What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure
1–10 of 77 posts
Re: What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure
#2Accept your data. According to one PI, success depends more on the people doing a project than on the topic of study; some people make their project work no matter what the topic is. Others block their own way to success because they require too much evidence. I, for one, have always been excessively critical of my own data. Although I am a meticulous experimenter, whenever my results seemed to confirm my hypothesis, I was afraid to accept them because I knew I was biased (it’s funny, I know). I was spending too much time looking for alternative explanations instead of accepting that I was on the right track and moving on to the next step. We have all heard about the reproducibility crisis — and I am not advocating the reckless publication of unverified data, or recommending being so careful that you end up publishing nothing — but there is a difference between being reckless and shooting yourself in the foot.
And this, fellows, is how you end up with the reproducibility crisis. Incentives are just all messed up.
Re: What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure
#3Accept your data. According to one PI, success depends more on the people doing a project than on the topic of study; some people make their project work no matter what the topic is. Others block their own way to success because they require too much evidence. I, for one, have always been excessively critical of my own data. Although I am a meticulous experimenter, whenever my results seemed to confirm my hypothesis,…
What's good for the field (we've decided) is when we only allow a 5% Type I error rate (95% of published positive results are correct). What's good for the individual is to drive their Type I error rate up just enough so that they can publish as much as possible without getting caught.
Re: What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure
#4Coming from another field, 23 years as a post-doc seems insane to me. Is this common in some fields? I never thought of post-docs as (semi-) permanent positions or something one would spend a major chunk of a career doing. I always thought of it as a transitional position, something people did while they worked on getting their own funding or transition to industry. Am I wrong or are there different standards in different fields, or is this person just an extreme outlier?
Re: What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure
#5Coming from another field, 23 years as a post-doc seems insane to me. Is this common in some fields? I never thought of post-docs as (semi-) permanent positions or something one would spend a major chunk of a career doing. I always thought of it as a transitional position, something people did while they worked on getting their own funding or transition to industry. Am I wrong or are there different standards in diff…
I’m also from another field, but 19 papers and 5 first-author papers over 23 years is a huge red flag. Many graduate students wind up with 3-4 first-author papers by the time they graduate. I don’t know what he was doing with his time, but the publication record seems to be the elephant in the room.
Re: What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure
#6"At the age of 41, after working in several postdoctoral positions over the course of 12 years, I started applying for tenure-track and other permanent positions."
Why would you wait 12 years after your terminal degree to START applying for permanent jobs?
Re: What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure
#7Coming from another field, 23 years as a post-doc seems insane to me. Is this common in some fields? I never thought of post-docs as (semi-) permanent positions or something one would spend a major chunk of a career doing. I always thought of it as a transitional position, something people did while they worked on getting their own funding or transition to industry. Am I wrong or are there different standards in diff…
I’m also from another field, but 19 papers and 5 first-author papers over 23 years is a huge red flag. Many graduate students wind up with 3-4 first-author papers by the time they graduate. I don’t know what he was doing with his time, but the publication record seems to be the elephant in the room.
Agreed. I don't know if this applies to the article author, but I've met a few "lifestyle" post-docs. They do just enough to keep in the system, but don't rise above that (either capability or motivation).
Re: What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure
#8Accept your data. According to one PI, success depends more on the people doing a project than on the topic of study; some people make their project work no matter what the topic is. Others block their own way to success because they require too much evidence. I, for one, have always been excessively critical of my own data. Although I am a meticulous experimenter, whenever my results seemed to confirm my hypothesis,…
What's good for the field (we've decided) is when we only allow a 5% Type I error rate (95% of published positive results are correct). What's good for the individual is to drive their Type I error rate up just enough so that they can publish as much as possible without getting caught.
Umm... That's not actually what only publishing a result when the p-value is less than 0.05 accomplishes. Such a publishing policy instead guarantees (or would if there were no other problems) that __only 5% of the FALSE ideas that researchers test get published as being "confirmed"__ (i.e., when the null hypothesis is true, only 5% of the time does it get "rejected" at the 0.05 level). It guarantees nothing about what fraction of these supposedly-confirmed ideas are actually true. That fraction could vary from zero (if researchers never think of true ideas) to 100% (if researchers never think of false ideas).
Re: What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure
#9Coming from another field, 23 years as a post-doc seems insane to me. Is this common in some fields? I never thought of post-docs as (semi-) permanent positions or something one would spend a major chunk of a career doing. I always thought of it as a transitional position, something people did while they worked on getting their own funding or transition to industry. Am I wrong or are there different standards in diff…
Obviously not everyone can promote all the way up, and not everyone wants to. There’s nothing wrong with someone doing good competent work at the level of a postdoc for as long as they want. We have a postdoc in his 40s in the lab I used to be in and he does excellent work as part of a group. I don’t think he wants to run his own lab and why must he?
Re: What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure
#10"At the age of 41, after working in several postdoctoral positions over the course of 12 years, I started applying for tenure-track and other permanent positions." Why would you wait 12 years after your terminal degree to START applying for permanent jobs?
Author appears to be a cell biologist, where this is not atypical. There are very few permanent jobs, there are hundreds of applicants for every one, and the hiring committees would generally rather not hire anyone than accept less than the very top applicants.
Author would surely have been well served by leaving science sooner. As another commenter noted, his output wasn't impressive, and it should have been obvious he would never be hired as an independent researcher. But that can be psychologically difficult for a 40-year-old whose project of becoming an independent scientist started when he was literally a teenager.