So you wanna do a PhD? Advice to undergrads

DISCLAIMER: I'm feeling cantakerous and frankly all that buddhist gratitude shit hasn't been working lately. So this post is bitchy and long. Real bitchy and really long. Read at your own risk.

Last week, two of the undergrads working in our lab asked me advice about grad school. At first, yes, I shuddered. I wanted to scream - run, run very fast in the opposite direction.

But then I decided that such a reactionary response is not very helpful nor frankly true to how I really feel. Instead of saying, "Don't do it," I sincerely asked her, "Why she wanted to go to grad school?"

Beaker, the undergrad, wanted to get the highest level of education possible and she didn't feel it was enough to get an undergraduate degree or even a Masters. Beaker was the first in her family to go to college . I asked her what her expectations were for the end of grad school, she said that she did not want to be an academic.

The second undergrad who asked me about grad school, SoYoung, just loves doing science. She's the one I worry the most about. I've seen so many colleagues of mine come to grad school with a true enthusiasm, curiousity, and love of science only to leave disillusioned with academia. In at least two cases, the supervisor was to blame. The others...who knows it was probably some combination of the institution, the supervisor, life events, and the academic environment.

These two made me think a lot about my own situation and whether if I knew what I know now, would I go to grad school to do a PhD. The honest answer is, "I don't know."

So here is my advice on how I might go about figuring out what type of school and supervisor to consider if I were an undergraduate again. I know that there are probably a lot of people who have given advice. But I thought I would throw my two cents in anyway.


1. Make an active decision about your future.

From what I've seen and read, when undergrads ask current or past PhD students advice about grad school, the most common piece of advice is, "Don't do it."

I don't think that this advice is really useful, if the student has already made an active choice. Too many students do grad school because they don't know what else to do or are just scared to leave the system. So the advice, "Don't do it," is really someone asking "Are you making an active choice or is it because you don't know what else to do?"

Anyone past the age of 21 years old who is old enough to drink, drive, and vote (hopefully not in that order) is old enough to make active decisions about their immediate future. "I don't know what else to do" is not an active decision. If you don't know what else to do, take a year off, travel or work, but don't just go to school because in the end you will regret it.

2. Why the fuck do you want to do a PhD?

The biggest question you need to ask yourself is "Why do you want to do a PhD?" If the answer is, "What's one more PhD? (This was the answer given to me by one Masters student in a neighbouring lab.) Not good enough, dumbass. And frankly, I don't care if you do your PhD, but you should.

In 5-6 years when you're done your PhD and you go looking for a postdoc cause remember there are 90,000 of us in the USA - it will matter to you. Or when you've realized that that less than average friend of yours who left college with an undergraduate degree, now owns a house and goes off to Europe for 2weeks every year with their gorgeous partner, and all you have is a stupid degree and a really bad headache. Oh fuck it will matter. Or when you're finished the 10th postdoc and still looking for that t-t position. So ask yourself do I really want this higher education.

This question forces you to become an active participant in your career trajectory.

Remember, that if you are interested in a PhD, at some level, you are trading off reproductive success and lifetime earning success. A typical PhD takes 5-6 years and sometimes 7 years. That's a lot of time in your your adult life to be choosing to have your head in the sand.

If an academic position is something you're chasing, good for you, but then understand the game. Yes, academia is a game and the rules aren't hard to figure out. What matters is pedigree and publications. So set yourself up for a win. (See the next advice).

Nowadays there seems to be a belief that you have to do a PhD to get a job. This is such bullshit. If a non-academic position is something you are interested in, do you really need that PhD, if so, what type of position are you interested in - industry, consulting, government work? Again talk to people in those places and ask them what's important then go out and get it.

3. Mobility and the size/level of school.

Because academic success is in large part a result of pedigree, you will have more mobility after your PhD if you go to a BigMFSchool. Most undergrads are naive and think that the supervisor's research should match their own interest. Yes, in some ways this matters because you'll be doing it for 6-7 years, but ultimately you will discover that the subject of research doesn't matter as much as the sociology of the department, university environment, and ultimately academia.

At the end of the degree, if you go to a small unrecognized school, your vertical mobility is less elastic. If, however, you go to a big school, in a lab whose supervisor is the latest thing since sliced bread, then for your postdoc, you can go to that small school, BUT you have the opportunity to also go to a large school. If you go to a small school, you'll have to be the superstar of a small pond to have that kind of vertical movement.

