Speaker 1: There are two major sorts of postdocs. You've got the shit postdoc and the other postdoc. The shit postdoc, the shit, is when you are brought on as a postdoc on someone else's idea or project. That is, your supervisor has already applied for the money, already agreed on what they're gonna do, and they just need a postdoc to execute on their project. The problem about this is, you have no say in the timelines, in what you've got to deliver. It is a shit postdoc. But most postdocs, in my experience, are like that. That means you have to squeeze as much of the other type of postdoc into this postdoc as possible. The other type of postdoc is one where you've got your own money, you've got some independence, and really, it's like you exploring the first steps of becoming a real academic on your own terms. However, these are very far and few between. In my experience, most people end up with the first one, which is a big pile of steamy postdoc. That means you've got to try to be a rubbished poo, what's it called? Phoenix, that's what it is. You have to become a poo phoenix and rise out from that big, steamy, stinky postdoc to become your own academic, which is much harder than if you start with your own amount of money on your own sort of like trajectory and your own project. So all the tips in this video are gonna help you become that poo phoenix, that's what it's called. Universities talk a big game, but in my experience, they fail to deliver. They talk about wanting postdocs to become their own independent researchers, but in fact, no one, no one at all will want to put you on their grants because you are a liability. They will not put you on as a chief investigator or even sort of like an investigator, a named kind of entity on the ground because you do not have the prowess and the prestige to help raise this grant up. In fact, they see you as a liability, so you have to fight to get on people's grants. You have to make sure that you are on the front foot when it comes to talking about the money you've brought in, the papers you've got, and why you need to be named as a named researcher on this grant. They don't want to do it, and you have to fight for it, and unfortunately, too many people see you as a liability, so that's one of the brutal truths and lessons I learned is no one wants to put you on your grant, which means then you can't get your own money in the future, so you really have to fight for those early-stage grant wins because then you can build on that, but no one wants to do that because you need to get money to get more money, but no one wants to allow you to get money in the first place so you can get more money later on. Mental. There's this thing called the postdoc treadmill that too many postdocs get stuck on. Yeah, they're marching along, putting in all the effort, but you're getting nowhere. You're publishing papers. You're doing all of the stuff that a normal academic would do, but you are not seen as an academic in your own right. You're just seen as a glorified lab tech. That postdoc treadmill can last for years and years, and to be honest with you, the only way I've ever seen people escape the postdoc treadmill is to apply for your own grants, so do that early. As soon as you start a postdoc, start applying for grants because if you don't apply for grants, you're going to have nowhere to go at the end of your postdoc, and you're going to be on this postdoc treadmill on other people's money and projects to continue your career, so apply for your money and your own independent research ideas as soon as possible because otherwise you'll get stuck. If you get stuck on the postdoc treadmill most of the time, the only way is to stop that treadmill and get off. See ya. Into another career, that meant. Your supervisor will probably just see you as a paper machine. When you're a postdoc, I remember entering one of my postdocs, and my supervisor said to me, I expect five papers a year, and I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, chill out, mate, in my mind, but outwardly, I said, yeah, of course, no worries. I'll do whatever you want, sir. Yeah, yeah, no worries. Because I was like, surely that's possible. It is not possible in many research fields to do five papers a year, and so you'll be seen as someone only to further their career a lot of the times unless you have this kind of unicorn of a supervisor who really is rooting for you. Rooting in Australia means something naughty. Hmm, naughty, naughty. But it's not that sort of rooting. That'll get you in trouble. This sort of rooting means just supporting you to become your own academic researcher. What a tangent. When you apply for a postdoc, you have to make sure that you're talking their language. Their language really is one of two things, papers and money. So when you're applying for a postdoc, what I would quite often do, and what I did, is I said, oh, I'm just finishing up some papers at the moment for my, and then I insert previous role here, and I'd love to sort of publish them here because they're imagining already you as someone who can deliver peer-reviewed papers without much effort for them. So you can talk about how you're bringing over papers from past projects and essentially just put in your name and their institution on it. Great, they love that. The second thing they love is money. If you can talk about money you've got in the past, it can be any sort of money. It can be travel money, it can be grants that you've gotten, student awards, just talk their language. So when you're applying, not only talk about the project, but a lot of people just don't realize that the thing they're really interested in is easy papers and easy money and someone that will help them look great in the future. So if you can talk about those two things in your application and tease them with the power and the prestige that you're going to bring in and pass on to them, that's what they really care about. Yeah, do that. When I was a postdoc, I actually brought in two big grants on my own. I was very, very happy about that. And the thing is, is about a grant, is that you end up with this pile of money. You're like Scrooge McDuck. You're kind of like swimming in it early on. You're like, this will last forever. And the problem is, is that you spend quite frugally early on and then at the end, you're going to have all this money left over. But the rule about grant funding is you spend it all. Because if you don't spend it all, later on, the fear is, and I've never seen this, but the fear is that someone will