(bright upbeat music)
- Hi, I'm Laurence Clement and I'm program director
of academic career development
at the University of California, San Francisco
in the Office of Career and Professional Development.
This video is part of a video series called
'The Strategic Postdoc'.
And this is module one,
'Positioning Yourself for the Postdoc'.
This is actually the last video in our series.
And today we're gonna talk about how to prepare
to leave your PhD and some of the issues
that some graduate students run into
as they're preparing to leave.
And to do this we're gonna use the situation
of a graduate student, Ana, that represents the situations
we see a lot in our advising work at UCSF.
So a few months ago, Ana met with her thesis committee
to discuss her graduation date,
and they agreed that she could graduate after
she had submitted her paper
that she's about to start writing.
And she's finally ready to submit this paper,
but her graduate advisor has asked her
to postpone her graduation date by six to eight months,
because he needs her to do a set of experiments
that he will need for his next RO1 submission.
And so Ana isn't sure what to do.
She was hoping to start applying for postdoc positions
and to leave for a postdoc right after graduation.
Now, she's not sure if she should even start looking
for a postdoc.
So that leads us to the types of issues
that graduate students can run into at the end of their PhD.
So one is feelings of obligation and guilt to give back
to the advisor and to support the lab
and make sure it succeeds.
A second thing they run into is a lack of support to explore
and secure the next position in their career,
making it more difficult to leave.
A third one is possibly role conflict faced by some advisors
when it comes to their supervisor versus their mentor
and their trainer roles.
And we'll talk more about this in this video.
And then the last one, which we'll also talk about is
the graduate student feeling powerless
in their advisor's decision to postpone
their graduation date.
What we did in our last video is we talked about reframing
the postdoc as a training.
And what I really want to encourage people to do here is,
especially if you're a senior graduate student, is
to also rethink about why you started this PhD.
Graduate school is a training that prepares
for an educational goal,
and it should end when you have fulfilled the requirements
of the PhD program.
Once you've reached your goal, it's time to leave.
So I think it's really important to remind this
to graduate students because they often forget this.
And one thing they often forget too,
is that knowing that you're a trainee,
it is actually your advisor's job
to develop a succession plan for your position
and to actually figure out what's gonna happen
when you need to leave.
So you do not need to stay extra time in your PhD.
So based on these two roles of graduate advisors
and postdoctoral PIs, especially in Ana's advisor's case,
it seems like Ana should be ready to leave the lab.
She has met the requirements of the PhD and she feels ready
to move on to the next career,
to that next step in her career.
But there's a third role that PIs have towards
their trainees, especially in the biomedical sciences,
which is the supervisor role.
And so sometimes these roles actually happen
to have conflicts with each other.
The supervisor role is really focused on
the productivity of the lab, the productivity of the PI
and the productivity of each individual on the team.
That is what the PI does as a supervisor
and his responsibilities illustrate this pretty well.
PIs hire, promote and terminate people,
especially postdocs who are staff at many institutions.
They also manage the performance, the behaviors,
and the productivity of everyone in their team.
They also allocate resources.
They assign projects and they also authorize sharing
of products and data.
So these are some examples of the responsibilities
of a supervisor and because PIs have these responsibilities,
they are not just mentors and they are not just trainers.
They're also supervisors.
What this looks like for Ana is that when the PI engages
in his supervisory role,
he thinks things like my goal is to ensure that my team
is as productive as possible.
And because Ana is the only person
who can do these experiments for the R01 grant,
I really need her to stay longer
because otherwise it's gonna jeopardize
the future of the team.
This is why there are sometimes role conflicts between
the different roles of PIs.
When the PI needs Ana to stay longer as a supervisor,
but actually is okay with her leaving earlier
as a mentor and trainer, there's a conflict here.
And for Ana, it's kind of tricky to know
at which moment she's engaging with her mentor,
with her trainer and with her supervisor.
And we see this happen even more for postdoctoral scholars.
Postdoctoral scholars are actually hired by the PI directly
and they can be terminated,
their position can be terminated at any moment.
That's an important role conflict
with the role of the mentor,
who is supposed to provide career development
and psychosocial support.
And that makes it that when they decide
to terminate a postdoc,
they can not be the person to support
that trainee for their career,
because this they're basically doing something pretty
negative for their career.
And they're also can't support them psychologically
as a mentor would.
This is what we qualify as role conflict.
So Ana is in the situation where the PI has multiple roles
and they don't all align with each other.
If you wanna hear more about this,
you can read our article on,
in the "Journal of Microbiology and Biology Education."
This was a work, a collaborative work with Karen Leung
and James Lewis at City College of San Francisco.
And Naledi Saul, the director of the Office
of Career and Professional Development at UCSF.
So for Ana, this may be really confusing
because her PI is making a decision that doesn't seem
to be working in her favor.
And as she considers him as her mentor,
there's a conflict with what she would expect him to decide,
which is to let her leave and to prioritize her movement
into her next step of her career.
So this anxiety, this can cause anxiety for Ana
and confusion and even maybe frustration.
So she needs to acknowledge these feelings and realize that
this is due to the systemic issues
of a graduate and postdoctoral training
and acknowledge that she might have feelings of obligation
and guilt that add on to this confusion
and this frustration.
And then remind herself that as a graduate student,
she is here to attain educational goals and she is meant
to move on to the next step of her position.
But as a supervisor, her PIs role is
to prepare her departure and to plan for her succession,
not to ask her to stay longer necessarily.
So the next thing is that Ana is gonna have to have
a negotiation conversation with her advisor,
but she needs to remember that that conversation
will not be necessarily a conversation she's having really
with her mentor in his mentor role.
She's gonna have the conversation with his supervisor role,
the supervisory part of him.
