As professors struggle to recruit postdocs, calls for change in academia
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If the pay isn't good, the culture and work should be. In academia, that's almost never true. I couldn't support my family, nor ironically pay my families student loan payments as a post-doc, the decision was an easy one to make... But if I were really doing it for the love, the love isn't there.
You might think "oh here's an industry person who doesn't like academia", wrong. I loved research, writing papers, teaching people stuff, forming collaborations, etc. Just can't make it survivable financially or psychologically.
"Oh? At which price point?"
"At the $4000 price point! It's a travesty!"
Calling a livable wage and fair working conditions a Lamborghini is not applicable.
If the price of milk shot up from $2/gal to $20/gal that's a shortage.
Erm, exactly?
If there were a real shortage, salaries would be going up. The fact that salaries aren't going up to counteract that "shortage" tells me that there really isn't one.
the worst part is that i think this experience has completely tanked my confidence.
now id take a jr python dev job in a second.
Work can be pretty good postdocing in some labs in Europe.
But the end of the road is still that after the postdoc you’re expected to either be a rockstar or a nobody. So anxiety is always there.
Access to coeds.
Where do you get these numbers from? This is not at all like that in Europe. A postdoc gets (say, in France) 30k per year, doing a calm, interesting job and paid travel to a couple of conferences per year, with almost total freedom to choose their daily schedule. This is not a high salary, but it is certainly livable and quite above the median of the country. A 150k salary is nearly out of reach for even quite senior developers, and nonsensical for "junior python developer roles".
CS is certainly an outlier in terms of salaries, but ANY person capable of landing a postdoc in a STEM field at a competitive school in the US is capable of figuring out a way to get a job as a software engineer in Big Tech (the grind of leet code is nothing compared to the grind of doing a PhD, full stop). This is why >60% of PhD grads in CS across top schools are ending up in industry, and I knew a TON of PhDs from physics, math, chemistry, etc. who left research immediately after graduating and are now SWE.
The work/life balance part is a bit trickier to quantify. Anecdotally US postdocs work pretty hard, but my experience is that highly paid engineers at FAANG-style companies also work pretty hard. If you don't want work to be your life as a SWE $250k seems to be the easiest achievable comp while meeting those requirements.
When I complete the PhD, if I go to industry in the USA, my income will probably be similar to that of my friends who will have been in industry the entire time (and gotten steady wage increases throughout).
It's important to note also cost of living. 40k/yr might sound like a lot, but in Boston, rent is >1k/month even with roommates, we don't have dental care, our health insurance is imperfect, groceries are expensive, etc. etc. Meanwhile in Tucson Arizona or Bloomington Indiana the stipend is something like 22-28K/yr, as cost of living is lower.
Generally speaking it's reasonable to say that completing a PhD in computer science is not a financial investment, but rather, something I am doing because I want to do it. I am very unlikely to literally "profit" (compared to, if I had gone straight to industry instead).
I hope this information is useful/interesting!
For any postdoc that thinks the university has leverage for this reason, if you are able to get a H1B, you can switch employers easily. You are not stuck at whichever company sponsored you.
* My understanding is that universities prefer J-1 visas in almost all cases [1][2], and such visas are not portable.
* H-1B is more flexible than J-1, but still not as flexible compared to a green card. In particular, the new employer has to fill out a new application, pay the fees, etc. Also, universities are exempt from the H-1B cap, but other employers may not be.
[1] https://internationaloffice.berkeley.edu/ucb_departments/h-1...
[2] https://postdocs.stanford.edu/postdoc-admins/how-quick-links...
We also had an untenured research scientist who did all of the PI's work and grant writing. After two 110+ hour weeks getting three grants written for several million dollars they went home to enjoy the weekend and dropped dead of a heart attack at 42. I miss him.
But in spite of an excellent CV, with the caveat that I had no affiliations with top schools and was not part of any in-group--I did not know how important both would be for an academic career, I though my many well-cited publications and clear and long-term research plans would have been enough.
Over the years, I applied for at least 70 tenure-track positions for which I felt I had a good chance of making at least the shortlist of 20 viable candidates. I was called for just one preliminary phone interview.
I started applying for industrial positions in Machine Learning and, after receiving a few offers, took a job that paid 5 times my last postdoc salary (my last contract was 6 months, so it would have been 10 times). It has been a fulfilling, very well paid, and fun career so far.
I always recommend that not-too-promising postdocs consider a career in the private sector early on, especially in technology or related fields. They rarely listen, think or led to believe they are different. They aren't.
Even those are not enough. I had all of those (great undergrad and grad school pedigree, postdoc with a novel laureate, publications...) You need to have a final boss who will go to bat for you, unfortunately the Nobel laureate was 84 and more into playing slots at the Indian casino/fucking around in the lab than he was in advocating for my career.
This is one of the things I like about industry jobs. Your career at a company might grow or be derailed by one person, but it's just that particular company. If it's a big company, it's just that particular org. In academia a single person can derail your entire career. As you've pointed out, sometimes it's not even malice. They just aren't interested in doing what they need to support you.
At one point my skip-level was a VP at a software company who loved to push people into doing things by saying "Think about your career. If you do things right you will be set for life." Outside of his tiny universe at that company, nobody even knew he existed. I burned some bridges with that person and some of his sycophants, but I just moved on to a different company with zero ramifications.
It's liberating to be able to just say F-it and move on.
It is true that you can change companies and rapidly leave behind all the problems and conflicts and issues you had in your previous jobs.
In academia, first, it is very challenging to move to another institution after you start your tenure track position (few jobs available, students need to be taken care of, it is at least a 2-year move), second if you have "issues" with other people in the field, and especially when they are more powerful than you (better known, better network, better financing), you have a miserable professional life in front of you. I see many an academic living on the verge of psychological collapse.
Freedom has no price, for all the rest there is money in the bank account.
The problems are also way out of the ordinary. I’d like to draw a parallel with medicine. Most researchers are doctors who interact and treat patients. In contrast - I think a lot of engineering post docs or phds may not be working on stuff the industry cares about.
Why is it obvious? There might be some groupthink on HN (and bias toward our career paths), but plenty of people go into academia.
> pay and work conditions are horrible
It's not like bosses and businesses in the private sector are Nirvana. You can see plenty of stories about them on HN.
When I think back to my thought process when I was applying for academic and research jobs after my PhD, there's one thing I remember that always keeps me from ever second guessing my decision to move to the private sector.
