postdoc research plan

Feb 20 2023

• Writing a Winning Postdoctoral Research Proposal: A Guide and Template

Eddy Haminton

Career advice

If you are interested in pursuing a postdoctoral position, one of the first steps is to write a research proposal that outlines the project you plan to undertake. A postdoctoral research proposal is an important document that can help you secure funding, support, and a position at a university or research institution. In this blog post, we will provide a guide to writing a postdoctoral research proposal, as well as a template to help you get started.

The purpose of a postdoctoral research proposal is to demonstrate your research expertise, creativity, and vision, as well as to provide a clear plan for the research you plan to undertake. A good research proposal should be clear, concise, and well-organized, and should provide a strong rationale for the proposed research. It should also outline the research objectives, methods, and expected outcomes.

Here is a basic template for a postdoctoral research proposal:

I. Introduction

• Provide a brief overview of the research area and context for your proposed research
• State the research problem or question that your project will address
• Provide a rationale for the importance of the proposed research

II. Objectives and Research Questions

• Clearly state the research objectives of your project
• Provide a list of specific research questions that you plan to address

III. Background and Literature Review

• Provide a summary of the key literature in the research area
• Discuss how your proposed research builds on and contributes to the existing research

IV. Methodology

• Provide a clear and detailed description of the research methods you plan to use
• Explain how your methodology will help you achieve your research objectives
• Discuss any potential limitations of your proposed methodology and how you plan to address them

V. Expected Outcomes and Significance

• Clearly state the expected outcomes of your research
• Discuss the potential impact and significance of your research for the research area and beyond

VI. Timeline

• Provide a timeline for the completion of the proposed research
• Break the project into specific milestones and indicate the time required to complete each milestone

VII. Budget

• Provide a detailed budget for the proposed research
• Indicate the costs associated with equipment, materials, travel, and other expenses

VIII. Conclusion

• Summarize the key points of your research proposal
• Reiterate the importance and significance of your proposed research

When writing a postdoctoral research proposal, it is important to tailor your proposal to the specific research area and institution you are applying to. It is also important to be realistic about the feasibility of your proposed research, given the time and resources available.

In conclusion, a postdoctoral research proposal is a critical document that can help you secure a postdoctoral position and funding for your research. By following the template above and tailoring your proposal to the specific research area and institution you are applying to, you can increase your chances of success. Good luck with your postdoctoral research proposal!

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Fellowships & Funding

Successful funding applications present reviewers with a strong research plan in an engaging and logical manner. They take commitment and time to craft. Below are events, strategies, and resources to help you during the writing stage of your proposal. Start writing your proposal early to take advantage of these resources!

   ✔ Establish a timeline for completion of proposal segments

   ✔ Start a writing group for peer-reviewing, accountability, and encouragement (See Successful Writing Groups )

   ✔ Follow the solicitation instructions exactly & use sponsor templates

UC San Diego Postdoc Proposal Development Events

Postdoc fellowship forum.

Monthly workshops with Professor Mark Lawson to answer all your questions and review your fellowship applications. This is a great way to meet fellow postdocs who are also developing proposals. Generally the 4th Tuesday of the month from 12-1:30pm.

Funding your Future Events

Funding workshops tailored to UC San Diego Postdocs. Check the website and your emails for upcoming events.

Funding Fest

Funding Fest is an annual series of funding workshops held in the spring/summer. Find the workshop right for you and your proposal!

Writing Resources

Opsa grant writing resource library.

• How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing , Paul J. Silvia, PhD.
• They Say, I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing , Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein
• Guide to Effective Grant Writing: How to Write an Effective NIH Grant Application , Otto O. Yang
• Everything You Wanted to Know About the NCI Grant Process But Were Afraid to Ask , The National Cancer Institute
• Writing Science: How to write papers that get cited and proposals that get funded , Joshua Schimel
• The Complete Writing Guide to NIH Behavioral Science Grants , Lawrence M. Scheier, William L. Dewey
• NIH 101 , Grace C.Y. Peng, PhD
• Writing the NIH Grant Proposal: A Step-by-Step Guide , William Gerin

UC San Diego Research Development

Explore the Research Development website for proposal writing resources, early career award guidance, and access to the Research Development & Grant Writing News articles.

New Faculty Guide to Competing for Research Funding

Strategies for identifying and competing for research grants. Geared towards new faculty, but includes tips applicable for postdoc grant writers. 

EMU Handbook for Proposal Writers

Helpful tips for grant development, maintained by Eastern Michigan University.

Agency-Specific Resources

National institutes of health.

• Write your Application
• Planning & Writing
• National Cancer Institute Preparing Grant Applications
• National Institute of General Medical Sciences NRSA Postdoctoral Fellowships FAQs
• National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Fellowship (F) Advice

Environmental Protections Agency

• Tips for Writing a Competitive Grant Proposal  

National Science Foundation

• Advice for Proposal Writers

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How to Write a Postdoc Research Proposal | Lex Academic Blog

6 December 2021

By Dr Michelle Liu (DPhil Oxon)

In an increasingly competitive job market, securing a postdoc somewhere is probably the best option many recent graduates can hope for. In the UK, where I am writing from, there are postdoc positions tied to specific research projects with restricted areas of research. There are also postdoc positions (e.g., British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowships, Leverhulme Early Career Fellowships, Mind/Analysis Studentships, various JRFs at Oxford/Cambridge colleges) where areas of research are unrestricted.

Writing a postdoc research proposal is almost nothing like writing a paper for journal publication. For a start, grant referees may not be in your subject area, in which case striking the right tone and level of technicality in your proposal is important. Moreover, some of funders may care a lot more about impact than your average journal reviewers. So, it may be essential to think about whether your research project has wider applications and ramifications.

In this blog post, I will discuss what I think might be helpful for someone writing a postdoc research proposal. Given my area is philosophy, what I am offering here is perhaps more pertinent to philosophy than other subject areas (though I hope the general tips will apply across different disciplines in the Humanities). I shall mainly focus on writing research proposals where areas of specialisation are open. Of course, two successful research proposals can look quite different. So, it’s worth looking at some successful samples, if you can, before you start.

First, what topic should you propose? You should definitely propose a topic that you are already very familiar with. This could be an extension of your PhD thesis. Alternatively, it could be a new area that you have already begun to research. Not everyone can sustain a passion for one topic for 3-4 years. It’s likely that some of you started working on other topics during your PhDs. But if it’s a new area, then it should be a topic you already formed plans to write papers on – or even better, have published in. It is not an understatement to say that writing a research proposal is often a retrospective process. Sometimes, you already have a good idea of what your research outcomes will be, though the details still need filling in. You are working backwards in your proposal, guiding your grant reviewers through how one should go about investigating the topic.

A catchy title is also a good idea.

In terms of the overall structure of the proposal, I tend to think it’s helpful to have three sections: the introduction, the main body, and the outcome.

The opening paragraph is where you introduce your research topic to your (very often) non-specialist audience. Make sure you avoid jargon and write in plain English, but in an engaging way that captivates your readers. Think about why your topic is worth pursuing.  Why should anyone care? It’s worth considering how your own research compares and contrasts with the existing research on the topic. Make sure you give the impression that your project is exciting and will make a new contribution to the field.

The main body of the proposal goes into details about your aims and methodology, and exactly how you will carry out the project. The first thing to consider is timeframe. How might you divide your research time? What issues do you want to investigate for each period? For a typical three-year research fellowship in the UK, you could, for instance, divide it into three one-year periods and focus on investigating one question for each period.

