What is so bad about the post-doc lifestyle anyway?

[Chronos]

Getting a secure job in science is like becoming a movie star. You need perseverance, luck and the right opportunity. Almost any Phd has the skill sets.

 

[StatGuy2000]

Industry is being used in the "anything not academia" sense. Most physics phds don't find work in (say) engineering fields.

From my phd cohort, I know two lawyers, an actuary, several software engineers,a youth minister a nurse, several people in finance, several people in insurance,an owner of a bar-and-grill near campus, and some big-data/stats people. I originally did data work for an insurance company, and now I work for a big-data consulting company. Most of those people agree that nearly nothing they learned while doing their phd has helped them, the exception being the finance people.



Not at all true- finance wants numerical programmers and it will take them where they can get them. For sales type jobs, having impressive credentials might help, but you won't be looking for a sales job. That doesn't mean they'll hand you the job- you'll have to teach yourself enough finance to interview successfully.

There is currently a shortage of statisticians/machine learning people, so its an easy job to bounce into, if you are willing to train yourself a bit.



This is a strange mentality. "I don't really care what happens to me, as long as the same thing happens to everyone else?"

ParticleGrl, just out of curiosity, do you know what area of law the two lawyers among your PhD cohort are involved with? I'm wondering if it may be in patent law or intellectual property law, since I've seen posts here on PF that those interested in those fields frequently have advanced science or engineering degrees.

 

[HepMan]

Except it isn't my anecdotal evidence against yours . It is more like my anecdotal evidence plus (official websites stating stanford and yales policies that show a limit on postdocs) against your anecdotal evidence. I would be interested in a site showing these postdocs (not research staff or research professors) which have 15 year CVs.

Depends on the country - Dragoon mentioned the UK and Canada. In the UK it is certainly becoming very common, especially in HEP, for "post-docs" to work in those jobs for 10,20 or even 30 years - partly because, in my opinion, if you become an academic the university is on the hook for your salary - as a postdoc they think they are not, and can just make you redundant if you don't bring in research money so its better for them money wise. Secondly many post-docs have very expert knowledge on some aspect of the experiment they work on and are in senior management positions within the experiment - so its not really in the interests of the collaboration to see them leave the field and they can also be used to supervise the phd students in the research group (often the academics don't have time, so this is really helpful). Its not really clear these types of jobs are the same as a traditional post-doc anymore, and perhaps they are a new career path that has emerged that is in-between post-doc and academic. However research fellowships mostly still have age limits, as in the US (except for those funding specifically particle physics which have removed the age limit). From what I know these types of long term postdocs don't really exist in any other research field in the UK, so it seems to be its related to the fact that e.g. the LHC experiments will run for another 20 years and expertise needs to be retained - and if academic jobs cannot be created, then some other job type needed to be.

In the US from what I know, this does not happen and the system is much more brutal for those who don't get a tenure-track job (although I know a few exceptions to this rule). One thing I noticed though is in a yearly cycle there are far more tenure-track jobs in the US than academic jobs in the UK. Perhaps this partly explains the difference?

 

[ParticleGrl]

One thing I noticed though is in a yearly cycle there are far more tenure-track jobs in the US than academic jobs in the UK. Perhaps this partly explains the difference?

If you scale it by the number of students graduated, the US and UK are pretty similar. All the hep experiment/theorists in my cohort have left physics for lack of a job. I get the anecdotal impression that the UK and Europe care a lot more about retaining the training investment, the US is happy to throw you out after your phd + a postdoc or two.