What are you going to do if you don't become that major league baseball player? If you leave a BigMFSchool with a PhD in hand, chances are you have more mobility outside academia. I'm sorry but that podunk school in the middle of nowhere'sville doesn't carry as much weight to the outside world as say BigMFUniversity does. Think about that when you're serving a non-fat soya latte at Starfucks in the same SmallTown you did your PhD.


4. What you like in research is irrelevant, what you like in a Supervisor is not.

A good supervisor-student relationship is responsible for an enjoyable and successful PhD.

For fuck's sake, make sure that you interview the Supervisor as much as they interview you. In order to do this, you need to be clear about what you value and expect in a supervisor. I'm talking specifics, none of this vague nonsense. So read about mentorship in academia - there are tons of blogs and other places like Sciencemag and Nature Careers and make a list.

Identify if the Supervisor is interested in your career and how are they going to help you. Don't work with someone who has no investment in the work you are doing. Make sure that person is honest about their investment in you. Set up a written but FLEXIBLE agreement about the expectations of progress during your grad career. Revisit this every year.

If you want independence in your question, experimental design, and analysis then think hard about taking a project that is funded by a grant. Ask about the flexibility of the "specific aims." Ask to read the grant - and yes, you can do this.

Ask about authorship rules and publication expectations. Conferences and travel expenses (who pays). If you have field work or lab work, how will this be funded? Will you have a chance to see the budget? If they will support you for 4 years what happens in the 5th, 6th year???

Get everything in writing, especially stuff about funding and authorship.

Find out how this supervisor deals with life events in his/her student's lives. You may think nothing will happen, but fuck...

Tenure. If the supervisor of interest, is a young prof seeking tenure - it could go either way. It could be good in that publications and grants will be important to them and thus if you are in their lab you are how they get this stuff. But it could also be be bad and exploitative. You need to decide. My personal feeling is that if I were to do this again, I would look for someone who is seasoned. Think pancakes. When you make them, what happens to the first one?

Don't work with two bosses. Or if you do - follow the money.

Lastly, you want to embark on a research career in whatever form that might be? Then start now. Get the names and emails of previous students who left happy and disgruntled and start asking questions about the Supervisor. Look at the publication records of the most recent students - where did they publish? How many? In which journals? Were they on other papers that came out of the lab? Where did these people end up? Academia? Industry? Does this match with your career trajectory?

I once told a student to run very far away from her potential supervisor. None of his PhD students have ever ended up in academia. Many left their MSc. degrees quite bitter. Did she listen? No she insisted that her relationship would be different. If you are going to douse yourself in some hot and sticky self-delusions, don't cry about how stuck you get at the end. Listen and read between the lines.

5. Genotype x Environment

The collegial environment matters to your growth as a scientist even if you're not interested in academia. It includes two things: the intellectual and social aspects of a school.

Intellectual Environment:

I wouldn't go to SmallUniversity, if you paid me an incredibly high stipend and especially not if I came with my own funding. As a grad student (and postdoc) the environment here is an intellectual vacuum. There are grad students and faculty but never the twain shall meet in a discussion group (unless it is for course credit).

Here faculty are not interested in mentorship but only in shameless self-promotion and the fulfillment of a bare minimum of teaching requirements. Seminars, discussion groups, joint lab meetings, and journal clubs are the life force of a biology department. It is where you have a chance to meet people doing science from a totally different pov. Because a lot of this was critical discussion of papers at LargeUniversityinCanada, I learned how to read science by watching and hearing how faculty did it. You need this as a grad student.

Here, at SmallUniversity, I started a discussion group, in the same vein as one that had a rich history of attendance by faculty, postdocs, and students at LargeUniversityInCanada. The response was muted. And only a small proportion of grad students came. All the postdocs attended but that's because we were starved for intellectually stimulation. Oh sure they have "lunch-time seminars" at SmallUniversity, but these are really just masked faculty meetings where everyone listens 'attentively' to the Godfather pontificate about the latest toy. Price of admission: Your balls in his purse.

Go to a lab meeting. Here is where you will get a chance to see how your chosen Supervisor interacts with his/her students. How interactive is the lab? Are they critical or just soft about the work. Critical is essential in a lab group.