At least in my field, so many people in academia and research had big egos and were a-holes. Some of them were brilliant, many of them just thought they were. It was so easy to end up in a toxic mess. You know that interviewer who makes you feel small because they knew some random minutiae that you didn't know? There are plenty of those in academia and you'll be answerable to them.
I've worked for a bunch of big companies and there's less acceptance of a-holes. If nothing else, your colleagues will acknowledge they are a-holes and validate how you feel. Even if somebody is a brilliant 10X a-hole, a decent management layer will put walls around them to minimize their damage. And if you find yourself stuck working with or for an a-hole, you have more options to switch because there are more jobs.
I still have memories of wanting to tell some of my tenured professors that they needed to grow up and find bigger things to cry about. I was in my 20s, they were all 40+.
At least IME, the younger non-tenured professors were less likely to engage in this pettiness because they had, as you have pointed out, a lot more to lose.
As silly as that but Nietzsche had it right: the will to power is one of the primordial forces.
But try to be a tenure-track professor in biology at a mid academic institution. You are fed up, you want more money, money you think you deserve. Where do you go at, say, fifty years old?
AFIAK, the leaders in almost every field are in academia, where they have the independence to do research, not earn profits, and where their research has the greatest impact because their employer doesn't hide it from the world as long as possible.
I noticed a major university announcing some new center to nurture businesses to monetize IP. I remember when universities tried to generate knowledge and value for society.
For instance, for something very practical, market-ready, basically Engineering I'd say you're correct. For basic research, not at all.
Don't consult a self-perceived expert on a field on a project you're considering? Uninvited from their July 4th BBQ.
Standing up for a junior tenure-track faculty who a senior person doesn't like? Have fun getting work done while scheduled to teach the 800 person remedial chemistry class, disparagingly called 'chemistry for artists.'
Need some equipment but you forgot to wish me happy birthday? Sorry, unforeseen maintenance lol. Oh please.
This doesn't really square with the horror stories I see from the private sector.
The remaining 10% are more than enough to account for the horror stories
It can take 5-10 years to find a tenure track job now because professors don't retire. I've seen 90+ year olds walking around departments, and 70 year olds are common. All the low hanging fruit is gone, so projects and problems take longer and longer. Together, it means that whatever semblance of academic integrity and honor is gone. There's too much pressure to produce something big that you'll hide data or even steal it. Even collaborations don't mean you'll see your name on a paper. My partner got their research scooped by former collaborators!! And your recourse for blatant plagiarism? Nothing! No institution will fight for you because your career doesn't matter to them. There's a huge pool of postdocs they can pick from if you give up. Most of the professors still pretend that they can talk things out and share data, or blame you for not anticipating the issues.
The pay is secondary for most people who made it through grad school. They generally _want_ to do research. But when the pay is less for a more toxic environment, it's a no brainer. And somehow the professors are confused why no one wants to stay...
That is survivorship bias. There are low-hanging fruit in newer fields, or fields with recent major shifts.
But imagine the displacement of those ivory-tower academic greybeards who will suddenly have to compete with actual professionals? They're still teaching HTML/CSS in my university, for example; cloud is largely pooh-poohed; AI and ML are barely on the curriculum, and sub-par at that; more interesting subjects, like e.g. computational neuroscience, or any software engineering that isn't Python, simply doesn't feature. They'll be out on their ear.
In addition, most of my EE professors were from industry and would smoke their contemporaries. They knew their shit cold and then some.
Plain HTML/CSS is still relevant today. Not everything needs to be an SPA. I also don't understand how one would write SPAs with React/Vue/whatever other framework without first having at least some understanding of HTML and CSS.
Agree with the cloud being poo-pooed.
Don't agree with barely any classes in ML. Grant money in ML has been hot, which means academic hiring in ML has been hot, and a good number of those hires are teaching classes. Basically every major CS department has a broad selection of ML courses or even ML concentrations and minors. Most smaller departments seem to have at least one or two courses to choose from.
I've never seen Python used to teach software engineering. Java is the classic language for that, even today. Although I suspect that we may have different definitions of software engineering.
1. https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-inte...
2. https://research.google/people/106471/ (Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20220612100903if_/https://resear... )
Assuming just because you have a PHD means you need to use it is a sunk cost fallacy. Starting over can be a completely rational choice.
Perhaps the value of a PhD is not limited to its "market value". I hope that part of the intrinsic value of a degree is an ability to think critically, unlike the "senior software engineer" example I cited, for which the "market value" is probably quite high. Sometimes markets are not rational. Myself, I do not care what any job market suggests. To me, education has value, both for the individual and for society at large.
"Tech" companies are not well-known for fostering crtitical thinking ability. Most of the world is eating, and feeding families, without knowing how to program computers. It has been that way since the dawn of humankind.
https://computing.louisiana.edu/meet-blake-lemoine-computer-...
Eventually I decided to scrap those 5 years for a triple salary as a junior developer and had a successful career since.
Is casual coding more interesting than research/teaching - no, but staying in academia requires way more altruism than I could find in me.
I also still find how to get some of the joys of academia in industry, namely, mentoring/holding workshops/writing design specs/turning the cluttered documentation into a nicely flowing coherent one~
I left to co-found a start-up - never regretted it as I was "hyper cynical" (a direct quote from a colleague) about the whole academic world and how easy it was to play the "publish or perish" game.
I like building stuff that people use, not writing papers that mostly went unread.
I had the same feeling!
And as it turns out, many of the skills are transferable: https://twitter.com/mizzao/status/1505529213612609536
Circa 2010, as I was finishing up my BS in CS, one of my professors asked me to have a meeting in his office. He was trying to recruit me into a graduate program under him, since he liked my performance in his class. I said I wasn't very interested, since I wanted to make things people will actually use. His response was there was a team in Utah that helped make part of the USB spec the decade previous. I was attending the University of Minnesota.
Yeah, no thanks.
Those aren't the only two options and even they were, it isn't always true.
Source: I’ve worked on both.
My guess is that if you want to be paid full-time to work on USB, you'll probably find more (and better-paid) positions in industry.
From a personal perspective I don't regret my PhD, though it was charity funded so it was topped up to be around £20 000 instead of the usual £14000ish per year. It was an opportunity to engage with a small group of experts in research that was engaging and of use to the wider world, and present it internationally. I also tried to start a start-up during this time, but the underlying idea failed to pass preliminary trials (I work in healthcare). So the two are not mutually exclusive.
