How Long are Postdoctoral Fellowships?

For a better analysis with more data, click here.

OK, apologies, chemblogosphere: today is apparently write-guest-posts-for-Chemjobber day.

He poses an interesting question in his "Ivory Filter Flask" post from earlier today:

" What is the median length of a postdoc these days, anyways?"

Well, I may have some answers to that question. Looking through the New Hires, I put together a list, and ran some basic statistics*:

MEAN:	3.7 years
MODE:	3 years
MEDIAN	4 years

MIN:             1 year
MAX:            8 years
(n = 38)

It's tough to make general statements about such a small cohort, but I noticed two trends:

1) Disciplines such as chemical biology, nanomaterials, P-chem, and computational chemistry tended to stay in longer postdocs.

2) About 20% of the faculty profiles were in more than one postdoc or other fellowship program prior to their faculty appointment.

Thoughts? Sound right, or wrong? Please let me know in the comments!

--

*Caveats:

These postdocs reflect pending faculty appointments; I'm clearly not counting those who went into government, pharmaceutical, industry, or left chemistry entirely. If someone has a good idea for how to capture that data, I'm all ears.

Counting time: If someone gave a graduation year - "Ph.D. 2009"-  I assumed a postdoctoral stint until their faculty start date. For example, 2015 start = 6 years a postdoc. If, however, they provided a range - "postdoc 2012-2014" - I assumed that they postdoc'd the difference of that time, or 2 years, despite the fact that, depending on start and end dates, that could reasonably be interpreted as any length of time between 13 months (Dec 2012-Jan 2014) and 36 months (Jan 2012-Dec 2014).

Of the 73 new faculty starting in 2015 or 2016 (as of June 2015), I was only able to find bio-sketch information for half. The following people from my list are represented in the above statistics: Li, Engle, Hyster, Matson, Menard, Personick, Thoi, Tsui, Wasa, Blakemore, Browne, Devery, Gahlmann, Kempa, Limmer, Nelson, Sing, Thompson, Bantz, Hubbard, Garcia-Bosch, Huo, Wei Li, Miller, Rossini, Seiple, Wu, Anand, Boudreau, Genereux, Jiang, Sletten, Theberge, Fu, Ke, Conley, Raston.

Making Time

Do you ever feel like you don't have enough time?

That seems to be a popular topic today, with two pieces in the popular press exploring that concept, albeit from very different viewpoints.

The first, from Wired writer (and Mythbusters host par excellence) Adam Savage relates the value of deadlines. He claims that he usually allows projects to languish on his workbench when given open-ended timelines, but while 'under the gun' performs at a high level and (in his words) finds solutions that are "innovative, elegant, and shockingly simple."

Of course, there's always that third option...
Credit: BBC | Wikipedia

The second, from the Times' Opinion Pages, tells a very different story: how to relax in order to increase one's productivity. Author Tony Schwartz, CEO of the consulting firm The Energy Project, argues that 'more is less' in the long run - we push to try and fill up work days with actual work, which results in tired, nonproductive employees. He recommends 90-minute 'sessions,' where one focuses solely on the task at hand, followed by breaks, exercise, or even - gasp! - naps.

Chemistry Angle: I like both approaches, but find they work best at different times in project cycles. While you're slogging through, trying to find those optimized conditions or exploring new leads, it's best to follow the '90-minute sessions' approach. Take a break! Nearly every scientific autobiography I've read suggests that problems get solved when the authors step away and do something completely unrelated for a while (Kekule, Feynman, Newton, Watson, Fleming, etc.)

Adam's approach (Hurry! Time running out!) fits best when you have a specific goal in mind - getting that paper out, presenting at the conference, filing that patent. Though I hate to admit it, the 48 hours leading up to submission often produce the bulk of such efforts. Sometimes it's worth the extra stress - and extra coffee - to get a superior final result.