I find it very helpful to frame the research plan in terms of guiding questions, with one question naturally leading to the next. Framing it in this way helps bring out your research goals and outcomes. For each question, think how you might go about answering it. What kind of literature do you want to engage with? Is there a popular view in the literature that you would like to criticise? Is there a hypothesis you want to investigate? You might have already made up your mind that you want to argue for thesis T when answering the research question you pose. But in this case, it may still be helpful to frame T as a hypothesis that you want to investigate in order to give referees a future-orienting sense of the project. In my own experience, I often find myself unsure of how to answer a specific research question that I raised. The advice I have received is that it is better to be specific and clear about what you want to argue for, even if you are not quite sure of it. Sometimes, you might have to put things in a way that sounds more confident than you actually are. It’s okay to be speculative; you don’t necessarily need to stick to your research plan. Also, I think it is better to show ‘positive’ outcomes (e.g., arguing for a new theory T) rather than ‘negative’ outcomes (e.g., arguing against theory X).

Depending on the nature of the topic, it may be appropriate to investigate it using case studies. In my own Leverhulme-funded project on polysemy, I investigate three case studies:  gender terms, sensation terms, and emotion terms. It is worth thinking about why these case studies were chosen. How are they related to each other? What overall purpose do they serve? In my own work, the three case studies were carefully chosen to encompass three different classes of words, i.e. nouns, verbs, and adjectives, from which wider philosophical implications about polysemy are to be drawn.

In the final section of the proposal, you should lay out the specific results you aim to achieve through your project as well as its wider impact. If your research is divided in several periods, think about what your output is for each period. It might be a specific paper for each period, in which case state the provisional title of the paper and the journal you are aiming to publish in. Again, this might not be what you in fact achieve if you secure the grant. It is also worth considering where you want to disseminate your research. Are there conferences that you want to attend or organise?

It is almost obligatory to include a section in the research proposal about the wider implications of the project. What significant impact does the research promise? It would be ideal if your project has wider social ramifications, such as clarifying conceptual confusions in a popular debate or resolving issues in certain clinical or policy-making contexts. If social impact is hard to find, it is still important to talk about how the project can advance debates in your field and what potential it has for applications in related research areas.

Finally, don’t forget to include references at the end as you are bound to cite research in your proposal.

Getting Feedback, etc.

There are other aspects of a postdoc application besides writing a research proposal. Some funding bodies give generous research allowances, in which case you will need to draft a budget outlining how you want to spend the money. This can involve various things from purchasing books to organising workshops or conferences. If the latter, it is important to give a breakdown of the costs. Where do you want to host the conference? How many speakers do you want to invite? How much would it cost to host each speaker? The last question depends on whether the speaker is domestic or international.

Often, you will also be asked to summarise your past and current research experience in your application. Here, you will inevitably mention your doctoral work and the papers that you have already published, that are under review, or that are in preparation. It is important to give the impression that your existing research experience naturally leads to your proposed project. Try to convey the idea that you are ideally suited to conduct the proposed project.

If your project is tied to a host institute, it is vital to explain (either in your proposal or elsewhere) the reasons for choosing a particular institution. What are its areas of expertise and how are they related to your research project? Mention members of the department whose work is relevant to yours. Also, how does your research contribute to the teaching and research in the host department?

Now that you have a draft for your research proposal, it is important to get a second opinion. In most universities, there are research offices dedicated to helping academics secure grants. Writing a grant application is a meticulous and formal process that involves peer reviews – something I was utterly unaware of when I was fresh out of my DPhil. However, graduate students or graduates who have not yet secured a university position are unlikely to have access to the expertise in the research office. In these cases, it would be wise to seek help from your supervisors as they are likely to offer useful insights.

Just as there are general tips that one can give to improve one’s chances for journal publication, I believe there are patterns that converge in successful grant applications. Like others, I am slowly figuring out both cases through experience and the helpful advice I’ve received from others over the years. Of course, it is undeniable that luck often plays a decisive role in grant success. My Leverhulme project on polysemy didn’t make it through the internal selection round at one institution, but I was lucky enough to apply at the last minute and eventually secure funding with my current institution. I hope that what I offer here may be helpful to some recent graduates, and I welcome others to share their successful experiences.

Dr  Michelle Liu is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire. Her project is titled ‘The abundance of meaning: polysemy and its applications in philosophy’. Liu completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2019 and was a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire from 2019 to 2021.

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Open Access

Ten Simple Rules for Writing a Postdoctoral Fellowship

Affiliation Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Department of Medicine, Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States of America

Affiliation Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Stanford Neuroscience Institute, Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States of America

Affiliation Division of Hematology, Oncology, Stem Cell Transplantation, and Cancer Biology, Department of Pediatrics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California, United States of America

* E-mail: [email protected] (LM); [email protected] (CMB)

Affiliation Asian Liver Center and Department of Surgery, Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States of America

Affiliation Stanford Biosciences Grant Writing Academy, Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States of America

• Ke Yuan, 
• Lei Cai, 
• Siu Ping Ngok, 
• Li Ma, 
• Crystal M. Botham

Published: July 14, 2016

• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004934
• Reader Comments

Citation: Yuan K, Cai L, Ngok SP, Ma L, Botham CM (2016) Ten Simple Rules for Writing a Postdoctoral Fellowship. PLoS Comput Biol 12(7): e1004934. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004934

Editor: Fran Lewitter, Whitehead Institute, UNITED STATES

Copyright: © 2016 Yuan et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: Dr. Ke Yuan is supported by American Heart Association Scientist Development Grant (15SDG25710448) and the Pulmonary Hypertension Association Proof of Concept Award (SPO121940). Dr. Lei Cai is supported by Stanford Neuroscience Institute and NIH NRSA postdoctoral fellowship (1F32HL128094). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

Postdoctoral fellowships support research, and frequently career development training, to enhance your potential to becoming a productive, independent investigator. Securing a fellowship sends a strong signal that you are capable of conducting fundable research and will likely lead to successes with larger grants. Writing a fellowship will also increase your productivity and impact because you will learn and refine skills necessary to articulate your research priorities. However, competition is fierce and your fellowship application needs to stand out among your peers as realistic, coherent, and compelling. Also, reviewers, a committee of experts and sometimes non-experts, will scrutinize your application, so anything less than polished may be quickly eliminated. We have drawn below ten tips from our experiences in securing postdoctoral fellowships to help as you successfully tackle your proposal.

Rule 1: Start Early and Gather Critical Information

Crafting a competitive fellowship can take 6–9 months, so it is imperative that you start early. You may even want to start looking for postdoctoral fellowships before you finish your doctoral degree. Compile a comprehensive list of fellowships that you can apply to. This list should include key information to organize your game plan for applying, including Sponsor (agency sponsoring the fellowship) name; URL for funding information; Sponsor deadlines; and any other requirements or critical information.

To find suitable fellowships, start by asking your faculty mentor(s), laboratory colleagues, and recent alumni about their experiences applying for fellowships. Federal agencies in the United States, such as the National Institute of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF); foreign governmental agencies; and other organizations, such as societies, foundations, and associations, often solicit fellowship applications. Additionally, many institutions offer internally supported fellowships as well as institutional research training grants.

Once you have an exhaustive list of fellowships you are eligible for, start gathering critical information that you can use to inform your writing. Read the fellowship instructions completely and identify the review criteria. Investigate the review process; NIH’s Center for Scientific Review reviews grant applications for scientific merit and has a worthwhile video about the Peer Review Process [ 1 ]. Sometimes Sponsors offer notification alerts about upcoming funding opportunities, deadlines, and updated policies, so make sure to sign up for those when offered. Also, gather previously submitted applications and reviewers’ comments for the fellowships you will to apply to. Both funded and unfunded applications are useful. Sometimes Sponsors make available funded abstracts like NIH’s Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools (RePORT), and these provide critical information about the scope of funded projects.

Many institutions have internal policies and processes that are required before a proposal can be submitted to a Sponsor. These requirements can include waivers to assess eligibility and internal deadlines (five business day internal deadlines are standard), so make sure you also gather relevant information about any internal policies and processes required by your institution.

