I’m not entirely sure why I keep responding to this, but Bruce Charlton left another comment about the supposed dullness of modern science that has me wondering about academic:
The key point is that a few decades ago an average scientist would start working on the problem of his choice in his mid- to late-twenties – now it is more likely to be early forties or never.
In the UK most people got a ‘tenured’ university lectureship straight after their PhD (or before) – created a lot of ‘dead wood’ but also gave people time and security to be ambitious.
Longer time spent as a doctoral student plus an extra added delay of six, ten, maybe fifteen years; spent doing short chunks of post-docs and temporary fellowships, here and there under supervision of various other people.
There are still a whole host of unsupported assumptions (bordering on assertions) in his piece, but the start of this comment is one of those things that makes me wonder how typical my experience of academia really is.
While it’s true that post-docs are not fully in charge of the labs where they work, my experience as a grad student and post-doc myself does not suggest that they are mere wage slaves toiling for tenured professors who allow them no freedom at all. This might be one of those areas where my experience as a grad student at NIST doesn’t generalize well, but the post-docs I knew there had a great deal of autonomy.
There was one guy, now in a tenured position at a major university, who came in to work on one experiment, and ran with something that was really a tangent to what the experiment was supposed to do. He spent six months plugging away on it, and nobody really had any idea what he was up to until he presented the final results to the group.
That’s an extreme case, but essentially all of the operational decisions– what to work on when, how to modify the apparatus to get a given result, etc.– were made by post-docs. Hell, even as a graduate student, I got to make a few calls– one of my grad school papers was an experiment that we did basically because I didn’t feel like rebuilding a Ti:Sapph laser one day.
Now, it’s true that neither post-docs nor graduate students were able to completely re-invent the projects to look at problems wholly of their own invention, but that’s an unavoidable constraint due to experimental resources. It takes a lot of time and money to set up a whole new experiment, and that’s not something that can be done every two years. My experience, though, is that within the parameters of an existing experiment, post-docs have a great deal of autonomy to work on what they want to.
And, moreover, it’s not like post-docs are assigned on a totally random basis. The decision of where to go (or at least where to apply) gives a prospective post-doc a fair bit of choice when it comes to the general sort of project they’ll be on.
I hear complaints about the post-doc situation fairly frequently from the disgruntled academic sector, though, so this may be one of those areas where the oddness of my academic career path prevents wide generalization. It may be that AMO physics is generally nicer than other fields, or that the NIST experience is even more anomalous than I thought. Or it may be that the people who leave grumpy comments on the Internet are selected from a naturally grumpy subset of researchers.
So, what is the lot of a post-doc in your experience? Is having to work for a more senior researcher a soul-crushing, creativity-stifling experience, or is it a useful and important step in the process of academic training?