[scott_s]

I found some of the phrasing in the NYT article odd, and this sentence clued me into why: "The authors, who did not get postdoctoral degrees themselves ..."

I think the NYT reporter thinks that people in postdocs are pursuing another degree. They are not. It's just a way for people with PhDs to remain in academia, doing research, so that they can build up their publication list to land tenure-track academic positions. (And, sometimes, even industry positions.) Perhaps what the study authors told the NYT reporter that they did not do postdocs, and the NYT reporter translated that to "did not get postdoctoral degrees".

I agree this is a holding pattern, as the author says it is. But it's not quite "back to school", as the title implies. (I know the person who wrote the article probably did not supply the title, but I suspect they both have the same confusion.) They're not pursuing another degree.

[chrisseaton]

I'm not sure holding pattern is fair either. I think doing a postdoc is a normal healthy part of a research career. I don't think most people are ready to start their own groups straight after finishing a PhD.

[compactmani]

I agree. The title should read 'Where Can a Ph.D. Take You? Forward to More Research, Usually'

Which is the entire point getting a PhD in the first place. More research. Forever.

I (along with many others) cringed at the phrasing of postdoctoral degree. A post-doc is not a degree. The article's comparison of a post-doc to law school for liberal arts majors was equally egregious. Sloppy writing.

Now, to be fair to their point. What they are observing is a cultural phenomenon in academia which is to stay in academia until you can't stay any more. Industry is for those who fail at academic research, whether that failure occurs at the post-doc stage or pre-tenure stage. This is in contrast to the sentiments of the real world (the perspective of the article author) which wonders why these "students" take so long to get a real job.

[analog31]

Plenty of people went straight from PhD to running their own groups, including my thesis advisor and his first grad student. It varied a lot from discipline to discipline. I would have observed at the time when I got my PhD, that the population of post-docs created the "need" for post-doctoral experience.

There were fields where post-doc experience was rare:

1. Engineering and computer science, where people had good employment prospects outside of academia

2. The humanities and social sciences, where there was no money to hire post-docs

Fields where post-doc experience was a requirement:

1. The sciences, with an abundance of money for hiring post-docs, and hit-or-miss employment prospects in industry, depending on your specialty and ancillary skills.

The other thing I've observed is that multiple post doc appointments don't really improve your chances. The superstars have identified themselves as such while still in grad school, or during their first post-doc appointment.

I concluded while still in grad school, that the arc of my career would not intersect with a professorship, so I finished my PhD and bailed out of academia.

[scott_s]

I think that one, or even two, postdoc positions is reasonable. But three or four is not unheard of, and that's definitely "holding pattern" territory.

[KKKKkkkk1]

Yeah, and it doesn't hurt either that you spend more time in your career payed below-market rate and without tenure, right?

[otoburb]

Also, chances are that the authors of the original study[1] did not pass erroneous information to the NYT reporter as they both hold PhDs in their field.

[1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6286/663

[rinze]

> It's just a way for people with PhDs to remain in academia, doing research, so that they can build up their publication list to land tenure-track academic positions.

Precisely this. Or also (my case): we have been doing research all our lives and were too afraid or too insecure to try to pursuit some other path. In my case, for a variety of reasons, I landed a postdoctoral position after I got my PhD but never really felt comfortable in it. Took a whole year to build up the nerve to start looking for industry positions until I finally found one that looked like a good match to my set of skills and I finally left academia. I don't regret it a bit.

[biswaroop]

Knowing what you know now, would you have skipped the post-doc? Or did it provide some further insights that your PhD could not?

[rinze]

I wouldn't have skipped it, as I learned a lot of stuff that I found incredibly useful. I would have left earlier, that is also true.

[mathattack]

Exactly. By this point it's out of necessity, to stay in the game. It's like asking an MBA, "If you could get to a plum Wall Street job without an internship, would you?" All of them would say, "Of course not!" In Science, the supply/demand imbalance is such that this "internship" (post-doc) lasts a lot more than a summer.

I have a friend who did his MD/Phd immediately after undergrad. That wasn't enough to land a job, so he did a several year post-doc before landing at a research university. Even still he was in his 40s before getting tenure. At that point tenure is about rewarding performance more than anything related to academic freedom.

[bbgm]

Many of my peers ended up doing postdocs (most finished PhDs in the early 00s). Some are academics today, many work in industry. Some like me are now in completely different fields. I was mostly lucky in that I got a job at an early stage startup after my PhD. I didn't want to be an academic so the post-doc route was not as interesting.

The relevant part was that none of us thought about post-docs as another degree but the next stage of our careers.

[KKKKkkkk1]

Doesn't the fact that you don't even get a degree out of a postdoc make it worse? In some groups, being a postdoc means simply that you're software engineering for 0.25 of the pay that you would get as a software engineer in industry. You're hoping to get a chance to stick around as a researcher, but you're not doing actual research (hence no degree).

[munin]

no, you're doing research. I know some postdocs who practically don't do research, they manage labs or write software, but their names go on the papers that come out of the lab which is frequently good enough. and usually, the postdocs do research.

my advisor said that being a postdoc was the best time of their life (they has tenure) because their responsibilities were ~0, they had no one to manage / no one they was responsible for, but they also had effectively no superior or supervisor because the PI was busy managing the graduate students and expected that the postdocs see to themselves.

[KKKKkkkk1]

I'm sure your advisor had an awesome experience, but there majority of postdocs don't get tenure-track positions and end up regretting doing a postdoc.

[eastWestMath]

Yeah, I know mathematicians are often incredibly productive during their post-docs. Mind you, if you aren't its a kiss of death to your academic career.