When having enough is not enough: the financial challenges of being a postdoc

My job just before I started my PhD paid 19,500 British Pounds per annum (that's about 39,000 USD in 2007 dollars, which inflation adjusted would be about 44,150 USD in 2015 dollars). My graduate student stipend was 27,000 USD a year. And yet, I probably lived more comfortably, and certainly more independently in graduate school than I did back in London on that nominally higher salary (cost of living in the most expensive city on earth and all). My current salary still has not quite reached the inflation adjusted dollar value of my previous salary. Yet, day to day, in a two income household with no dependents in an inexpensive part of the country, I live well enough. Certainly it would be disingenuous of me to claim poverty when you look at some of the things I have spent money on in the past few months. As I write this, I should also add that I am pretty much in the Rolls-Royce of postdoc scenarios financially. I'm funded out of my PI's R01, with full staff benefits. Also, as result of having done my undergrad in Europe, I have almost no student debt. And, as a result of my mother's generosity, I have no structural debt at all and never have had. It would not take much (a kid, a more expensive part of the country, a large amount of debt to service) to shift me into a position that would be financially much harder.
Which leads me to my main point: I could probably live quite comfortably for a long time on this salary. I could build up a retirement, maybe make some investments. All good. But that is not a scenario I can contemplate. Because my employment is of fixed term, and I am always facing the knowledge of the imminent cessation of income. It is this combination of limited, low-ish income and limited term contracts that is the particular financial difficulty of the pre-faculty (and let's be honest, pre tenure) phase of academia.
I saved throughout graduate school, a fair amount. But those savings were devoured by the process of having to finish my dissertation after my funding ran out. Even had I secured a job, in all likelihood moving costs alone would have demolished my savings. And postdocs employers do not usually pay moving fees (for my current postdoc I was lucky: my PI paid for my flight from the UK, because she is wonderful). Further, had it not been for the opportunity to live back at home (which comes with its own personal costs), I'm not sure what I would have done financially. Certainly, I would have given up looking for a postdoc sooner than I did.
The problem is that grad school stipends and postdoc salaries are, quite simply, too low to put together a nest egg sufficiently large to insure against the periodic cessation of income, or to weather any prolonged period of unemployment.  Thus, for most of us, when our graduate stipends or our postdoc grant salaries are coming to an end, there is significant pressure to simply secure a source of income as soon as possible.
Which brings me to my next point: there's a lot of discussion about people taking postdocs who aren't committed to science. Or talking about how you should only do a postdoc if you really want to. It's bollocks. The main reason, when you reach the end of your phd and are staring at your paltry savings to have a postdoc lined up is so you can get paid. It pays more than grad school, and it buys you time.
Yes, career transitioning would be better for many. But career transition is a hedge, especially in this job market. It requires that you invest either time, or money, both things that are in short supply at the end of your PhD.
So if you need a postdoc to keep paying the bills, take it, it's a honorable thing to do for you. And try to build a nest egg big enough so that you can get out of there if that's what you decide to do.
As a postcript: this problem, the problem of the financial costs of fixed term entry level jobs, is one that is well documented in one of my home countries, France, where all entry level jobs are fixed term CDD and people coast from CDD to CDD until they land a CDI. This has huge financial consequences on young people, from the impossibility of getting a mortgage, to financial dependency on parents as garantors of all loans, to requirements to move around France, to inability to build up savings or retirement benefits. The precarity of fixed term employment is real.

Fallingwater: on excellence and mediocrity

Coming back from a weekend with friends two weeks ago I had the opportunity to fulfill a long time wish: I managed to visit Fallingwater. I've been in love with Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece of integrated design since I first found out about it. Finally, I was about to see it in person. It provoked the same response in me that the Taj Mahal did: no matter how many photographs of it I'd seen, the experience of being in its presence was overwhelming. Much like the Taj, Fallingwater is exquisite craft expressing conceptual genius at almost every level of analysis.