go, no, no, no, you need less grant money in the future. So you need to spend more of it. So we won't give you as much in the future. So everyone's worried about that. So they got to spend all of the money, but don't worry. There's ways, there's ways to get rid of this money. There's always ways in universities, like there's secret accounts, which may or may not be illegal. Now they're not illegal. They're just sneaky, where they say, oh yeah, we'll take this money. We'll hold it in this account for you. So there's a lot of all these accounts. And if you speak to your finance department, you'll notice they are wizards at pocketing away money, making it look like you've spent all of your grant, when in fact you haven't. They just sort of like put it aside for later on. There are accounts and that happens. So do not worry. There are essentially finance people cooking the books in universities so that all of the grant money gets spent. Is that libelous? I don't know. The brutal truth is, is you're going to have to live quite a nomadic lifestyle to find postdocs continuously. A lot of people nowadays do two or three postdocs before they even get a chance of applying for another position. And during those postdocs, you need to publish your ass off. So that means to open up your opportunities, give you more options, you need to think about not only just sort of like the country you're living in, but the world. You have to travel. And a lot of people at this stage of life don't want to travel because they've got kids, they've got adult things going on, or they want to start those adult things and have kids and get married. So the brutal truth is that if you're not willing to travel as part of your postdoc position, then I think you're limiting a lot of your opportunities moving forward. And for some reason, I've never understood this, well, maybe I understand it, I don't know. I'm so confused about the whole system now apparently, is that if you go away somewhere for a postdoc and then come back to like your home country, you're seen as exotic. You're seen as having these like magical tendrils that reach out into other mysterious academic lands, and people love that. So going away and coming back, actually, I think does help a little bit because no one employs the known sort of like postdoc in their lab because it's like, oh, they're just seen as a postdoc, whatever. We don't need to employ them. But look at this magical, mystical person from countries afar. I wonder what they could do for our publishing and our money situation in the university. Yes, we'll grab them. During a postdoc is so important that you actually find your niche. You need to find out what you can market yourself on. I know people that have stumbled into it and they've just been really, really lucky. But here's the real thing is that then you need to get known as the scientist or the researcher that does this. Initially, it can span out in the future. It can sort of like go into other fields. It doesn't matter. But you need to be sort of like aware that this is also a really heavy personal branding and professional branding time for you. So during a postdoc, think about what your niche is and how essentially you can introduce yourself to the university's communication team. Like, I'm the person that does, and then insert trendy topic here. And then they'll be like, ooh, we've got this young researcher who's doing this trendy topic. It just becomes obvious for them to do stories about you. So then once you've got that kind of reputation of being a certain researcher in a certain field that's trendy, then you can attract the money. You can attract all of the collaborations. But until you've got that, it can be very, very difficult to find your own foothold in academia. There's no doubt that now as a postdoc, there are increased expectations on you. There are a load of things that you need to do that aren't necessarily spoken about because when you enter a postdoc, you're really entering this really turbulent, unknown area of someone else's life and career. So when you enter a postdoc, even though you know you're gonna be doing research, they often spring stuff on you. They often like spring stuff on like, you're now gonna manage like three PhD students. You're now gonna manage certain projects. You're now gonna be responsible for all of the paperwork around this project. You've got all of these key deliverables that we talked about ages ago. Now they're your sort of like problem. These are the expectations that really you don't know that are on you until you enter a postdoc. It's happened in every single postdoc of mine. And so yeah, that's just the reality, which brings me on to my last point. Just like when you enter a PhD, there's loads of skills that you don't necessarily know you need until you're in that sort of new environment. So during your PhD, you're like, oh God, now I've got to learn all of this like new stuff. I've got to learn how to do literature reviews. I got to learn how to read the papers, the peer reviewed literature. There's all this stuff that essentially goes unspoken during your PhD. And you only find out until when you get there, you're like, oh, oh no, I'm so in over my head. I got to learn all this stuff. The same is true for a postdoc. That's what I wanna say, postdoc, postdoc, postdoc, postdoc. In a postdoc, you need to enter knowing that you will have to quickly get up to speed with a load of range of stuff because of those expectations. Maybe you've never done like a project management thing before. You're now gonna have to learn how to project manage. Maybe you've never supervised PhD students before. Now you are an unofficial co-supervisor. Well done you. Also, maybe there are like reporting requirements, KPI requirements, that means key performance indicators. Maybe there's different sort of like networking things and collaboration meetings and symposium now that you need to go to. You don't know what they are. You don't know what you've got to do there, but all you know is that they are now your thing to do. So there are a load of things that when you first enter a postdoc, you need to get yourself up to speed. I would quite often just write a little list of like, oh, shit, I'm lacking in all of these ways. Where can I go find out about, or who can I just have like a coffee conversation with about these things? And that helped a whole lot. If you like this video, go check out this one where I talk about what they don't tell you about postdocs. It'd be a great watch for you. I think you'll love it. Thank you.