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.
In the machine learning community, I have observed the same kind of behavior since 2005 and I’m afraid it will be worse in the coming years. As a grad student who aspires to become a faculty someday, this worries me a lot.
Until 2005, mostly good people used to get an academic job immediately after their Ph.D. I know a lot of people who are postdocking for few(> 3 yrs) years and are quite frustrated with the current job market. Also, the postdocs supported by DARPA projects do not have much scope to do research(this is true even for grad students and faculty w.r.t DARPA projects, when NSF grants are so competitive). I’m not talking about the CI Fellowship for Post-docs which is highly competitive (60 among all sub-fields of computer science).
I’m sure students will start thinking – Is it really worth ? I’m referring to all the years of grad school, then postdocking and struggle involved in getting tenure.
It looks like this year’s academic-job market is even worse than last
My job search spreadsheet currently has about 10 top-50 schools that are hiring tenure-track positions possibly compatible with theorists. This includes several positions open to any area of CS whatsoever, some positions with a narrower list of areas that includes theory or algorithms along with several other areas, and a pair of Econ/CS positions. On the downside my contacts indicate that several of the open positions are unlikely to hire in theory this year. Do you know how this compares to previous years?
@Jana: I’m not (yet?) familiar with DARPA grants – I didn’t realize that they would be entirely contract based. I would hope that one could be creative and be able to fund interesting research while on a contract. I’d say more, but I’m ignorant of the issues involved with DARPA projects.
also @Jana: there has been surging frustration in Canada where undergrads have been told for 15 years (my sister’s generation, then mine, and still now) that they should “go to grad school! There will be all these retirements in 6 years! You’ll get the sweetest job as a professor!” Well, those retirements are either not happening or the vacancies left behind are not being filled. I’m not sure what US undergrads are being told upon entering grad school, but I would be hesitant to tell any undergrad, no matter how bright, to put all their eggs in the tenure-track basket.
@Warren: My feeling is 10 is worse than last year. In the end, I applied to 21 jobs – some in Europe, 2 in Canada. I know several of those positions didn’t end up hiring. However, my search was pretty directed. I did not apply to jobs that were in places I didn’t want to live, which at least halved the possibilities for me. To, unfortunately, further hurt the situation, more people last year didn’t get jobs that otherwise would have – I think the number of people looking will be higher this year.