A long tale of woe. This post has undergone a number of iterations in the last few weeks. It started off as an expletive-laden cathartic rant, not unlike my tirade at First Great Western. But I’ve calmed down a lot and re-written it to try not to sound bitter. Which was difficult, because I am.
I was going to title this post Leaving Science, but I could never leave science, intrinsically I am a scientist. I fucking love science. Which is why it is particularly painful to have to leave the lab bench and stop doing the thing I love. But I feel I have to.
I feel like I’ve been forced out of academic research science by a lack of opportunities to progress my career and become an independent researcher.
For those not in the loop, I should probably begin by explaining the career path in academia, or within life sciences at least. First you need an undergraduate degree, then you need a PhD. A PhD is effectively the start of your research career; you’re learning, but you’re learning fast and by the end of your three or four years as a PhD student you should be indistinguishable from the postdoctoral research staff in the lab. Which is handy, as this is the next step.
Being a postdoctoral researcher is a tough life. It is frowned upon a little (for no good reason) to stay in the same lab you did your PhD, so you’ll be expected to move. You’ll also be given a fixed-term three year contract – if you’re lucky – I’ve seen (and signed) far shorter contracts that that. As a postdoc your boss will have high expectations of you. That you will produce the data that will make the big publications. But you’ll probably also have to write those papers, supervise the undergrad and postgrad students, and do the ordering, cleaning and other jobs which keep the lab ticking over. For all this work you’ll be rewarded not with a tenured position, oh no. You’ll be rewarded with another fixed term contract – if you’re lucky. It’s a slightly crappy situation but everyone puts up with it, because it’s the only way you’ll ever get to be the boss.
Most postdocs would like to be the boss of their own lab. I’m aware there are some postdocs that don’t; who would like to be lab workers for other people for their entire career. However this is also very difficult and there is generally considered to be a time limit on how long you can be an academic postdoc, it’s a bloody mad situation, but not the subject of this post.
Traditionally there are two ways to become independent and to run your own lab and pursue your own ideas: i) you could get a prestigious fellowship with your salary and research funds provided by one of the research councils or a charity; or ii) you could get a lectureship with your salary paid by a university and you have to go and get your research funds from research funders and teach undergraduate students to earn your keep.
For the last two years I have been trying to become an independent scientist. I have written fellowship applications. Four of them in total. Each one a 50 page form of about 10,000 words. I mostly wrote these on my own time. In the evenings and weekends or on annual leave. The first three were all rejected, in one case without 96% of it being read by a single person and with zero feedback (thanks for totally wasting my time BBSRC). But after each application came a new iteration. With each set of feedback came useful comments to help make it better. Finally with my fourth application, I cleared the biggest hurdle. I got shortlisted by The Wellcome Trust. It was momentous, and I’m under no illusion as to how lucky I was to get to that stage. Unfortunately I wasn’t successful at the final interview stage. It’s not much consolation to me to be told I did really well to get through to the last couple of dozen in a prestigious national fellowship. If anything it hurt more than the rejections before interview, because I was so close.
“Well, I’m sure you learnt a lot for next time” said my Dad upon hearing the news. He’d be right of course, but sadly there is no next time. My time is up. For some reason these fellowships come with an “experience limit”, a maximum time you can be a postdoc for before applying. This is a bit like the postdoctoral time limit I spoke of above. But far more explicit. 6 years. If you’ve not made it by then, then they don’t want to know. So, I’ve had my chance, and it’s gone. What the point of these time limits? I have no idea, my best guess is that it is simply to limit the number of applications each time. But six years? It’s no time at all. Why would you exclude people with more experience? Especially in these days when data can often take years to appear in publications.
The other path to independence is a lectureship. I’ve applied for four of these positions too, at three different universities of various standing. In each case I wasn’t shortlisted, but in each case no-one in my peer group was shortlisted either. No other postdocs. Just established lecturers and fellows often from abroad. There’s been no-one at my own institution hired from postdoc level in the last five years either. So that’s four universities life sciences departments who haven’t hired a postdoc to be a lecturer in at least two years, if not longer.
