Speaker 1: For many postdocs there's an immense overwhelming feeling once they realize what they've got themselves into. Now I think everyone goes into a postdoc with rose-tinted glasses thinking that this will be an opportunity to progress their career and then as you get further through it you start to realize that all is not what it seems and I am not alone in thinking this. Nature has been putting out editorials looking at postdocs. You've only got a look at the titles to get what is going on. Postdocs in crisis. Science cannot risk losing the next generation. The pandemic has worsened the plight of postdoctoral researchers. Postdocs under pressure. Can I even do this anymore? Long hours, a lack of job security combined with workplace bullying and discrimination are forcing to consider leaving science. Pandemic darkens postdocs work and career hope so it's getting worse. There is no doubt that a postdoc is depressing for many people in many ways. You've only got a look at the number here where they say that up to 23% of respondents out of 7,600 people said that they have sought help for anxiety or depression. So those are people that are pushed to the point of needing help but I'm sure there are many more that don't get to the point of seeking help and just think that it's part of being a postdoc. Now there are loads of reasons why people are depressed during a postdoc and arguably postdocs should not exist. They should not exist as they are right now. That is limbo. There is no doubt that postdocs are academic limbo. They are just this holding pattern where the ghosts of PhD students go to haunt until some of them get good enough and lucky enough to warrant the university promoting them to a real position. I have seen loads and loads of people get stuck in this academic limbo and of course the question is like why don't they leave? Well they don't leave because first of all there has been and I think there still is a stigma of leaving. Like to leave to go to industry there's still a stigma around like well you didn't make it as a real academic. You failed in some way which is absolutely not true but also it is really hard to convince industry that you have the skills that they need because you've spent so long sort of cooped up in the ivory towers doing research. So we are stuck between a rock and a hard place and a PhD going into a postdoc doesn't necessarily understand that right away. It really is limbo and there is always scunge money to keep you on in this limbo area and as long as you're providing value to principal investigators, to supervisors who need your skills to further their own careers you will remain there. So you do have to take control and charge of your career in that area. If you are in limbo you really need to start thinking about how to get out of there and stay around because in this video towards the end I'm going to show you and tell you how I did it and I think how you can do it as well. Arguably the pay you get for being a postdoc sucks. It is not enough to actually compensate you for all of the years of earning you missed out on before getting your postdoc. So I was employed I think on about $75,000 a year in Australia and I was very pleased about that. That is a lot compared to some other countries but it still wasn't enough and it didn't progress fast enough to keep up with all of the missed earning opportunities while I was doing my PhD and arguably I'm the most qualified I had ever been and I was still not earning as much as my friends who left academia to go into industry that had a proper kind of graduated pay scale and they were awarded for the skills and the value they bring to their company. That doesn't really exist in academia. You've got your pay scales and you creep up every now and again but I think relative to the qualification you have it is not compensated enough and in a world where our self-worth feels like it's directly correlated with the amount of money we can earn I think postdocs end up feeling depressed because they feel like they've put all this effort in and they are not valued as much as they feel like they should be valued and for the amount of effort they've put in to get there. There is no doubt that once you start a postdoc you start to feel the pressure of academia. You need to bring in money, you need to publish papers or to satisfy the insatiable desire of the University. Without doing those two things you will not progress in your career at all and everyone's trying to scramble for money and papers. We just do whatever we can to do that and the pressure starts to get to people. I know that during my postdoc the first couple of years where I had money it was brilliant. I was doing stuff, I felt like I was on top of everything and then every two to three years I needed to find money for the next two to three years. So I just started a project and then in my mind started thinking okay well what's next? It's this constant kind of cycle of having to get money, the relief of getting money and then having to find money again. It never stops and it will never stop in academia and I think that pressure really sort of like dawns on people once you've done it a couple of times and you realize oh this is now forever. If you are a postdoc that's put on a project from someone else the pressure is immense. You are now expected not only to project manage a multitude of other people and things to satisfy the grant requirements but also your principal investigator or supervisor may actually just expect you to do everything. I know of supervisors that have just completely gone hands-off. I met up with them like once every two weeks and they just kind of like pointed in the right direction, signed the right forms but really were like okay your job depends on you hitting these milestones. If you don't hit them well you know I've got my job essentially it's your job on the line so good luck and they were the people that got the grant money, come up with all of the experimental submissions and the hypotheses that then they employed someone i.e. me to get through and it was like here's my ideas I have now got no risk so now it's all your risk because your jobs on the line if you don't get what I said I would get. So it really is a weird power imbalance at that postdoc stage. You're expected to do everything and in my case I adopted and took on all of the risk for not getting those things but I'm not rewarded by actually sort of like getting a job or having a permanent position so the power imbalance and what's expected of you from your principal investigator just is all over the place. So how can you make sure a postdoc works for you? Well firstly you have to make sure that you understand that this is temporary. It's either temporary because you cannot find more funding or it's temporary because you take control and you get ready to leave when you are ready. Start networking with the right people in industry or your desired career. Start building up the skills. Identify what skills you need to be attractive to those people outside of academia. You also need to start preparing yourself mentally. Start thinking along the lines of you know it's not failure you're just leaving to get a job. Understand and really internalize the fact that about 5% of postdocs actually get academic positions. That's 95 people like you that are going out into the world and you need to prepare. So skills, networks and preparation in the first year of doing a postdoc means that you have at least the option to leave when you are ready and if you need to rather than get into the end like a lot of people and actually being kicked out because there is no funding and then scrambling around and being like oh I guess I'll become a patent attorney but I'm sure being a patent attorney is a great job. So there we have it. There's everything you need to know about if postdocs are depressing and why there is a mass exodus. Let me know in the comments what you would add. I'd love to hear your experience and also remember there are more ways that you can engage with me. The first way is to sign up to my newsletter. Head over to andrewstapeton.com.au forward slash newsletter. 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