#12: Post-postdoc
{3200 words, 13 minutes}
It's month 12 of the contracted 30 months of my postdoc. Scratch that, it's month 21. Well, I started writing this post at that time but now it's month 29. Admittedly, I haven't exactly spent a lot of time writing for this blog during (any of) that time, particularly of the postdoc process and particularly of the last few months. Frankly, that delay has been driven by the stress of a lot of changes in the past few months, most of all, crossing the halfway point around November/December of 2017. While I still have the rest of a little of 2018 left ahead of me, I still need a lot of lead time to think and act on decisions for my future career. Making life-changing decisions also means taking a hard look at what I've done and trying to refine the value-based principles that guide and justify those decisions. Coming up to this point, I've been faced with deciding whether I should stay the course in Norway or choose to go somewhere else (including returning to the U.S.). Writing, although not always publicly, has been one of my tools to help myself consider all of the factors in play. It's difficult to tackle in one blog post but this should cover the main questions at hand.
The first value-challenging question I posed to myself was: why am I a postdoc?
A postdoc traditionally serves as an opportunity for a newly minted PhD to obtain new experience. Since most PhDs germinate in a single research environment, it is valuable to see how research is done at other institutions or even other countries. It is frequently recommended as an opportunity to broaden knowledge horizons, shifting focus to a related field or jumping into an entirely new one. Additionally, being steeped in a new environment can allow a new PhD to truly put their skills to the test and rapidly expand their career network. Overall, it serves as a transitory period between a student who primarily does lab work and a principal investigator who primarily writes grants and papers. As competition is so high for a limited number of tenure-track positions, the postdoc has become the primary pathway toward a tenure-track position. The postdoctoral role has evolved over time and has many faults and drawbacks I won't cover here but to me, these aspects are, to me, the defining characteristics of a postdoc. All were valid reasons for me to pursue a postdoctoral position.
For perspective, at the beginning of my postdoc/job search back in 2016, the plan for any postdoc I got was to first succeed in the postdoc and then use the postdoc experience and network as a way to progress into a permanent job. As I understood it at the time, and I believe it still holds, this is a fairly common opportunity for many good postdocs who work hard and who of course actually want to stay, barring other life-altering circumstances. The end goal of any postdoc, to me, is always a permanent job in science. A permanent job in science assures stability, which I believe to be important (and greatly undervalued) for successful research. I prospected that I could reliably achieve a position at a national laboratory; my initial goal was to become a beamline scientist. If I was lucky, I might obtain a tenure-track (TT) academic position at a university. This was, in retrospective, a naïve attitude; it ignores significant nuances.
Short of the PhD student geniuses, successful postdocs usually take two to three years before moving on to TT positions. Having read about the sheer difficulty of obtaining such positions, owing to the imbalance between PhDs produced and TT positions opened annually, I have my doubts of my ability to obtain (and succeed) a TT position. Nevertheless, a postdoc kept the door to academia open for me and offered a chance to change my own mind. The purpose here was to learn about neutron science and battery science, both of which were mostly new to me, and to keep as many opportunities open. For personal reasons, it wouldn't hurt to get some international exposure along the way.
In my naïveté, I assumed that many postdocs went on to TT positions and that I would succeed enough to be prepared for a TT position. That belief is because I always browsed CVs of professors, trying to divine patterns in how their careers developed into their current positions. Due to self-selection bias, most professors had successful 2- or 3-year postdocs which led to positions. That seemed like a natural progression of career development. In a generalized statement: all professors have successful postdocs; but not all postdocs successfully become professors.
My optimism met its demise when I realized that every other postdoc I have met at IFE had already been through at least one prior postdoc (also in another country but that's due to the multinational nature of Europe). Meaning, their postdoc did not lead to a permanent research position. Within the standard five years of eligibility post-PhD, one could have as many as three or four postdocs before simply being a "temporary researcher" who is simply another year-to-year postdoc by another name. It seems hard to expect that I might fare any better than them given my productivity. I would be looking at another postdoc, at minimum, probably somewhere more prestigious than IFE, to competitive for an academic position. I'm not sure I'm ready to dedicate another 2 years of nomadic life, setting up in another country and again trying to find my footing while also being scientifically productive. But if I want a TT position, with my current CV, I will probably need another postdoc. TT positions are built on prestige; for every one of you, imagine that there is at least one more like you at Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, etc. All are competing for the same positions, which number far fewer than that of the existing postdocs. And if I couldn't join them before, can I really expect to join them later without a massive step change, a lucky big break in my own CV? Eventually, the rich get richer with prestige, and you can see their career trajectories begin to pull away from yours.
