(soft music)
- Hi, I'm Laurence Clement,
I'm the Program Director of Academic Career Development
at the University of California, San Francisco
in the Office of Career and Professional Development.
And today I'm presenting the second video in a series called
'The Strategic Postdoc' and we're working on module one,
'Positioning Yourself for the Postdoc'.
And this video is about the fact that we want you to start
at the end when designing your professional development.
We want you to ground your plans,
by first looking ahead at your career goals.
To explain this, I'm gonna start with two examples
that we often see in our work as advisors at UCSF.
These are typical postdoc situations we run into
and we help people with.
And so I'm gonna talk about Lily,
who is five years into her postdoc
and she wants to be a tenure track faculty
at a research intensive institution.
And she knows that she needs to write a research statement
for her faculty application, but she's not sure
what to propose in her research project.
She's mostly worked on her PI's work until now,
and so she's not really sure what to pitch
as an independent research project.
And we also have another situation that's pretty common,
which is Carlos.
In this case, we chose that a situation where Carlos
has been a postdoc for four years, and it's clear to him
that he doesn't want a research intensive faculty position
that he'd like to attend more professional development
so he can explore careers beyond academia,
or he could also teach at an undergraduate institution
to find out if a position at a primarily
undergraduate institution is the right fit for him.
And so the issue for Carlos in this case is that
his PI isn't very supportive of him
spending too much time outside the lab,
and he's not sure how to negotiate that.
And the reason why Lily and Carlos are in these situations
is because they didn't design their training from the end,
and what they did is that they didn't think about
how to backward design their training.
And how to really think about their career goals.
Because in reality, there is more than one postdoc
in academia, and there's this misconception
in academia that everyone should do
the same type of postdoc, but it really depends
on your career goals, and it really depends also
on what you learned in graduate school
and what you know already.
And so when you think about the different
types of postdocs, there are things, there are postdocs
that prepare you for a research intensive faculty position.
There are postdocs that prepare you for faculty positions
at primarily undergraduate institutions,
like that have a lot of research and teaching.
There are positions that prepare you for scientist
positions in industry.
And there are also postdocs where you actually train
and you actually explore your career
before you start training for a career.
And we're gonna talk about these different scenarios.
And if you think about Lily and Carlos,
they are at different points in the timeline
that we would expect they would have
for these different postdocs.
And if you look specifically at Carlos,
he's actually beyond the amount of time you really need
to train for these two career goals that he's considering.
One thing that's really important to remember
is that many careers are accessible without a postdoc.
And these careers can be careers in industry, in government,
and even in academia, whether they're faculty
are not faculty positions, there are many positions
you can access without your postdoc,
and we're gonna talk about this a little bit more.
One thing I want you to really think about
is that there's actually a cost to the postdoc
for the trainee.
So for example, for Carlos, who's thinking
of potentially an industry position,
he could actually have given up up to 21%
of his income over the first 15 years of his career.
And that is something that was discussed in a paper by
Kahn et. al. in Nature Biotechnology in 2017.
So really what you wanna think about
is that you wanna find the right postdoc
for your career goals.
And you also wanna think about the fact that
if you're not sure about what type of career
you really want to engage in, you should really prioritize
this career exploration early on in your career,
you should really start now exploring careers,
and you should actually make that really a priority
as part of your weekly schedule as you move forward
with your training.
So that very quickly you can make a decision
about what type of career is really the right fit for you.
Because if you think about it,
if you decide to go for the longer postdoc that requires
more training the research intensive postdoc
for a faculty position, you'll might miss some windows
of deadlines that are associated
with some grant funding opportunities
that will increase your chances of getting that position.
For example, the NIH K99 Grant is an example
that has a funding mechanism that has a very short timeline,
a window for you to apply for.
So the other thing that we really want postdocs or graduate
students to do, is to reframe their postdoc as a training.
And when you think about it, the postdoctoral training
is supposed to be originally a training
for a very, very competitive type of position,
the faculty at a research intensive institution.
And it's very much like training for, you know,
high level sports or art forms.
And because I'm French, when I think of training
for a competitive sport, I think of soccer.
And so I made a parallel here between training
for a research position and training
for becoming a competitive soccer player.
So if you think about it, the postdoc is a training
that prepares for a career,
and if you are already prepared for this career,
then you do not need the postdoctoral training.
So you really need to know what career you're preparing for.
Just like soccer, it ends with the competition,
and in this case, it's for a position.
And again, if you're already competitive for this position,
you do not need postdoctoral training.
The other thing is that if you do decide
that you do need training, you need to be really clear
on what the goal is so you can get a shot at that position.
So you really need to be very clear about
what your goals are when engaging
in a postdoctoral training, and very few trainees
actually have that in mind when they start their postdoc,
not very few, but a lot of trainees actually
do not think about that when they start their training.
And so the first question you're gonna have to ask yourself
with this is what types of careers are most appealing to me,
but you might also be considering other things
when you're deciding which careers to go for.
It might have to do with the inclusivity of the workplace
or the type of work environment and might have to do
with your personal or your community values.
And if you are still considering this
and still thinking about this, I recommend that you go back
to our first video in module one about
acknowledging your preferences, your needs and your values
and making career choices based on all of these parameters.
The other thing is that if you're gonna be applying
for faculty positions, you need to be aware
that there are different types of faculty positions,
and that was pretty clear from what Lily and Carlos
were going through.
Lily wanted a position at a research intensive institution,
which I'm gonna call R throughout this video series,
where when you want to get tenure at that institution,
you have to be really strong in research.
So in publications and grant funding,
you have to be very productive on the research site.
And there might be some teaching involved in that position,
but the majority of the decision-making factors
of how we hire these faculty is based on their research.
There's also a big category of institutions in the US
that have both research and teaching,
and they actually decide on tenure for their faculty
by weighing both the research and the teaching
pretty heavily.
Some of them are much more research focused
and others are more teaching focus, we're gonna talk about
those nuances later in the video series,
but I'm gonna talk about these institutions as RT,
which is what Carlos is interested in.
And then there are also teaching only institutions
that again, are some of those institutions
that may not require for you to complete
a postdoctoral training at all.
And these are institutions either at community colleges
or some smaller primarily undergraduate institutions
that have very little research.
And many of them are gonna really make their tenure decision
based on your teaching and your ability
to support diversity.
And so, again, it's a very different training
that you would have for these positions, but that training
might actually be mostly in graduate school,
although postdocs do apply to these positions.
So if you want to find out more about
these three types of positions, you might wanna check out
the Academic Career Readiness Assessment
and the paper that we wrote in CBLSC,
and that describes the different types of institutions,
how to find which institutions fit in which category,
and to know more about how they make their hiring decisions,
which we'll talk more in details about
in the next few videos.
And the last thing you should do, when you're thinking about
reframing the postdoc as a training, is to think about
the fact that it requires a coach and a strategy,
like in soccer.
And so you're gonna have to find the right mentor
for the postdoctoral position that you need to complete.
And come up with a really good training strategy
that gets you to your objective.
And we'll talk more about this in our next video,
which is 'Building a Game Plan' where we're gonna talk more
in more details about how to backward design your training
and come up with a postdoctoral training strategy.
Thank you.
(soft music)