$hould you do a postdoc?

Academic twitter was in disarray recently, this time regarding postdoc salaries. As trainee that’s always made more than the NIH baseline salary, I have some thoughts. Tl;dr: academics would be better off if they listened to hiphop. Kinda facetious, kinda serious, always obtuse.

How much a dollar cost

Drug Monkey is a better blogger on academic matters and I defer to his post on how the purchasing power of the R01 has gone down over time. So off the rip, doing science is harder than before, at the very least financially. Account for rising salaries in general, and you can understand why the NIH has a set baseline for grad student and postdoc salaries (cuz budgets haven’t gone UP, their purchasing power has technically gone down.)

Still, can you be upset if you get an R01? Drake would be if it included indirects and ignored inflation. “'Half a million on my head I can accept/ Least it makes me feel like someone tried their best”

Yesterday’s price is not today’s price.

To make this more interesting, let’s look at my grad school experience in a high cost of living area! My salary (starting in 2015) was $36k pretax and was bumped up to about $38k by 2020 when I graduated (probably just below $40k for PhD candidates these days.) To cover my last 3 years (i.e. focus on research vs working an additional 20 hrs a week as a teaching assistant), we obtained an R01 diversity supplement. Since the NIH grad student stipend was $25k max, I scrambled to find additional funding from the school of pharmacy, but they wouldn’t make up the whole difference, at least not by themselves. Their rationale: I had just earned a research grant before the R01 diversity supplement, so while that award was supposed to enhance my research, I should use it all on my stipend, and then they would make up the rest. This blog and many of the things I have blogged about would not be possible without that award, full stop.

I’m not gonna lie, I put up a fight. How could I NOT??  Between October of 2016 and May of 2017, we had submitted Ford, NSF, Soros, and AFPE predoctoral fellowships, plus an initial R01 diversity supplement (F31 style) and a resubmission (NOT F31 style; don’t write it F31 style). Yes, I had earned an AFPE predoctoral fellowship, but having it used to make up the salary difference for being awarded the R01 supplement (and being a grad student in LA) felt bad. I let the graduate school know how demoralizing the situation was, and thankfully, they agreed, and the rest is history*.

Academic mood.

Now let’s pour gas on the fire at the postdoc level! My salary in San Diego as of January 2022 is now $62K thanks to California wage laws. Looking at the 2021 NIH guidelines, I’m getting paid a salary commensurate with ~5 years of postdoctoral experience. I’m grateful and appreciative and lucky to be at an institution that has the resources to make up the difference. Still, seeing PIs go full “Let them eat cake” mode? I was tight.

Full disclosure: Since I was an undergrad, I’ve made it my goal to be fully aware of the resources available to trainees at their institutions, and it has always played a role in my decision-making process. This factor is probably at least as important to me as research itself, and my career has turned out ok so far.

Money isn’t the only thing, but it can be some thing

Its important to follow your dreams/passion, and a career in academia does not make sense if its money over everything. Me? I’m “money over a lot” and I am where I am because the sum of the intangible opportunities/benefits offered to me outweighed the alternative. In other words, this was a chance to invest in myself, and I will always bet on myself, always.

That said, I can’t say I would still be here if presented with different opportunities in my final year of my PhD; the dials (environment, research, funding, mentorship, etc) were at the right levels at the right time. I had very clear goals in mind when I chose to pursue postdoctoral training, and I was never deadset on a purely academic career. I don’t think there’s any shame in admitting that. To that end, I’m ready for the next step in my career, the foundation of which has been laid during my postdoctoral experience. Besides, I’ve heard that the whole point of a postdoc is to find your next job, sooooo ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Should postdocs be paid more?

When I was a grad student, I lived in a small but affordable $950 studio in Alhambra. Three months later, the property was sold to a large development company, and I was told that when my lease was up, my rent would be $1,600. I went to their office to learn more, and the manager told me that, while my unit wasn’t being upgraded, “property values are rising so the rent has to go up.” Without missing a beat I asked “Has it ever gone down?” and she said “Uh……No.” I just nodded and said “Yeah I know.” Maybe it was an uncomfortable joke, but I also wanted to hear them say it.

Why bring this up? Because yes, the jig is the jig, but that doesn’t mean you have to let up on the pressure. I know I’ve been paid an egregious paltry sum during my academic journey, and I want everyone to be paid more. That includes technicians, undergrads (I made sure each of my students got paid), grad students**, postdocs, staff scientists, and even PIs. Besides, can you really say academia, as a monolithic institution, wouldn’t lower wages if it could? I argue that it technically has if you account for falling purchasing power and inflation in the face of stagnant wages, but I digress.

The flexibility tho?

I get that the appeal of academia is the flexibility one is afforded, but to me, that’s just a piece of the big picture. Getting up at early in the morning is easy for me, and while its nice to be able to come into lab whenever I want (kinda; if you’re doing ephys, you’re coming in early to record), I can adjust. There are non-upsides to flexibility btw: you might have to do more experiments to get a paper/grant out, you’re at the mercy of reviewers who may be biased/unreasonable, and you have to be able to do many things at once (writing, reading, experiments, admin, service, etc.) Plus, academics do a lot for the look. I’m just saying that flexibility is a two-way street.

Me personally, I like doing science with a goal/outcome in mind (drug target X, make cells do Y.) I can’t work on a problem if I don’t think it’s going to make an impact for patients suffering from a disease. Maybe I’m weird, but my scientific curiosity goes hand-in-hand with drugability usefulness. The phrase “hire missionaries, not mercenaries” comes to mind, although I’m not sure academia can choose the latter.

Tl;dr Should you do a postdoc?

IMO, if you can be persuaded/dissuaded either way, you shouldn’t do a postdoc. I knew at the start of my 5th year that to accomplish certain goals (yes, industry goals) a [short] postdoc made sense, albeit only to me, and like Ye said “You can’t tell me nothing.” If my rationale is unclear or it doesn’t make sense to you, that’s intentional, because doing a postdoc usually only makes sense to the person doing it. I will say that industry postdocs are a thing and may be a better idea if you think you might end up in industry but want to keep your options open, yet need more training; I wasn’t able to find one that fit well with me (career goals, location preferences, graduation timing, training, etc) compared to my current postdoc. You’re still playing the long game though, so buyer beware.

The best advice I could give someone to get into industry is to do an internship in industry during grad school. Preferably early in the PhD when you should have more free time, but I think that even if it means you graduate a semester late, its probably worth it. The best advice I could give to someone wanting to pursue an academic career is to learn the rules of the game, because there are a lot of them, and its not just about the science (its barely half of it.) Also, look into the NIH loan repayment program; its a thing.

 *     In the end, my advisor approved $1,000 of the award going to me directly (on top of my full stipend) every year I earned and renewed the AFPE fellowship. Unrelated, but FNGU was on a run ‘till the pandemic hit, right? Thank god for stop-loss orders lol

**    When people would tell me “your graduate program is one of the highest paying in this University, stop complaining” I was always like “So what? Pay everyone more.”