You could say I have been unlucky to have been trying to make this transition to independence at a time when finances are tight. But there have been positions advertised. They’ve just gone to more experienced, more expensive, scientists. Universities seem unwilling to take a risk on an unproven scientist. Instead they let funding bodies take all the risks on unproven scientists and hire fellows with funding or scientists from abroad instead. Ten years ago a fellowship was a parallel to lecturer on the academic career ladder, my impression now is that fellow is the rung before lecturer.
Why is this happening? I don’t know. I’m tempted to blame the upcoming 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF), a huge operation to assess the quality of research currently taking part in UK universities, the outcome of which will decide where future funds will end up, and has led universities to try and boost their REF score by buying in talent*. But there have been similar assessment exercises in the past decades and young lecturers used to be hired. And besides, I have been offered the opportunity to take part in a secondment scheme where the best postdocs were given part time positions as lecturers in order for them to be submitted to REF. However given this was not a tenure track scheme, with no research support, no opportunity to apply for independent funding, no formal teaching training and not even a pay rise, I politely declined “the opportunity”.
Is this just a case of sour grapes from someone who didn’t quite make the grade? It’s possible. Maybe I’m not good enough. In which case, I have finally got the message! I have given up trying to objectively assess the quality of my own academic output (so don’t envy those who are going to have to assess hundreds of academics during REF). I have had comments about my track record from referees including; “poor, with no outstanding publications in first position”, “very productive”, “very good pedigree”, “good but not exceptional”, “top-level scientist”, “5 first author papers in excellent journals” and my particular favourite; “the applicants CV is a weakness with only 11 papers published in 8 years”.
Whilst that final comment is the one that stands out. Just how many papers does a good postdoc have in 8 years? And I think you’ll find its 7 years. The first comment is the one which really annoys me. The two pieces of work I am most proud of during my academic career were to develop and adapt existing methodologies to novel applications in order to answer questions for someone else’s project. In each case I was third author on the paper in question. Being third author on these papers is understandable, but to have my best work overlooked because I wasn’t first author is heart-breaking. Judging someone’s research output solely on papers where they are a lead author is crazy. We do the best work as academics when we work together, with people of different expertise and different skills, but this is being discouraged by a proportion of the community who are not willing to give proper credit to collaborative working**. As the situation currently stands I would honestly advise new postdocs to think twice before helping out on other people’s projects.
My personal circumstances (a young family & elderly relatives) mean I can’t travel the country and/or world to find career progression, and why should I have to? My young family also mean I’m no longer willing to do the four-hour round-trip commute (that I’ve done for 7 years) and see out my current contract whilst blindly hoping things will change, when I have no evidence that they will. So I’m taking positive action to change my life. I’ve handed in my notice and am moving to a career where my skills in communication and enthusiasm for science are valued (another problem with academia). In September I start on a PGCE course to be a science teacher, and I’m really excited about the challenges ahead and my new career (see next post).
Update:
I’ve had a couple of comments (not via the comments section) suggesting there is more to being shortlisted for lectureships than having a decent research publication record. Whilst this is undoubtedly true, I have always been advised by *the great and good* otherwise. And besides, I do pretty well in this regard anyway; I have extensive public communication projects including working with The BBC, national newspapers, magazines and have done school and pub talks. I also have undergraduate lecturing experience (one lecture/year over last five years) which has excellent student feedback. I have requested further lecturing experience and formal training in my current post but was told this wasn’t available to postdocs, only to lecturers. Yet again a case of needing formal training to get a lectureship but not being able to get a lectureship without the formal training. I would honestly like to be the academic all-rounder with research, teaching and public communication all playing a part of my career. However I am repeatedly told that only my research output will count towards getting a job and thus I have concentrated on this in my professional life, and this post.
Footnotes:
* I do have one suggestion for improving REF. Instead of assessing the output of individual researchers, assess the output of universities and departments. When a researcher moves from one university to another their work should count towards the output of the university where that research was carried out. This would incentivise universities to invest in potential rather than past performance.
