There’s talk of postdocking* in the air – for one, Jonathan Katz posted about how to better match recent grads to postdoc positions. It looks like this year’s academic-job market is even worse than last and that postdocs might just fill in the gap for a year or two for some people – including those that are currently postdocking. Hearing such things make me cringe, but not because I think postdocs shouldn’t exist. I am very thankful for my 20 months spent as a postdoc. I don’t think I became a stronger job applicant in that time, but I do think that I became more confident in that time.
In the agonizing months** between interview and job offer at Oregon State University, I gave a lot of thought to “what do I do if I don’t get an academic job?” I had the option of staying on as a postdoc through summer 2010 – an option that made me cringe. “If I stay as a postdoc and next year’s market is terrible and then take another postdoc … where does the cycle end?”
I have many friends in the biosciences where two 3+ year postdocs is the norm. One has started a blog devoted to advocacy for postdocs; a recent post encourages the cycle of postdocing to end. I worry that CS could “get worse” and end up like bio. I hope that the competition offered by industry will help keep the postdocking length down. But Ph.D. enrollment is going up – where are these students supposed to go? Does anyone know if there are stats on the average postdoc length in computer science?
* I officially propose postdocking as the verbal of postdoc much like trafficking to traffic.
** Days became months due to budget hoop-jumping.