Rule 2: Create a Game Plan and Write Regularly

Writing a compelling fellowship takes time, a lot of time, which is challenging to balance with a hectic laboratory schedule, other responsibilities, and family obligations. To reduce stress, divide the fellowship requirements into smaller tasks by creating a detailed timeline with goals or milestones. Having a game plan with daily and/or weekly goals will also help you avoid procrastination. Make sure you are writing regularly (i.e., daily or every other day) to establish an effective writing practice. This will increase your productivity and reduce your anxiety because writing will become a habit. It is also important to make your writing time non-negotiable so other obligations or distractions don’t impede your progress.

Rule 3: Find Your Research Niche

It is crucial that you have a deep awareness of your field so you can identify critical knowledge gaps that will significantly move your field forward when filled. Keep a list of questions or problems inherent to your field and update this list after reading germane peer-reviewed and review articles or attending seminars and conferences. Narrow down and focus your list through discussions with your mentor(s), key researchers in your field, and colleagues. Because compelling projects often combine two seemingly unrelated threads of work to challenge and shift the current research or clinical practice paradigms, it is important to have a broad familiarity with the wider scientific community as well. Seek opportunities to attend seminars on diverse topics, speak with experts, and read broadly the scientific literature. Relentlessly contemplate how concepts and approaches in the wider scientific community could be extended to address critical knowledge gaps in your field. Furthermore, develop a few of your research questions by crafting hypotheses supported by the literature and/or preliminary data. Again, share your ideas with others, i.e., mentor(s), other scientists, and colleagues, to gauge interest in the significance and innovation of the proposed ideas. Remember, because your focus is on writing a compelling fellowship, make sure your research questions are also relevant and appropriate for the missions of the sponsoring agencies.

Rule 4: Use Your Specific Aims Document as Your Roadmap

A perfectly crafted Specific Aims document, usually a one-page description of your plan during the project period, is crucial for a compelling fellowship because your reviewers will read it! In fact, it is very likely your Specific Aims will be the first document your reviewers will read, so it is vital to fully engage the reviewers’ interest and desire to keep reading. The Specific Aims document must concisely answer the following questions:

• Is the research question important? Compelling proposals often tackle a particular gap in the knowledge base that, when addressed, significantly advance the field.
• What is the overall goal? The overall goal defines the purpose of the proposal and must be attainable regardless of how the hypothesis tests.
• What specifically will be done? Attract the reviewers’ interest using attention-getting headlines. Describe your working hypothesis and your approach to objectively test the hypothesis.
• What are the expected outcomes and impact? Describe what the reviewers can expect after the proposal is completed in terms of advancement to the field.

A draft of your Specific Aims document is ideal for eliciting feedback from your mentor(s) and colleagues because evaluating a one-page document is not an enormous time investment on part of the person giving you feedback. Plus, you don’t want to invest time writing a full proposal without knowing the proposal’s conceptual framework is compelling. When you are ready to write the research plan, your Specific Aims document then provides a useful roadmap.

As you are writing (and rewriting) your Specific Aims document, it is essential to integrate the Sponsor’s goals for that fellowship funding opportunity. Often goals for a fellowship application include increasing the awardee’s potential for becoming an independent investigator, in which case an appropriate expected outcome might be that you mature into an independent investigator.

We recommend reading The Grant Application Writer’s Workbook ( www.grantcentral.com ) [ 2 ] because it has two helpful chapters on how to write a persuasive Specific Aims document, as well as other instructive chapters. Although a little formulaic, the Workbook’s approach ensures the conceptual framework of your Specific Aims document is solid. We also advise reading a diverse repertoire of Specific Aims documents to unearth your own style for this document.

Rule 5: Build a First-Rate Team of Mentors

Fellowship applications often support mentored training experiences; therefore, a strong mentoring team is essential. Remember, reviewers often evaluate the qualifications and appropriateness of your mentoring team. The leader of your mentoring team should have a track record of mentoring individuals at similar stages as your own as well as research qualifications appropriate for your interests. Reviewers will also often consider if your mentor can adequately support the proposed research and training because fellowship applications don’t always provide sufficient funds. It is also useful to propose a co-mentor who complements your mentor’s qualifications and experiences. You should also seek out other mentors at your institution and elsewhere to guide and support your training. These mentors could form an advisory committee, which is required for some funding opportunities, to assist in your training and monitor your progress. In summary, a first-rate mentoring team will reflect the various features of your fellowship, including mentors who augment your research training by enhancing your technical skills as well as mentors who support your professional development and career planning.

As you develop your fellowship proposal, meet regularly with your mentors to elicit feedback on your ideas and drafts. Your mentors should provide feedback on several iterations of your Specific Aims document and contribute to strengthening it. Recruit mentors to your team who will also invest in reading and providing feedback on your entire fellowship as an internal review before the fellowship’s due date.

You also want to maintain and cultivate relationships with prior mentors, advisors, or colleagues because fellowships often require three to five letters of reference. A weak or poorly written letter will negatively affect your proposal’s fundability, so make sure your referees will write a strong letter of recommendation and highlight your specific capabilities.

Rule 6: Develop a Complete Career Development Training Plan

Most fellowships support applicants engaged in training to enhance their development into a productive independent researcher. Training often includes both mentored activities, e.g., regular meetings with your mentor(s), as well as professional activities, e.g., courses and seminars. It is important that you describe a complete training plan and justify the need for each training activity based on your background and career goals.

When developing this plan, it is helpful to think deeply about your training needs. What skills or experiences are missing from your background but needed for your next career stage? Try to identify three to five training goals for your fellowship and organize your plan with these goals in mind. Below are sample activities:

• Regular (weekly) one-on-one meetings with mentor(s)
• Biannual meeting with advisory committee
• Externship (few weeks to a few months) in a collaborator’s laboratory to learn a specific technique or approach
• Courses (include course # and timeline) to study specific topics or methods
• Seminars focused on specific research areas
• Conferences to disseminate your research and initiate collaborations
• Teaching or mentoring
• Grant writing, scientific writing, and oral presentation courses or seminars
• Opportunities for gaining leadership roles
• Laboratory management seminars or experiences

Rule 7: STOP! Get Feedback

Feedback is critical to developing a first-class proposal. You need a wide audience providing feedback because your reviewers will likely come from diverse backgrounds as well. Be proactive in asking for feedback from your mentor, colleagues, and peers. Even non-scientists can provide critical advice about the clarity of your writing. When eliciting feedback, inform your reviewer of your specific needs, i.e., you desire broader feedback on overall concepts and feasibility or want advice on grammar and spelling. You may also consider hiring a professional editing and proofreading service to polish your writing.

Some fellowships have program staff, such as the NIH Program Officers, who can advise prospective applicants. These individuals can provide essential information and feedback about the programmatic relevance of your proposal to the Sponsor’s goals for that specific fellowship application. Approaching a Program Officer can be daunting, but reading the article “What to Say—and Not Say—to Program Officers” can help ease your anxiety [ 3 ].

Rule 8: Tell a Consistent and Cohesive Story

Fellowship applications are often composed of numerous documents or sections. Therefore, it is important that all your documents tell a consistent and cohesive story. For example, you might state your long term goal in the Specific Aims document and personal statement of your biosketch, then elaborate on your long term goal in a career goals document, so each of these documents must tell a consistent story. Similarly, your research must be described consistently in your abstract, Specific Aims, and research strategy documents. It is important to allow at least one to two weeks of time after composing the entire application to review and scrutinize the story you tell to ensure it is consistent and cohesive.

Rule 9: Follow Specific Requirements and Proofread for Errors and Readability

Each fellowship application has specific formats and page requirements that must be strictly followed. Keep these instructions and the review criteria close at hand when writing and revising. Applications that do not conform to required formatting and other requirements might be administratively rejected before the review process, so meticulously follow all requirements and guidelines.

Proofread your almost final documents for errors and readability. Errors can be confusing to reviewers. Also, if the documents have many misspellings or grammar errors, your reviewers will question your ability to complete the proposed experiments with precision and accuracy. Remove or reduce any field-specific jargon or acronyms. Review the layout of your pages and make sure each figure or table is readable and well placed. Use instructive headings and figure titles that inform the reviewers of the significance of the next paragraph(s) or results. Use bolding or italics to stress key statements or ideas. Your final documents must be easy to read, but also pleasing, so your reviewers remain engaged.