Seminars. These are where you get to hear about work that has really impacted the scientific community or in some small way impressed either the grad students or faculty. The second reason this matters is it will become the base of your network. When a seminar speaker comes to a department, you can meet with them and should. Day1, as a PhD student you should be thinking about building your academic network. Who knows where this could lead? Collaborations? A postdoc? So find out who has come in the past to these things? Look at the publication record of the past speakers because this will tell you about the level of science that your university of interest does. You can ask for this information from the person who has coordinated these events or even the secretary in the department. One advantage of a BigMFSchool, is that they don't have difficulty attracting speakers. Here at SmallUniversity, I've heard grad students complain about how hard it is to get speakers and then the expense at bringing them to a place in the middle of nowhere. And I think as a result, the Biology seminar series here is spotty at best.

Funding creates the environment. If I had to do grad school all over, as a Canadian I would choose to go to a grad school in Canada over a school in the US, simply because the funding situation. In the US, it's really difficult to get grants partly because the grants are large and there are so many people chasing money. Although the typical grant is $150,000 (subtract off ~50% for university overhead), the chances are slim, between 7-12%. Furthermore, most of that grant tends to go to salaries. As a direct consequence of this boom-bust cycle of funding, I feel that there is an atmosphere of self-preservation and intense competition within labs, departments, and US schools.

In Canada, the average grant is between $35,000-40,000, but the chance of getting that is 77%. It's a more sustainable system. Labs don't crash and burn if they don't get renewed because they don't grow to unsustainable sizes when they get funded. A second difference between Canada and the US is that NSERC funds a lot more graduate students. This really makes a difference. At SmallUniversity, the money is in the hands of the PI and as a result so is the power. Money in your hands means that no one can leverage that against you. If you come with your own funding, you have more power and thus options. In my mind, money in the hands of graduate students is better spent and way more democratic.

Social environment:

I'm not going to talk about the obvious social life of grad students because as a potential grad student coming in you can easily find out about this. Instead, I'm going to talk about the atmosphere. The soft selection so to speak of the department. Walk around and look at the walls of the department and the different labs. What's on the walls - what's being highlighted? Only posters from scientific conferences? Lab photos of people in a social context? Or both? How does this fit with what you want out of the PhD experience?

How is the departmental space organized. Where are the faculty offices? Where are the grad students housed? postdocs? Walk down the hallways. Are the doors to the faculty offices open or closed? At SmallUniversity, the faculty are segregated from the students and postdocs and the doors are never open. This reflects the accessibility and interaction of the faculty with the grad students or postdocs. In other words, here, it is limited at best. At LargeUniversityCanada, the faculty and grad student offices are interspersed and the doors are always open. There it was encouraged. In the grad student offices, who shares with whom? Is it lab focused or more interactive so that there is a mix of labs? While at LargeUniversityInCanada, I learned a ton from my office mates, most of whom were not in my lab.

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None of this advice matters, because no matter how much you tell someone that they're in for a bumpy ride, they think that they are special, the exception.

Don't lie to yourself about how important or smart you think you are. Because you're no different than the rest of us.

Stay humble, always.

How to make the postdoc experience better.

There are two ways to think about how to make the postdoc experience better. The first is from a personal point of view – i.e. determine what you can do as a postdoc to alleviate the current difficulties you face. The second is more systematic and requires an overhaul in the academic structure as well as a paradigm shift. This blogpost will focus on the former.

I talked with a number of people in my field (n>10; current postdocs, assistant professors, senior faculty well established in their field) and almost all agreed that the postdoctoral experience is “the best of times and the worst of times.” And 80% of those who now had tenure or were tenure track said that it was more of the worst of times.

Given that you are operating under the worst of times, what can you do to make life easier for yourself? Here is a list of things that I have complied from talking with friends and colleagues.

1. Remember quitting is an option. It does not mean you failed.

As postdocs, we have something that Assistant Professors (at least immediately) lack - mobility. Right now, sitting in my inbox are 12 different ads for postdoctoral positions across the United States and Europe. I’m qualified to apply for all 12 of those positions. Although faculty positions may be scarce and the competition for those faculty positions is enormous, there seems to be a ton of postdoctoral positions (at least in my field), perhaps largely coming from stimulus funding.