As we left Fallingwater, we drove through miles of countryside scattered with new builds. Within minutes of one of the most inspiring houses ever built, we were back in standard, prefabricated MacMansions that stuck out on hills, with terraces and balconies jutting out at odd angles. It was disappointing. So little of Lloyd Wright's careful thought about the integration of architecture and landscape, about the use of light and space, heck even about using cantilevered concrete rather than wooden post and plasterboard to deal with steep inclines, has made it into the bulk of modern architecture. 

Going further, if we look at the glass-and-steel monoliths that increasingly dot cities and university campuses, which of them really display anything like the intricate thought of Fallingwater, or the Guggenheim in New York? I remember in London, before I left, my first encounter with the base of the Shard. I was wondering how the architect has sought to integrate this glass and steel behemoth with the ramshackle brick buildings around it? The answer: not at all. The glass and steel cladding simply descended into a canopied atrium, as if the starship of a spectacularly aesthetically unsophisticated alien species had crash landed on south London. 

When confronted the reality of how little brilliance like Fallingwater affects day to day construction, how little careful ideas about the spaces we live in seems to have affected the practice of how and what we build, one is tempted to get depressed. And I would hazard that similar things happen in science. How often do we get frustrated that ideas that were soundly and brilliantly rejected years ago continue to have a zombie life in the literature? How often do we complain that the nuance and subtlety in the source materials of innovative ideas is lost in the work of those who pursue those ideas? My recent experience at the clinical meeting highlighted how little people were thinking about new ideas and new directions, and how much time was being devoted to flogging dead horses. And in my old field of paleontology, many of the scientist doing the most interesting and subtle work get ignored in favor of self promoters doing the same old thing, with newer analyses tacked on for flashiness (much like modern house building in fact). 

If in architecture, as in science, brilliant, thoughtful ideas and approaches get so diluted in the mass, how do we, as individuals, keep doing good work? The best I can come up with is to think critically about the bad stuff, regularly engage with the good, and shoot for an architect designed house. 

I am not Frank Lloyd Wright of experimental biology, evolutionary biology or paleontology. But I have had the good fortune to work with people who think about science like he thought about buildings: carefully, yet radically, questioning all the tools we use, how we use them, and our approaches. And ultimately, the reward of working like that is to assemble something complete, integrated, beautiful, inspiring, and good.  

Defying gravity, finding balance

I'm just done with a three day meeting in Chicago. It's been thought provoking, and has jump started my thinking about the next phase of my life and career. This postdoc, wonderful and intellectually enriching as it is, won't last forever. And if there's one thing my PhD taught me the hard way, it's that you can never start planning too early for the next move.
This conference was unlike any I've been to before. It was a clinical research conference at which Ph.D.s probably were a minority. Most of the paper presentations consisted of retrospective analysis of patient case studies, and one of the major keynotes was essentially grand rounds. The neurophysiology lectures were few, and only two labs presented work on animal models. My PI left frustrated at the state of the basic science in the field. I left... unenergised. I took notes on maybe three talks, and these are people whose work I'm already aware of. This meeting was also the first one I've ever been to where every session ended with several minutes of rambling interventions by questioners from the audience that added almost nothing to the presentation. In my own talk (generally well received) the dominant question was simply an attempt to invalidate the clinical relevance of the research based on something that, well (yes I'm biased) totally missed the forest for the trees.
I'm from a basic science background in a field with relatively little translational potential. Yes, people turn to paleo to understand the potential effects of climate change on faunal transitions, but the immediate applications of such knowledge are limited. And although I will defend with every inch of my being the notion that any useful knowledge on human biology cannot be derived without some understanding of mammalian evolution, again, there are several steps between this, and clinical research. I have, from the beginning, been somewhat apprehensive about working in a more clinical focus. At 18 and again at 21 I turned down the opportunity to become a physician to pursue science. I don't think like a physician. There is mutual frustration in the clinician/basic science researcher relationship, as there is between any two groups with a narrow area of collaborative interest but broadly different focuses and approaches. And I have a lot of sympathy for the clinical perspective. We may harp on about lack of mechanistic and physiological understanding of the symptoms we're studying, but clinicians still have patients that need care here and now and cannot wait for a new, physiology driven paradigm to emerge. Yet, to me, the frustration remains, and I have to decide if the potential benefits (increased opportunities for research and funding yes, but also the knowledge my research has a measurable impact on people's wellbeing) are worth coming to terms with that frustration, and learning to build a dialogue with the clinicians willing to take the field forward. Professionally, this postdoc is a crossroads with two very different paths out of it, and this meeting has re-emphasised that some commitment on my part will become necessary soon.
Related was my reaction to being back in a big city. I am a city boy at heart, and after over a year in rural North East Ohio the effect of being in Chicago was electric. Riding the blue line from O'Hare was exciting enough, but walking through downtown Chicago to the hotel, my heart rate doubled, my pace accelerated. For the next three days I was like a kid in a candy store. I went shopping with pleasure for the first time since I left London. We explored secret hipster bars and sang karaoke and went to wonderful, innovative restaurants. I miss that, so much. I miss there being a world of excitement and delight and pleasure on my doorstep. And so I am reminded that, next time I move, I don't want to end up at another great job in a place that bores me. And yes, I know that sounds snobbish and privileged. And I am aware that living in a place like Chicago is challenging on an academic salary (I turned down a postdoc there in part for that reason). But I am also now sure of what I want in terms of quality of life from where I live. It will be difficult to get a professor gig I enjoy. It will be harder still to get it in a place I enjoy. But for myself, I need to try and do both. And if I can't do both, I will have to choose (or, as my mother would put it, life is more likely to choose for me). On the one hand, compromise and choices from imperfect options are the essence of life. On the other, life is lived only once, and I intend to get as much out of it as I can. It's a dynamic, unstable equilibrium at best, but I am still young enough that I want to at least try to have it all.

