Timeline for When and why did the postdoctoral position originate?
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10 events
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| Mar 4, 2010 at 16:27 | comment | added | Ben Webster♦ | Of course, phrasing like "more postdocs than necessary" suggests that everyone's goal is to avoid doing postdocs and get permanent positions as soon as possible, which I don't think is really the case. It's many people's but postdocs do have a lot of advantages: the workload is generally lighter than for tenure-track faculty (I know I'm going to be teaching more when I switch to being an assistant professor next year, and I'll also be doing service and supervise grad students), you can often live in a place more congenial to your tastes, etc. | |
| Mar 4, 2010 at 7:48 | comment | added | Q.Q.J. | Oh, yes that makes sense to me now, thanks. | |
| Mar 4, 2010 at 7:22 | comment | added | JBorger | Definitely not. I guess I was just working at the margin, as economists like to say. At some point people started doing most post-docs than necessary (=zero, originally), and I was proposing a reason why. Now you pretty much have to do at least one post-doc, but if you wanted to go against the flow, you could try to get a tenure-track job one or two years after your phd. This would involve compromises, but so would another few years in post-docs. | |
| Mar 4, 2010 at 5:55 | comment | added | Q.Q.J. | I'm curious to know whether you are implying an alternative approach to the standard academic career path with your last point. It's hard to get a permanent position without at least one postdoc. | |
| Mar 3, 2010 at 6:47 | comment | added | JBorger | Fair points. I guess we're starting to get into what it means to explain why something happened, when you can't repeat the experiment. All this would be interesting to talk about, but the discussion would probably balloon, so maybe MO isn't the best place to do it. | |
| Mar 3, 2010 at 4:22 | comment | added | Ben Webster♦ | James- Like Kevin says, this is a bit problematic as a complete explanation. It gives no good explanation for why funding agencies like the NSF sponsor postdocs, for example. There's also the fact that rich schools, not poor schools, hire postdocs. When universities want cheap labor, they get grad students and adjuncts, not postdocs. Of course, postdocs' cheapness relative to senior faculty is a factor, but I don't see it as the primary driver of the postdoc phenomenon. | |
| Mar 3, 2010 at 4:11 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by Ben Webster♦ | ||
| Mar 3, 2010 at 2:33 | comment | added | JBorger | I agree that things depend a lot on the country. I assumed (maybe wrongly) that the person was asking about the US market. I also agree that a longer and less certain tenure-track system would give the same result, but I'm not sure that's different in substance to the current system. The only difference I can see is that with a post-doc, the agreement is that they're not going to promote you unless you hear otherwise, whereas with a tenure-track position, they agree to tell you if they're not going to. | |
| Mar 3, 2010 at 1:39 | comment | added | Kevin McGerty | Hi Jim! I'm not sure the "why" part is as easy as you say: the extent to which post-doc positions from part of the standard career trajectory seems to vary a lot with subject area and country. My impression is that in France people often get permanent (but possibly poorly paid) positions quite early. On the other hand, in the US for example, wouldn't a longer and maybe less certain tenure-track system give the same cheap-labor result? | |
| Mar 2, 2010 at 22:56 | history | answered | JBorger | CC BY-SA 2.5 |