14 Steps to Succeed as a Postdoc: What Nobody is Telling You

1. Be aware of the postdoc clock. Most postdoc scholarships are training grants. Since they are training grants, they are frequently limited to applicants with less than a certain number of years of experience past their PhD. This has a few natural consequences:
2. It becomes much more difficult to get a grant as time goes on. The easiest time is probably 1–2 years out. At that point, you have enough time to publish research from your postdoc but are still eligible for all training grants. After two years you start to lose eligibility. I have never seen a training grant that allows postdocs with more than 3 years to apply.*
3. Grant eligibility is determined by the date of the final official PhD acceptance letter and not the day you start your new job. Delay this date as much as possible. Do not take a lengthy sabbatical between grad school and your postdoc.
4. Finish up your PhD work and decline further work unless it really advances your career. It will become a second job if you don’t.
5. Make a choice between industry and academia early. Many postdocs consider industry to be a backup plan. Industry tries to weed out these candidates as they are far less likely to be happy and therefore less likely to be committed to the job. Nobody likes leftovers. The best way to get an industry job is to work in a lab with strong track record of industry placement and network intensively.
6. Win a teaching award. The same logic applies to getting a faculty job at a teaching intensive university , which make up the majority of available positions. Again, nobody likes leftovers. Getting a teaching award and publishing with undergraduates is one way of showing an interest in undergraduate education.
7. Realize that your interests and those of your mentor may not align perfectly. Your mentor is also your boss. This creates an inherent conflict of interest, especially around the time applications are due. This is natural and it does not mean your mentor is being a bad person or unethical. However, because of this conflict of interest you may get bad advice such as “one more paper is more important then polishing your faculty application’. This is probably not true in most cases. Seek out a second mentor who is not tied directly to your career.
8. Be aware of the competition. It is common place in science career advice columns to say getting a faculty position is mostly a matter of institutional “fit”. This may be true but there is a clear unstated lower bound for an applicant to be considered. If you scroll through the CVs of new hires, you will see that their publication records tend to fall in a fairly narrow band.** You may not like paper counting but it does exist, at least subconsciously to set a minimum threshold level for further consideration.
9. Learn to write quickly and effectively. Writing up your own research is the most direct way of doing this. It is unlikely though that at this point in your career you will have enough results to learn scientific writing purely by writing about your own research. Take any chance you can get to write. Broaden your interests as much as you can.
10. Spend time on your research proposal. This should be obvious, but the pull of finishing one more paper will be strong. Resist it as much as you can.
11. Be a good citizen. This is the term scientists use for those who are co-operative, easy to work with, share credit, and take on non-glamorous tasks. Science is a small world. You will see the same people again and again and your reputation will follow you.
12. Take a leadership role as early as possible. Becoming a professor is less about acquiring more technical skills and more about learning to run a lab. Take an independent project if you can and take ownership of it including training new students.
13. Establish a professional identity separate from your PI. This is pretty difficult to do and may create conflict with your boss. If you can, insist on presenting your own work at conferences. Handle communication between your lab and your collaborators on your project if you can. At the very least, make sure they know who you are.
14. Write a grant. Actually write several. This serves two purposes. First, it gives you practice for the next career step. Second, it takes pressure off your boss which can only lead to good things. I think I personally ended up writing close to a dozen.

*You can apply for an NIH grant in your own name at some institutions but the odds of succeeding are small

**For my former field (molecular biophysics) this number for a top 50 university was between 6–20 papers (average around 13) during the Great Recession with at least one a first author CNS or at least PNAS paper . Jobs were scarce then and the number may have fallen since then.