Human assets

I have a lot a of friends who are academics, but I think that, on balance, most of my friends are not. I like this. It allows me to escape from the navel gazing that permeates many academic discussions. It allows me to put the problems of junior scientists in perspective, to learn that they are, in the words of Elrond to Gimli, "only part of the troubles of the world". This does not mean that I don't think that junior academics have problems, far from it. It merely reminds me that our problems are similar to those in other careers, and (more often than not) have similar root causes.
My brother recently got a new job. He works in strategic marketing, that is, the data driven part of marketing, not the shiny ads bit. He aggregates and crunches data concerning the products his company sells, and makes recommendation on where the company should be targeting its existing products, and where it should be focusing new product development.
For the past several years, he's worked for a major multinational whose entire product line exists in a mature market, that is a market where almost all possible consumers already buy either the company's product or a rival's similar one. In a mature market, growth is marginal, innovation is incremental, and strategy primarily trench warfare. My brother hated it. It played to none of his strengths, and the company had no interest in branching out into new markets. Thankfully, he recently switched to a company that is positioned in a non market leader position in a dynamic, changing market. A company that hired him precisely because he is excellent at 6,000 ft, broad picture of things strategy recommendations backed by a thorough understanding of the data.
A comment from my brother's exit interview with company number one struck me when talking about this. His soon to be ex-boss said to him "you've been under used and poorly used". To me, that seemed an explicit recognition that his talents were ill suited to the company yes, but also that the company had failed to find a way to make use of what it recognised as potential assets. What a waste. While we can probably justify this from an actuarial perspective, one cannot help but feel that, well, it is a sub-optimal way to deal with resources, and a pretty shitty way to deal with people.
This problem, "under used and poorly used" is surely one that affects academia. And there is no such thing as a mature market in academia. We should always be able to make use of the assets people bring to our labs. We can always develop our products into new markets. Heck, in the current funding environment, spinning out new products is all we do. What is more, academia, I think, has the potential to forge a different way of managing human assets because, historically, mentorship is built into the very structure of the profession. I know that it often, in this day and age, doesn't seem that way, and I know that many people fail to live up to that ideal.  But the American research university is based on the XIXth century German research university model. And mentorship, the nurturing and guiding of talented young scientists, was and remains a key ingredient in that vision.
That norm of mentoring is an important one, and one that can inject humanity and compassion in what can often be difficult times (especially for ECRs). But, I think that today, we need to reconsider what constitutes good mentoring. It is, I think, no longer merely about developing the student or postdoc as a scientist. It is about being honest with them about the job market and expectations. It is about guiding them, or pointing them towards others who may guide them, if they decide to transition out of academia. It is about using your status to advocate on their behalf. It is about supporting them when they advocate for themselves. If mentorship as a value in science as a social endeavor is to remain meaningful, then it requires that mentors engage at least somewhat with the reality of what their trainees face. A discussion about what mentorship means in this context is long overdue.
There has been much talk on the internet lately of the ubiquity and unavoidability of cost benefit analysis in life, particularly as they relate to the difficult choices of young scientists, and the older scientists who sometimes support them. My brother's situation at his old company may have been the result of such a cost benefit analysis: developing him as asset would have been too expensive to be worth it. In the midst of such discussions, it is worth remembering that cost benefit analysis is not the only decision making framework which exists. In fact, it has often been explicitly rejected in determining how we should interact with other people. Kant's categorical imperative (always treat another human as an end in itself, not as the means to an end), for example, argues that utilitarian analysis of human interactions is unethical. The 'golden rule' (treat others as you would they would treat you) similarly cannot be reduced to cost benefit analysis. In the tension between cost benefit analysis of human assets, and the necessary human interactions of work, lies the difficult path of academic mentorship.

