PostdocPartum #0: Prologue
{1200 words, 6 minutes}
Preface: I wrote the following as the epilogue to #dissertuesday. Now, after some editing to update my perspective after becoming a postdoc at IFE, it serves as the prologue to PostdocPartum. PostdocPartum will continue as a regular column about my life and career as a postdoc.
By March of 2016, everyone I know who graduated with me in December had found a full-time job.
I had been looking for jobs for 4 or 5 months by that point without much success beyond one interview with a professor at MIT (she was impressed, but they hired someone else).
I had a few rules guiding my search scope. I had been looking for a research position in government or private industry. I was flexible with payscales of $50K and up, assuming a reasonable cost of living. I ruled out academic postdocs except for top-tier universities with perfect fits to my skills; grad school had already chewed up enough opportunity costs. I also ruled out consulting and oil-gas companies as poor fits, although the latter become more of a non-decision as the price of oil dropped. Perhaps my biggest job search advantage compared to my friends and colleagues was that I was geographically unrestricted, primarily because I'm single, never married, and have no dependents (this suddenly turned into a tax form). Based on my synchrotron experience, postdocs at national laboratories were ideal for me, because of how they fit me in terms of the research goals, the work environment (heavy on being technical and scientific), and the pay (above average for postdocs).
During my search, a lot of people gave me advice on the job search and I appreciate that. They provided ideas about national labs, industry, and startups. Besides working in the U.S., there are also opportunities at research institutes and synchrotrons in Asia and Europe. All in all, there are hundreds of potential places to apply to and this huge selection of possibilities is overwhelming. It afflicts upon me the paralysis of choice. It's going to the grocery store to buy some salt, and seeing 400 kinds of salt on the shelf. When you check out, you're left wondering if you bought the "right" one. When you add the salt to your food and it doesn't taste quite right, you're wondering if you'd have been happier with a different one.
Everyone I know had geographic or other legal restrictions, whether for career prospects, significant others, or proximity to family. There are obvious sacrifices to make to preserve these aspects of life, but there is also a hidden benefit. When the choices are fewer, the pros and cons are easier to weigh. The clearer it is to see which choice is better, the more people are satisfied with their decisions in retrospect. There is less doubt about whether another choice might have been better. Imagine how difficult Goldilocks's circumstance would be if she had 100 beds to try instead of three.
It's not just the paralysis of choice, though, since most job applications will result in rejection. It's also the paralysis of analysis, of optimism and pessimism, of idealism and perfectionism. How do I decide where to go? How do I decide which is best for me? Is an offered position better than the prospect of a different, potentially better position? Does this position close doors in the future? Am I overqualified or underselling my skills for this position? Is a position that favors life experience more important than one that favors a better career path? Ultimately, it's a decision that each person has to make for themselves, but I'm not sure how people go about making this decision. In fact, maybe it's not a decision people actually make; maybe, they just take the jobs that they can and have gratitude for their luckiness.
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In middle school, high school, college, and graduate school, I always aimed to be the best. I was not the best. Each stage taught me more and more how less and less than best I was. Each stage, I always felt I had to keep going; I always chose the harder route, the more challenging path, thinking it would lead me to become better. If you can beat hard mode, you can beat easy mode. I never started off as great at something but I always knew I could get better at it, to the point of being respectably good. I just had to work harder, stay longer. Stick around when the other kids gave up and left. Grit was my specialty and the education system rewards grit very, very well.
But I didn't have to think that hard about life back then and there weren't many choices back then. Grit was a massively powerful drill and school was the guiding pilot hole. School had a defined path of progression, a predictability that I lovingly enjoyed. Engineering was the obvious choice for having competencies in math and science. Michigan was the only (and best) place to go. Georgia Tech was the only one to accept me for a PhD. That's where the well-defined progression ends, where the drill punches through and spins about aimlessly, wondering what to drill next. Although each stage gave broader opportunities than the last, now the doors were blasted wide open. Now, it wasn't so easy to decide where to go next. Now, I have to drill my own pilot holes. It is clear which location is harder to get to (obviously, academia), but the paths aren't clear anymore; there are many and they all curve beyond what I can see.
However, in retrospect as a postdoc now, the choice to go to Norway doesn't seem all that different from the other choices I've made in my life. It was the best of the circumstance, what seemed to be the most natural choice, just as every decision before was "naturally" the best. Truthfully, I could had made other choices in the past, like look for a job or get a Master's instead of the PhD or medicine instead of engineering. Perhaps, the conclusion now upon reflection is that the presence of other choices doesn't necessarily diminish the quality of your choice. It's not a zero sum situation. Every decision we make, every path we choose, eventually becomes the only path we can know. Our lives are the story we craft, and we craft a story to fit our lives. A story of "what if?" is actually not very interesting beyond fanciful daydreaming, because it ends in a question mark right away. There are no details, no themes, no stories of victories and defeats, no heartbreaks, no resolutions, only a long blank space after the question mark.
Objectively, though, what does anyone really know about Norway? Sure, there is probably a subconsciously selfish desire to live vicariously through friends in far off, foreign places or to have a local point of contact for future travel. We say the happy things we say and have happy expectations for each other because we have optimism for the future. We really do wish the best for each other, in spite of the fact that we may have no idea the consequences of our choices, because what do we know about "what if?" stories, the biggest of which is in front of us? The only way to objectively know something about Norway, to answer the "what if", to craft the next chapter of my story is to go there. It's like Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel; you can read about the paintings, the building, and their history endlessly but how do you know what it smells like unless you go there yourself and find out?