People's experience tends to vary. I think a lot depends on how much you research the group and supervisors you will be working with beforehand, and how much you engage them in the research you do.
I was lucky enough to get involved in the web very early (1992) and present papers at the first few web conferences - though that wasn’t my day job.
Edit: I worked on a couple of EU Esprit 2 projects.
I imagine that must have been quite interesting!
In the US, PhDs can take 6-8+ years. There are some shitty advisors who delay their students' graduations to get additional low-wage labor. Also, the academic job market is terrible and has been for 30+ years, so it takes a full year just to do the search.
Because the duration is so dependent on the program, and the only end is when the advisor agrees that sufficient work has been done to merit a PhD, it can stretch on without much hope in sight.
The former step is intended to clearly define what is sufficient work. In effect, it is the contract that eliminates some of the risk of the advisor's whim.
That seems unfair. By the time many people get started on their dissertation they have often done years of research and have gotten several papers published. Starting your dissertation basically means that you're 'done' with your PhD and ready to summerize what you've discovered.
So with those advisors, it was normal for people to graduate six months after the prelim (because the department required a minimum of 6 months between the prelim and the defense).
At least one world famous research university has a fix for this problem of "... when the advisor agrees":
The official statement of the university is that the Ph.D. student must submit "an original contribution to knowledge worthy of publication".
So, if a student believes that they have done such work, then they are free to, and maybe should, submit it for publication. When the work is accepted for publication, the student can then so announce to the professor, department school, and university.
> So, if a student believes that they have done such work, then they are free to, and maybe should, submit it for publication. When the work is accepted for publication, the student can then so announce to the professor, department school, and university.
For many fields, this would not work. My advisor required a journal publication to get the Master's degree, and several to get the PhD. He (and many others) would have failed any candidate's defense if they had just one paper if they were in their committee.
(Yes, it's crappy).
But yeah, you gotta do what pays the bills. I'm not making triple figures in dollars, but in my country it's six times what I would get during a PhD program.
What I find curious: I get paid to do lots of things which are clearly complete nonsense, but the funding comes with the requirement that these specific nonsensical things must be done. I could do lots of useful things, but I do not get paid for those.
I'm far enough into the process that I've decided to just collect the stupid credential before I move on. Which is funny because I did not get into this for the credentials, but dropping out at this point would just look weird on my CV.
Developing all sorts of platforms that will theoretically benefit the public / researchers / whoever, but in actuality will never be used by anyone and in fact will be shut down as soon as the corresponding project ends.
Those are the two generic examples I can think of, for everything else I'd have to give too much context.
I just recently got a post doc offer from someone, which I will almost certainly turn down because I know the reality: academia sucks, science is great. For years, people have put up with the former to enjoy the latter, but I think we are hitting a threshold.
So we have these discussions about pay and supply and demand, which is part of it, but not the nature of the positions themselves, the ponzi funding scheme underlying it, the status hierarchies, none of it. No one wants to cut or line-item justify indirect funds, or turn those postdocs into faculty positions.
The last place I was at this issue came up about being able to have grad students without funding: the argument was if you can't fund them off of grants you shouldn't have them. On the surface, this sounds great, pretty reasonable, until you realize that now you're incentivizing taking grad students to support grants, rather than as an end in itself. Basically you're incentivizing a permanent student culture, because the expected lifecycle of the researcher is maybe 30 years, whereas the student is expected to only be there maybe 5 in theory.
It's so hard for me to wrap my head around it it: the best analogy maybe really is a ponzi scheme. The desired product is the input. It's so broken in so many ways. It's like no one is actually paying for research, they're paying for attracting students, attracting the money to pay for the research, the trappings of research, etc. That actual useful research gets done is a convenient side effect.
I guess it all comes down to who is saying it. I guess most of the time it's the fact that the jobs are crap, but employers don't want to shift the social contract that creates the apparent contradiction, but who knows.
Job openings exceed job seekers by a record amount. Unemployment is close to a record low.
Not like there are hundreds of years of economic history to learn from...
Do you think nominal wage gains coupled with real wage declines makes people happy? Check consumer sentiment polling which just hit an all time low, why don't you?
It's funny to see society broadly reject the impact of covid era policy, yet some advocate to do more and more of it.
Fed kept rates low in pursuit of unsustainably low unemployment, by the way, motivated by pressure from progressives
Wages should increase in response, not decrease. Inflation hits different sectors differently, and I'm OK with a PS5 inflating 300% if it means that a person on a minimum wage can have food security.
There is a wealth of economic history that shows this.
The stimulus checks and co were the primary driver of inflation. Handing people more money is not the answer
By exacerbate I suppose you're imagining a cycle where higher wages result in higher prices which result in higher wages and so on. However wages are just another price in the market and it's not clear why the cycle needs to be broken after all prices have gone up except wages. We don't need to let workers end up holding the bag yet again.
You are referred to the PPP loans that the US gov delivered to businesses. I agree that these contribute to inflation, but note: these loans went to businesses to secure the individuals paycheques, not individuals directly, and indeed the wages were not affected. Thus, we have inflation as you describe, and the claim that increasing wages could help in an economic downfall is safe, for now.
However, the PPP is not what I am advocating for, and most people serious about the topic agree there were far more efficient stimulus models that the Biden gov could have explored. If you somehow got the impression I am advocating for the PPP, my apologies.
For an example of what I do advocate, I refer you to the stimulus packages provided by the Australian government during the GFC. There were two significant differences to the US govs and Australia's stimuli: for one, the Australian stimulus was delivered to individuals (increasing purchasing power of the individuals and stimulating further purchases) and secondly, it was done as a single lump sum early on in the crisis, and was done to promote spending rather than to replace income.
This allowed Australia to then leave the GFC with relatively little damage (it can be shown that Australian debt soared afterwards, though it is widely agreed that the cause of that debt was the successor governments misspending rather than the GFC debt).
To summarise, I reject your assertion that higher wages exacerbates inflation. If you have the 'wealth of economic history' to support your claim, please feel free to specify.
(Side note: SBA.gov states that this was actually a Trump administration bill, not a 'progressive' bill, but that is irrelevant for the broader point I am making)
Wages growing results in prices growing. This is still beneficial for the people whose wages are growing. (Which, in the past year, have mostly been lower class workers. Gas going up in price sucks, but an extra two dollars an hour more than offsets it.)