Telling stories about the real world

Science is very good, on the whole, at what it does: establishing predictable facts about the natural world. It's probably fair to say that modern science, in so far as there is such a thing, is better at this than pretty much any other system that humans have ever devised. As scientists, we are often tempted to take other areas of human knowledge gathering to task for not behaving enough like science in their attitude to establishing facts about the world. We berate and bemoan the lack or misuse of evidence. We pour (sometimes deserved) scorn on the apparent flimsiness of other enterprises. In two very interesting posts, drugmonkey discusses why journalism and law can be so unappealing to the scientifically trained. I don't disagree with everything he says, and I think that certainly parts of both could stand to be held to more scientific standards of evidence.
And yet, I am always a little cautious about yelling "be more scientific" at people. Scientists as a whole have a bad a case of epistemological "PC gaming master race" syndrome (if I ever make a nerdier analogy, shoot me).  We are convinced of the innate superiority of our means of knowing what we know. This view is hubris. On the one hand, as has been shown time and again by historians, philosophers and sociologists of science, it is remarkably difficult to pin down, at any time in history, a single definition of what constitutes the scientific method. What's more, efforts to do so have often lead to awkward situations, such as Karl Popper's continuous flip flopping over whether evolution by natural selection could be considered scientific. (One of the many reasons I dislike Karl Popper). On the other, there are entire areas of enquiry in which applying the many commonly accepted facets of the "scientific method" (hypothesis testing by experiment, replication) is difficult, impossible, or wrong headed. And no, I'm not talking about your position on omnipotent beings awkwardly obsessed with judging humans. I'm talking about the two things that are (not coincidentally) crucial in both journalism and courts of law: the reconstruction of historical events and  the determination of people's internal states.
Wait, I here you cry, are you claiming history is not a science? Well, no. What I am claiming (and the philosopher Anton Schopenhauer got there first) is that one cannot apply an experimental framework to individual point event in the past, and furthermore that the range of applicability of hypothetico-deductive methods is much more limited. And when attempting to ascertain the truth behind a single event, in the past, never to be repeated (such as a current event, or a crime), what are we left with? Testimony, correlation, hearsay. Also known as a case. Also known as a story. Neither Baconian empiricism, nor hypothetico-deductivism, nor Popperian faslificationism, will help us here. At best, they will allow us to evaluate some (though by no means all) the evidence. In essence, the repeatable experiment is a tool for erasing the singular nature of point events (and it is much more difficult to do then often presented).
This exact problem is one that plagues my original discipline of paleontology. Paleontology is, in many ways, history writ large. Except it is not writ, more sort of left lying around. Many of the events we would like to understand are unobservable, their consequence inferred from disparate sources of evidence observed in the here and now. And the paleontological literature is rife with people grappling with the problem of just how scientific this endeavor is. And they run the gamut, from people twisting Popper's theory into an unrecognizable pretzel to accommodate paleontological historicity, to people consigning vast tracts of what is normally considered part of paleo to the dustbin of unscientific speculation. Neither approach is satisfying, and both end up running into absurdity and intellectual sterility. Paleontology is largely historical, as such the best we can do is marshal evidence for competing narratives, and go with the most plausible. Some of that evidence will fit with more prescriptive definitions of the scientific method, most (and I count most cases of fossil discovery in this category) will not.
As for the reconstruction of the internal states of a person at a given time and place, science isn't even close to figuring that one out. Yet we, as humans, are always in the business of trying to figure out what's going on in another person's head. And, in the West at least, it is literature that has grappled most directly with this problem, through what one could describe as thought experiments, but that we usually call novels. As the philosopher Mary Midgley once wrote:

"That is why literature is such an important part of our lives - why the notion that it is less important than science is so mistaken, Shakespeare and Tolstoy help us to understand the self-destructive psychology of despotism. Flaubert and Racine illuminate the self-destructive side of love. What we need to grasp in such cases is not the simple fact that people are acting against their interests. We know that; it stands out a mile. We need to understand, beyond this, what kind of gratification they are getting in acting this way."

Ironically, two of the authors who most thoroughly embraces this task of literature, Emile Zola and Marcel Proust, both believed that their novels were eminently empirical and yes, scientific.
Abandoning the notion that a one-size-fits-all epistemological framework derived from the physical sciences can be applied across all areas of possible human knowledge is not the same as saying "anything goes". Rather, it is a requirement that we be more rigorous, more critical, more demanding of the evidence and narratives presented to us given the constraints of what it is we are trying to understand and know. Indeed, the uncritical acceptance of a superficially science-y framework can be as dangerous for critical thought as any narrative-based understanding of the world (this is what Richard Feynman described as cargo cult science). We should have more that one tool in our epistemological kit. The world of things that are knowable is complex enough to need them.


PS: While researching this post, I found this delightful Schopenhauer quote we can probably all agree on:
"Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly."

Silent Ivories

My mother has always had a piano. Playing the piano is central to her idea of herself. The only thing other than a house she has ever taken a loan for is the upright Steinway in our living room. Having "time to play the piano" is a measure of how much control she has over her life. It is, to use modern parlance, her measure of self care. Yet, interestingly, the piano is not relaxing for her in the way that a movie or a book might be. She is always challenging herself to play harder pieces, to get better. It requires effort and energy: more of a discipline than a hobby. And when my mother does not have energy for the piano, then she knows that something else in her life is taking too much of her time.
My relationship to the piano is very different. Its presence and sound are comforting to me, yet I never really played. My instrument was the violin, and our relationship is estranged at best. I have dabbled in playing the piano (over the course of a decade I have taught myself the first two movements of the Moonlight sonata), and whenever I am back home I find time to refresh my memory.
During the year between ending my PhD and starting my postdoc, when I was unemployed and living back with my mother, I started playing the piano more seriously. At my mother's prompting, I took lessons with her piano teacher. I improved noticeably. I began to think of other pieces I would like to learn. And so, when I moved to Ohio, concerned I would be bored, I resolve to buy myself a piano.
I found a good electronic piano on Craigslist, one that was highly rated for its sound. In fact, it is based on sampling a Steinway concert grand. I set it up in our spare room, and got sheet music for the Moonlight (no point in losing the benefit of all that practice) and the next piece I'd resolved to learn, a piece of Tchaikovsky incidental music from his Seasons series. After almost a year, I can play 8 bars. I play the piano maybe a couple of times a month.
On occasion, I feel guilty about this. I enjoy the piano, and I want, on some level, to learn these pieces, and ultimately, one day, to master the third movement of the Moonlight sonata, which is currently far beyond my technical skill. And, of course, I compare myself with my mother, who throughout her always busy, sometimes hectic life has always been able to practice several hours a week. It would be easy to blame science, and its tendency to expand to fill all available space. It would be easy to argue that I could cut out more mindless pursuits (like twitter, or browsing the internet, or playing video games, or watching TV). Certainly, my upbringing was Protestant enough that I must always wonder if I am making the best use of the time allotted to me. And certainly the pressures of being an early career researcher don't help.
But I think also, part of the problem lies in being honest about what is important to us. As I was talking to colleagues over the weekend about the compatibility of science with time consuming hobbies, I came to a realisation. I have decided what matters to me: my work, my fiance, my friends and family, and exercising so that I can enjoy the outdoors in the summer. These are the things, when I look at how I spend my time, that I make time for. It is not worth feeling guilty that I do not play the piano enough. It is simply not important enough to me to make the cut. And conversely, it is clearly important enough to my mother that she will make time for it in the face of other pressures.
Life is difficult enough, and there are enough pressures and demands on our time as scientists, that we should not burden ourselves with feeling obligations towards activities that we do not in fact value that much. Embrace the things you care about, and make time for them. That choice is personal, and yours, and your choices are valid.
Maybe in ten years time I will have deciphered the Tchaikovsky piece. If that is the time it takes, then that is the time it takes. In the meantime, I will enjoy my fiance's company, invite my friends to dinner, and plan for a summer of camping trips in the Appalachian mountains.