It may be heartbreaking to have to think about this one and it will depend on your circumstances (visa requirements, a partner, kids, etc) but you can get out of academia. A senior faculty at a prestigious LargeUniversityinUSA, extremely well-respected in his field, said that now is the time to apply to industry jobs. Since most academics have their heads up their ass, they don’t know how to go about applying to industry- so they make a half-hearted attempt. This faculty member also believes that the faculty job situation will only get worse because the economy will not get better. Competition is minimal right now for those industry jobs, but in 5 years there will be a scramble from PhD graduates and postdocs to apply to these jobs. One thing is true is that if you do suffer from a two-body problem, most industry jobs are in big cities, which means that there is a greater probability that both of you will find jobs.

The psychological benefits to thinking about your next job are enormous. First it is an opportunity to reflect on what isn’t working about where you currently are and to figure out what you seek in your workplace. Second, it will boost your confidence in your own abilities and help you look forward to better things.

One postdoc friend of mine applied for a couple of industry positions when he thought his funding was going to run out. He had a couple of interviews and the interviewers told him that his resume was quite impressive. He spent maybe two hours on the application and apparently copied the format from one of my old resumes. During this interview, he realized how smart he was and how much he knew. This friend also applied to be an economic analyst at a bank in New York. His reasoning was - I’m not an economist and I’ve never worked in a bank but hey I keep my money in a bank and I like money. So why not? Fuck, it’s brilliant. Of course he never heard back (as far as I can tell) but the idea is that he put it out there.

Academia is a 10-tonne truck that crushes your self-esteem. Applying for other jobs may help you realize just how good you are and that you do have options.

2. Use the time to get to know academia at a distance.

I believe that it takes at least year to get to know people and places. After a year at SmallUniversity, I’d say that I understand how funding structures can impact the politics of a department. I now see how each professor relates to those political and funding structures within a department. Although as postdocs we have no power, we can witness the inner workings of a department without any investment in that structure. We aren’t applying for or seeking eventual tenure at this institution, and our labs and the people associated with those labs don’t live or die if we do or don’t get grants.

And no matter how challenging this past year has been, we are both grateful for the experience. Why? Now we recognize the subtle signposts of a difficult personality and can intuit political ambitions from the interpersonal dynamics in academic department. We also know what questions to ask of the faculty in the department to understand those political structures. And we know what type of colleagues we want and which ones we don’t.

3. Minimize your interactions if your supervisor is a fucknut.

One description of this personality type in academia, offered by an Assistant Professor at another institution, is that s/he is a power-crazed silverback, who will beat his/her chest and stomp the ground until they feel you understand in your gut that s/he is the alpha male.

Spend as little time as possible around this type of personality. If s/he is a brilliant gorilla, then chances are they have very little time for you in the first place. You can also go to other professors in the department to discuss and help you with the science.

A second way to protect yourself is to change the nature of your communications. If most of your communication is through email, then you’ve got a written record and it minimizes the instability you feel from the ground shaking as a result of the stomping.

If and when you do have to meet with the silverback, one way to approach the situation is to act confused. Being confused is non-confrontational and can’t be seen as a threat. Ask them to be explicit and if necessary act like you don’t understand and get them to draw or write out what they want you to do (keep this for future reference). Don’t call the silverback on their inconsistencies and just leave everything as an open question. When they change their mind from the previous meeting, pull out the piece of paper you had them write on and ask gently, “I’m confused could you explain which of these directions you think we should go on the manuscript?” Never lead the way, let the silverback do it.

4. Get two types of communities: one within the university and one outside the university.

Joining with other postdocs, regardless of the department, will make you feel less alone. It will be a place to share your experience and hear other experiences. In the long run, a community will provide you both support and a voice during a very difficult time. Furthermore, it may lead to the establishment of a group or union that will ensure the university develops consistent policies on how postdocs are treated. In Connecticut, California, New Jersey and now Massachusetts, postdocs have organized unions to establish guidelines on compensation, visas, intellectual property, hire arbitrators, and ensure that postdocs are treated fairly. A recent issue of The Chronicle, reported that a panel of deans at the annual meeting of the Council of Graduate Schools said that research institutions should be prepared for the fact that postdoc unions will likely become more commonplace.

At the University of California, where 6,400 postdocs won union certification in August, union officials are negotiating with the university over pay and other issues. Christine Des Jarlais, an assistant dean at the University of California at San Francisco who also spoke on Thursday's panel, said negotiations were aided by the fact that the university already had put in place system wide guidelines for postdocs.