** REF gives no credit for collaborative working either, with each publication only being allowed to be credited to one researcher. If two researchers have worked together on a project, only one of them can take credit for it. My idea to tie work to universities rather than individuals would also help with this and wouldn’t discourage academic collaboration within a department/university.
drbillyo 
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All I can say – Bravo!
So much of this resonates with me. I’ve got about 18 months left in academia, on my current contract, before I bug out, and end up (probably) going a similar route.
It’s madness. I look at the skill set that I have acquired, and to have that experience and those skills wasted because of an incredibly short-sighted employment dogma is galling. However, I accept that not every postdoc can become a PI.
IMHO, Academia (and their funders) should go the route of CRUK and other research institutes, where they have a high Scientific officer to Postdoc ratio.
In the lab I worked at in CRUK, there were 4 SOs, 3 PDRAs and 2-3 PhDs. The SOs run the lab, train everyone, and maintain continuity in the lab for long-term projects. They publish, they run their own projects (within remit of the lab), and they are highly valued members of research staff. The productivity of the lab at CRUK was exponentially greater than labs in academia, because of the productivity of these SOs.
You keep the expertise and experience in the lab, rather than waste it.
Question is – who is going to change the system?
I don’t know. As @Dr_Aust_PhD says in this post, most at the top just shrug and say “that’s how it is”. http://occamstypewriter.org/notranting/2013/07/25/shame-or-should-that-be-postdocalypse/
Your story is familiar, and one which is happening around the UK at the moment. I am one of the “lucky” ones – when I was in the last 6 months of my last post-doc I applied to every single lectureship in my subject in the UK. I’d saved, and told myself I had 6 months past the end of that post-doc to find a lectureship or a fellowship before giving up on academic science. It took 12 applications, 2 interviews, and 3 months signing on after the end of the last post-doc, but I got the job in Aber.
One think I think has really suffered in the current environment is the academic all-rounder: people like yourself (and myself, I hope) who can teach, do outreach, write, speak, and research. The emphasis on REF is all about the research; if our universities are full of 4* researchers, recruited for their paper output alone, we’re not doing our research communities or our students any favours. It’s not only science that has lost you – it’s the UK HE system, has lost someone good – you’d have been a superb lecturer.
Thanks Hannah, I hope instead I’ll make a superb teacher.
You work in a world that is alien to me, but I know how long you’ve agonised over this decision. It is always sad when any industry loses a good person and the knowledge that goes with it, but that will be education’s gain. I’m sure your natural enthusiasm will rub off on the students. Good luck.
Thanks Baz.
What about applying to other places in Europe? I know very little *recent* cases of people managing to say in a single European country for their whole career. But I guess it also depends on the area. I work in theoretical, mathsy stuff, and there being first or third author is irrelevant (usually one just uses alphabetical order), so I guess there are a lot more differences. Anyway, best of luck for your new career.
Thanks Carlos,
For sure my personal circumstances have not made life easy, but we’re not really moveable within the UK, let alone abroad.
[…] an example, you should read this post by my Twitter mate ‘DrBillyo‘, aka Dr Bill Wilkinson. It says it far more eloquently […]
That “experience limit” sounds a bit iffy to me. I wonder if a court of law would consider it to be a form of indirect age discrimination?
I suspect given that its technically “university funding” that is the prize, rather than a job per se, I suspect they’re just in the realms of legal, but you’re right it’s very suspect.
Interesting post – I don’t know much about the research side of academia (yet!) but that being said, it’s really surprising to hear you say that you can’t get teaching work in your area as where I work (Northumbria) it’s the mirror image situation. They have all guns blazing trying to become a research-intensive University (instead of focussing on learning and teaching which is where their strength lies as a former poly) and no-one gets taken on without a PhD – they absolutely love young, research-active postdocs. I don’t know a PhD student who hasn’t been taken on and ended up lecturing if they’ve wanted it. A real shame about the geography of it. Anyway, you’ll make a kick-ass science teacher!
