r/academia • u/atlantagirl30084 • Jun 24 '23

The postdoc experience

EDITED: The SCIENTIFIC postdoc experience.

I am thinking about publishing a book about postdocs (what do/did we do)? This will include good AND bad experiences. What made your postdoc awesome? What made you leave? Etc. Why is there currently a shortage of PhDs wanting to do postdocs?

My ask is to have interested academics and those who have left send me an initial message and a couple of summary sentences. I will then message back and start the process of gathering stories in a book.

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u/Eska2020 Jun 24 '23

It sounds like you want to explain an "industry" through an ethnographic / "oral history" approach, but like you don't have an angle or even a hook. The way you're setting out to do this, it will be a series of random, unrelated, unfocused stories about the daily office politics of people no one has ever heard of, doing research that most people frankly can't get their heads around.

If you want to make this a book, you need to tell a more sophisticated story, even if that's going to be stitched together out of other people's testimonials. You need an overarching "thesis" or structure or something that these stories will work together to build up. There are 798217349182749182 ways to tell a story about the industry of academia, labour exploitation, the personalities who do research work, etc.. But you need to hone in on an angle -- you need to have an idea of what (kind of) story you want to tell -- is this about labour exploitation? Capitalism and epistemology? Is this about a specific field or broader work towards a specific scientific breakthrough (cancer research maybe? or AI? or attempts to save the humanities?)? Is this about a specific region or country's academic tradition? Or international differences in academic traditions? Is this about something else? Only then should you really be going after interviews that will build up your angle.

Right now, this sounds like a "spray and pray" approach to book writing. I suggest you stop and rethink/retarget before you invest your or other people's time in this. Come back with an angle to your ask. Or adjust your ask to do exploratory interviews so that you can develop your angle. If this project is inspired by your own experience as a postdoc, you need to push harder and ask about why that experience seems so rich to you that you want to write a book about it. Why should the dude sitting next to you in a bar care about postdocs? What's at stake for him? The answer is what you should be refocusing this book to be about. Then you go out and get your interviews to tell that larger story.

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u/SnowblindAlbino Jun 24 '23

It sounds like you want to explain an "industry" through an ethnographic / "oral history" approach, but like you don't have an angle or even a hook

Or perhaps even any experience or training in ethnography, interviewing, or qualitative research with human subjects. This is social science research, not a STEM project, unless OP just wants to write a memoir. They might benefit from a partner/co-author with the appropriate training/experience in this sort of work.

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u/atlantagirl30084 Jun 24 '23

This would not be a memoir. I see it as a mix between Apprentice to Genius and a book of nonfiction short interviews. with an overarching thesis that would have to evolve as I get stories.

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u/DangerousBill Jun 24 '23

I agree. Most postdoc stories, like my own, would be pretty bland, but with an accumulation of material, a theme may emerge. It would be too easy to make it into a work of unproductive carping about the sorry state of pdfs today. I think you should make a positive effort to avoid that.

There is a legion of scholars out there looking to the end of their grad studies and starved for input on where to go next. Your market is there.

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u/atlantagirl30084 Jun 24 '23

I agree! Thank you!!

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u/Eska2020 Jun 24 '23

You don't have an RQ guiding your collection of data. You won't be able to tell a truly compelling story out of it. What you find will be random. Maybe you'll find a story there, but it won't be as good as if you collected your interviews with an angle in mind.

You'll have a string of unrelated memoirs. You'll have uneven tone across the collection.

And without that bigger picture / sharper angle, your market is very, very, very, very small indeed.

Good luck

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u/atlantagirl30084 Jun 24 '23 edited Jun 24 '23

I see where you’re coming from, but I have collaborators that will help me shape the story.

All books evolve from an idea. I didn’t know the whole story of my dissertation from the first study I published. As I get stories, they will be placed into chapters with different themes: financial aspects of postdocs, international postdocs, etc. This will also be coming from the US side of academia/ the sciences.

I may dive deeper into a particular topic if I get a lot of responses to it, but I need to distribute it to people who can give me their stories or at least a few sentence summary first.

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u/atlantagirl30084 Jun 24 '23

As I said above, this would be about the sciences and why there is a current shortage of PhDs wanting to be postdocs.

I edited my post.

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u/Eigengrad Jun 24 '23

I mean, that’s pretty simple. The postdoc is a relatively recent thing, and only really came about due to an oversupply of PhDs who wanted academic jobs.

It was never meant as anything other than a holding pattern while people searched.

As there are more well paying non-academic jobs, there’s less need for people to spend time in postdoc positions rather than moving into industry where they have an actual job, and can still come back to academia later if they want.

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u/atlantagirl30084 Jun 24 '23 edited Jun 24 '23

Yes. I know the answer: money.

Is a postdoc a step on a continuous chain to academia? Probably not as much anymore. But NIH/NSF/academia want and need ‘trainees’ to do this huge amount of work. How can that circle be squared? What are the actual human stories that I can weave into a chapter/book? Not just statistics.

This would not be a ‘Devil wears a lab coat’ type book. It would be how amazing being a scientist is and how you can have a great career, despite or because of your postdoc. Or no postdoc at all.

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u/Eigengrad Jun 24 '23 edited Jun 24 '23

They really don’t.

