For this first part, I want to talk about the thing that is on my mind right now: maternity leave. In my homecountry, women get 16 weeks off around the birth of their child. This is mandated by the government, so there are no differences in policies per university like in the US (where there is no such thing as paid maternity leave mandated by the government). When I talked about this on twitter today I discovered that for many, many graduate students and post-docs, there are no regulations regarding maternity, paternity or adoption leave at all. This leaves people very vulnerable, because it is up to your advisor to determine how long your leave can be and whether it is paid or unpaid. So if you're looking for a post-doc and you have the intention to start a family in the near future, it might be wise to VERY CAREFULLY try to find out what your future PI's view on leave is.

Some positions, like my current position, make you eligible to apply for Family and Medical Leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). However, you might want to study this before starting your family, because it requires you for example to be employed for longer than a year before you have a baby and to work a certain amount of hours to be eligible. In my homecountry, there's really not a lot you need to do to apply for this type of leave, but here in the US I found that you need to carefully follow the rules and make sure you are eligible before applying. This is especially important because if you don't get paid during your leave, you still need to pay for your health insurance that is normally taken out of your paycheck. In my university, when applying for FMLA you first need to finish all your sick, annual and personal days before the unpaid leave starts. So when you're considering having a baby it might be worth trying to save as many days as you can to make sure the unpaid portion of your leave is as short as possible. One might ask: but then what do you do when your baby is sick after you've gone back to work and you have no days left? I have no clue at all… Which brings me to the following question from twitter:

@mwilsonsayres @BabyAttachMode @ChrisPickett5 @FitAcademic On that note: any examples of good US #matpatadoptleave at research institutes?
— Kerry Swift (@RowGirl2012) January 27, 2014

Please comment if your university or institute does, because others might be able to change this at their institute!
So as with many things my most important advice about maternity, paternity or adoption leave is: READ TEH FUCKING MANUAL!!

Homecountry nostalgia: Elfstedentocht

With some pillows and a boppy it's totally possible to nurse a baby and type on your computer at the same time. However, sometimes being trapped under a nursing and/or sleeping baby is a perfect excuse to watch some tv. Just now I watched this highly recommendable (but not subtitled) homecountry show about the Elfstedentocht in 1997. It nearly made me cry from all the nostalgic feelings. Since 98% of my readers are not from my homecountry, I should probably explain.

The "Elfstedentocht" (eleven cities tour) is an ice-skating event that last happened in 1997. To me that sounds like yesterday, but in reality that's 17 years ago (crap, that makes me feel kinda old). This event is a 200 km (120 mile) skating tour on natural ice in one of the northern provinces in the homecountry. A province so far away that people even speak their own language. Every year the main question during the winter is whether this epic tour is going to take place or not. Only 16.000 people can skate during this event and the other 16 million inhabitants of the homecountry travel to said province to party and encourage the skaters. But with global warming and such, the last time the ice was thick enough to hold this many people was in 1997. So we nostalgically look back and wonder when the next time will be. In the meantime, there are a bunch of "alternative Elfstedentochten" where people skate 120 miles on ice somewhere else in the world and there's a host of other Elfstedentochten, where people use rowing boats, bicycles, motor cycles and what not to complete the same route. Yours truly cycled the tour once and rowed it twice (but with rowing it's a relay race, I should add).

The entire internet could not provide me with a clip with English subtitles but here's the 1997 finish. Also, this was the winter fashion in 1997. Also quite interesting.

Getting jobs through the back door

Warning: this post is written in an empty lab because all my colleagues left for the Society for Neuroscience meeting. Since I am too pregnant to attempt going to such a large meeting that is an uncomfortably long flight away, I am still in the lab. In the meantime, I can’t help but worry about whether I will find grant money and/or a job before we move back to the homecountry next year. So then you know why this post is kind of ranty.

Every now and then I check the websites of some of the institutes and universities in my homecountry, to see what happens there. And more often than I would like, I will see that someone who used to be a post-doc in one of the groups, then moved up to become a group leader in the same university or institute. Good for that person, you would think. But wait a minute, how did they get there? Was there a vacancy for a position that they applied for? Most of the time the answer is no. Most of the time, these people get promoted within the institute or university. Why does this happen? Because they are there and people know what they’re capable of? Because they are friends with the people who make those decisions? Because it’s easier for the institute to just hire someone than to have a search? I don’t know. Perhaps a combination of those reasons. What I do know is that it makes it hard to find a job if you don’t already have a foot in the door, because there are rarely any advertised jobs for anything higher than post-doc positions. I know this is not specific to my homecountry, but actually happens in many European countries, which explains the lack of mobility of researchers between European countries. As you might expect, I think this system kind of sucks.

Alright, I got that off my chest, now I can go back to work. Enjoy SfN and keep me updated on who filled their SfN Bingo cards first!!

Changing science, one lengthy PDF at a time

This weekend, I read an article entitled: ”Rebels rise against science gone crazy” (my translation) in one of my homecountry’s newspapers. A short version can be found here, the whole article is behind a paywall. The article was about a group of Dutch scientists, who believe that certain things in science need to change. These scientists by the way are all white males in their fifties (from looking at their pictures). Apparently increasing diversity, which is not one of their goals anyway, is not something the group strives for themselves. But exactly what do they think needs to change? I first clicked on their website, called “Science in Transition”, that is unfortunately completely in Dutch. There are a couple English articles on there, if you know that for that you have to click on “meer lezen”. (No wonder Nature Magazine recently found that there is very little mobility between European countries.) The scientists have written a manifest stating their ideas and solutions. However, this manifest is a 31 page PDF with no bullet points, highlighted sentences or a summary. It’s harder to read than the classic Fatt and Katz paper about electrophysiology, but I read it anyway (as opposed to Fatt and Katz I must admit to my shame).

