“Postdocs don’t get vacations.”
Jul 30th 2006WallabyGeneral & nerd alert
At least not in my new lab. Which isn’t to say that I was planning to take that many — an occasional weekend trip down to NC, an occasional overnight camping trip, that sort of thing. It’s a “real job”, after all. Of course, it winds up being just another example of how different things are between this lab and the ones I’ve been in previously.
No group meetings, for instance, when other professors use group meetings as a great opportunity for students and postdocs to get some badly-needed practice in communicating their results to others, to handle administrative details like cleanup schedules, and to go over the latest journal articles of particular interest.
He’s very big on keeping postdocs around indefinitely — there’s one who’s apparently been working for this professor ever since the professor began, which is now 6 years ago. My PhD advisor starts pushing postdocs towards the door after a year and a half, even when they’re being super-productive.
And way back when we first started talking about this particular postdoc opportunity, there was a certain figure mentioned by way of salary…. which was vastly more than usual, so I probably should’ve found a bigger grain of salt than I did. That figure has now been cut by roughly a third. Not that I’m complaining. Apparently (according to a page I found on chronicle.com about faculty salaries) it’s more than the average full professor at my undergrad was making while I was there. (That says a lot more about why it was so hard for them to recruit and retain faculty than anything else — other liberal arts schools in the area were averaging at least a third more.)
Also on the Chronicle’s site — job listing for assistant professor of analytical chemistry at University of Maryland Eastern Shore, pref. with a strong background in a variety of techniques and an interest in environmental applications. Starting immediately.
But this is interesting research I’m doing! It’s significant! It’s my chance to be the first one to make a material with certain unusual properties! Except that I’m not that kind of chemist, so I’ll actually just be coming up with way to do much faster testing on materials that other people make. Which isn’t nearly as noteworthy, but a lot more fun.
For now.