Thanks Katy. Really hope I can do myself justice in teaching.
Hey, thanks for this. Was just wondering where in the REF guidelines the part in the last footnote on single credit papers came from..? Seems a bit of a [massive] caveat of the REF!
Well between institutions or between departments returned to different assessment panels multiple credit can be given. But where two researchers in one dept have worked together, only one of them can return a piece of work (publication) and take the credit for it.
See paragraphs 40-43 here http://www.ref.ac.uk/media/ref/content/pub/panelcriteriaandworkingmethods/01_12_2A.pdf
Awesome, thanks for the link. It is a little unusual, but I guess it’s an attempt to stop submissions just being full of intra-departmental repeats? Maybe. Luckily, my research group is me and my supervisor, so no REF submission required! *snoopy dance*
I can sympathise with your feelings. I got fed up with academia when I realised, the first idea behind every paper I wrote was “I need to publish a paper. Let’s find something that’s good enough for a paper”. There are only a handful of academics who have the luxury to only publish when they have something to say. The cause-effect relationship of results and publishing are reversed. You don’t publish because you have results to share with the world, you seek results because you need to publish to survive.
Many people waste years of their lives trying to massage non-interesting research results until they can be published, or rewriting the same paper, with the same data, same results in a different language until reviewers like it and it eventually gets published. The incentive system in academia is very poorly calibrated, and it’s getting worse as the field gets saturated.
One thing that’s not even mentioned in your post, is that salaries are really low, even if you are successful. There is no real opportunity to earn a decent salary (commensurate with your skills and level of education) until perhaps you become a tenured professor and you can spend some time consulting in industry or something. Often prestige and salary are inversely related, a highly competitive research fellowship in a Cambridge College pays something like £18k? Yes, there are other benefits, and yes, there are limited funds available, but this is still unfair and it makes an academic career a sacrifice.
The pay isn’t great by any means, but it’s adequate, fair and enough to live a comfortable life. I’m not sure where you get that £18K figure from for a fellowship, but I’d suspect that’s a tax-free PhD stipend. Being a public-sector job, academia is never going to be well paid and anyone who wants to do science for the money will have jumped ship to industry immediately after their PhD, if not before.
You’re right though about the need to publish and the skewing this causes in publishing of whatever you’ve got to make a paper. We need to be accountable to the public who fund us, so I suspect our publication records will always play a big part of that, but we need to find a way of being a little more subjective about it. Assessing quality as well as quantity.
You are verbose and whingy.
Guilty as charged.
I was in a similar position, and applied for a bunch of lectureships without getting anywhere – probably ten of them. Then I got an interview, then I got a job. It was at a fairly poor university, and I took it because my postdoc funding was running out and I needed something. After ten weeks in the job, I saw lectureships going at a better university where the other academics were closer to my interests, and I ended up getting that and moving there/here.
My point is that I was persistent and did it in a roundabout way. I applied for many more jobs than you, and got rejected a lot of times, but I got it in the end. It’s quite possible that I was lucky, but I can’t help feeling that you’ve given up a bit easily here. Four lectureship rejections is not a high number. If you talk to people who have ‘made it’ then you will often find that they got knocked back more than that. It sounds like you have a real enthusiasm for what you do (or did) and it’s a shame to give that up. It often seems like people have to lower their standards a bit – if the four you applied to were all Russell Group then it’s probably not a surprise you didn’t get anywhere.
I do sympathise, it can be ridiculously competitive and not everyone is going to get a job. Perhaps your personal circumstances are a geographical constraint, but it must have been apparent to you earlier in your career that this would be the case. Very few academics avoid moving. I’ve moved three times in the last two years, about 200 miles each time. That’s what it took to get me the job I wanted in a place I was happy with.
You are probably right of course, and I acknowledge that my lack of flexibility in being able certainly didn’t help.
On the issue of universities, two of the jobs I applied for were at non-Russell group unis.
