What kind of success...

There are days I feel I am all wrong for academia. These days are the days when I look outside, and wonder what it means to ...live a normal life. Life not full of papers and codes. Life that does not propel you to be the best in your narrow field. A life that is happy in spite of that.

I will come out of this as an expert in nothing.

Every day I work on this postdoc is a day my competition gets to think more about my Ph.D. work. So I fall behind and I turn from the expert to a sideviewer. And I am just starting out in this new field, and in the end I would be in this new field in the position I was with the old field at the end of my Ph.D. Except I will now have two fields to be falling behind in.

Adversity strains us. It can be a good strain -- when we work on a project and experiments fail but with each failure we learn something new. But it can also be a bad strain -- when we work on a project that is ill thought out, governed unreasonably, unfunded, or otherwise blocked in ways irrelevant to greater understanding. When we overcome the first type of adversity, we come out tired but able to get up the next day and try again and again. The second one, however, leaves us empty, drained, struggling to make the next day count.

The current job/postdoc situation turns even the first adversity into the second. Regardless of how successful your projects are, you still hear that you need to do 1-2 more postdoc, publish in Science, or some other goal which seems unreasonable -- including that we should be grateful to have the opportunity to learn new skills, not manage a lab or some other reason which does not leave us fulfilled.

Lets step back. You are young, you find you have a knack for math/physics/chemistry/biology. You go to college and find you really do like it. You go ahead and work hard to get a Ph.D. becoming an expert on your thesis topic. You are sustained by speeches, such as the President's State of the Union address in 2006, of how badly needed are people in the STEM disciplines. You read about the American Competitiveness Initiative and you know you have a future.

And then you wake up.

No jobs in STEMS. Sorry we're all filled up with people who got their Ph.D. a decade or more ago. But you can be a wage slave and a certified nobody as a post doc. And you'd better appreciate the opportunity. Oh and post docs are limited in duration; we must make room for the next batch of graduates.

The current economic crisis has little to do with it. Academia does not grow and shrink in quite the same way as industries do. Tenured professors did not get fired -- at the worst they got furloughs, maybe even a small pay cut. They get to do their science, publish and peer review each other.

The race is often won not by the quickest but rather by the one who doesn't quit in the face of adversity.

This isn't true. The race is won by the lucky few who are at the right place at the right time working for the right person, getting the right introduction. The rest face adversity of the maybe the first and definitely the second kind. Some drop out, and inevitably some of those left do succeed. But what kind of success is this?

To be continued ...

Pressure and murder

First off, nothing really excuses murder. Dr. Bishop cannot, and should not, be excused. But some details are worth discussing anyways.

Postdocs have recently been discussed over at Ms. PhD and DrugMonkey quite a bit. In summary it seems, that established faculty tend to not see the problems with long postdocs, and current postdocs seethe at being underpaid and under respected.

A friend of mine, in his 4th or 5th year as a postdoc, was recently told that there is nothing else that he can do to improve his chances for a faculty job but to publish in Science or Nature. This was not for a job at Harvard or Standford or anywhere close. It came from people well towards the end of their career, who are sitting on the hiring committees and who have never ever published in Science or Nature.

Unrealistic expectations and pressure...

But postdoc is not the final rat race. Tenure is.

She had developed a new approach to treating Lou Gehrig’s disease, which a company was in the process of licensing for development. And she and her husband, a computer engineer with a biology degree, had invented an automated system for incubating cells that investors said would be a vast improvement over the petri dish. The system is to be marketed by Prodigy Biosystems, which raised $1.2 million in capital financing.

“From the way it looked to us, looking from the outside, she’s had success,” said Krishnan Chittur, a chemical engineering professor. “I’ve been here longer than she has, and she’s had more success raising money than I’ve had.”

Geez! I wish I were that successful. Making progress on a horrible disease, making progress in a technique, and getting more funding? No! That is not good enough anymore.

What Dr. Bishop did is deplorable and inexcusable. But are we truly surprised?

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As a foreign scientist, I found some other things disturbing. It was mentioned that the department chairman, who was shot is not American. I wonder what is the value of this information?

Should we sympathize more or less with him? He and others are dead. It is an equal tragedy whether the person killed is American or not. Or should we sympathize more with her? I mean this foreigner is taking the jobs of the hard working Americans?

Either option is in bad taste and inflammatory. And sad.