Rule 10: Recycle and Resubmit

Fellowships applications frequently have similar requirements, so it is fairly easy to recycle your application or submit it to several different funding opportunities. This can significantly increase your odds for success, especially if you are able to improve your application with each submission by tackling reviewers’ comments from a prior submission. However, some Sponsors limit concurrent applications to different funding opportunities, so read the instructions carefully.

Fellowship funding rates vary but, sadly, excellent fellowships may go unfunded. Although this rejection stings, resubmitted applications generally have a better success rate than original applications, so it is often worth resubmitting. However, resubmitting an application requires careful consideration of the reviewers’ comments and suggestions. If available, speak to your Program Officers because he or she may have listened to the reviewers’ discussion and can provide a unique prospective or crucial information not included in the reviewers’ written comments. Resubmitted fellowships are many times allowed an additional one- to two-page document to describe how you addressed the reviewers’ comments in the revised application, and this document needs to be clear and persuasive.

The ten tips we provide here will improve your chances of securing a fellowship and can be applied to other funding opportunity announcements like career development awards (i.e., NIH K Awards). Regardless of funding outcomes, writing a fellowship is an important career development activity because you will learn and refine skills that will enhance your training.

• 1. National Institutes of Health. NIH Peer Review Reveal—a front-row seat to a review peer review meeting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBDxI6l4dOA .
• 2. Stephen W. Russell and David C. Morrison. The Grant Application Writer’s Workbook–National Institutes of Health Version. Available: www.grantcentral.com .
• 3. Spires MJ. What to Say—and Not Say—to Program Officers. The Chronicles of Higher Education. 2012. Available: http://chronicle.com/article/What-to-Say-and-Not-Say-to/131282 .

University of Southern California

Office of postdoctoral affairs, proposal guideline for the usc postdoctoral scholar research grant.

The primary purpose of the Postdoctoral Scholar Research Grant is to facilitate the independence of our postdoctoral scholars and help launch their research careers. It does so by providing grants that assist postdoctoral scholars in developing independent research projects and serves as a stepping stone to external funding such as the NIH K99/R00 and F32 grant programs.

To achieve these goals, a USC Postdoctoral Scholar Research Grant provides up to $25,000 in research support.

We will start accepting applications February 8, 2016.

Eligibility for Research Grants

Postdoctoral scholar category.

The Postdoctoral Scholar Research Grant is only open to USC Postdoctoral Scholars with the following job titles and codes: Postdoctoral Scholar – Research Associate (Job Code 98227), Postdoctoral Scholar – Teaching Fellow (98223), Postdoctoral Scholar – Fellowship Trainee (Job Code 98219), and Postdoctoral Research Associate (Job Code 98067).

Applicants must be full-time postdoctoral scholars working with USC faculty throughout the award period.

Current Research Support Limits

Postdoctoral scholars who already have a significant externally-funded research award are not eligible. Among eligible postdoctoral scholars, potential for independence and future external funding will be an important consideration in making awards, with priority given to awards that make an appreciable difference in postdoctoral scholar’s research potential.

Evidence of a strong mentoring relationship with one or more USC faculty is a requirement for all applicants. This may be demonstrated in part by uploading a copy of the postdoctoral scholar’s completed Individual Development Plan , signed by both the postdoctoral Scholar and the mentor. A brief statement of support from the mentor is also required.

Types of Assistance

• Research materials, small equipment and supplies that are necessary to carry out the proposed research;
• Travel funds related to the proposal, including conferences and registration, and foreign travel, to complete research which promises to lead to publication;
• Assistance with publication, including manuscript preparation and permission fees;
• Salary for applicant (at their current rate), plus fringe benefits.

Grant Conditions

• The Postdoctoral Scholar Research Grant is not intended to supplement currently funded efforts or to provide interim bridge funding.  Applicants must clearly demonstrate how their project differs from that of their mentor’s and therefore cannot be funded by their mentor’s grant(s)
• Awardees have discretion in the budgeting and rebudgeting of funds to meet their research needs within the general guidelines of the award and the terms of the proposal; however, funds may not be transferred to another project.
• Permanent equipment required for the conduct of a research project, and purchased with Postdoctoral Scholar Research Grant funds, becomes the property of the University.
• Awards will include fringe benefits, but awards are not assessed indirect costs.
• Awards are not transferable to other institutions. Recipients must be postdoctoral scholars working with USC faculty for the duration of the award period.
• Awards are not transferable to other researchers.

Postdoctoral Scholars Mentor Criteria and Activities

Applicants are required to include a research mentoring component in their proposal. A well-considered and substantive research mentoring plan that promises to strengthen the applicant’s project will be considered in the evaluation of the proposal. Any full-time USC faculty member at the rank of Associate Professor or above of any type may serve as a mentor. A postdoctoral scholar’s mentor may support the applicant’s research through activities including:

• Identifying prior and current scholarship and research related to the project;
• Assistance in preparing the research design and executing the research activities;
• Arranging forums for the presentation, dissemination, and/or critique of the applicant’s research;
• Identifying potential publication sources and assisting in the preparation and submission of articles and manuscripts;
• Establishing linkages between applicant and other investigators at USC and at other institutions who are conducting research on the same or similar topics;
• Identifying potential funding sources and assisting in the preparation of grant proposals to external funding agencies.

Research Proposal Evaluations

Research proposals submitted to the Postdoctoral Scholar Research Grant are evaluated by faculty panels. The panels advise the Director of the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs on which proposals merit funding and at what dollar amount. Because of limited resources and intense competition, not all proposals can be funded and some will be funded for less than the requested amount. In reviewing research grant requests, the faculty panel will consider:

• The significance and originality of the proposed scientific research;
• Evidence that the project can be completed as proposed;
• The impact of funding on investigator’s ability to initiate scholarly research;
• The likelihood that the project will lead to independence and to external funding;
• Appropriateness of budget for proposed research or scholarly activity.

Notification and Term of Award

In the event of a favorable panel recommendation, and approval by the Director of the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs, postdoctoral scholars will be notified of the amount and conditions of the award by the end of May 2015. Copies of the notification of the award will be sent to department chairs and deans.

Reporting and Acknowledgement of Support

Awardees are asked to submit a brief report (including an accounting of expenditures and any external support received) within 30 days of the termination of the grant. A formal request for a final report will be sent to awardees at the close of the grant period. These reports will be reviewed and portions of the report may be reprinted to build support for the award among the university community and to make decisions about how best to use the award to promote productivity in the future.

Any publication arising from work supported by the grant should acknowledge the University of Southern California Postdoctoral Scholars Research Grant. Copies of publications should be submitted to the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs.

For more info and a listing of past recipients, please visit the Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar Research Grants page

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National Academy of Sciences (US), National Academy of Engineering (US), Institute of Medicine (US), Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy. Enhancing the Postdoctoral Experience for Scientists and Engineers: A Guide for Postdoctoral Scholars, Advisers, Institutions, Funding Organizations, and Disciplinary Societies. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2000.

Enhancing the Postdoctoral Experience for Scientists and Engineers: A Guide for Postdoctoral Scholars, Advisers, Institutions, Funding Organizations, and Disciplinary Societies.

• Hardcopy Version at National Academies Press

5 The Postdoc and the Institution

Institutions benefit in many ways from the presence and activities of post-docs. Most importantly, their work supports the overall intellectual strength of the institution. Successful postdocs help plan and carry out the institution’s research programs, build alliances and intellectual bridges to other institutions, raise the reputation of laboratories and departments, mentor graduate students, and increase the inflow of grant support.

In return, institutions have the responsibility to support their postdocs with adequate compensation and benefits, a supportive infrastructure and working conditions, appropriate institutional recognition and standing, and mechanisms for advancing their careers and finding subsequent positions.

