Mammas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Postdocs

In most careers, when you do a good job, you get rewarded - a promotion, a bonus, a raise, whatever. These things are the incentives that make you strive to do your best.

In science, as a postdoc, you get penalized for your success.

I did something postdocs are supposed to do - get money by writing a research proposal that you submit to a funding agency. The process is competitive and time-consuming; when you are successful, this is a significant achievement, an essential step in your career.

But the actual payoff is really years down the road. In the immediate aftermath of successfully obtaining a funded postdoctoral fellowship, you lose out:

- Your salary very well may decrease. That's right - if you write a successful research proposal, your salary could go down. The going rate for an NIH fellowship was less than what I was earning as a university-paid fellow; it was only thanks to the timely help of my advisor I avoided a pay cut.

- Your health insurance premiums become fully taxable. Before I was funded by the NIH, my health insurance premiums were taken out before taxes - just as it's done for everyone else in the country with employer-sponsored health insurance. Once you are an NIH fellow however, your insurance premiums (including the hefty 'employer contribution') are not deducted before taxes - the entire cost of your health insurance premiums is considered taxable income. Thus my taxable income jumped up by several thousand dollars, but my take-home pay remained unchanged. (You can of course deduct the premiums at the end of the year, but this substantially complicates your tax filing.)

- You have to submit your own tax payments. As an NIH fellow, you are nobody's employee - not the university's, not the government's. But the IRS doesn't consider you self-employed either. You technically don't earn wages. You don't receive a W-2. You're not a student.

Thus you have to spend hours navigating the labyrinthine state and U.S. tax codes to figure out how to submit quarterly tax payments. I thought I had it all figured out - until I suddenly discovered that in my state, quarterly doesn't exactly mean quarterly. It turns out that sometimes you have to submit three months worth of taxes after just two months of pay! (April 15 to June 15). Of course, on my shamefully excessive NIH postdoc salary, it's no problem at all to save up extra taxes on income I haven't been paid yet. I suppose I shouldn't be eating anyway - there is lab work to do!

The list could go on... The sheer hours of bureaucratic combat involved in living off of NIH funding makes the whole process almost not worth it. Almost - there is the fact that your future academic career is not too bright if you don't manage to get some sort of fellowship.

Postdocs are in such a nebulous, in-between world - not students, not staff, not faculty, not employees of any kind. This basically means you're everyone's awkward step-child, only partially claimed by the NIH and the university, left to fend for yourself.

Are boring science classes the reason we aren't training enough American scientists?

Tom Friedman, in his Friday's NY Times column (subscription required) comments on Walter Isaacson's new biography of Einstein and asks:

"If Einstein were alive today and learned science the boring way it is taught in so many U.S. schools, wouldn’t he have ended up at a Wall Street hedge fund rather than developing theories of relativity for a Nobel Prize?"

While our schools can undoubtedly use improvement in their science curricula, there is a more important reason we're not training as many scientists in this country as we should - science just doesn't pay off, at least not until the scientist has reached an age when most other professionals in the US are thinking about how much to put in their 401Ks instead of worrying about where to find their first job. If Einstein were alive today, he'd have good reason for choosing to work at that hedge fund over the spartan life of a young scientist struggling to get a tenure-track job.

By the time you start making a reasonable salary as a scientist, you've watched for years as all your friends who are MBA graduates, computer engineers, physicians, lawyers, or even moderately paid teachers buy houses, take family vacations, buy their kids music, sports, and dance lessons, and start a substantial retirement savings - all while you were just barely getting by from paycheck to paycheck. Scientists begin saving for retirement and their kids' education at an age which financial self-help books tend describe, with half-hearted optimism, in phrases like 'not completely hopeless.'

For a science career, you live in poverty for 5-7 years of grad school, with no retirement benefits and poor health insurance. That's somewhat understandable - law students and med students also live in poverty during their graduate training (although a PhD program is longer, and senior science grad students are already working at a professional level that lawyers and physicians don't reach until after they graduate).

After grad school, a postdoctoral fellowship is absolutely necessary for any kind of academic career at a research university or in a senior position as an industrial scientist - in other words, the kind of permanent job that induces people to seek a PhD in the first place. Postdoctoral fellowships usually run at least three years now, with a salary in the 32-45k range (you maybe reach 45k after 2-3 years, if you have an outside source of funding). As in grad school, there are no 401Ks or other retirement benefits, and even when you do get decent health insurance, all the money for the premiums (including the 'employer' contribution) is considered taxable income through some perverted loophole in the tax code.

Scientists tend to be in their mid- to late 30's by the time they get a permanent job, and on average they don't get their first research grant (critical for establishing an independent research program) until age 42. This is extremely late for people who want at least some financial security before they start a family. Women scientists are disproportionately affected, because the brunt of the work of having children, biologically and usually socially, falls on women. Those who hope to have a family life are faced with the unpleasant choice of waiting a long time or risking their job and financial security to have children at a more normal age.