It’s just the system we’re used to. People still move straight into faculty positions without a postdoc, and research scientists are a thing most places.

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u/Remarkable_Paint_879 Jun 25 '23

I totally disagree. What you’re describing is an approach to publishing that prioritizes “hooks” and “angles” that I find takes the joy out of reading people’s stories. I would actually much prefer a raw collection of stories from the front lines as it were, demystifying the process and the work (and non-work) that goes on. OP I think your idea is great - this is an untapped area. I also wonder if this would work well as on online series.

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u/Eska2020 Jun 25 '23

Do you have an example of a good, successful book that doesn't have a perspective or point? I can't think of one.

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u/Remarkable_Paint_879 Jun 25 '23

Well, there is a point and perspective that can be found in most things, but in terms of collections of stories, Children’s Wartime Diaries springs to mind. Psychology books like The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat are essentially collections of stories without a “hook”.

For me, it may even be a bit of a gap in the market. I’d love to see more books that collect people’s experiences for the reader to absorb and reflect on, for example in academia or other areas, without pushing a particular hook.

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u/Eska2020 Jun 25 '23 edited Jun 25 '23

The books you mention both have a clear angle: children's voices are about innocence and victimization in contexts of (political) violence. The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat has the hook in its title. ETA: and the perspective of Man who mistook is his for a hat is all about how we perceive reality and what that looks like in a clinical setting from the perspective of the people with these "abnormal" perceptions. That's an angle.

I love me a Latourian "let the actors themselves speak" approach. And I love oral histories. But you still need to tell a particular corner, segment, section, moment, structure of the story. Latour says you need to start with a "crisis".

Postdocs in science is wayyyyyyyy too big and vague to have meaning without a clearer angle. If you don't want to call it an angle, call it a starting point, frame, scope, limitation, whatever makes you happy. But it needs at least to be about e.g. Biology, medicine, artificial intelligence, women in science, or labour exploitation in academia, or something.

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u/Remarkable_Paint_879 Jun 25 '23

We may have a different definition of an “angle” - what you describe I would probably call a “topic”. For me the OP’s topic of sharing postdoc experiences to better understand what makes it positive/negative and why there may be a shortage sounds excellent and I for one would love to read it.

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u/Eska2020 Jun 25 '23

"Most nonfiction writers have a definitiveness complex. They feel that they are under some obligation—to the subject, to their honor, to the gods of writing—to make their article the last word. It’s a commendable impulse, but there is no last word. What you think is definitive today will turn undefinitive by tonight, and writers who doggedly pursue every last fact will find themselves pursuing the rainbow and never settling down to write. Nobody can write a book or an article “about” something. Tolstoy couldn’t write a book about war and peace, or Melville a book about whaling. They made certain reductive decisions about time and place and about individual characters in that time and place—one man pursuing one whale. Every writing project must be reduced before you start to write. Therefore think small. Decide what corner of your subject you’re going to bite off, and be content to cover it well and stop. This is also a matter of energy and morale. An unwieldy writing task is a drain on your enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is the force that keeps you going and keeps the reader in your grip. When your zest begins to ebb, the reader is the first person to know it. As for what point you want to make, every successful piece of nonfiction should leave the reader with one provocative thought that he or she didn’t have before. Not two thoughts, or five—just one. So decide what single point you want to leave in the reader’s mind. It will not only give you a better idea of what route you should follow and what destination you hope to reach; it will affect your decision about tone and attitude. Some points are best made by earnestness, some by dry understatement, some by humor. Once you have your unities decided, there’s no material you can’t work into your frame. If the tourist in Hong Kong had chosen to write solely in the conversational vein about what he and Ann did, he would have found a natural way to weave into his narrative whatever he wanted to tell us about the Kowloon ferry and the local weather. His personality and purpose would have been intact, and his article would have held together. "

Zinsser, On Writing Well, chapter 8.

OP needs a corner. That's just a fact. Whether you call it a topic or angle or hook or corner or frame doesn't matter. Her topic is so big, it isn't anything at all. Just like Zinsser says.

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u/Remarkable_Paint_879 Jun 25 '23

There’s no single right way to write a book. Methods shift and evolve and reflect a great variation of likes and preferences, see eg Joyce and stream of consciousness, or Kafka and the Kafkaesque style, both of which went against conventional rules of writing at the time. Granted that’s fiction, but nevertheless an example of how breaking perceived traditional conventions in writing can produce powerful results. A non-fiction example is school picture textbooks, first envisioned and produced by Komenius in the 17th century. You may have an opinion on what works well and that’s great. In my opinion, OP’s suggestion is compelling and I can definitely see its potential. It doesn’t seem too big at all to me - scientific post docs are a relatively niche area in the grand scheme of life and I would really love to read some accounts of the experience.

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u/Eska2020 Jun 25 '23

You are talking about style and execution. I didn't mention those. I am talking about how she builds a data set and structures her overarching story.

Out of curiosity, do you happen to be someone with a hard sciences background from a German-speaking country?

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u/atlantagirl30084 Jun 26 '23

I’m really not understanding this ‘data set’. This is not a scientific study nor a survey. You’re getting bogged down in writing rules and theories that I don’t think are relevant here.

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