• The Institutional Status of the Postdoc

In many government and industrial settings, postdocs are treated much like other researchers with regard to institutional status, compensation, and other benefits. In universities, however, most postdocs are identified and recruited by individual faculty members to work on specific research grants. The university’s administration may have only an approximate picture of the postdoctoral population and provide few mechanisms to standardize benefits or institutional status. Postdocs may be regarded as benefiting a particular investigator rather than the institution as a whole. In such cases it is the postdoc who suffers, receiving uncertain or no institutional standing and inadequate levels of compensation and benefits.

Best Practices Sample Surveys of Postdoctoral Populations

Some postdocs seeking to enhance their experience have started with basic questions: How many of us are there and how can we reach each other? This was the motivation at Baylor College of Medicine in 1997: “No faculty or administrator knew how many postdocs were working at Baylor ,” recalls an official, “let alone how to contact them.” It took six months to design a survey that asked the right questions and to establish a web site. The survey asked for issues of importance to postdocs, how postdocs rated their tenure so far, and what goals and priorities should be set for the newly formed postdoc association.

Postdocs at the University of California at San Francisco conducted an extensive survey in 1996 that received 419 responses from 1,076 postdoctoral scholars (one-third with MDs, two-thirds with PhDs). Respondents, whose mean age was 32 years and half of whom were foreign, reported poor perceptions of the job market and of prospects for their own careers. These perceptions were most pessimistic when interactions with their mentors were infrequent. Of the PhD post-docs, 21 percent said they had prolonged their postdoctoral position because of difficulty in finding other employment. This finding led to a recommendation for improved career guidance, mentoring, and performance evaluations, and to ongoing efforts with the administration to enhance those functions.

The postdoctoral association at Johns Hopkins , founded by postdocs, gathers survey information annually from both program directors and postdocs. Of the program directors, it asks if their division: 1) has a committee to help with postdoctoral issues; 2) has a mentoring committee to provide guidance and evaluation of post-docs; 3) does annual performance reviews of postdocs; 4) has a formal orientation for new postdocs; and 5) pays for fellows’ health benefits.

The exit survey of postdocs at Johns Hopkins has grown more sophisticated and extensive over the years, and now poses 81 questions on issues related to compensation, source of support, benefits, goals, responsibilities, career planning, mentoring, accomplishments, future employment, issues of concern, and family issues. The primary concerns of postdocs have changed somewhat over the years moving from personal to professional issues. In 1992, the greatest concerns were personal safety and health insurance; in 1997, the greatest concerns were salary levels and future job placement ( Figure 5-1 ).

In its 1998 study of the postdoctoral experience, the AAU committee wrote that “…the lack of institutional oversight of postdoctoral appointments, coupled with the evolution of postdoctoral education in a number of disciplines into a virtual requirement for a tenure-track faculty appointment, creates an unacceptable degree of variability and instability in this aspect of the academic enterprise.” 1 Through its meetings with postdocs and advisers, COSEPUP has found that uncertain status, low pay and benefits, and lack of professional recognition are indeed issues of concern at many universities. This section describes those issues and lists initiatives that some institutions have found helpful.

Primary Concerns of Postdoctorates at Johns Hopkins University. Source: Data collected by Johns Hopkins University Postdoctoral Association as presented in Science , 1999, Vol. 285, p. 1514.

Variations in titles

Cosepup survey results how are postdocs classified at your organizations.

Most of the organizations surveyed (50 percent) used the term “fellow” with smaller numbers classifying their postdocs as “employee” (40 percent), “trainee” (35 percent), “associate” (23 percent), “faculty” (13 percent), “student” (13 percent), and “staff” (10 percent).

The “other” ways to classify postdocs included “employees-in-training,” “scholars,” “visiting postdoctoral scholars,” and “students in training.”

Recently, for example, one medical school counted 17 appointment categories for postdocs. After establishing a postdoctoral office, this number was reduced to three, and a uniform policy was applied to all. Other institutions report various systemic inequities. For example, postdoctoral researchers paid from the grants of advisers are usually considered temporary employees and qualify for employee health plans, parking facilities, vacations, and other benefits. Postdoctoral fellows, however, who have received their own funding directly, may be considered neither students nor employees and thus may or may not receive health benefits from (or through) their institution or lab. A standardized system of nomenclature can help avoid these inequities. (In addition, funding agencies, especially federal agencies, should require and fund health care benefits; see Chapter 6 .) See Table 5-1 for a summary of some of the differences between classifying postdocs as a student or employee.

Another advantage of consistent status is that it can allow universities to track their postdoc populations after they finish their terms. This is extremely difficult when postdocs are paid and classified in widely different ways.

Examples of Differences in Entitlements based on Classification of Postdocs as Students or Employees.

• Incorporating the Postdoc into the Institution

Institutions have taken a variety of steps to incorporate postdocs into their programs and classifications structure. This section examines postdoctoral policies, offices, and other mechanisms that respond to the needs of postdocs.

Establishing institutional policies

The first step in improving the status of postdocs is to establish institutional policies for them. This often begins with a simplified classification scheme. At the University of Notre Dame, the Graduate Council’s Postdoc Committee recommended a new category of employee for “postdoctoral scholars,” distinct from students, faculty, or staff and placed under the supervision of the graduate school. Each institution needs to adopt policy guidelines that both suit its particular mission and gain the support of postdocs and faculty.

Because of their hybrid training-and-working status, postdocs do not easily fit into simple categories at most institutions. Many institutions have struggled with this challenge, with different results: At Vanderbilt University the postdoc is a research fellow; at the University of Iowa, a postdoctoral scholar; at Stanford University, a student; at Eli Lilly, a postdoctoral scientist/fixed-duration employee.

The vast University of California system tackled this issue in 1998. The Council of Graduate Deans’ Report on Postdoctoral Education recommended that “Postdoctoral scholars should be constituted as a distinct group of individuals … clearly separate from students, other academic employees, staff employees, and resident and house staff…” Although they did not indicate their reason for this decision, it was presumably because the nature of research funding determined the classification of postdocs. The council recommended at least two sets of appointment titles: One set, for postdocs who are paid by an adviser’s research grants, must be employees and “therefore require academic titles,” another set, for postdocs funded through fellowships and traineeships, are not considered employees. The San Diego campus decided on three titles: postdoctoral fellow (individual awarded a fellowship), postdoctoral trainee (supported by a UCSD training grant), and postdoctoral scholar (neither a fellow nor a trainee). 2

The Mayo Graduate School of the Mayo Clinic, which considers itself a “hybrid academic/industrial environment,” devised a different solution. Postdocs are considered “valued professionals in their final stages of development” and are offered a clear progression of positions from training toward full employment. The progression includes research fellow (up to three years), senior research fellow (3–7 years), research associate (a springboard to independence), senior research technologist (employment in technology), and professional associate in research (employment in research). Mayo believes that “some mix of temporary and permanent research workers is necessary to achieve the end results.”

An adviser at the University of Pittsburgh concludes: “Nobody’s categories are perfect. Each institution has to devise something that works. The postdocs should get the best of both worlds, not the worst of both worlds.”

Establishing a postdoctoral office

A second helpful step in improving the status of postdocs is to assign an officer the job of monitoring postdoctoral policies and providing advice and resources. At present, it is common for post-docs in universities to lack a “point person” who can answer their questions and provide information. At the University of Colorado, all postdocs are now appointed through a central office, which allows that institution to apply appropriate policies and track its postdoc population.

One goal of postdoc offices is to ensure consistent application of policies. The University of California at San Francisco, for example, now requires a formal hiring letter, jointly signed by the faculty mentor and department chair or other university official, along with a statement of goals, policies, and responsibilities applicable to postdoctoral education. These details include expected duration of support, compensation, and benefits. Initial postdoctoral appointments may last no longer than two to three years, and can be extended only when adviser and postdoc jointly agree that renewal would advance the postdoc’s career. As a general rule, total time spent is limited to six years.