Postdocs used to be an exception, something prestigious you did before settling into a permanent role that might be a lower-ranked university. If you were really good, you might do 2 years at IAS or MIT before taking the position at a place like UCLA or Michigan (which are still excellent, just not as highly ranked). Then it became something you had to do, before getting any job--mandatory low-wage labor, another rung on the ladder. Now, it seems to be going out of fashion, as the prize loses its appeal.
I'm surprised this didn't happen 10 years ago. The academic job market has been a toilet for 30+ years--and this change is a good thing, by the way--and I had expected bimodalization to come much quicker.
You're absolutely right on the "labor shortage" bullshit. There isn't one. The working class has been fully depleted and there isn't any more give. People are shutting down. Workers who can't afford gas are forced to live off other people (either through illegitimate labor or by dependency.) This is the turtle at the bottom burping. About fucking time.
I see a similar dynamic for postdocs, but with a slight difference. I believe the PIs in the article when they say that they are having trouble hiring postdocs. As a former postdoc myself, it pays poorly and has no job security. You take those jobs mostly because you like the work, and right now many people have better options available. That is part of the reason I left my postdoc, but the other part is that there are just so few research jobs in my field (postdoc or otherwise) at the moment. Some fields seem to be flush with money right now and unable to hire enough people to meet demand, while others are barely hiring at all. My field appears to be barely hiring at all. And that is why I think that statements like "there are no jobs available" and "employers cannot find enough workers" can be both true at the same time, since it really depends on the field and what kind of work is being funded at the moment.
For perspective postdocs, it’s not about money, job security, or job environment . It’s first and foremost potential to be a leader in their field.
Plenty of phd graduates are willing to postdoc at MIT or work with a Nobel laureate for starvation wages and intense work environments.
Clemson university just can’t compete.
There's no reason to do a postdoc at any school outside of the top 10 in your field unless, as you point out, you're working for an exceptionally well-regarded PI who is particularly going to be able to move your career in your desired path.
The people who do postdocs at these institutions are usually foreign, for whom a US postdoc is gold. Come to think of it, I can't recall ever interacting with a university postdoc who was a US citizen -- I've only worked for one "PI-generating PI", who happens to not like hiring postdocs.
Even within Harvard, the percentage of postdocs getting faculty positions is low.
One needs to calculate essentially how likely you will get a top publication in that lab.
The arithmetic is something like for a research group, what is the average number of top publications per year per postdoc. Many top labs at Harvard don’t do well with this metric because they have like 20 postdocs and 1 top paper a year.
Another metric is what fraction of postdocs end up in good faculty jobs.
Research backs up the idea that there is a small clique of “elite” universities that exclusively hire from each other. Also, the only direction of mobility is downwards, it’s rare to get hired at a more prestigious university than your postdoc institution.
I am a computational immunologist who studies cancer immunotherapy, if it matters. I am not independently wealthy or blah blah. I am a normal everyday person.
I agree academia is nonsensical for the many reasons that are frequently discussed in HN.
Mine is not a perspective I see represented here often: I absolutely love my job as a post doc. Everyone is different - I get a lot of joy from my work. Most of my friends in science at different stages feel more or less the same (albeit everyone complains).
I could get paid 10x more or work half as much, maybe both at the same time. So to answer the question here, why do people do this? Cuz I like it. Don't make everything so complicated (as an academic, that is my job).
Would the pay scales below for post-doc positions be about rightish or make you laugh hysterically?
https://www.crick.ac.uk/careers-study/postdocs
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/human-resources/pay-and-pensions/...
Just to put a rough scale on things
I guess since I sling code/data I take a pretty nice pay cut relative to that also.
Whoops!
Even if you enjoy postdoc, some places won’t let you stay for more than 4 or 5 years.
If permanent postdoc positions existed, I am sure many people would view it favourably, especially if the lab is a good environment.
At least in my areas of science (chemistry), most of this money comes from grants, which comes from the NIH, DOE, or NSF depending on the project. Ultimately it comes from taxpayers, and portioned out by Congress.
So the solution is either to get Congress to really care about this (ha!) or re-architecture funding of all of higher education.
Neither of these is simple.
You have a chemistry phd. You don't have to build your career on other people's crushed financial futures. Either find a job where you can pay people well or find a job where you don't need to manage other people's labor to stay employed.
I have A LOT of dubious pet projects I could convince NSF to fund and would love to work on if I had the moral stomach requires to convince highly educated broke 30 year olds to give me hundreds of thousands of dollars in free labor. But I don't.
So instead I turned down TT offers and went to industry where I spend a lot of time convincing people with the money to actually pay living wages with good benefits to people who can work on slightly different things. I don't have a lab with my name on it. I don't have an office. I will never have tenure. No on calls me Professor or even Doctor. But I'm also not exploiting the shit out of 20-35 year olds. My post-docs are paid $100k-$200k.
Stop relying on broke kids to fund your dreams. Leave academia and find a company who will fund your work. Or stay in academia and don't hire people to help you unless you can pay them even close to what they're worth.
> I'm also not exploiting the shit out of 20-35 year olds.
... I've got to say, you probably work for someone who is. It sounds like you're a decent human being and that's great--we need more of those--but the entire point of corporate capitalism (although this behavior exists in ostensibly noncapitalist organizations, too) is exploitation. Do you think CEOs care about whether they destroy the careers of people under them?
There's no ethical consumption under capitalism, and there's no ethical production either, but ultimately, we have to survive.
This is actually a very fair point, so I'm not sure why you are downvoted (perhaps the last sentence comes across as inviting trolling). But I take my responsibility for not doing so to people under me seriously.
This is the weakness in your argument. Not all of science is interesting to the private sector.
I worked for a large company once that in the past had large labs for researching charge transfer and other fundamental physics. When I toured those labs, they were all empty, with broken and unused machines.
I know this site focuses on computers and tech. But there is a large world of scientific disciplines out there that just aren’t useful to business. But useful to society as a whole.
Lastly, postdocs typically make ~50-55kk in my neck of the woods. Underpaid, maybe depending on the field. But far from “broke”. Thats around the starting salary of school teachers and many other professions.
More helplessness.
My research area is famously hard to fund even within academia, so I substantially changed the way that I frame my research and the type of work I was proposing. I still do the most important bits of pushing advances in my field, but there's a lot of auxiliary work that has immediate value as well.
It's less fun, it's CERTAINLY more humbling, and it's a lot more labor. But it provides both short-term and long-term value.
