Skipping a Postdoc Isn’t Wrong
By: Alicia M Prater
Tags: Work, Science, Academic Research, Career Advice, Postdoctoral Researchers

Skipping a Postdoc Isn’t Wrong

How a non-traditional career path kept me in science

Photo by Martin Adams on Unsplash

Although I haven’t worked in a research lab in over a decade, I’m still a scientist and work with research every day. I haven’t taught a class in several years, yet I’m still an educator, sharing knowledge every day. This is only possible because I chose a non-traditional career path — though it was mostly by accident.

The traditional pipeline — Student to postdoc to career

The usual flow for a burgeoning scientist is to get a graduate degree and then go into post-doctoral training. The “postdoc” is supposed to be a position that puts the academic scientist on the path to a professorship, their own lab, and a tenured place on faculty. Depending on the institution they end up at, the final goal could be a variable mix of research, teaching, and mentoring so that the process can continue with new academics or clinicians just entering the pipeline. Another variation of this is a postdoc internship or junior scientist position at a biotech or pharma company, or a government research agency, which then leads to positions as a senior scientist, lead investigator, team leader, etc. in industry.

The problem in recent decades has been the bottleneck of postdocs vying for increasingly limited academic research positions (with decreasing pay and benefits) and the ever-decreasing availability of both funding and tenured faculty positions. My experience is with the U.S. academic system and life science research funding, but similar issues are occurring worldwide and across STEM fields, with new worries because of the ongoing pandemic.

Stuck at the bottleneck

When I started my graduate training and doctorate studies I was already suffering from burnout because of personal issues during my undergraduate career. It was not a good starting point for what was expected to be a several decades-long endeavor as an academic researcher, but I felt pressured to keep moving forward in order to prevent stalling out. Even as I was starting, I was already looking for the end. It didn’t help that, once I neared the end, the positions welcoming me into the postdoc period were limited and funding difficult to obtain.

After finishing the work for my degree, I relocated, hoping for new opportunities elsewhere as I also attempted to make personal changes to shake the burnout that had never quite ended. I wanted to teach — there were no teaching positions in my areas of expertise. I wanted to work in a small academic lab — positions were for large labs with funding in areas of study I wasn’t interested in. I considered simply leaving science behind.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I loved working in a lab. Put me in a lab coat in front of a problem with fully stocked glassware and reagents and I’ll get so caught up I’ll forget what day it is. I’ll stay up for days to synthesize the data and write it up just so I can get the whole story. I also loved teaching —putting together a lecture and helping grad students understand how the body works so they can carry that over into their field of study — I gave up a lot of evenings to stand in front of a projection screen while my dissertation was half-written. But when it was time for me to continue down the pipeline, I was stuck.

I allowed myself to take non-traditional opportunities

Serendipity as a guidance counselor

I learned pretty quickly that I’m not just a scientist by training, I’m a scientist by nature. I question everything. I seek out answers even if I know I’m not going to like them. I look for the truth. I was never going to be able to leave science or academia behind, even if it felt like they had left me.

I’ve written before about how I built my current career. I didn’t get an official postdoc position. I worked for a time as an independent contractor with a researcher to put together the background sections for his publications, filling in the gaps in work with other similar and non-science related jobs. I leveraged all of the experience of both that gap year and my degree to finally land a gig that would anchor my career as a scientific editor and writer. I’ve been self-employed for over a decade and still work with science every day.

Because I allowed myself to take the non-traditional opportunities instead of forcing myself into the postdoc box, I ended up doing what I enjoy in fields of study I love to learn and talk about.

Non-traditional options for traditional postdocs

The traditional pipeline doesn’t work for everyone — I don’t think it ever has. There are many non-traditional options for new graduates looking to have a career in research. I know a few scientists who are still working as postdocs 20 years after finishing their degree, and others who are now PIs. But I also know scientists who have gone the postdoc route only to leave after a few years to become entrepreneurs, guidance counselors, lawyers, or stay-at-home parents. I know others who have foregone the postdoc route and started their own companies anyway or written books in a completely different field.

If you aren’t sure what path you should take, ask yourself these questions:

What do I see myself doing in 10 or 20 years? (Is it teaching? Research? Seminars? Writing?) What areas of study am I interested in? What areas would I stay away from no matter how much I’d get paid? (for me it’s physics, and the world is better off not dealing with my confusion over quantum mechanics) What can I do right now that would be anywhere near the first two answers while staying away from the third?

Maybe the answer to the last question is a traditional postdoc position in academia or industry, but it could also be an internship at an international think tank or local nonprofit. Maybe because of your current expertise the answer is to get a teaching certification or to take a journalism course to get experience in a different area, where you can then apply yourself in a way that matters to you.

I don’t recommend the serendipity approach. If you want to look into your options beyond the traditional pipeline, the National Postdoctoral Association is just one organization that offers resources, advocacy, and job listings that may help give you a push in whatever direction you’re heading. As you decide which direction that may be, there are professional societies that can help, such as the American Medical Writers Association, American Copy Editors Association (ACES), New York Academy of Sciences, Editorial Freelancers Association, Freelancers Union, and those affiliated with universities, to name a few.

Whatever you do after you have a doctorate is postdoctoral work and — regardless of what that job is — as long as it puts you on the path to the work you want to do, it’s worthwhile.