What is a postdoc?

Today's post is for everyone wondering "what is Rory actually doing in Paris? What is a 'postdoctoral researcher' really?" Since you asked the question, you get to learn about the wonderful world of academia and higher education.

The answer is, on one level, quite simple, but also quite complex as there are many caveats and exceptions. The simple answer is that a postdoc is a form of temporary employment for people with PhDs, which allows them to gain extra training and experience before (presumably) moving on to a permanent position as a professor.

For the longer answer, we have to consider the traditional career trajectory of someone with a PhD. This trajectory is roughly (a) get a PhD, (b) be hired into a professorship. (By "professorship" I mean being hired as an "assistant professor" in North America, or as a "lecturer" in the UK. The positions are broadly equivalent. (Confusingly, "lecturer" in the North American context has a different meaning.)) However, there are two problems with this traditional trajectory:
1) There are very few professorships, and quite a lot of people with PhDs
2) Some fields of knowledge are so very specialized that even after getting a PhD, your knowledge is not complete or effective enough to do groundbreaking original research.

So, as a partial solution, a "postdoctoral" period of additional training is common. Postdoc positions are very diverse, but traditionally they involve working with a mentor (usually an established, famous researcher) on some new project that is related to but not the same as your previous research. Along the way, you will learn new skills, theories, and frameworks, and acquire valuable experience in writing up research articles and supervising students. Some postdoc positions involve working on a specific, pre-determined project, some are open-ended. Some positions involve a little (or a lot) of teaching, to postgraduates or undergraduates, while some have no teaching. Some involve a lot of committee work, organizing, and managing, while others do not. Some postdocs don't even have an explicit mentor.

In some fields, such as the natural sciences, doing a postdoc is all but mandatory if you want to stay in the academic game. (In natural sciences, there are also a lot of job opportunities for PhDs in private industry, so that's where many people go instead of professorships.) In the humanities, postdocs are somewhat rarer. In the social sciences (like linguistics and cognitive science), they're fairly common. Postdocs also appear to be more common in Europe than in North America, although I think that's more to do with the volatile nature of higher education funding in Europe than an actual cultural preference. Indeed, it's not uncommon for academics in Europe to be sustained purely through research funds acquired from grants, rather than through a direct contract from a university. They're still affiliated with a university, but their salary comes from a research foundation (usually funnelled through the university, who skim money off the top so they can pay their electricity bills). This kind of precarious academic situation is becoming more common, and all it takes for them to face unemployment is a few failed grant applications or research budget cuts. It's scary.

So, postdocs are really diverse. What's mine like? Well, I have a supervisor (or a mentor), and together we are working on a project that is largely of my own devising. I do not have any teaching responsibilities, although I've been informally mentoring some master's and PhD students, and I'm otherwise free to pursue my research in whatever way I like. All in all, it's a great position, and very conducive to learning new skills, getting papers published, and making me more attractive for landing that coveted professorship job.

What do postdoctoral researchers actually do, though? For me, there is a lot of variability in my day-to-day activities. Here's a rough outline of the sorts of things that I do:

• Attending discussion groups. Someone may seek expert feedback on a research proposal or a draft presentation for a conference.
• Meetings. Yes, you can't escape meetings, even in higher education. Meetings with collaborators to discuss our projects (and assign tasks and keep people on schedule); meetings with students to review their progress; meetings with the whole lab to discuss administration; meetings with visiting scholars to talk about their latest project; and more.
• Reading articles. Staying up-to-date on the current state of the field is very important - new findings are always being published, and new methodologies and techniques developed. I spend a lot of time simply prioritizing what I need to read closely, what I can simply skim, and what I can ignore. There's a lot of good science out there!
• Designing and planning experiments. This can be a long process and is often one of the most varied aspects of my job. It can involve making recordings, combing through dictionaries for words with just the right combinations of sounds, creating huge spreadsheets to make sure your designs are "balanced", tweaking hardware to ensure that stimulus presentation is correct and that responses are accurately recorded, learning new programming techniques for presenting stimuli, and more.
• Analyzing data from experiments. This part can also take a while, depending on how much (or little!) work I did in the planning stage. This usually involves a lot of statistics and a little programming. For many experiments, acoustic analysis is also necessary (and invariably tedious).
• Preparing presentations to give at professional conferences. Sending work-in-progress for consideration for presentation at conferences is all part of the job. The feedback you get at conferences can really improve the work that you do, and the personal connections you make with people can be really important too. Before the conference, of course, many hours are spent perfecting the presentation - you only have your audience for a brief time, so you have to be sure that you convey your message well.
• Writing (and re-writing) articles for publication in scientific journals. This is a big part of the job. Academics are judged to a large extent on the quality (and quantity) of their publications. Finished articles are sent to a journal, who sends them out to reviewers (other academics) who write critical reviews of the article, saying whether it's good enough to be published. Usually, it isn't, and they demand particular changes - incorporate a particular theory into the discussion, run another experiment, change the statistical analysis. Sometimes they simply reject the article as inferior. It can be a slow, gruelling, and soul-crushing process. Still, getting published and contributing to humanity's understanding of the world is pretty great.

I won't do all of those things in a single day, but they're all things I do. There's usually a fair degree of overlap - while I am planning my next experiment, I'll also be analyzing the data from the previous experiment, and writing up the results from the experiment before that. My job is self-directed and generally very flexible, which is great in some regards. It also means it's easy to procrastinate or skive, so I usually try to impose a fairly rigid structure to my days with clear goals so that I actually get things done.

I definitely enjoy my job, but there are times when I wish the system were simpler, or that the process of proving your worth as a researcher didn't involve so many hoops to jump through. Still, that discussion is probably better saved for another post. Sorry for the lack of pictures today. Next week, we'll be talking about Rouen (in Normandy), so you have that to look forward to!