Climbing Without a Rope

Upon joining graduate school, you immediately have a goal and that is ‘to graduate’. As a newly appointed assistant professor at most institutions, it is to ‘get tenure’. As a post-doctoral researcher, however, the goal and one’s measurement of progress per se are much more nebulous…and therein lies the difficulties of being in this state of one’s career in academic science.

As a graduate student, while there were many points that I was in my own personal and somewhat chaotic hell, my graduate program had specific checkpoints and requirements that ensured my progress was adequately monitored and that I was actually making some headway in my research. While my thesis committee meetings and Works-in-Progress seminars were a source of stress and anxiety, and later on, caused me to rant and roll my eyes in frustration at this ‘waste of my time’, I realize now (in retrospect, of course) that ultimately, they were good for me. My thesis committee members were not only a source of fresh ideas and knowledge, but helped to rein in some of my mentor’s goals that would have been too ambitious/risky for a graduate student. And since they served me from a financially and intellectually unbiased standpoint, and hence only my data was guiding their thinking, their suggestions and recommendations often pointed me in the ‘right’ direction, in a way that perhaps they could not even do for their own students. In fact, I really wish that there were some similar forum for documentation and monitoring of ‘progress’ in the post-doctoral stage of one’s career.

In thinking about it, it seems odd to me that being a post-doc, which is ostensibly still part of one’s training period as a scientist, is in fact completely unmonitored, save for the person serving as your principal investigator. Progress in science, at all levels, is of course measured by the currency of science: ‘pubs’. How many and what quality of your publications are the gold standards for progress. But while many and ‘high profile’ publications are admittedly a form of success as a post-doctoral fellow, there are many things that you never get training for and cannot be measured just in terms of one’s ‘pubs’. While I can think of many examples, for the purposes of this discussion I’ll focus on just one, and continue this thread of thought sometime later.

Writing skills is one of the most important things one needs as an academic scientist, yet many post-docs are not actively involved in the writing of grants and fellowships, and sometimes even their own papers. As a graduate student, we were expected to write two different proposals, one for our qualifying examinations on a subject completely unrelated to our dissertation work, and one for our actual project. While these were time-consuming activities- time that I’m sure many mentors thought could be better served at the bench, they served some essential purposes. First of all, they forced you to write. While fellowship writing opportunities exist for post-docs, due to federal budgetary constraints and decisions by PI’s as to whose project is most likely to ‘get’ a grant, not everyone gets to do so. And writing a grant proposal is a key skill that one needs to develop to become an academic scientist.

One could argue that writing papers provides you with the necessary opportunities to develop your literary ‘sales’ skills, so to speak. In my opinion though, these are very different things. A paper is a culmination of a body of work and hence you are ‘selling’ your data to the journal and reviewers. That’s why it is so much easier to write the results and material and methods sections, as essentially these are descriptions of hard facts that you yourself were responsible for discovering. On the other hand, writing a grant or proposal, enters the realm of fiction and fantasy. While the ideas you propose are based on existing data, they are not solely yours and represent a distillation of what you have found and how it relates to similar work in your field. Persuasively, yet logically, selling your ideas in a way that makes them exciting and novel, but still reasonable, for your study section reviewers, I believe, actually becomes almost an art form. While some people may be more inherently adept at this type of writing, I think that with practice and experience, this can become something that a post-doc can and should learn how to do. And this should be a skill that one learns long before a submission of one’s first RO1.

I’m not exactly sure on how to monitor this type of ‘skills acquisition’ by a post-doc. We scientists, by the very nature of what we do, are inherently independent and do not like to be regulated and monitored. But a more regulated system of ‘pos-doctoral’ training, I think, will benefit us, and the entire scientific community. Many of us used to poo-poo as graduate students at what seemed to be the draconian demands of our programs- course work, attendance at works-in-progress talks and faculty seminars, bi-yearly committee meetings, annual department presentations, participation in a journal club…the list seemed endless. And on top of all that, productive research. But with the 20/20 clarity of hindsight, I see how all those demands enhanced my all-round development as a scientist. Attending seminars that were not related to my study of autoimmunity forced me to learn how to quickly distill information and kept me exposed to new developments in many fields long after I finished my coursework. Giving regular formal presentations to my department made public-speaking less arduous and taught me how to organize my thoughts so that I could logically speak to diverse audiences, which helped tremendously when I had to present at conferences outside my institution and interview. Unfortunately, my time as a post-doctoral researcher has, so far, not helped me enhance some of these skills acquired as a graduate student.

There is an inherent desire by the mentor, department and institution for a student or new faculty member to succeed, and there are hence checkpoints set up at these career stages, but for a post-doc this is certainly less so. I think because of this lack of regulation, many post-docs feel like they are without a safety net or rope, and actually, this sense of insecurity is why many of us choose to leave science and disappear into that post post-doctoral ‘black hole’.