We need to talk about the dissertation

It's been over two years since I picked up the 8 bound copies of my dissertation from the library of Johns Hopkins University. The box weighed a ton. The printing had cost me a fair amount of money I no longer had by that point. I confess that when, upon asking her if she wanted a bound copy, my mother said "yes", I was more than a little annoyed. That was another 400 sheets of acid free paper, another 40 dollar binding fee. I dutifully handed my advisor and my department a copy, posted two more to my US based committee members, and boarded the plane back to the UK with three hard copies, because they took up too much of my limited baggage allowance to be worth putting in the hold. Of those copies, I handed one to my committee member who was in Glasgow, one came back with me to the US when I started my postdoc. The third is on the table in my mother's office, more or less exactly where she put it two years ago, slowly getting covered by bills and newspaper clippings.
If you've read this post, you'll probably find the sentence above an apt metaphor for the fate of dissertations such as mine. My program still required dissertations to be written in the monographic format, and despite vague encouragement to publish during my PhD, my advisor never pushed me to realise that my focus on my dissertation as a monolithic project was a liability. Thus, none of that 400 page tome was published by the time I finished up my program. And to this date, all of it that is published is this (unless you count four conference abstracts, which no one does). Other than that, there's a revise and resubmit that's been in limbo for almost a year at this point. And when that gets published, that'll be it, I think.
Given the above, you'd probably think I'm kind of sour on monographic dissertations. And I won't deny that the CVs of graduate students from paper focused programs made me jealous when graduating. Certainly my affection for the object itself is limited. But I am still proud of what's within those pages. That project is solid, cohesive science I would (and have) stand up and take ownership of. It's grounded in a deep understanding of the issues that drove it, both methodological and theoretical. It leveraged under used ressources (museum collections). Moreoever, it is the brainchild of my own intellectual development. Thanks to my masters, I was already well versed in the techniques I applied in my PhD, and I knew the kinds of questions I wanted to ask. I chose to work with my advisor because he too was interested in those questions, and because he has access to the resources (fossils) i needed to do my project. So the intellectual process that lead to my dissertation I am proud of, and happy with. Like others, I defend the holistic, root and branch approach to science that a good monographic dissertation requires. But only up to a point. And the point at which I stop defending the monographic thesis is the point at which it hobbles the already dim career prospects of graduate students. More fundamentally, the point at which it perpetuates the lie that your research is valued irrespective of your productivity, which is publication. If graduate school is training for academia, then it must reflect the reality of academia. And that is both that your work must be thorough, rigorous, and yours, and that it must be published.
Instead of focusing on sterile arguments about whether or not three papers bound together counts as a dissertation, we need to work on developing a system of awarding graduate degrees that both encourages and develops thorough, original thinking and research in science, and which encourages regular, high quality publication of said research. Rather than end this post on my half baked ideas, I'd like to hear your thoughts on the topic.