On the other hand, not all permanent jobs in science are the same. In a place of prestige, one might become a world-leader, one of the foremost experts in a subject field, and mass-produce science with an assembly-line army of postdocs and students and various collaborators from other prestigious places. In a smaller place, perhaps like IFE, a permanent researcher might be a subsistence farmer, producing enough science to be self-sufficient. These two situations fall along a line of what I consider the "expected outcomes" model, where given amounts of prestige result in proportionally equivalent amounts of production, prestige being causally linked to resources, networks, people, etc. I don't believe that proportionality to be linear (rather, exponential is more likely due to network benefits and the power of capital investment into scientific instruments) but I think it could be considered fair to IFE and Norway, once we control for other economic factors, primarily the cost of labor in Norway. Success matters, but the context in which it occurs also matters a great deal.
In that regard, there are situations where one might be subsisting in a place of prestige (a situation I think most assistant professors start out in) and conversely, where one exceeds the expected productivity given the prestige or resources available to them. The latter seemed more achievable to me, but it cannot be determined if one situation is better than the other, only that there are all manner of degrees in between. In setting my postdoc goal of "permanent job", I ultimately let this nuance take a backseat priority to simply having a postdoc instead of the "perfect postdoc". And so I ended up at a place like IFE, where I knew it wasn't prestigious but I felt that I might exceed my own expectations. In the balance of success and context, I chose to value context.
As the end of my postdoc approached, I was then faced with this question: is the IFE where I want to stay?
IFE does not, in my opinion, have much of reputation in academia. I'm not even sure if it's well known in Norway, much less Europe, and internationally. We are frequently overshadowed by SINTEF, a research services institute about 3 times our size in personnel. Parts of IFE are within certain specialty fields, like the Halden Reactor Project with regard to nuclear safety and operational studies. Otherwise, the only place I have found it on the internet thus far, besides the main website and the Norwegian news (people always have something to say about nuclear reactors and their risks), is a listing of neutron sources in Europe during my literature search.
It is reasonable to expect this of IFE. IFE only has about 600 employees. Its facilities are largely closed off from outside users, although NcNeutron will change that significantly. Its annual turnover of $125 million USD isn't large by US standards. For comparison, the National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven National Lab, one facility of several on-site, spends $50 million USD a year alone on operation costs. By most metrics, it may not even be reasonable to compare us to academic groups at universities networked to million-dollar investments in infrastructure. Our new battery department is about 20 people; one major established PI has as many workers and any given university will have several established PIs working in the same field as a cluster of experts.
Yet we should, in my opinion, still strive to publish in the same journals. I underestimated the size of that struggle. And I misjudged my expectations of what a single postdoc can achieve in a small laboratory in place of being a postdoc in a top-tier academic group as I was a PhD student in my PhD group. The academic environment and age demographics for university groups creates a different type of work ethic and prioritization for scientific productivity, which isn't present at a hybrid academic/industry-collaborator institution like IFE.
IFE's mission is noble and its historical origins in post-war Atoms-For-Peace Norway is illustrious. But I'm not sure anyone really knows about IFE and the work that's taking place here, the facilities, the people, the collaborators. IFE doesn't really pretend otherwise, at least in renewable energy. Even one of my project's objectives was to raise the reputation of the institute through the publication of high quality science. The group is still relatively new and most of the department hasn't been in the field for more than 10 years. We're like a dark horse in the race to find renewable energy solutions and that comes with all the advantages and disadvantages of being a dark horse in a field filled with competitive, proven champions (Panasonic, Sony, Hitachi, Japanese universities, Samsung, South Korean universities, and top European and North American academic groups with Chinese academic groups sprouting rapidly). I worry about what coming to IFE tells my future employer. Have I closed career pathways by choosing to work abroad, for a not-well-known institution, in stereotypically easy-going Europe, despite working on a very important problem? The simpler, scarier question is: did I sell myself short? Has my self-deprecating attitude, while socially humorous, cost me professionally?
The choice now is as it has always been: bet now and wait for something to grow or hold off and wait for a better opportunity. It's not a simple decision. In fact, much of the stock market is picked on the same, difficult question: do you bet on what you think is undervalued or what you think has the most potential for growth? Institutions that are established are not frequently undervalued, so the opportunities are highly competitive. Institutions with the potential for growth can create a different kind of value but carry the risk of being unknown and thus failing to succeed for undefined periods of time. Do you try to be on the tip of the drill with the sharpest of them all or find somewhere else to cut a new path? Again, success is qualified by its context. Neither is better than the other and both have value. They are simply different. Orthogonal, even. This decision faced me before the postdoc and is facing me now again, as I approach the end of my postdoc.
