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What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure

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Re: What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure

#41

Post by Fomite »

chrisseaton wrote: post #9
shmageggy wrote: post #4

Coming 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?

So a couple issues:

1) As postdocs get more experienced, their pay usually goes up.

2) As mentioned in the article, it's possible to "age out" of a lot of fellowships, which have limits like "5 years since your last degree" requirements.

Which means the burden then falls on the PI of the lab to support them as essentially a staff scientist.

If I pay a postdoc $60,000 a year, at 10% pay lines (which is not unreasonable for the NIH), I have to write about $600,000 in grants in expectation to be able to afford them. That's a lot of work, and unless they are significantly better than a new postdoc, potentially not worth it. They're also not a good speculative investment - they're not going to go on to be a PI of their own lab, which has benefits for their PI down the line.

Re: What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure

#42

Post by sjg007 »

All great advice even outside of academia. It is also important to look at other issues such as demographics in the field itself. Computer Science is now on a tear because so many kids wants to study CS and deep learning is the new hotness. Structural biochemistry is also probably about to explode due to deep learning and recent novel techniques for fast structure determinations. There's probably a few startups in this space looking for someone like the author.

Re: What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure

#43

Post by [deleted] »

fabian2k wrote: post #21
jurassic wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know the norm of the author’s specific field but I had the same reaction: His publication record is not even in the ballpark of where it probably should be for tenure. I feel so sad that the scientific industry is set up such that guys like this can plod on two decades or more past the point they should have realized they weren’t on a tenure trajectory. Now he’s 40-something and has to start over in something…

I might be a bit too cynical about this topic, but it really should be obvious to anyone in the field that you're not on track to become a PI this way. If you want to pursue the academic career, you need to focus on that from the start of your PhD. And you really need to be on some position on a track towards full professor after one or at most two PostDocs. I'm quite confused by the timeline here, though. A PostDoc…

[deleted]

Re: What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure

#44

Post by sjg007 »

raincom wrote: post #34

For many in the third world countries, going to America for Ph.D or for postdoc is a way to get out of their native countries. However, if you are an American citizen or a citizen of any developed country, be careful about getting on that post doctoral treadmill, which Prof Katz calls this phenomenon. http://katz.fastmail.us/scientist.html

This is so true... even the doctoral treadmill isn't necessarily worth it. I'm a little disappointed that he claims that American students who pursue PhDs are weak students. This is not necessarily true.

Re: What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure

#45

Post by raincom »

sjg007 wrote: post #44
raincom wrote: post #34

For many in the third world countries, going to America for Ph.D or for postdoc is a way to get out of their native countries. However, if you are an American citizen or a citizen of any developed country, be careful about getting on that post doctoral treadmill, which Prof Katz calls this phenomenon. http://katz.fastmail.us/scientist.html

This is so true... even the doctoral treadmill isn't necessarily worth it. I'm a little disappointed that he claims that American students who pursue PhDs are weak students. This is not necessarily true.

For many students in Iran, getting a student visa for MS is difficult. They join a Ph.D program in flyover country.

Re: What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure

#46

Post by refurb »

gone35 wrote: post #2

Accept 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,…

Like it or not, being a good scientist (read: getting tenure track and funding) is not just about good science, but also exciting, cutting-edge science.

If a scientist runs a couple experiments and find something truly remarkable, the guy who rushes to publish is going to win out over the guy that says “this needs another year of work before it’s perfect”.

Re: What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure

#47

Post by dannykwells »

A few points many are missing :

Publications/year depends on field. In parts of biology, you just need one every 3 years to be fine. The journal matters too. Even one every 4, if it's in Nature, Science etc., and you'd secure a job. And field: Even papers not in Nature if they're in a hot field would be enough. And PI: even papers with a famous PI, without being a hit field or high impact, might be ok.

In this case the author appears to be a biochemist without any high impact publications or from any famous labs. So yeah, no dice. (source: just Google him)

Re: What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure

#48

Post by dnautics »

I disagree with all of these insights. I checked a lot of boxes, had great scientific output, managed underlings well, had an excellent pedigree (including top tier undergrad and grad schools and Nobel laureate as my immediate postdoc supervisor), but failed to obtain a tenure track position.

Looking at the peers who made it and didn't (including ones that were slightly less deficient), I realized it's because you need to have one of those PIs go to bat for you. It was something as a leader I did for my underlings (I arranged for both of my interns to have one-on-one lunches with a Nobel laureate and a his buddy that didn't get to win a prize in spite of inventing site directed mutagenesis - an experience that I haven't even had myself). As soon as I realized that my high profile bosses had checked out and would never go to bat for me or anyone really (still love them though) I got out of dodge.

Anyways, that my advice for anyone who wants a tenure track position. 1) Table stakes are a top tier postdoc (ideally a top tier grad school too). 2) Table stakes are 1-1.5 (ideally 2) publications a year. If you don't have these it will be VERY hard. Don't feel guilty for giving up, don't let anyone trick you into thinking it will be easy. Most most most importantly, work for someone in grad school or postdoc who will network for you.

I'm in the tech sector now, and have performed well enough that my CEO seems to think of me as a performant employee, so we'll see where that goes. Maybe I'll get really rich and pay for my own science. (doubtful, but at least I get paid well enough to not worry about my future).

Re: What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure

#49

Post by dnautics »

dragonwriter wrote: post #26
Obi_Juan_Kenobi wrote: post #12

23 years of post-doc with 5 first-authors? That's really all you need to know: that's a terrible publication record for someone looking at tenure-track. A decent target is an average of one first/last author paper a year. Two one year and zero the next isn't a problem, but one every five years certainly is. This doesn't even get into the 'careerism' of picking safe but dependable projects; anyone making reasonable ch…

> 23 years of post-doc with 5 first-authors? No, 12 years of post-doc with 5 first authors: “after working in several postdoctoral positions over the course of 12 years, I started applying for tenure-track and other permanent positions. At this point, I had 19 peer-reviewed publications, including 5 as first author” > Why didn’t anybody tell this guy to start his career in private industry 15 years ago? He did start…

That's still pretty low. In the us at a top tier, which you'll need for most tenure track positions you're expected to have about 5 first authors in five years as a trainee and moving forward into a postdoc a pace of about 1.5 to 2 would be good. Strategic timing by having a really high profile paper come out from grad school around when you're finishing your postdoc probably also helps.

But as I indicate in a direct response I don't think any of that really matters either

Re: What principal investigators taught me about my failure to land tenure

#50

Post by mattkrause »

Fomite wrote: post #41
chrisseaton wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

So a couple issues: 1) As postdocs get more experienced, their pay usually goes up. 2) As mentioned in the article, it's possible to "age out" of a lot of fellowships, which have limits like "5 years since your last degree" requirements. Which means the burden then falls on the PI of the lab to support them as essentially a staff scientist. If I pay a postdoc $60,000 a year, at 10% pay lines (which is not unreasonabl…

The NIH scale doesn't rise that fast. A brand-new postdoc costs about $50k on NIH pay scales.

There is often also an assumption that more senior people will also bring on money, either completely by themselves or by enabling more projects. The (completely idiotic, IMHO) 2 or 5-year cutoffs on some fellowships makes this somewhat more difficult.

I also think experience is weirdly undervalued in academia. I would bet that, in many fields, three random students at $25k/ea are not appreciably better than one highly skilled staff scientist at $75k, especially if the lab actually paid full freight for the students instead of having them subsidized by training grants and time-limited fellowships. This is tricky to study though....

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