Skipping a Postdoc Isn’t Wrong
How a non-traditional career path kept me in science
Although I haven’t worked in a research lab in over a decade, I’m still a scientist and work with research every day. I haven’t taught a class in several years, yet I’m still an educator, sharing knowledge every day. This is only possible because I chose a non-traditional career path — though it was mostly by accident.
The traditional pipeline — Student to postdoc to career
The usual flow for a burgeoning scientist is to get a graduate degree and then go into post-doctoral training. The “postdoc” is supposed to be a position that puts the academic scientist on the path to a professorship, their own lab, and a tenured place on faculty. Depending on the institution they end up at, the final goal could be a variable mix of research, teaching, and mentoring so that the process can continue with new academics or clinicians just entering the pipeline. Another variation of this is a postdoc internship or junior scientist position at a biotech or pharma company, or a government research agency, which then leads to positions as a senior scientist, lead investigator, team leader, etc. in industry.
The problem in recent decades has been the bottleneck of postdocs vying for increasingly limited academic…