A postdoctoral office can accomplish other useful functions: organize orientation and professional development programs; maintain a career center; publish an orientation manual; encourage best practices by mentors; act as a liaison between postdocs, advisers, and administrators; provide a certificate of completion; and keep a directory of the postdoctoral population, including more experienced postdocs who are willing to mentor new arrivals. Some offices help post-docs learn about research program development, job seeking, grant writing, teaching, the mechanics of running a lab, and other professional skills, such as management, negotiation, meeting organization, and conflict resolution.

A well-conceived postdoctoral office is sensitive to the needs of the adviser as well as to those of the postdoc. “It would seem that a postdoctoral office is logical if it helps define the postdoc’s status,” said one adviser. “But if it restrains the way the PI can do science, it won’t work.”

The structure of a postdoctoral office will vary with the institution and size of the postdoctoral population. An existing office for graduate students can handle many functions for postdocs as well. Some of the needs of foreign post-docs may be met by an existing office of international students.

In terms of staffing, two kinds of expertise are useful. The first is a person with postdoctoral and research experience who can offer informed advice to both faculty and postdocs. The second is a human resources person with expertise in student, staff, and faculty issues.

Best Practices Creating a Postdoctoral Office

• Offer dual leadership for the office: a faculty researcher who can discuss laboratory and mentoring issues, and two persons trained in human resource issues;
• Design a template for an appointment letter and compile an orientation package containing information on health insurance, housing, visas, taxes, off-campus living, the registration process, and other postdoc issues; faculty use both the letter and package to inform appointees;
• Standardize postdoc appointment procedure and employment policies, including stipends based on the NIH National Research Service Award (NRSA) scale, a six-week parental leave policy, and uniform health benefits;
• Initiate a database of information on postdocs, including date and institution of terminal degree, discipline, research specialty, publications, and visa status (45 percent of the postdocs at Penn are foreign postdocs).

From the outset, planners realized that the office needed to serve not only the postdocs but also their faculty advisers. They created a web page that PIs can use to list their postdoc openings. The web page is advertised in Science and Nature , at no cost to the PI, and has links to postdoctoral associations and other resources. A postdoctoral association was formed to represent the postdocs.

Another pioneering postdoctoral office was started at Albert Einstein College of Medicine four years ago. In addition to many of the functions at Penn, Einstein also sends a letter to all advisers after a postdoc has been in their lab for 18–24 months, advising them that it may be time for a salary increase. In the fourth year a more extensive letter asks for each postdoc’s CV and publication record. The adviser and department chair are then asked to decide whether the postdoc will be renewed for a fifth year, and what might be expected after that; additional years require faculty-level benefits. This policy effectively places a cap on postdoctoral terms.

The University of Alabama at Birmingham established an Office of Postdoctoral Education for its 325 postdocs in 1999. It serves as “a natural extension of the existing services already being offered to graduate students, and emphasizes the training aspects and formal communication link” between postdocs and the administration. The explicit goal of the office is to provide opportunities for postdocs to identify and acquire skills needed for successful career development. A second goal is to “enhance the postdoctoral experience by promoting intellectual growth and facilitating the goals of mentors and scholars.” The office provides a model acceptance letter, specifies an appointment procedure (and provides a checklist), conducts a mandatory orientation for new appointees, sets a term of four years (with the possibility of extension to five), and maintains a “postdoctoral scholar applicant tracking system.”

An institution cannot always solve practical problems of housing, parking, and day care, especially in large and/or expensive cities. But even basic informational resources can improve morale and speed the search for a dwelling or other resource. As one dean put it, “Every minute a postdoc spends looking for a parking space is a minute lost from more productive activities.”

Career guidance

A primary function of the postdoctoral office is to provide support for postdocs who are searching for jobs. While advisers are often best positioned to contact and suggest potential employers in their own field, a postdoctoral office can offer job counseling for other fields or sectors, coordinate and publicize recruiter visits, maintain contacts with former postdocs, post job openings, and hold workshops on employment trends. A career office can also assist with the basic mechanics of job seeking: how to write a CV, prepare a cover letter, organize slides for a talk, and so on. Especially helpful are statistics on recent jobs taken by postdocs, especially permanent positions. According to COSEPUP’s survey, only a few institutions have career service offices that are focused on postdocs (see Box).

A central postdoctoral office constitutes not only a practical resource but also a focal point to unite a dispersed population that may number a thousand or more. At the same time, each large division or school (e.g., the school of engineering, arts and sciences, etc.) needs to address its own particular postdoc population. For example, the Department of Medicine at Johns Hopkins designates a faculty member to discuss professional or personal issues related to the postdoctoral experience with any postdoc or faculty member.

Postdocs need the most assistance when they first arrive. Argonne National Laboratory provides a Newcomers’ Office, whose offerings range from lists of recent appointments (to introduce newcomers) to recycled furniture for arriving families. A volunteer spouse’s program is also available.

COSEPUP Survey Results Does Your Organization Provide Job Placement Services for Your Postdocs?

About half do … either as part of general student/employee services, through the adviser, or from an assigned individual whose sole responsibility is to work with postdocs (and/or graduate students). For the other half, job placement is the dual responsibility of the adviser and the postdoc. A few organizations mentioned such resources as career centers, job fairs, job placement web sites, and general student services. Several reported that job placement activities are localized and vary by institutional unit.

Best Practices Developing ‘Survival Skills’

• How to choose a postdoctoral adviser
• What should and should not be expected from an adviser
• How to establish goals for a postdoctoral experience
• Intellectual property rights
• The resources available at their institution
• How to build a community of mentors
• How to develop a professional network
• How and when to become independent
• How to leave the institution on good terms

As a key mechanism, the task force has developed a Survival Skills and Ethics Workshop for postdocs, graduate students, and faculty. The workshop, held several times a year, offers programs and advice on such topics as writing research articles, making oral presentations, job hunting, teaching, writing grant proposals, personnel and project management, and responsible conduct.

Similarly, the NIH fellows organization sponsors three skills development seminars a year for its on-campus fellows. Topics include writing, speaking, and teaching; it has also arranged for a fall job fair, extra travel awards, and adjunct jobs teaching in the evenings.

Postdocs often need help with practical questions: How do the requirements of research institutions differ from those of undergraduate teaching colleges? What kinds of internships provide the best preparation for professional careers? How is an industry job search different from a university job search? What different skills are required?

Best Practices Postdoc Handbooks

One of the early priorities of most postdoctoral associations (or postdoctoral offices) is to produce a handbook to orient postdocs to institutional and area services. The NIH Fellows’ Handbook , produced by the Fellows’ Committee, could be considered the granddaddy of postdoc handbooks, offering nearly 60 categories of information from Acronyms Used at the NIH to Washington Metropolitan Area Activities. There are informative sections on appointments, conflict resolution, ethical conduct, housing, leave policy, mentoring, ombudsperson services, parking, post-fellowship employment, research conduct, and many other topics.

The fundamental goals of the Fellows’ Committee, as explained in the Handbook, include promoting education and career development, fostering communication among fellows and within the larger NIH community, helping inform fellows about policies, and serving as a liaison to the administration.

Similarly, the NRC’s Research Associateship program produces the Policies, Practices, and Procedures: A Handbook for Research Associateship Awardees to serve its approximately 700 associates, most of whom work in national laboratories. The handbook has chapters on definitions, accepting an award and beginning tenure, stipends, visas, insurance, taxes, travel, relocating, patents and publications, renewing an award, and terminating an award. Like most handbooks, this one is found on the web. 3

For NIH, see ftp://helix ​.nih.gov/felcom/index.html ; for NRC, http://www ​.nas.edu/rap

Most nonacademic organizations offered both orientation sessions to discuss benefits and information about benefits with the letter of acceptance.

• Other Responsibilities of the Institution

There are many useful steps the institution can take, not only by offering services but also by publicizing best practices that help integrate postdocs into the institution and make their work more productive.