BTW: if you want to do work no one will fund, that's fine. Just at least acknowledge that your largest funding source is the massively under-paid labor of 20-35 year olds.
> Thats around the starting salary of school teachers and many other professions.
Your post-docs are >= 28, have graduate degrees, and have several years of research experience. Also, "teachers and many other professions" almost NEVER sign fixed term contracts that require them to move all over the country/world.
BTW, what is your university's pension plan like? Many teachers have great pension plans (that actually make sense to use since they have jobs that last more than 2-3 years). If comparing to industry, what's your 401K match and stock purchase program?
You can't even beat the working conditions and wages that mediocre 22 year olds can get right out of college in a famously under-compensated field. "My PhD employees would be substantially better off as secondary school teachers" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement.
> My research area is famously hard to fund even within academia, so I substantially changed the way that I frame my research and the type of work I was proposing.
I don't see the private sector funding ethnomusicology, philosophy, ecology, social history, ...
sseagull mentioned NSF, NIH and DOE. None of those funds ethnomusicology, philosophy, or social history.
The NSF also gets somewhat close to the others via Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences, which includes anthropology/archaeology and linguistics.
Ecology is a probably a field where the world would be better off if we re-appropriated post-doc funding to USFS and hired people with bs or even no degrees to do important work on the ground.
> BTW, what is your university's pension plan like?
Postdocs get the same pension plan/401k plan as any other faculty (postdocs are indeed research faculty). You are also an employee of the state government, with reasonably good health insurance and other benefits. It can't compare to private sector (especially tech sector), but compared to a lot of other businesses, it's fairly good. (Also a downside - lots of bureaucracy from the state legislature).
EDIT: 401k is 5% mandatory contribution, with 8.5% match by the university.
My comment about school teachers was mostly about the salary making them "broke". Lots of people live just fine on that ($50k is about $25/hour full time. Median earnings in the us is around $42k last I looked). Tech is an anomaly.
Now, again, don't get me wrong. I'm not a fan of postdocs, academia is a mess, and I want it change. But I really just wanted to point out that the "simple" solutions are not "simple". They require coordinated action among many stakeholders, and lots of dealing with squishy humans and their emotions.
That's fair. I do think managers have responsibility to their direct reports. The postdoc situation in th US isn't going to change as long as faculty and post-docs continue producing. So, quite seriously, the solution is for faculty and post-docs to collectively say "we can't get work done under these conditions". Otherwise things will just get worse.
> EDIT: 401k is 5% mandatory contribution, with 8.5% match by the university.
This is generous (but also fairly uncommon for post-docs). Good to hear that your uni provides retirement benefits.
> My comment about school teachers was mostly about the salary making them "broke". Lots of people live just fine on that ($50k is about $25/hour full time. Median earnings in the us is around $42k last I looked). Tech is an anomaly.
The huge difference is that post-docs are transitory and require uprooting one's life. $50K with the knowledge that you can buy a starter home is very different from $50K and knowing that you cannot buy anything because you will likely move in 2 years. This also has real human cost. See articles like this: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/postdocs-dilemma-when-g...
Thanks.
That's actually a really bad analysis and entirely misses the point.
Fundamentally (in the US) too many postdocs are being funded from a fixed grant pool NIH/NSF/etc. has to offer. Too many professors think their research is so much more important than anything else they hire postdocs for peanuts. Too few postdocs have a career path because so few faculty positions are available after completing their postdoc.
Yes, not all science is interesting to the private sector. But that doesn't mean that publicly-funded science has to proceed at its current rate with its unsustainable model of employing postdoctoral slaves.
Thanks. This is my point. If you want to manage a team of PhDs, especially in STEM, figure out a research agenda that allows you to do that in a fair and reasonable way.
If you want to do things that are uninteresting to anyone outside of one tiny (likely incestual) sphere of grant-committee-political-influence, then do those things with your own time. Don't drag others into it.
BTW: if no one wants to fund this work then what jobs are the post-docs being trained to do?! And if post-docs aren't being trained for useful jobs then why are we taxpayers funding these ostensibly trainee positions?
There's no excuse for the academic job market being this lousy when universities have so much money coming in from so many different sources.
The problem is that they spend it all on administration. Paying a "Dean of Multiple-Choice Quantum Intersectionality" $600,000/year is a way for rich white elitists to pretend they care about things they actually don't.
Although one part of this is regulatory burden by the state. This adds lots of overhead which the university would probably rather not have.
Cut the number of postdoc positions in half, double the salaries of the remaining positions, and make it much more competitive to get a postdoc. The purpose of a postdoc is a final training step for someone to become faculty. Only people who are clearly faculty material after finishing their PhD should even attempt a postdoc. Unfortunately, many professors take on postdocs who have no shot of becoming faculty because their lab runs on the cheap, experienced labor they bring.
Remember, the replacement rate for academia is exactly 1 postdoc with faculty aspirations per lifetime of each professor. Anything >1 and academia must grow exponentially to accommodate every single postdoc who desires a faculty position. Most professors have >>1 postdoc over the course of their careers, which means there are way too many postdoc positions in the world.
The current structure is a holding pattern for absorbing the large population of PhDs who can't get jobs.
Indeed. When I originally wrote my parent comment [0], it was about overproduction of PhDs.
That’s a great point that I neglected to consider. Regardless, the overall point still holds—the production rate of postdocs is much greater than the replacement rate of professors (at all institutions).
Show me a single politic saying that science must grow, so we allocated more resources for it.
From defunding shit research. And don't give me that crap, you know exactly what kind of research you could cut without anything of value being lost. Start there.
For most people, an academic career is a dead end. So, reduce the number of PhD and post-doc positions and increase the wages.
Universities have been doing the opposite. E.g. some Dutch universities stopped offering relatively well-compensated employee PhD positions and replaced them by bursary positions with far lower compensations. The primary motivation was that they could hire more PhDs for the same money. That maybe works when there is a recession, but when there is an ample supply of jobs, many good candidates will just choose an industry position instead.
Besides that, universities have gained a lot of administrative staff over the past decades. Plus some universities spend hundreds of millions of Euros on fancy buildings. Sure, it looks nice in PR material, but they could've also built something functional and use the remaining money for better salaries.
My perception was that phd students in Netherlands live quite comfortably.
