Postdoctoral Affairs

Although I had planned to keep my personal life out of this blog for the most part, this morning I received the second of two unpleasant surprises fit for a post on the problem of postdocs.

I'll start at the beginning. When I began postdoctoral research at Pseudonymous Northwest University, my advisor's grant was paying my salary (at the NIH recommended minimum) and benefits. These included a pretty good healthcare plan as well as a nice employer-matched retirement program, both standard for faculty at PNU. However, like any good postdoc, I began applying for outside fellowships as soon as possible. Getting one would not only bring prestige to myself, my advisor, and PNU, it would also free up funds from my advisor's grant so that he could hire additional hands in the lab.

I was lucky enough to be awarded a coveted fellowship by a cancer research foundation, a feat apparently deserving of a brief congratulatory announcement in the PNU Weekly. This fellowship not only provided for a substantial raise in salary from the standard pittance received by starting postdocs, it also came with a $2000 annual allowance for educational expenses. Things were really looking up. I was hopeful that I might even be able to recoup my relocation expenses by the end of my first year.

A couple of months after beginning support on my new fellowship, I went to a conference on the East Coast to present my research in progress. My advisor encouraged me to go, saying that I could use my educational allowance to pay for my trip. Unfortunately, when I returned and sought reimbursement, the payroll office informed me that the money in question had already been put towards my benefits. To his dubious credit, my administratively challenged advisor was as surprised to be reminded of this as I was to learn of it. He instructed me to ask the department for travel funds, but on finding that none had been allocated for postdoctoral (as opposed to grad student or faculty) travel, he eventually agreed to cough up the funds himself.

That was Unpleasant Postdoc Surprise #1.

This morning I was talking to our lab manager about IRAs, having stayed up far too late the night before struggling with my income tax returns. At one point, she suggested that I check exactly what kind of employer-matched retirement fund I had so that we could compare. Imagine how I felt when I logged into my employee account and discovered that I NO LONGER HAD ONE.

It took an irate call to the PNU Benefits Office to ascertain that I had been reclassified from "research associate" to "research associate trainee" when my fellowship support commenced in August of last year. That made me immediately INELIGIBLE for my faculty retirement plan. Some great reward for my success in securing outside funding! Same person, same skills, same job, that blurb, and yet... less love. And no one had even bothered to inform me!

That was Unpleasant Postdoc Surprise #2.

Am I alone in my experiences? Hardly. At noon today I complained to a room of 15 postdocs from departments scattered throughout PNU and was informed that at least three others had suffered similar incidents. The fact is, it's all too easy for postdocs to fall between the cracks. Although we form a huge fraction of the experimental enterprise, especially at top tier research institutions like PNU, university administrators don't seem to know what to make of us. We're not exactly students, or staff, or faculty, or well-organized or represented. That results in extreme heterogeneity of title, salary, benefits, and access to resources. Until very recently, PNU didn't even know how many of us there were, much less how to contact us or assist us. We were left entirely to the mercy of our research mentors (and the extremely generous interpretation of Howard Hughes "graduate" training program funds by a sympathetic faculty member) for training and support.

Hopefully this situation will improve as recognition of postdocs' plight spreads. According to the National Postdoctoral Association, over 100 US universities and research institutions have established their own Postdoctoral Associations and/or Offices of Postdoctoral Affairs. Major areas of advocacy include equitable pay and benefits, funded opportunities for professional development, and tracking of training experiences and outcomes.

One major NPA recommendation, as it happens, is to "increase the percentage of postdoctoral researchers funded by independent fellowships compared with grants initiated by Principal Investigators."

Hmm. Thanks to diligent advocacy by a band of determined postdocs, PNU just established its own OPA on an 18-month trial basis. I wonder if they can get my retirement plan back.