In discussions with unions, universities must preserve the ability of faculty members to make final decisions about the academic performance of postdoctoral researchers, she said. If a case is sent to arbitration, outside arbitrators should not be able to substitute their judgment on academic matters unless a faculty member has failed to follow an established procedure, she said.

"Faculty absolutely have the right to recruit, appoint, reappoint, not appoint, to communicate and mentor, to set the standards for work performance," she said.

Universities do have an advantage when dealing with postdoctoral unions, compared with other unions, she said, because postdocs are less likely to strike than other groups.

"That's what's so unique about the postdoc world," she said. "It's almost like the university has the upper hand now, because postdocs who want careers are typically not going to go out on strike. They're just not going to do it."

While there doesn’t seem to be any teeth to a union that has no leverage, it is still a place to feel like you have a voice.

Although I believe that you need support within the academic environment, I think it’s just as crucial to have a support system outside the university. This may come in the form of a university counselor, family or friends or all of the above. One of my postdoc friends is having a really great postdoc experience. But she has set up an complex friend and family network outside her town that she can visit. What this postdoc has done is essentially spread the risk. No one friend is her total support, instead, she can call upon various people to support her without the risk that she will drain one particular person. Plus for some people friendships and social interactions can be a way to re-energize.

5. Eat well, take some weekends off, and find a creative outlet for your anger and frustration.

I know this seems obvious, but in our life styles it is typically the first thing to go, especially if you are depressed. We think that given the context of the competitive environment and the ever-contracting job situation we can’t afford to follow hobbies or exercise or eat well, but actually we can’t afford not to. Productivity falls off when you are exhausted, depressed, anxious, stressed, or unhealthy. What makes you laugh? How do you replenish your energy and provide for your heart? How do you take care of yourself? Are you eating processed and/or take out food or do you spend time making healthy meals for yourself?

Working with a silverback, makes you think that you have no time for anything, especially if he is riding you about your tempo. But you know what - a fucknut is a fucknut no matter what. So whether you spend that extra evening or weekend in the lab, it is unlikely that this will change their behaviour. One postdoc friend I knew spent weekends, long evenings, and even their Christmas vacation in the lab getting data. And yet her supervisor told her that she had no passion. You can’t win with someone like this so instead of trying, why not spend your time finding what replenishes you.

A second reason for eating well, taking some weekends off, and finding a creative outlet for your anger and frustration is that you will be in a better position to make decisions about your life. In a situation where you are frustrated and angry because it seems like you have no control over your life, it is so important to find a way to discharge that emotional energy from your system.

Imagine that you have two scales: emotional state and a cognitive abilities scale. On the emotional scale, 1=minimal to no frustration and 10=blind rage, while on the cognitive scale 10=on the ball, 1=can’t think because a fog exists in my brain. A person in a blind rage is essentially in a brain fog and thus has reduced cognitive capacity. So the key is keeping the emotional scale low. One way to do that is to recognize and become aware of when the emotional scale is starting to increase, catching it, and dissipating the energy so the scale drops. Finding a creative outlet for this energy like painting, playing a musical instrument, washing the car, cleaning the house, baking bread, baking cookies, offers the added benefit that you now have something to show for that anger, frustration.

6. Change your attitude – live beyond approval.

We are trained from the time we are five in a study of how to seek approval. And every stage of academia continues that training. In academia, we make this crazy effort to seek approval for our performance as PhD students and postdocs from our supervisors, and then as tenure-track professors from our colleagues.

If you show up and express yourself, of course not everyone will agree with you. Some may appreciate what you say and do, but not everyone. And even if you do get approval, will it ever be enough? Approval seeking behaviors are needy and tiring and frankly, who wants to be around someone so clingy and always tired? There is so much in our lives that already tires us, so why add one more thing?

What this means is separating science from who we are. We are not our science. We only seek approval because we want people to like us. But really what does having our science critically evaluated have anything to do with liking us as a person? Most of the time, our colleagues and supervisors don’t spend enough time with us to know whether they truly like us or not. They only spend time with us in a professional sense. If your supervisor and/or colleagues like your science does it mean that they will like you? Nope – if they like the science, they like the science. It has nothing to do with you.

