Oh the priviledge!

Comrade PhysioProf posted this recently.

Longer post-docs should be welcomed by those aspiring to PI positions, as it provides a much fairer opportunity to prove one's mettle. Many post-docs start slowly for a variety of reasons, and so just because you don't have much to show after two years, doesn't say much about your potential. But if you haven't achieved much after 5+ years as a post-doc, it is reasonable to conclude that it is not just a matter of bad luck, bad mentors, or anything other than a simple--and unfortunate--lack of the skills and talents required to be a PI.

And YFS really nailed it. Read her post. She's right - five years at the crap pay we get - fuck that shit.

All I can think of is HippieHusband who for six months faced constant harassment from TheBully. Every two months TheBully gave him 'the talk' where he told him he didn't show any "passion." Yeah, no passion. Because working over the Christmas holidays (yes Christmas day because living things need to be dealt with), weekends and nights when no one else in the department was around shows that you have no passion about the work.

Oh yeah and he forgot to thank TheBully for the offering him such wonderful low hanging fruit.

Six months of this shit sent him to a counsellor, I can't imagine what five years would do. Well I think of YFS...

Let me tell you a little about this "low hanging fruit."

These were datasets generated by a six year post who never published anything. The datasets were not replicated, large sections of a manuscript plaigirized and one of these datasets consisted of three numbers with yet again no replication.

This failure is not entirely attributable to the postdoc. The guy was an engineer not a biologist. He came to collaborate with a biologist who as the expert should have taken responsibility for experimental design. The PI hired the guy knowing what the postdoc's expertise was - so really the PI either showed no vision or was just lazy. Frankly, the postdoc is an opportunity to collaborate with people from different discplines - but everyone has to contribute.

Now HippieHusband is blamed for this failure.

I'm on a listserv for my field and everyday I get emails about a new postdoc position either here in North America or in Europe. They can't fill the postdoc positions at SmallUniversity. There aren't enough of us to go around.

And frankly here (at SmallUniversity), most of the PIs (with the exception of my supervisor) don't want "the most talented and accomplished scientists" who show scientific independence. They want trained monkeys to meet the specific aims of their NIH grant. Mentorship, for many, is not part of the deal. They need that next grant.

There are many people in academia who lack the skills and talents required to be a PI but you know what - there they are - they have tenure and they constantly tell us that we must earn the priviledge to be here. Fuck you, CPP.

But guess what, despite the fact that we tell them to go fuck themselves, we still chose the system and so we bend over and say thank you thank you. But what we wouldn't give to be on the other end of that fuck.