In this PDF the writers define what the problem is: one part of the problem is that scientists are judged too much on basis of impact factors, and H-index, which can be influenced according to these authors by scientists promising each other authorships and citations. Another (perhaps related) problem is that the public has the wrong ideas about how science works and how scientists come to certain conclusions. The third problem is scientific fraud.

Now I wanted to summarize their ideas and solutions to change science, but the need to do science got in the way of getting through these pretty horribly written 31 pages of the manifest. In very short (copied from the newspaper article), they state:

•         Society should be more involved with the identification of scientific problems that scientists need to work on.
•         The value of science (and scientists?) needs to be measured not with impact factors and h-indexes but with societal relevance.
•         The number of PhD students should decrease, and PhD students should learn better how the science world works.
•         Scientists should be honest about insecurities about their data, conflicting results and conflicts between scientists.
•         More research should be done on the sociology and economy of science itself.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it is great that people are thinking about how to change science and that scientists are trying to be open about the flaws in the current scientific system, but PLEASE write a manifest that is readable because throwing this manifest down from the ivory tower may not be the best way to change science. Also, please discuss their ideas and solutions.

There's so much emptiness here!

Coming from a country that's just a little bigger than the state of Maryland, but with more than three times as many inhabitants, I am not used to seeing a lot of empty land. Wherever you are in my homecountry, you're usually just a short car (or bicycle!) ride away from the nearest supermarket. However, here in the States I am always astounded by the amount of emptiness, for example when we were driving through Wyoming on our way back from Yellowstone and Grand Teton.

 Look at that, there's just NOTHING there! It always gives me a bit of reverse claustrophobia. Is there a word for that?

The home of the free toilets

Whenever we go back to the homecountry, I’m excited about all the things I can eat there that are hard to find here in the US. However, some things are not that great in the homecountry, for example the availability of bathrooms. And for someone who is pregnant and needs to pee at least once every half hour, this is quite an issue. What I love about the US is that everywhere you go, there’s a bathroom that you can use for free. This might sound weird if you live here, but for example in the homecountry there are no toilets in parks (not even porter potties), there are no bathrooms in supermarkets, and some trains don’t even have toilets in them. Also, whenever there are bathrooms, like in the train station, in a department store or in a gas station, you usually have to pay for them. It usually costs 50 eurocents (~$0.60) to use the bathroom. So for the remaining time we will live here, I will certainly appreciate that this country is the home of the free toilets.

The part-time paradise

My home country is the country in Europe where most people work part-time. Nearly half of the workforce (both male and female) work part-time (meaning less than 38 hours a week). And if that is broken down for gender you can see that 75% of women work part-time.

Source. I couldn't find this figure in English, but the X-axis shows the percentage of working people, and my homecountry is the longest blue line all the way at the bottom.

You might say: ‘Oh nice, there are so many jobs that people can do part-time and they get to spend more time with their family’. True, but the downside of this is that daycare providers often also work part-time. This means that if you are one of those few mothers that want to work full-time, you will almost certainly put your child in a daycare where it does not have one steady care provider, but different ones for almost every day, making it much harder for your child to form a bond with their care provider. 

And that is not even the worst part of it. Because the reality is that because so many women work part-time, it is almost seen as a crime when you have children and decide to work full-time. Almost no child goes to a daycare 5 days a week, and if you ask if that’s a possibility, the answer we got was:”I guess, if you insist”. I won’t even get started about the judgmental looks and comments from other mothers. It is just not done. 

So can you science part-time? I think you can, because as a matter of fact a couple of my mentors from grad school (both men and women) worked four days a week. Some of them worked 4 times 9 hours (technically full-time but with one day to be home with their kids), others worked 4 ‘regular’ days. I’m not saying that these people did not work at nights and on the weekend, because I’m pretty sure most of them did. And I guess in about a year from now (if all goes well, we get some kind of grant, etc etc) we will try for ourselves. Both Dr. BrownEyes and I are considering working 4 days a week, so that BlueEyes and prospective baby can go to daycare 3 days a week, just like their fellow homecountry kids.

Incentives to have grad students finish

In the home country, the time to finish your PhD is four years. From the start it is clear that you will need to finish within that time, because then the money has run out. I have to add that you can only start a PhD program when you already have a master’s degree, so there’s a lot less course work than in the US. Also, truth be told, most people take longer, but you have to ask your PI to support you longer, or write your thesis on welfare money. Also, departments usually get money (I don’t know how much) when grad students graduate, so that’s an incentive to get grad students to finish too. 

However, in the US it seems that there are very little incentives for grad students (or their PIs) to finish their thesis and defend. For PIs, keeping a grad student around a bit longer seems only beneficial: it’s a trained person who costs relatively little. Or, what I recently see around me quite a bit, is that PIs just seem too busy to read a grad student’s manuscripts and that keeps them around a lot longer than necessary in my opinion. And from the grad student’s point of view I guess sometimes it’s nice to stick around a bit longer to wait for job opportunities (or the lack thereof).

So what am I missing? What are the incentives to finish your PhD in the US, either for the grad student, the PI or the department?