It wasn’t so much the rejections per se, it was the conversations I had with staff in all those institutions and finding out that none of my peers were being short-listed (let alone getting the job).
I was getting plenty of advice similar to yours to keep applying and keep applying. But I saw no evidence for myself that anything would change and I was sick of commuting. So instead of moaning (bar this blog), I decided to take positive action to change my life.
P.S. Am loving teaching.
I was interviewed about my motivations for writing this piece for Sydni Dunn’s piece on Quit Lit for Chronical Vitae (https://chroniclevitae.com/news/216-why-so-many-academics-quit-and-tell).
I certainly feel I tick quite a few of the motivational boxes.
How are things going after nearly 6 months?
I decided in 2008, after a period of time as a postdoc, that my heart wasn’t in it as all I saw was an ever receding chance that I might get a permanent position after several years of globe-trotting and putting my family life into suspended animation. I had written a couple of applications for grants/ co-PI, etc. and been rejected (perhaps I was a bit early in the process), but I had a similar inexplicable range of comments about my publication record. After my PhD and 18 months of a post-doc (when I started writing applications) I had a total of 12 papers with 5 first authors including a Phys Rev Lett (a top journal in my field, the go to after you have had your nature/science rejection), h-index of 8, but one referee described it as ‘mediocre’ and another as ‘limited’… All the academics I sought advice on before my applications said that they considered my publication record in my field to be ‘strong’.
I also applied for a permanent staff position at major scientific facility (to run a part of the facility co-designed by my PhD supervisor using a technique I had used throughout my PhD and postdoc) only to be rejected and offered a chance to apply for a post-doc on less money than I was on at the time in a much more expensive part of the country. The permanent staff position went to a foreign post-doc who had no experience in the technique at all. My applications to foreign scientific facilities for advertised posts were not even acknowledged.
So, I jumped ship to industry and have never looked back, much better pay and conditions, fantastic development and progression opportunities and I am treated with respect by people who previously would have looked at me down the end of their nose (professor now do what I say, not the other way around).
I have a contemporary (and friend) who decided to stick it out. He was a brilliant scientist (much more talented than I) but he was shy and preferred being a ‘doer’ rather than a ‘shaper’ so he got stuck in perma-post-doc mode until the funding ran out several years later when he was forced to take on any job he could get to support his family and he is pretty miserable. We are now drifting apart in our friendship because I feel utterly wretched talking about work as it is so obvious that my decision to get out of academia earlier was the right one. Most of my friends who have tried to stick it out are utterly miserable stuck in temporary contracts and constantly looked over for permanent positions (5 years later!!!!) in favour of foreign academics with or even without prior experience, only one of my contemporaries has made a fist of it and he really is good at talking the talk, but, imho, he is not the best scientist of the lot of us.
All in all, pretty miserable and why I advise prospective academics to seriously think hard about their choice to pursue this career as it can leave you high and dry quite easily.
I find the whole thing utterly depressing and I consider my time as post-doc to be a bit of a waste. Tbh I probably would be further on in the company if I hadn’t bothered with a PhD at all – this is what the system does to your dreams.
A lot resonates in your story to mine, and as Sydni Dunn’s piece linked to above shows, we’re far from along. Sadly, like you, I see my years Postdoc as something of a waste of time career-wise, but the PhD has huge value in the “real” world.
I have read a blog piece recently which I pretty much agreed with in terms of advice to PhD-grads and potential postdocs, they need to ask themselves two questions:
1. Do you want to be a lab head and run your own group?
2. Are you willing to travel the world and forego settling down with a family (or at the very least drag them with you), to achieve this?
If the answer to these two questions isn’t yes, then I really would advise against postdocing, but even if it’s yes, it’s simply not true to say you’ve just got to plug away, you’re also going to have to get lucky. …*daft punk plays in head*….
Bill – I’m gutted to hear you are leaving. There very little that is meritocratic about academic progression. On the plus side, I’m sure you’ll make a fantastic teacher. Good luck with it! Ned.