This is a guest blog post
by Bruce Felts, PhD candidate at the
University of North Dakota.
On the opening morning of SfN 2014 I had the pleasure of
attending a workshop entitled "Careers Beyond the Bench." The tone
was set right away to start the morning by the fact that even prior to the
session getting started at 9 AM, the conference room was completely packed with
graduate students and postdocs interested in paths outside of the traditional
career trajectory of academia. Interestingly, at the exact same time on
Saturday morning was a second workshop entitled "Success in
Academia," meaning graduate students and postdocs were forced to decide
which career path to pursue at that exact moment in time. Unsurprisingly, a
long line formed outside of the workshop on academia and there were only a few
very persistent people able to enter into the room after the program began.
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| Figure 1: Number of post-doctorates by type of support. |
The opening speaker of the "Careers Beyond the Bench"
workshop was Dr. Sally Rockey, a Deputy Director for Extramural Research at the
NIH and the author of the blog "Rock Talk",
which helps keep the scientific community abreast of the latest trends and
challenges faced at the NIH. Dr. Rockey opened her talk by highlighting that
the number of postdoctoral fellows working in the US continues to increase.
This is especially true in fields that receive the largest portion of NIH
funding (IE Genetics, Biochemistry and, of course, Neuroscience). This trend
toward an increase in scientific fellows working in the US is presented in the
chart below (Figure 1, not presented during the session), which plots the
number of post docs supported by specific funding sources between the years
1979 and 2009.
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Figure 2: Where college graduates who pursue PhDs end
up, career-wise.
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With this in mind, Dr. Rockey next presented a basic flow chart
detailing who is part of the biomedical research workforce and the general
paths taken to get to those positions (Figure 2). Here, she highlighted that
despite most PhD students thinking their degree means they will pursue a job in
scientific academia, less than 50% of biomedical research positions are made up
by academic positions. Dr. Rockey also underscored that the transition between
graduate education and career positions is very poorly understood (numbers in
red are values that are not well studied, and thus the accuracy of these values
is not likely correct).
Because a majority of postdoctoral fellows are foreign nationals,
along with the fact that postdoctoral fellowships can have a variety of titles,
it is difficult to track the average length and structural make-up of the
postdoc community. However, Dr. Rockey did say that anecdotal evidence points
to the length of postdoctoral positions increasing as vacant jobs in academia
continue to decrease. This is somewhat exemplified when examining the median
age of graduation from PhD programs along with the median age of first entry
into non-postdoctoral positions and then comparing these values between
biomedical and other scientific fields (Figure 3).
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| Figure 3: Average age at the beginning of each career stage. |
Here a couple of noticeable trends are seen. First, the age gap
between when biomedical PhDs graduate and when they enter into their first
academic position is somewhat larger than the same age gap found with Chemistry
PhDs. Moreover, the chart shows that biomedical PhDs pursuing careers outside
academia typically receive their first position at a younger age than those
pursuing a career in academia.
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| Career Neuron by Dr. Immy Smith, @Cartoon_Neuro |
To close the talk, Dr. Rockey ended on a positive note by
emphasizing the value of a biomedical PhD degree and encouraged students not to
be afraid to look outside of the classic tenure-track faculty position when
considering a future career. It may be that your mentor feels it is his/her job
to make you into their scientific protégé.
However, given what we know about job outlooks and the overall amount of
training one gets when going through a PhD degree program/postdoctoral
experiences, biomedical PhDs are more than capable of succeeding in a whole
host of alternative careers outside of academia.
Other posts in this series:
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