I can haz job!

So I have been complaining about how hard it is to find a TT job in my homecountry and how often people seem to get jobs through the back door instead of through vacancies that are posted somewhere. For a while it seemed like I needed to get at least a personal grant or fellowship in order to continue doing science in the homecountry. And since my husband already got a personal grant and the homecountry's scientific organization made him move back before a certain date, it looked like not getting a grant would mean no job for me (at least not the job that I would want). One fellowship that I applied for got rejected, and one got a score that _might_ get funded, but more likely will nog get funded. And even if it got funded, the European Union decided that only half a salary would be enough to "integrate your career"… So things were looking a bit bleak and where last year I was sad that there were so little TT jobs advertised, now I was sad that maybe this meant that I would have to look for other jobs outside of science. And even though I'm not sure if that would be what I want, the prospect of never patching a cell anymore really made me really kind of sad.
But this morning brought the happy email saying that I can come work as a post-doc for a year on project that I'm very interested in, at the university where Dr. BrownEyes has a job too. So yes, I am very happy that I'm going from being a Research Associate here to being a post-doc in the homecountry and I am very happy about it. And I could insert all kinds of disgruntled postdoc comments here, but I won't. Cause I'm happy I get to do science for at least another year and a half.

Happy holidays everyone!

The upside of academia

I have an awesome summerstudent (the same as last year) who is trying to decide whether to go to grad school or med school. And every time we (the disgruntled postdocs in the lab) talk about science, about how little we get paid and how dire the funding situation is and how hard it is for us to transfer to an independent position, he leans more toward med school. Without realizing it, we’re creating a disgruntled summerstudent… So today we listed all the things that are pretty great about academia and about going to grad school now. I thought I’d share them here too:

- the relative flexibility of academia is great. My friend who is a pediatrician has an awful time when her daughter is sick and she has to go to work. She needs an enormous network around her to be able to combine the demands of her job and caring for her daughter. Whereas in academia, whether you have children that are sick or parents that need extra care, it is a lot easier to take a day or even some time off to do that. I understand that this is different when you’re teaching, but right now this is one of the aspects I really enjoy. 

- it’s good to start grad school during lean times. When I started grad school (in 2005), the times were great. There was a lot of funding and the lab that I was in grew exponentially for a couple of years. Now, when I’m at the point where I should transfer to an independent position, the times are tough. If you start grad school now, chances are that in 8-10 years, when you’re at this point in your career that I’m at now, the times are going to be better. And instead of being used to all that wealth in the lab (as I was), you’re used to lean times and things can only get better.

- you come out of grad school without additional debt: going to med school in many cases means getting in a ton of debt, whereas in grad school you get paid to go to school. And even though MDs probably end up making more, the looming liability lawsuit or even a very unfortunate accident that renders you unable to work can leave you in huge debt for the rest of your life. 

What do you think is great about being in academia or going to grad school?

What is your obligation as a PI?

Say you’re a PI of medium sized lab (or any size, it really doesn’t matter for this question) and you get an offer from a non-academic place to go work there. It’s very tempting because they pay tons of money, and with the difficult time getting grants that sounds like sweet music to your ears. So you take the job, which means your techs, grad students and post-docs don’t have a PI anymore. 

What is your obligation here? The grad students will be taken over by other PIs because the school promised them continuous funding (although it will cost them extra time), but what about the techs and the post-docs? Officially, of course, you probably owe them nothing (or do you?), but in reality what would you do? Do you try to make sure they get somewhere or is that not your problem?

Of course, this is an entirely hypothetical situation. I just wanted to talk about something else than the Boston Marathon bomber for a change.

That tree in the forest

Analogous to that tree in the forest that falls without anyone hearing it: is it worse to have a grant submitted and then rejected or almost completely written and then NOT submitted because my PI decides that is a bad idea for reasons I cannot share here? To me, the second option feels worse.

On parent-friendly science

So a lot of people, for example Erin McKiernan and TSZuska share my opinion that the recent piece in Nature kind of misses the point in trying to show that it is a piece of cake to combine a career in academia with being a mom. However, when I talk about this with friends or with my husband, their comment is often:”So who cares when women quit science because they want to stay home with their kids? What if these women don’t want academic careers, but they just want to be a stay-at-home mom?” I find it hard to formulate a good answer to this, because sure, if women want to stay home then that’s their choice. But I think that often it is not their choice to leave academia, but it is the academic culture that makes it incredibly difficult to pursue an academic career as a woman/parent/both. 

As Zuska says:

  “But every time we devote words and energy to discussing How Women Can Be Mothers And Scientists Too! we are not discussing What The Hell Is Wrong With Science And How Can It Be Fixed.“

So let’s move on to what I think can be done to fix this.

First off, it would be great if having babies and putting those babies in daycare would be easier, especially when you’re a post-doc and you don’t have all the money to arrange help in any way you would want. But this is not really changing science, it is just changing the environment around us a little bit.