I've recently finished four years as a postdoc (and now have a permanent academic job and am applying for grants). It's the precarity of it which is a bigger killer than just the crappy salary. Fighting huge numbers of applicants for the chance to uproot your life (again) and move around the country for a contract that may be as short as 9 months, with every move having a good chance of being the end of your career (which you've invested years in training for). It's a grim position to put people into.
Treat postdocs with respect, give them plenty of autonomy and freedom to focus on their research, don't make them work long hours or use them as servants, and you'll no doubt find many people willing to take the job without raising the pay.
Post-docs on the other hand are usually contract workers and they can be fired without any recourse. Usually with two to four weeks compensation. It gives their bosses tremendous power. I know post-docs who have been fired for questioning a PI or a paper they are part of. This can be devastating for a post-doc and their future career. They may have toiled years on a project and can have it taken away on a dime.
I never understood why there are salary guidelines in the first place. Why should a lab with $200k/year to spend on postdoc salaries be unable to hire a single postdoc at $200k/year? Current guidelines stipulate the lab must instead hire 4 postdocs at $50k/year.
At the end of the day, research quality is what matters. The research output of a single excellent postdoc worth $200k/year could easily exceed the total output of four mediocre postdocs each worth $50k/year.
The article pretty much answers this. It's impossible to convince the program office that a postdoc is worth $200K/year - that's substantially more than the PI himself probably makes. In reality, the program office will majorly push back if you ask for 10k more than the going rate. You can swing $5k more for a postdoc with some years of postdoc experience, but not more than that.
Given the way the contractual relationship of postdocs are setup, it's actually hard to find mediocre postdocs that survive in the system. Mediocre postdocs would be fired soon enough and a bright fresh PhD from China or India would take their place who's willing to work at $50k/year. That bright Chinese or Indian postdoc cannot easily accept a better paying industry job due to the nature of work visas for those countries so will work as a postdoc for several years till they can finagle a green card.
https://www.webofstories.com/play/freeman.dyson/95;jsessioni...
Sounds like everyone understands the issue... so why don't they respond by meeting the market price?
If you want to buy something like a tissue sample for an experiment in a lab then you pay the market price. You wouldn't think to offer 20% of the market price and then be puzzled when nobody will sell it to you - you just pay the going price, and it's part of the cost of doing research.
Why don't people apply that logic when it comes to costs for hiring people? Why is it such a barrier to see that that's just how much a person costs?
Academic researchers often pay either zero or get a massive discount on all kinds of stuff (hardware, software, data, samples etc.) for their research that people in private sector pay a huge premium for.
Not completely accurate. Every time you get a grant, your institution get a percentage of it to pay for indirect costs. These costs include office space, office personnel, and other expenses that the grant doesn't pay for directly. So, if you are getting "free" stuff from the department closest, it is very likely that your (or some else's) indirect expenses are paying for it.
Overhead percentages are set by each institution. My current one is set at 54%, meaning that for each $1 of award, I get to keep 64 cents and the university takes 36 cents (more or less).
Whatever the current problems are, they are likely the predictable outcome of policy changes made 5-10 years ago. The 20 years of war is largely over, immigration policies discourage some folks, and the educational sector as a whole is very sick.
Society is different too. I was giving talks at high schools as part of an outreach/mentorship program, and science was rarely mentioned by anyone as what they wanted to be when they grew up. A shocking number of kids wanted to be investment bankers.
it's not just the postdoc, it's the whole thing. I make a bit more as a 29 years old very occasional freelance than the highest possible grade for university professor reachable only after 30 years or so of work and something like 6 years in "difficult conditions" in my country.
Does this disconnect happen in other spending decisions?
For example does the maintenance department ask the administrators for money for new lightbulbs that cost $1 each and the administrators ask them to buy them for 25c instead, even if they aren't available for that price?
How can you even decide what to pay someone without looking at what the market says? Just pick a random number? If you're going to do that why not try to literally pay minimum wage?
The maintenance funds part is where it gets even worse actually! As an example when you write a grant proposal, they are usually for 2-3 years. You may want to buy some piece of equipment with those funds, and that's fine. However you can't earmark some if that money for future maintenance of that equipment after the grant period ends. Then, when you apply for the next grant, on most occasions, you can't ask money for maintenance of old equipment. And once it breaks, there's enormous hurdles to overcome to get money for repairs.
Most post-doc are funded through soft money (i.e., grant money or other non-earmarked department money) to a principal investigator. The PI wrote the grant and budgeted for post docs. Meaning that they set the salary for the postdoc in advance at the time that they wrote the grant (most grant applications I was part of required approval from the University's finance office before submission). They can increase the postdoc salary if they want.
The problem is that if they pay more for a postdoc, that money will need to come out from something else and usually that's from other personnel expenses (as most funding agencies have set amounts that they will allocate to spending categories, so you cannot propose a grant with only personnel expenses for example). That means that increasing the postdoc pay will either (1) reduce the number of postdoc that can be hired on any specific grant or (2) reduce the amount of compensation that a PI will get from the grant. You can see how both of those option are a non-starter as (1) will reduce the manpower on the grant, leading to less productivity, and a reduction in likelihood of future funding and (2) is just a non-starter as most PIs feel like they should get something out from getting a grant (i.e., they don't do research just because is fun).
Plus, there is a close to infinite supply of recent PhDs in pretty much any field that cannot get a faculty position and that will apply for postdocs, so there is really no market incentive to increase base postdoc pay.
Note, I have only applied to NSF grants so other funding agencies (i.e., NIH) might have different budgetary requirements. Private foundations are the Wild West of funding and each one has its own requirements.
This is often not true and the article addresses it: A PI needs the university's approval to increase salary, regardless of how much their funding is. It's usually set by the department. If a postdoc wanted more, they needed to apply for independent funding (e.g. a fellowship). These would have their own stipends defined, and the university could not take it away. Often, they're not even tied to a PI or even the university - if the postdoc decides to change institutions in the middle, he takes the money with him to the new institution.
I took a postdoc because my PhD is solid but I jumped around topics a lot, so it's not quite coherent enough. My postdoc is also at a more prestigious institute.
I'm rolling the dice that it might be enough to get that tenure track job. But I also have no dependents and don't care about material possessions very much. If my situation were a little bit different, it would be foolish to do what I'm doing.
What money?!? Lol. Headline should read, “People with 10 years post-secondary education not applying to jobs paying less than corporate entry level jobs.”
That's an interesting stat which might be the source of the parent post assertion.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2021/08/19/inter...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/education/edlife/american...