Emotionally, it's also frustrating to grapple with this ingrained belief that when one comes from a prestigious academic institution, one must move ever upwards. Again, this may be based on my past habit of reading many successful professors' CVs and seeing the patterns of their trajectory. There is also a biased perception that one has to come from "MIT, Caltech, or Stanford" in order to be any good or near the top. Like top seeds in a playoff tournament, where the expectation for success is so high that it nearly becomes automatic. Assumed. To do any less, to perform below par, is to waste the gift and privilege of attending (two) top 10 schools. And that belief is subconsciously embedded in me, even though I struggle now with whether I should be living with this largely unsustainable and unrealistic standard. Only a few make it to the TT level; survey research tracking PhD students and post-degree 5-year outcomes indicate that many overestimate their expectation to reaching a TT job by 3 or 5 times that actual rate. Those that do make to TT (again, this means "tenure-TRACK", meaning it's only on the way to a tenure position, not an actual permanent position) after 5 years have made significant sacrifices or have had others (i.e., spouses and/or families) make sacrifices to get them there. Whether I'm willing to make amends with those terms or not, by the end of this postdoc in a short while, I don't think I'll be ready for the next level. For now, for better or worse, I'm stuck with the dark horse.
However, the term "dark horse" exists for a very good reason, because underdogs have from time to time made a story of themselves as the powerfully new talents entering the field in an exciting manner. But a dark horse only exists because someone believes in the potential for worth and growth far beyond anyone's expectations. It's the unknown that has the allure. And someone, at least several people at IFE, believe in me and in having me be a part of the team, so much so that they offered me a permanent position as researcher in the Battery Technology department. It bears repeating: a permanent position in scientific research.
To get that is to achieve the goal I set out in choosing to postdoc in the first place. This is what I want … isn't it? Well, as you and I now know, it isn't that simple. There are nuances: success vs. context, prestige vs. expectations, undervalued opportunity vs. growth potential, risk vs. chance at reward, delaying gratification at 31, coming to terms with ingrained beliefs of endless success and how much more successful your peers are. There are also many other factors, some personal, that I haven't discussed in the slightest. To be frank and concise, I will list them here:
Evidence for staying:
Getting a staff position is rare; four postdocs have transited through IFE in my time and none have stayed (although one was offered a permanent position).
The new Battery Technology department where I will be hired into is young, growing, and full of new projects and opportunities for leadership and new creative research directions.
People like me here and I feel valued by management, which was not the case in my PhD student years.
My project manager is also new. We haven't been fully jaded yet. We believe we can change things around here and make a difference. We believe in the growth potential model.
I have always been slow to mature my network and solidify connections in any new place (in my experience, I typically need two years to get my footing socially). Jumping off to somewhere new while the roots are weak seems unwise.
IFE's closer relations to industry means better professional networking opportunities.
The urgency of research-based solutions for climate change makes it a priority to work on energy storage technology, which is where I want to be as a scientist.
Europe is balanced geographically between Asia and America, which has allowed me to travel to Japan/China and the U.S. more than I would have if I stayed in the U.S.
I still don't have papers published yet (although I have several under preparation or submitted) which means moving to a new position will require a double workload of finishing prior work while starting up new work.
Evidence against staying:
Norway does not feel like an elite community. IFE is not a world-class institution in my opinion. We may never publish in Nature/Science or top energy journals. Our contribution to the scientific community may be marginal or irrelevant.
The job benefits are good (hello, 5 weeks of paid vacation per year), society is focused on providing a dignified and just standard of living for all, but pay is actually subpar to what I could obtain in the U.S. for an equal permanent position. The postdoc pay was substantially higher but this advantage evaporates when moving up to the permanent position. In other words, the floor is high but the ceiling is low (which is the opposite of the U.S.).
Making friends in a tightly-knit Norwegian society is difficult and is compounded by the language barrier, whose importance is underestimated.
Relationship status and prospects are dismal. There are many issues in this topic alone, but simply put, the race, age, and height demographics are all not in my favor and Norway is still primarily a white European culture.
Housing is extremely expensive in Oslo and prices have been diverging from income-growth for the past 25 years. I have concerns over the sustainability of this trajectory.
Friends and family in the U.S. are much farther away and that means missing important occasions, especially those occasions which are more tragic than happy.
After thinking about all of these things, I did end up accepting the position at IFE. As you can tell, it is not without conflict or reservations. But when it comes down to those two main questions, why am I a postdoc and is IFE where I want to be, then I think it's the right answer. Success is impossible to plan, but hard work isn't. Over the years, I've come to learn that hard work will lead to success, but generally not the success you initially envisioned nor at the time you desire it most. Regardless of the outcome, it will always feel like trying to lift a boulder with a spoon; nothing worthwhile has ever come easily. Well, I guess I've always liked a challenge.