What would also be great is if you could be a scientist also if you don’t love insecurity about your job. It would be awesome if there were more research associate/staff scientist type of positions for those of us who LOVE to do science but who HATE the fact that science can only be done on a short-term contract OR on a super-hard-to-get tenure track position that in itself means tons of insecurity in terms of getting grants. Wouldn’t it be great if you could have a science job that doesn’t come with tons of disappointment…?

Next, it seems like right now it is impossible to take some time (i.e. few years) off to take care of children when they are very little. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could do that and then be able to come back as an academic scientist? I sure would consider it. Or work part-time for a bit when your children are little.

Finally, for women it would be beneficial if grants and papers would be judged either anonymously or with only your last name on it. In comparison with the two items above this seems like something that can be pretty easily implemented right?

All this is coming to you from a disgruntled post-doc who just heard that she didn’t make the cut to be interviewed for a TT position in the home country and who is in a lab where funding is running out, while desperately trying to find grant money to support myself. I'm going to go dream about this fairytale land where you never have to worry about grants and you can do science with the unicorns.

It's not all there is.

I was tied to my electrophysiology rig for the past three days and completely missed the #postdocalypse hashtag on twitter. It started with Ethan Perlstein's post where he describes how even a "prestigeous independent postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton" did not guarantee him a TT position at a top institute. At almost the same time as I read about this on ProflikeSubstance's blog some people on twitter were talking about how the median age to first receive an R01 is 41. And I thought: sure all of this sucks, and we need to do whatever we can to try and change this; it would be great if there was more money for science, and a higher chance of getting a desired TT job. But at the same time, all this panic is not getting us anywhere.

Sometimes PIs lose funding, or decide to move to the other side of the US, or decide to fire a bunch of postdocs, and not too long ago one of those scenarios was a serious option in our lab. I thought for a while that I could lose my job, and I seriously thought about what I would do in that case. I could make myself useful in another lab, I could stay home with BlueEyes. I could become a yoga teacher or a babywearing instructor or both. I could write a book. All of a sudden the possibilities were endless, and I was almost sad that this scenario wasn't going to happen and I continue to be a scientist.

What I'm trying to say is that even though you've worked to become something ever since high school, and you will be extremely disappointed when you don't become what you want because of factors out of your control, that is not all there is. Seriously, it's not. And sometimes it is extremely liberating to realize that. 

In case you worry what all this hippie talk is doing here: don't worry, next time I will write a disgruntled postdoc post again.

On postdoc funding

Bashir has a post up about postdoc funding where he says that it’s weird that it takes a long time (~year) to apply for funding (i.e. the time between applying and hearing whether you’ve got the money) and that it’s hard that funding is rarely for longer than 2-3 years whereas the average postdoc length is more like >5 years. So you either have to stitch several grants together or (like me) be lucky enough that your PI supports you. I am currently applying for grant #5, the previous 4 I didn’t get. 

In the comments Drugmonkey suggests a system in which you can only apply once within the first year after getting your PhD. This is actually exactly the system that the home country funding agency has for handing out postdoc grants, and I don’t really like it for the following reasons:

First, the fact that you have to apply within the first year after your PhD, and the fact that this funding agency looks at CV (meaning: number of papers published) a lot, means that you should preferably wait as long as you can to apply to get as many papers from your PhD out. However, the funding agency also prefers it if you’re not yet at your host lab when you submit your grant, meaning that the only way around this is to stick around in your PhD lab for another year (or take a looooong time getting your PhD so that most of your papers are already published). I’m not so sure if that’s something you want to encourage.

Second, I think the transition between PhD and postdoc is the best time to switch fields or learn a new technique. When you choose the lab to do your PhD in, you may not be aware of your interests, or all the techniques that you can learn. Or you may switch interests during the course of you PhD. And during your postdoc you should form ideas about what you want to do when you have your own lab, so that doesn’t seem like a point in your career to make any dramatic changes to what you’re doing (or am I wrong? Please discuss!). However, if you need to learn a new technique (like I did, I only started doing slice electrophysiology during my postdoc), it’s very difficult to write a grant about experiments when you don’t have a clear idea what exactly those experiments are and how much time they will take. So a grant like this will either favor people who stay in their field and keep doing what they know or people who’s PI writes their grants for them. I’m not sure that is something you want to encourage either.

Also, being able to apply only once takes away the opportunity to learn from the review comments and improve your proposal in a next round.

Anyway, this comes from someone who thought that she had very strategically waited to apply for this grant until the last possibly option for her (a year after defending my PhD), because by then she had most of her papers from grad school published. However, then the government of the home country decided that this round of said grant was going to be the last, so all of a sudden many more people applied but they only handed out the same number of grants, meaning that the funding rate dropped to about half of what it normally is. Next round they said:”Haha we were just kidding, here is another round of this same grant”. So I may be a bit disgruntled about this.