Unfortunately, the informality of academia confuses the lines between friendship and our professional lives. It might be that those lab socials, lab outings contribute to the blurring of the line. Minimizing the amount of social time (nonprofessional) that you spend with your lab and supervisor will help maintain that professional relationship. I also think that having a community outside of academia will help prevent you from using your colleagues and lab group as a social crutch.

I believe that not only do we seek external approval, but we also have trained ourselves to seek it internally. Again, will we ever get enough internal approval? I do this all the time and this kind of self-punishment is exhausting. It makes me feel like I have no chance at a career in science or even at life.

And so, while this may sound Oprahesque, I find it works.

For example, my internal voice says,

“You should have run that gel today and now you will be two whole days behind. How will you get that manuscript out by the end of the month if you keep putting lab work off. Such and such has 10 publications and you only have 5. You need that manuscript. This will seriously hamper your chances at a faculty position.”

When I write this out, I can see the ridiculousness of the logic. But in my head, I can’t seem to see it - this because the thought has me in an emotional vicegrip. So I take a deep breath and try to localize where in my body do I feel this statement. Usually I feel it in my jaw and right shoulder. Then I work on softening that part of my body. By this point those ridiculous thoughts have washed through me and I’ve let them go. The more I practice this the better I get. More practically, seeing yourself as something beyond just a scientist can help so have other hobbies or activities in your life.

I hope this advice was helpful. Obviously it is not comprehensive so if anyone has anything else to add – please bring it to the table.

Advice to grad students looking for a post-doc

This week we have two potential postdocs coming to SmallUniversity to visit. And the guy who is the main supervisor, obviously, wants to make a good impression because it is hard to attract smart postdocs to SmallUniversity. So he's doing his darndest to try and get the departmental faculty and the postdocs to meet with these two.

And much like what happened to us when we arrived, they're really schmoozing these two. I remember thinking after we visited SmallUniversity how weird it was to be so schmoozed because I wasn't a potential faculty member. In the words of HippieHusband, this department is really good at the front end sale, but they don't put any energy in the retention of their "customers".

The two postdocs, much like HippieHusband and I, have done their PhDs at a large university. From their webpages, my guess is that they are probably smart, creative and pretty independent thinkers. And good or bad, it seems like one if not both of these postdocs will work pretty closely with TheBully.

At the end of a PhD, because of the emotional damage that occurs to you, it is really easy to be swept up in schmooze. After all someone is feeding the very hungry ego.

So what advice would I give to PhDs when looking for a post-doc?

1. First and foremost - figure out what you want out of the post doc. Obviously publications - but think harder - what skills do you want? Do you want a mentor for your career? How long do you expect to be there? What life events (like children, marriage, death, brain tumor, etc) might interfere with your goals? How will you handle this? What are the supervisor's expectations?
2. Do your research. Officially, you got a PhD for your research skills. What journals does the person you want to do your postdoc publish in? What's the rate of publication? When was their last publication?
3. So find out who are the postdocs in the department - past and present. Email them directly. Don't wait until the supervisor hooks you up with these people - he's only going to connect you with people that will talk highly about him and the department. It's really important to talk with postdocs who left. Why did they leave? Do they still maintain contact with their supervisor. If they don't, this might be a red flag.
4. Always talk with their students - again past and present. Grad students are the heart of a departmental research program. Yes, the heart. The best grad students to talk with are the ones in the last year or so of their PhD because this is when the grad student is ready to leave a department. Although it will be through a filter of bitterness and exhaustion, if these students still speak highly of their supervisor - then it's a gold star.
5. Pay attention to the dynamics amongst faculty, faculty and students, faculty and postdocs. If you can go to a journal club or joint lab meeting - do it. Although a potential supervisor may be on their best behavior, the undercurrent of the true dynamic in these relationships should still be present.
6. Read between the lines. Unhappy students and postdocs will never jeopardize their careers for frankness to a stranger. They will make judicious comments about the department, faculty and the supervisor. The onus is on you to figure out what they're trying to tell you.
7. If you are working with two people ie one is your actual supervisor and the other is a "collaborator" but you work in his/her lab. Define expectations and roles amongst the three of you.
8. Find out the expectations and rules around authorship? Do they expect to be on all papers that you write during your postdoc? What is their definition of intellectual contribution? A coffee talk?
9. What are the expectations around grants? Will you have to fund your own research? Are you expected to write your supervisors grants? Will you be acknowledged on the grant?
10. How open is the supervisor about his/her funding? The budget? Do you have access to that information?
11. Remember it takes a year to really know a place. The nooks and crannies, the gullies, the skeletons, the hidden gems. My opinion is that you can't really take advantage of the good stuff until you realize where the shit lies.
12. Get everything in writing.