Note that the definition of "international student" excludes those with permanent visas. The number of foreign born PhD students is therefore significantly higher than 64%. Don't know if there are any stats for citizen/non-citizen share of PhDs though.
Why are you interested in the percentage of foreign born PhD students? You realize that a lot of Americans are "foreign born". It seems like an archaic way of thinking about things.
"International student" should indeed exclude those who are permanent residents. Which means they have been living here permanently before becoming a student, likely grew up in America, or just waiting for the citizenship, etc. "International student" means someone who moved here to study.
I'm assuming good intentions, but want to make sure we're not intentionally trying to gatekeep what it means to be an American.
In STEM grad school, no more than half the people are from the US, and it could easily be as low as 25%, depending where you are.
Actually, the very source you cited agrees, roughly:
> international students earned nearly half of all Master’s and Doctor’s STEM degrees awarded in 2019
I suspect that the number "5%" is also too low even at the undergrad level, if you restrict attention to, say, the top 20 universities.
In part, because academia is exempt from H1b quotas.
Hence, the burden of post-docs just grow (I was talking to a biology PhD who said 5-6 years of post-doc was typical, for chemistry I've seen people do 2).
I don't think so - industry can't hire enough PhDs. In my field (programming languages) shortage of qualified people is a bit of a problem at the moment! We wish there were more being produced.
Yeah... hence why you need a PhD. 90% of domain knowledge in this field isn't even written down - you have to sit down with a wide range of people to learn from them - which you get to do on a PhD.
> Many major companies that maintain programming languages do not require PhDs in order to work on their compiler teams
They don't require it... but look at who's actually there and how many of them in practice have a PhD.
> if you are biased towards people with PhDs and preexisting experience for junior hires
As I've said elsewhere I've taken on people with no high-school diploma and zero experience in the past - I'm not personally gatekeeping.
Like I get the schooling you do prior is supposed to allow you to hyperfocus something, but at the same time, I've seen jobs asking for postdocs with experience in highly niche areas, often cross disciplinary. One I saw was looking for someone with encyclopedic knowledge of some crazy domain specific algorithm at the intersection of two sciences.
Wild guess, but I if I were to bet, I'd bet most people with a PhD or even professional experience in the filed would not have heard of this algorithm.
I guess I've seen similar software jobs, but at least with software I can usually afford the equipment to learn things myself.
I think both are true. Academia is producing too many PhDs in fields that industry isn't interested in and too few with a background that industry wants/needs.
I've worked with people without even a high-school diploma in my compilers team, so I'm not snobby, just realistic that to succeed you need things and that a PhD is a great way to get them.
Easy, you just have your ATS automatically reject any resumes that don't appear to have a PhD
I'm a (relatively early on) grad student at a chair that does PL and ML, and it's been pretty depressing to look up alumni or authors of papers more on the PL/FM side and seeing those that left academia at 'normal' jobs that seem unrelated to PL, whereas the vast majority of people more on the ML side work directly with it. I like PLT a lot, but especially if you're not at a top school it seems like quite a gamble.
My other thought is that maybe companies that pay little taxes but hire a lot of PhDs should maybe be looked at. Corporations have been extremely successful in outsourcing training to higher education, online learning, and other learning avenues, all off of their books and timesheets.
It was trending in that direction for many years, but the pandemic was a major structural change. You should consider any kind of academic job as a backup rather than a destination.
By now, the good students and post-docs know what is going on: The system is already so broken that there is a high chance that you end up with a PI who got his job because he/she/* is good in making friends with some VIPs. For the actual research, that is what you are hired for. Have fun turning the "great vision" of these PIs into something that makes at least a bit of sense. And only if you are as well the type to make friends with VIPs, you will have a chance to tenure-track.
In return, I met and worked with and for some brilliant people and was exposed to interesting research.
In other words:
- More funding to STEM, at least the profitable parts.
- More funding to the parts of humanities, socal science and law schools, who's work help bring the nation together, find common ground and reduce conflict.
- Partly cut funding to institutions that do not provide such benefits, and to institutions with too much administrative overhead.
- Completely cut funding to institutions that actively promote social conflicts.
To make it easier to reach these goals, without interpreting each goal in a politcal light, change the funding process as follows:
- Add an x% corporate tax, earmarked for science & education.
- Set up a board, where representatives chosen by those companies that pay the above tax (proportionally to the tax paid) make up 60%, former highly trusted academics 20% and representatives chosen by the sitting government 20%.
- Have this board govern the expenditure in the ways that maximize the benefits defined in the charter above, while having some checks and balances to prevent corruption.
- Encourage grants to be given in larger chunks than today. Direct grants to students should be the exception, and not something a student would apply for. Rather such grants should be awarded in a similar way to how the military grants medals for exceptional performance. When a research leader identifies a particularly deserving candidate, he/she can recommend that this candidate is granted a special individual scholarship, due to exceptional performance and ability. Leaders who repeatedly send spurious recommendations should be discouraged from doing so.
- Instead, institutions or high profile reasearch leaders should be given grants based on historical performance, and be trusted to be able to find the right students themselves. (Within some framework to prevent corruption.)
- Once granted, funds should only be revoked in the case of breech of confidence. Renewal should happen early enough to allow continuity.
The goal of the above proposals, would be:
- Prevent public money from being wasted on wasteful or destructive activities
- Reduce time spent on research grant applications, so that students and employees can focus on the actual science.
- Encourage academic freedom and promote integrity.
- Make sure institutions educate the kinds of students that are in demand in the job market, and the scientific results needed to promote economic growth as well as a more robust state.
I am surprised that universities haven't created formal part-academia-part-industry partnerships with nearby companies just yet. Instead we are stuck with post-docs and adjunct roles, which get you the worst of both worlds.
Good Riddance.
These do exist. I was offered to do a so-called 'Industrial PhD' at University of Copenhagen, where you get funded by a company, you do research split between university labs and the company labs, and work at the company at the same time. Should be noted that the time crunch is brutal, as you have the standard 3 years to complete it, but also have to work part time.
The smart people in industry don't do it, unless they need a government pass, or at least keep the best parts for themselves.
I stay because I'd like to think I can improve things (I'm very active in management talks, where I can be) but as we're now at 6 (? Maybe 7) years of below-inflation pay adjustments, and with no progression possible at my grade unless I make the leap to lecturer or equivalent I'm just stuck here and its getting tiresome, and every year I look at my bank and go 'why am I doing this?'.