COSEPUP Survey Results Which of the Following Benefits Is Provided at Full Compensation to All Postdocs, Regardless of Adviser or Funding Source?

At academic organizations, the only benefits offered by more than half the respondents were e-mail accounts, library access, and vacation time. Smaller numbers offered on-campus parking or the equivalent (45 percent), sick leave (45 percent), parental leave (31 percent), dental insurance (28 percent), and disability insurance (28 percent). Only 7 percent offered child care, and 10 percent paid travel expenses to conferences where the postdoc would be presenting.

Benefits at nonacademic institutions were relatively generous. Nearly 90 percent offered dental insurance, disability insurance, e-mail accounts, vacation time, sick leave, and life insurance. More than half offered parental leave, parking, retirement funds, and library access. One-third offered child care and cost-of-living salary adjustments.

How Is the Postdoc Made Aware of Benefits that Are and Are Not Available?

From academic organizations, the three largest categories with similar numbers of responses were as follows: 1) the adviser bore the responsibility of discussing benefits with the postdoc, 2) an orientation meeting where benefits were discussed was offered to all entering postdocs, and 3) each postdoc received a letter before arrival that outlined the organization’s policies. Three organizations explicitly stated that no information on benefits was formally provided, and additional comments indicated that some institutions report this information informally or have initiated a process of including benefits information in an acceptance letter.

Mentoring committees

Cosepup survey results what neutral parties are responsible for handling grievances of the postdoc.

Responses to this question indicated a wide diversity of mechanisms. The largest number of organizations (76 percent) said that a dean or department chair handled grievances; smaller numbers pointed to a human-resources staff person (51 percent), the adviser (46 percent), or an ombudsperson (43 percent).

Institutions reported a wide variety of “other” methods for handling postdocs’ grievances, from “same as junior faculty” to “office of grad studies and research” and “ombudsfolks—faculty peer adviser selected by postdocs”). A few reported that most of the responsibility lay with a single person; a smaller number described a more flexible process (“Dispute resolution guideline for College of Medicine postdoctoral fellows; Ad hoc committee makes recommendation to associate dean for research and graduate education”).

It is true that experienced investigators have little time to spare for additional duties. However, postdocs have found that even brief discussions (one to two hours per meeting) can bring valuable rewards in new perspectives and suggestions.

Ethical development

Institutions should emphasize the importance of professional development and ethics as a central feature of mentoring. By establishing seminars or workshops on research conduct and ethics, the institution can supplement what is learned from the adviser and provide a baseline code of behavior for all postdocs. 5

The imbalance of power in the adviser-postdoc relationship increases the possibility of misunderstandings and abuses. A desire for a grievance procedure is commonly reported by postdoc surveys, and the AAU recommends that each institution’s core policies should provide mechanisms to resolve grievances. The University of California system, for example, recommends that campuses establish a standard grievance procedure for postdocs that is written, protects due process, contains clear time lines, and requires a clear statement of alleged grievance and requested remedy. 6 The COSEPUP survey shows that institutions handle grievances through a variety of mechanisms (see Box).

The role of the ombudsperson

What can a postdoc do when he believes his department chair or other senior scientist should just be thanked in a paper’s acknowledgements, but the adviser insists on including such individuals as coauthors? What can a postdoc do when she is told to work on a project in which she has no interest?

One reason grievances are difficult for postdocs to resolve is that they often arise from the decisions or actions of their advisers. Similarly, deans or department chairs may be seen as siding with the institution. In an attempt to provide an independent and impartial person to assist in resolving disputes or misunderstandings, some institutions have found that an ombudsperson can be helpful. An ombudsperson serves as an informal information resource, receives complaints, and assists in resolving disputes on a confidential basis. The ombudsperson is a facilitator, not a decision maker.

One university dean praised his institution’s ombudsperson as a sympathetic and confidential person to whom postdocs can turn. The NIH, which has some 2,800 postdocs on its main campus, has hired an ombudsperson to head a Cooperative Resolution Center, defined as “a neutral site for resolving work-related conflicts.”

Special needs of foreign nationals

Postdocs on temporary visas comprise approximately half of all postdocs in the US. Many need help, both before and after they arrive, in resolving visa questions, finding housing, meeting other postdocs, and arranging bank accounts, credit cards, driver’s licenses, and Social Security numbers. Because of cultural and language barriers, foreign postdocs also experience far more social isolation than US postdocs, which potentially reduces their contributions as teachers, research collaborators, and members of the community. (For a thorough discussion of visas, see the US Department of State’s web site at travel.state.gov/visa;exchange.html .)

Many institutions can respond to such needs simply by publicizing an already existing office of international affairs. Access to information about visa issues and grant requirements, in particular, can make an institution far more attractive to foreign scientists and engineers, and increase the possibility that the best of them will choose that institution. Stanford University has enhanced its visa processing by contracting with an outside specialist. 7

Foreign postdocs often need encouragement in strengthening their command of English. Postdoc advisers at Vanderbilt University have found that verbal skills are the best indicators of overall career success, and that those with poor English require an average of two more years to find US jobs than those with language proficiency.

COSEPUP Survey Results Does the Organization Have Staff Who Deal Specifically with the Special Needs of Non-US or Foreign National Postdocs?

Most respondents (70 percent) answered yes; only 8 percent answered no, and 8 percent reported that the needs of non-US postdocs were handled by the adviser.

Most of the “other” responses indicated a pattern of offering postdocs the same access to international services as students and other scholars.

If Offered, in What Areas Do Foreign National Postdocs Receive Assistance?

Virtually all respondents (97 percent) assisted foreign nationals with visa issues, and more than half offered assistance with tax issues, housing, and English language studies. Smaller numbers reported assisting with Social Security questions (43 percent), driver’s licenses (11 percent), and credit references (11 percent).

Several institutions offered help with household furnishings and support groups for spouses and dependents.

Postdoctoral associations

One of the postdoc’s most common complaints is a feeling of isolation and the lack of a peer group through which to communicate with the institution. Postdoctoral associations can fill both needs, helping to build community and improve communication. Because postdocs are a transient population, these associations need institutional support to survive. An institution that encourages a postdoctoral association signals to postdoctoral candidates that their concerns are taken seriously.

These new associations (one of the first was founded at Johns Hopkins in 1992) sometimes begin with the indispensable step of counting the number of postdocs at an institution, as was the case at the University of California at San Francisco (see Box, Postdoctoral Associations ). The UCSF Postdoctoral Scholars Association, formed in 1995, has worked with the university to formalize a grievance process, bring postdoc representatives to committees that set postdoctoral policy, establish an annual orientation for postdocs, and offer access to group health insurance.

COSEPUP Survey Results Is There a Postdoctoral Association or the Equivalent at Your Institution?

Most organizations (58 percent) reported that no postdoctoral associations are available. Just over one-fourth reported the presence of postdoctoral associations run by the postdocs themselves. In some cases, postdoc associations or councils are run by the institution.

The “other” responses included one other postdoctoral association run by post-docs and called a “postdoctoral council.” One institution reported an association run jointly by postdocs and the institution. Most indicated that postdoctoral activities were either informal, located within a laboratory or department, or focused on a particular group (such as a group of Chinese students and scholars).

If Your Organization Has a Postdoctoral Association or Equivalent, What Are Its Main Functions?

Almost all these organizations (93 percent) reported that postdoctoral associations provided professional and social activities for postdocs. Most (79 percent) said that the associations acted as liaison between postdocs and administration. Half noted that associations provided information for postdocs on issues of general interest, and some (36 percent) said that the associations appointed representatives to the organizations’ administrative councils.

COSEPUP’s survey indicated that only a small minority of institutions have formed postdoctoral associations. The primary goals of existing associations are to provide a liaison with the administration and to provide professional and social activities for postdocs (see Box).

Stabilizing the postdoctoral population

Best practices postdoctoral associations.

The first postdoctoral association, organized at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1992, grew out of a concern for safety when several postdocs were assaulted outside the laboratory at night.