These were not in any particular order but it's all I got right now.

The overlap between friends, faculty and postdoc

Recently, I received an email from a friend who has been asked by a "casual friend" to do a post-doc with her. "Casual friendships" arise because of the overlap between academic stage and real age. In our line of work, people may be at different stages of their career like grad student or postdoc but be within the same age range. Add to that that people get to different stages of the academic career at different paces. So you may start out as grad students together, but one of you fast tracks through a post-doc and becomes a junior faculty, while the other takes a year off or ends up in a post-doc for a much longer period of time. Another scenario that could arise is that as a senior grad student you became friends with the post-doc in the lab or adjacent lab group largely because you were similar in age. Now this person has gone on to become a faculty member. So I think the confound of age makes this even more challenging.

Here is his email:

I'm also writing to ask for your thoughts on something. When I finish my PhD I'll be looking for a post-doc in (insertCityName). Yesterday, I got a surprise offer from (insertFriend's Name), whom you know. We're decent friends and I'm enjoying getting to know her. She wanted to bend my ear yesterday about a project she's planning, and at the end she informally suggested I do a post-doc with her. My response was that the thought had crossed my mind previously (she does really cool stuff), but that I was wary about doing a post-doc with a friend as a boss. It still seems to be an open offer.

Here are my thoughts on whether I would recommend this type of post-doc:

1. A starting faculty or junior faculty has one thing on their mind - tenure. Faculty get tenure by writing and getting grants. They get grants by pumping out papers. Papers are produced by grad students and post-docs. If a grad student and post-doc start at the same time, the post-doc is expected to produce at least two papers per year, one of which should be from their current work even if this work is completely different from their PhD. The pressure that this places on a friendship can strain that relationship. It's not really fair to place all the blame on the junior faculty but at the same time, many junior faculty choose tenure over a friendship with a transient post-doc. They're doing what you're doing - trying to survive and thrive.
2. Friendship is compromised by the unfair hierarchy that is academia. The inherent structure in academia changes the power dynamic between friends from one of equals to an asymmetric one. This person will evaluate your work and write you letters of reference.
3. I believe that as a post-doc, it is really important to work with someone who is older than you. It becomes confusing for both parties when the age of the two individuals are so similar. That's because there is an expectation of friendship causing the lines of friend and mentor to become blurred. If you are much younger than the person there is no reason to expect friendship. It becomes even more difficult when two people enter this relationship as friends - the expectation is already present. When two people are friends and supervisor-postdoc, actions and words become interpreted in ways that make people feel bad about themselves or the other person.
4. I think that for both post-docs and grad students the most important thing is how you get along with the supervisor. Personality conflicts can tank a career and make you miserable for years. Despite the cutting edge research and the productivity of a lab, it is really important to make sure that your personality is one that meshes with the supervisory style. Supervisory style is a different beast than how that person relates to you as a friend.
5. A second factor to consider is the lab atmosphere. In the end, you are likely to spend more time with your labmates than the faculty member. This is not to say that you won't develop friendships with other faculty in the department but because your friend, the supervisor needs to cultivate ties in the department (think tenure), s/he probably won't have time to just hang out that much. This can cause resentment.
6. The post-doc is a place where you do a lot of work - if you're lucky it's innovative and sometimes exciting - but don't expect to get any credit for the work. The glory will come later when you have your own lab. This lack of recognition can sour a friendship, which is based on mutual respect.

Lastly, I know three people now, who have done post-docs with people they knew as "casual friends." All of them claimed to get along well prior to being a post-doc, but the friendship was soured by the end of the postdoc. Frankly, I think it takes two really awesome people who value and respect each enough other to rise above all the politics. Sadly, I don't know of any examples.

My answer is that I would not do it. Even if science was exciting and you knew that you had a really good relationship with the person, my response would be no - don't do it.

Well that's all I can think of - does anyone have any other reasons for or against doing a post-doc with a friend? Or any cases where two people are friends and remain friends - I'm sure that there must be, I just haven't heard. It would be great to pass along the advice to my friend!