One day I'll stop asking why and leave, but I like what I do - its just not economical.
... and for the curious, I've made the case for promotion and applied for it a number of times, but as no-one ever retires in the industry (profs forever?) the next grade up is stupidly over-subscribed, so my chances are extremely low.
LoL.
Among all the stereotypes in academia perhaps the truest one is profs taking credit for what their students achieve.
Not even bothering to hide it anymore.
So many research lab have zero impact on the real world.
I think most of the useful research happen in corporation now.
I am currently coming to the end of my PhD and want to end up in industry later. However, I am going to do a postdoc for at least a year for a few reasons.
Firstly, it is with a scientist that I work well with and is doing work that I believe in. They are a great boss and I take time off when I need it and without guilt. Second, the location is right and in an area I want to live in and eventually find jobs in. Lastly, the postdoc pays like $80k with benefits; less than I could make in ad-tech, etc. However, it is a decent amount to live well in the location. I'm also doing work on problems I choose and without a need to justify them. It's amazing to me that I can earn money doing this type of work at all.
Plus the postdoc is meant to be a job-hunting exercise. I basically am getting paid a salary to do interesting work and shop around for a job and live in the area I want a job in. It's a win-win. Even my most anti-academia friends in my PhD program are considering doing this for similar reasons.
I guess I am posting this because going through PhD I only ever heard complaints come through about the system (a lot of them valid IMHO). However, now that I'm making the decision it seems like I have a lot of great opportunities. Not that my field doesn't have its problems, but I wonder if the severe ones are concentrated elsewhere. I suppose there's hope out there if you're in the right field.
Since I moved to Sweden I see much more issues trying to recruit postdocs. We still get reasonable number of applicants, but they are very low quality. We have been hiring PhD instead, who are much better generally (most of the postdoc applicants for positions where we looked for both, wouldn't have made the cut amongst the PhDs).
I blame that on several factors,
1. We are in a research area where our PhDs can go to industry earning 6 figures (at least in the US) so many opportunities for them if they look around
2. An increasing percentage of funding comes from competitive grants, so there are lots of postdoc positions. So even if applicants want to stay in academia if they are good they can be very picky.
3. A more general frustration with funding processes and universities continuously increasing academic workload, which academics are more open about. So PhDs see the downsides of sticking around more clearly.
I should say that I agree with the article that all this is good because it might be the only way things will change
But as a side effect of decisions folks were coerced into making during the last recession, many fields like CS which require very little physical labor now also use post-docs.
Often a post doc is just something given to a sub par PhD student who coasted on the work of others graduates from a "prestigous" program until they can author a few papers ACTUALLY on their own.
On my end, I deeply regret not backpacking around SE Asia doing English lessons the past ten years -- I'd probably be happier, healthier, and have a bigger bank account than the path I took instead. (Aborted PhD -> terrible NGO -> terrible nonprofit -> piecemeal consulting paired with a Bellingcat certification)
If I were going to attempt a PhD a second time, I'd probaby do it in the EU where they clearly define success criteria from the outset, and I'd probably do it after obtaining an EU passport.
(I should not have to consider getting a second passport to find work with my skillset, but people sometimes are stupid enough to interview me, refuse to take my advice, then get butthurt when the Russians skullfuck their servers or their bank goes out of business because they decided to be cute and treat an interview as a free consulting session, but not actually listen to anything I said.)
The structure is such bullshit. Incentive to get a postdoc is super low IMO. You make 50k after 10+ years of training and publications and are treated like a second class citizen. They need to offer more money and better benefits with an actual path for growth.
Something seems backwards.
This is exactly what saved me. I was an undergraduate research assistant and our postdoc warned me.
Is this just being unwilling to engage? Why would people remain in a training role in todays environment?
They could start by firing a few administrators and spread the savings on better pay for the postdocs.
Interesting. Or maybe you are from Europe, where civil war has a long tradition.
But maybe you insist that it was "Leftists" back in 130 BCE in the Roman Empire.
The 8th century Chinese general An Lushan was a Leftist as well? Good to know.
The "Roundheads" in the English parliament back in 1642 were basically commies as well, whereas the royalists "Cavaliers" were the level-headed ones - I mean what's not to love about absolutism, "All hail the King!" and all that.
The Portuguese back in 1832 must have been Leftists as well; I just need to find out which of the royal brothers was the commie.
But yeah, sure. EVERY time with the god damned leftists!
Extra points if is in a foreign language to show that you are cool people. The problem to solve is less important than all this marvelous crispy sounds when is spelled
Use a lot of trendy terms and fancy words. Your project to improve the texture of the mayonaise must sound like Bruce Willis in Armageddon. The more confusing, holistic and superfood, the better.
Stress that you want really motivated candidates. The job is boring as hell so they need to came yet motivated from home. They will not grow professionally here.
Assure that the job is available only in a narrow interval of time. Much better if is in the time when everybody is posting job offers and competing for your attention. Biology shows us that fishes in a school are safer from being noticed individually.
Reject people that stopped for three years working on science. They could need to spend an entire afternoon to read and understand everything that happened in their field in the last three years. Yup, the whole nine articles. You don't want to use their previous decades of experience and university classes.
For a better measure go to the corridor and run screaming "a gap!, a curriculum gap!" in terror
Use deadlines in your profit. Assure to email your job offer two or three days after the closing time has expired.
Don't be concise, your candidates love to spend ten minutes reading about vanity issues, the history of your building and why the bricks are violet.
Ask they to write an essay about how your project was their dream since school.
Put the salary hidden in a link. Better if this leads to twenty pages of bureaucracy before.
Use several categories for your job offer to reduce the probability of a match. Use fancy names like "Ramon y Cajal" position or "Juan de la Cierva" offer to made it seem more relevant. Then put your job only in one of them. Example: We look for a biochemist for a Sara Borrel thing, requisites: having less than 30 years, visited the Tibet in the last year and be a natural blonde more than 6 feet tall. Their field of research does not matter. "Oh, you studied exactly the same thing but you look more like a `Juan de la Cierva' to me. Maybe the next year".
Your job application must be a turning point in their life. Assure to ask the lab rats to spend all the day filling a job application so complex that would made Kafka proud. A real example: Looking for somebody to work in city X. Requisites. Can't live currently in city X (that would be so easy, and yes, is a real example from a real job offer).
Assure that your selection process to hire scientists has a 70% of questions related with laws, 10% about ideology, and the rest about the real work to do.