And she can acknowledge that there is a conflict
in her departure that it would create an issue
in terms of productivity for the lab and for the PI.
And then she can start working with him to address the needs
he has as a supervisor,
which is to have someone else with her level
of expertise in the lab.
And they can start working on a training plan
for an early stage graduate student
or a postdoc or even training a technician
to actually do these experiments so she can leave
and he can continue with and maintain
the productivity of his lab.
The second thing that Ana has to deal with is
a power differential between her advisor and her.
And this is where what happens,
this becomes really complicated
if the PI doesn't respond well to that conversation,
or she doesn't feel she can have that conversation,
even, with her PI.
That comes from the fact that those multiple roles come
with different types of power.
I'm gonna talk about the six types of power
that are described by Raven and French
and how they're connected to the PIs roles.
The first type of power is the referent power.
This comes from the fact that Ana really wants to maintain
a good interpersonal relationship with her PI or advisor.
It's often tied to that mentor role,
and that gives her PI power over Ana
'cause she does want to maintain that good relationship.
The PI also has expertise power because she prefers to do
what her PI or advisor suggests
because she recognizes his professional expertise.
So that gives him a second type of power as a mentor.
As a trainer, he also has information power.
He controls and owns a lot of information and knowledge
that Ana needs to succeed.
But as a supervisor, he also has legitimate power,
which is that really, if he is her supervisor,
he actually has the right to direct Ana's activities
as he sees fit.
On top of this, he has,
what's really important for Ana right now,
which is reward power.
Ana really needs him to recommend her
for her postdoctoral positions.
She will need him to recommend her for her faculty positions
in the future, if she wants a faculty position.
And so in this case,
the PI can provide that letter of recommendation,
which is part of providing opportunity
for Ana's career advancement if her work is outstanding.
And the last thing is he has coercive power,
which means that if he is not happy with what she does,
he can take actions against her,
which is part of what a supervisor can do.
But Ana can actually balance out the power dynamic
with her PI.
She can reach out to another mentor for protection,
one who can strategize on how to negotiate with her advisor
or can influence her advisor.
And when I talk to graduate students about
who can help them,
they often bring up a senior postdoc
who has worked with their advisor for a long time,
somebody who might really be able to influence their PI.
And they're also talk about PIs at their institution
at other institutions where good advisor mentors
or know the advisor well,
and could even help her understand how to talk to him
or even talk to the advisor.
She can also check with an ombuds office
or coaching session about how to have that conversation
with her advisor.
We have an ombuds office at UCSF,
and these are professionals who actually listen to
the situation you're in and talk with you
about the best way to actually have
that conversation with the PI.
And you can come back to them and tell them how it went
and how you can, what the next step can be.
And so they're really fantastic.
We really rely on them a lot in our advising role.
And then she can also ask for a consult from somebody
who has legitimate power.
The thesis committee is a good example of that.
And she could really set up a time to meet individually
with one of the thesis committee members,
or with all of them.
And when we have advising sessions with our students,
we often talk about who is the best person to talk to?
Who do you feel you have a good relationship with?
Who do you feel is really,
doesn't have a lot of role conflict with just relationships
with their PI outside of this thesis committee,
and can really talk with you and maybe even with the PI
about this decision to postpone the graduation date.
And then what she can do is she can begin reaching out
to postdoctoral labs and let the committee and advisor know
if she gets an offer.
Everyone can then work towards getting Ana transitioned
into her postdoc including her new PI.
And so having a new position lined up can help Ana set
a realistic timeframe for leaving the lab.
One thing I wanna point out too,
is that these people together kind of make up
a sort of advisory team for Ana.
And this advisory team is something that she'll really need
over her whole career especially if she moves
into a research intensive faculty position,
when she's applying to R01 grants as a pre-tenure faculty,
she will really need rely on several people
to help her put together her proposals,
make them competitive, but also learn how to manage a team
and make a team productive.
And that team, that advisory team
could also really help her be much more competitive
when she's applying for faculty positions
at the end of her postdoc
and even earlier during her postdoc,
make sure that her strategy is right
and that she's making the right decisions.
And even before that, as she's applying for postdocs.
So what we recommend is that you think about creating
a small advisory team for you,
people you trust that can support you in different ways
for different parts of your professional development
and your career development.
So if you think about the senior postdoc
and these two faculty,
they're kind of their relationship advisors,
they help her figure out,
how to manage relationships with people of higher power
like her PI in this position, in this situation
or in the future with even people with lesser power,
how to be a good inclusive manager
and not slide into toxic behaviors
will be very important.
And then there's a group of people that might,
and they might overlap,
but there's also a few people that will be helping you set
your scientific strategy and your career strategy based on
that scientific strategy.
So thinking about what postdoc lab to choose,
thinking about how to write your R01 grant,
when you're a faculty,
giving you feedback on your research statement,
your application materials as a postdoc,
all of these things will require critical feedback
from scientists who really are there
to help you move forward.
And that's sort of what the thesis committee
should be doing and hopefully your thesis committee
will help you do that.
And then it's really also helpful to have another person
who was kind of like a role model,
somebody who has overcome similar challenges maybe as yours
or somebody who has similar values to yours.
And maybe they're not exactly
in the same career type as yours,
but they can help you navigate a lot of the things
you're facing, you know, a lot of things we're talking about
in these videos have to do with systemic inequities,
with the postdoctoral and the graduate training,
and they have figured out how to work through that.
And so they can give you that kind of feedback
and help you evolve on this.
So we'll talk more about this in the next video series
about how to develop that advisory team,
but it's actually a good time to start now.
So this is the end of the first module of
'The Strategic Postdoc' video series.
We'll see you in the next module two,
'Applying for a Postdoc'.
Thank you for watching.