The whole process can be extremely discouraging and demoralizing. I have a PhD, more than 8 years of experience in the lab, several published papers, my own funding based on a successful, peer-reviewed fellowship proposal, and I earn less than my younger sister, a clothing store manager who successfully worked up from an entry level job in the two years she's been out of college. I work nights and weekends with no overtime pay. Instead of recording overtime, I fill out a time sheet at the end of the month stating my "hours absent" from the university. I have school debt that's accumulating interest, while my kids rely on grandparents to buy them shoes and swimming lessons.

The National Postdoctoral Association
puts it this way:

"Postdoctoral scientists have slipped between the cracks of the scientific workforce as a heterogeneous group of 'apprentice' scientists. They generally do not have well-defined expectations of employment, appropriate employment rights and responsibilities, commensurate or even normalized pay scales, performance evaluations, consistent employment benefits such as proper health care, pensions, occupational health insurance, or procedures for resolving conflict."

We could have the best public school science curricula in the world, but that would not be enough to overcome the large disincentives students face when considering a career in science.

Fattening up our nation with farm subsidies...

By the end of this week, this blog should be back in full swing - I've got a post on Vectors, Quaternions and Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day coming up, a review of David Lindley's new book Uncertainty, and a discussion of why the newly sequenced macaque genome, published in Science, is going to help us learn great things.

In the meantime, here's a thought provoking, if somewhat obvious, article in today's NY Times magazine on how the US government's farm subsidies are exacerbating the obesity epidemic that biomedical researchers and physicians are trying so hard to contain.

Almost the best quote I've read all week (it can't quite compete with some gems from the Gonzales hearing):

"The farm bill essentially treats our children as a human Disposall for all the unhealthful calories that the farm bill has encouraged American farmers to overproduce."

As a postdoc with three kids (one of whom, as a second grader, gets to be one of those human Disposalls) and a subsistence salary, this subject hits close to home. It's extremely depressing to walk through the grocery store and see how much cheaper it would be if I gave up on the real juice and fresh vegetables, and instead fed my kids flavored corn syrup, tater tots, and processed frozen vegetables drenched in salt and fake butter. At least in my case, the depressingly tight grocery budget is temporary (assuming a tenure-track job is somewhere in my future), but that's not true for millions of Americans who are very likely to end up obese while living on affordable junk food.

Going though the NIH review process

One of the most critical things a postdoc in science has to do is get independent funding. Even if your mentor is rich, proving that you can put together a research proposal and successfully obtain funding is a critical career step.

I submitted four funding applications this year, my first year as a postdoc. It's a long, slow process - each funding application has different length and content requirements - ranging from 10 pages not counting references, to 5 including references. By far I found the NIH applicatio to be the most onerous. (The NIH was the only US government agency I applied to - the rest were private foundations.) The application includes a massive, 104 page instuction manual for filling out all the damn forms. And then it takes months and months to go through the whole cycle. I submitted my application in August, and I just got my reviews back. I won't know about a final funding decision until February at the latest.

It was an interesting experience getting these first reviews. NIH fellowship applications are scored on a scale of 100-500, with 100 being the best. (Actually, I don't think they really score proposals that earn a score worse than maybe 300 - the applications considered to be in the worst 40% are 'triaged' and not reviewed further.) Applicants also get a summary of the discussion that took place in the review session, and written critiques from three reviewers.

Each of my three reviewers disagrees with the other two at some point. It's amusing to read some of the examples:

Reviewer 1: "The application is for an average candidate in an outstanding environment..."
Reviewer 3: "This is a very strong application from an outstanding candidate..."

Reviewer 1: "However, there is little discussion of the possible outcomes of each set of experiments, or the possible pitfalls and stumbling blocks that might be encountered if all does not go as planned..."
Reviewer 2: "This specific aim was concise, comprehensive and well-written. It
addresses potential concerns..."

As long and cumbersome as the overall process is, I got fair, good-faith reviews from all the people involved, even though I disagree with some points here and there. My program officer at the NIH (the person handling my application) said I was in the 'maybe' category. The worst part is that I have to wait a few more months (by which time I will have completed my first year as a postdoc) to hear the final decision. And then I may have to do a minor rewrite, and go through the whole damn cycle again. It's a long process for something that's supposed to happen during a relatively short postdoctoral period.

Now that I'm obviously much wiser about this, having gone through the whole process exactly 0.75 times, I have some advice for any grad students who stumble across this blog:

- find a mentor who has excellent grant writing skills and get him or her to give you a ton of advice

- find a postdoc who already has fellowship funding, and get a copy of that proposal. Reading someone else's successful proposal is invaluable.

- keep sending in applications everywhere you can until someone gives you money.