“Before we started,” recalls current co-president Lisa Koslowski, “we had no benefits, no salary guidelines, and morale was very low. Now we have minimum salary guidelines on the NIH model, health benefits, and a good relationship with the institution. When we bring issues to them, such as safe parking facilities, they are more than willing to help us. In the last few months we’ve worked out a plan for dental insurance.” To stay abreast of current concerns, the group conducts annual surveys of all postdocs, including entrance and exit interviews.

Postdocs at the University of California at San Francisco formed their Postdoctoral Scholars Association (PSA) from a variety of motivations: to create a resource and sense of identity for a largely undefined group, out of the “frustration that PhD scientists feel when they compare their career and mentoring with those of medical professionals,” and out of concern about career prospects for biomedical scientists. The PSA later combined with the Graduate Students Association to spur the creation of a Career Office for Scientists, which offers career counseling, helps with the mechanics of résumé preparation and effective interviewing, and compiles databases of alumni who have connections in academia and industry.

Postdocs at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park developed a Trainees’ Assembly “to foster the professional advancement of postdocs, visiting, and predoctoral fellows and other non-tenured, non-permanent scientists.” The group disseminates information at a web site, publishes an Orientation Handbook , and sponsors a seminar series where trainees can present research projects or lectures and receive critiques. They also have forums on professional topics (e.g., grant writing, industrial and non-academic positions), a science fair with local scientific colleagues, a distinguished lecturer lunch, outreach activities in the community, and monthly pizza socials.

A group at Albert Einstein College of Medicine was formed in 1996, according to cofounder Paula Cohen, to revitalize its postdoctoral programs and image. “Einstein was faced with the problem of being the poor cousin of New York institutions.” Dominant themes in the response to a survey of postdocs were insufficient mentoring, a lack of interaction with other labs, and limited teaching opportunities. Most of the group’s suggestions for improvements had to do with increased information and interpersonal contact. The administration was supportive in designing a series of reforms to improve career guidance, mentoring, and the overall quality of postdoc life.

Although this COSEPUP report does not specify mechanisms for stabilizing the postdoctoral population, it does reiterate the concerns of the Trends report with respect both to hiring more permanent laboratory workers and restraining the size of the postdoctoral population. Mechanisms should be adopted by individual institutions. For example, an institution might restrict the employment of postdocs whose stipends/salaries fall below a certain level. If adequate compensation is not provided by the funding organization, the institution would then appoint the postdoc only if supplementary funding is made available.

Some early predictions that postdoctoral associations would become adversarial or union-like organizations have not materialized. Leaders of the Johns Hopkins association, for example, describe their group as a vehicle for sharing information with one another and communicating their concerns to the administration. “There is no need for a union,” said one member, “when communication is open.”

Informing graduate students about the postdoctoral experience

Many, and perhaps most, postdocs begin their appointment without a clear idea of what to expect from the experience. The success of an appointment may depend heavily on early communication with the adviser about expectations and responsibilities. Therefore, institutions and mentors of graduate students have an important role to play in educating them about the postdoctoral experience before they decide to undertake this advanced training. Important questions to consider are the level of their own research skills, training needs, and career goals. For further discussion of career decision making, see COSEPUP’s “Careers” guide, cited in the bibliography.

Summary Points

In many institutions, the administration may have only an approximate picture of the postdoctoral population and no policy to standardize institutional status or benefits.

An important step is to establish postdoctoral policies on such matters as titles, expected terms, and institutional status. This status may strongly affect benefits and other financial issues.

Some institutions have established a postdoctoral office or officer to serve as an information resource for postdocs and to organize programs for postdoc orientation, professional development, and career services. Such an office can also encourage good mentoring, act as liaison between postdocs, advisers, and administrators, and track the postdoctoral population.

Many institutions offer financial and logistical support for postdoctoral associations, which constitute a vehicle for discussing issues of concern to postdocs, building a social network, and communicating with the administration.

Some institutions are experimenting with the use of “mentoring committees” to provide additional perspective and guidance to the postdoc.

Institutions can help resolve grievances by establishing mechanisms, including an ombudsperson, to work toward conflict resolution.

Each institution should ensure that foreign postdocs have a resource person or office to advise them on such issues as acculturation, visa compliance, income taxes, and language skills.

AAU, 1998. Cited above.

See web site saawww ​.ucsf.edu/psa/

For further details and examples, see the National Academies’ Adviser, Teacher, Role Model, Friend: On Being a Mentor to Students in Science and Engineering , 1997, available via the web ( www ​.nap.edu/readingroom/books/mentor ).

As referenced earlier, the National Academies’ publication, On Being a Scientist: Responsible Conduct in Research , 1995, may be useful in such discussions.

Council on Graduate Deans, University of California, Report on Postdoctoral Education at UC , Fall 1998. See web site www ​.ogsr.ucsd.edu/PostdocEdu/Report.html .

Visa requests at Stanford’s School of Medicine originate in the sponsoring department and are then routed through the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs for approval and forwarded to the Bechtel International Center for processing. Bechtel, which is able to process J-1 requests in one week, also offers seminars for administrators on visa completion.

Office of Scientific and Engineering Personnel, National Research Council, Trends in the Early Careers of Life Scientists , Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1998. [ PubMed : 20845561 ]

• Cite this Page National Academy of Sciences (US), National Academy of Engineering (US), Institute of Medicine (US), Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy. Enhancing the Postdoctoral Experience for Scientists and Engineers: A Guide for Postdoctoral Scholars, Advisers, Institutions, Funding Organizations, and Disciplinary Societies. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2000. 5, The Postdoc and the Institution.
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Postdoctoral Fellowship Research Statements: What I Wish I Knew Before Writing

Written by Andrew Feldman

Of course, the odds of receiving postdoctoral fellowships are not high (typically single digit percentages). Knowing these odds, I applied for eight fellowships: four through university departments and four through government agencies. I initially felt like I had no idea how to be successful, especially since I received none of the 12 doctoral fellowships I had previously applied for. I also had a rough start: my first postdoctoral fellowship application was rejected a month after submission for being slightly out of scope. It certainly required mental fortitude to continue through this application process.

After speaking with colleagues in my field, common themes emerged in how they approach proposals, especially in how to write a stand-out research statement. At this point starting the fifth year of my PhD, I understood the importance of conveying a strong vision in my research statement: it is essential for getting and staying funded regardless of how stellar one’s publication record is. While I knew the motivation and methodology well, my colleagues taught me that conveying my vision in a convincing, focused, and exciting way for other scientists is a different matter. I believe their collective advice was pivotal to improving my research statement and ultimately getting me on the “funded” pile for three of the eight fellowships. I share some of these insights here.

1) Why now? Why me? When formulating your idea, focus on ensuring that your proposal answers why this research should be completed right now, as opposed to anytime. Many committees strongly weigh how much of a priority your research question is. The best introductions will extend beyond an informative literature review and directly state why answering your question is necessary and urgent.

They also want to know: why are you the best person to address this problem as opposed to someone else? Explicitly sell your fit to your research problem and your vision. Lean on your PI choice here – PIs can fill in any technical knowledge gaps and provide complementary tools to those learned during your PhD.

Most surprising to me is how much focus you need place on “why now? why me?” in your motivation. There is no fixed number, but be sure you spend more real estate motivating why the problem and approach is so amazing rather than on addressing every pitfall with your research question and approach.

2) Your audience is broader than you think. Many proposal writers will incorrectly assume (like I initially did) that their committee will include that harsh reviewer of their journal articles who can identify all methodological shortcomings. Rather than trying to defend against this omniscient and unlikely reader, keep the focus on convincing a researcher of an adjacent field that your questions and approach are spectacular. An excellent research statement will ultimately excite any researcher enough to fund the work.

Another nuance to consider: postdoctoral fellowships are mainly offered through federal government agencies (i.e., NSF, NIH, etc.) and specific university departments. Government-based fellowships will be reviewed by researchers closer to your field (but not quite as close as that of a journal article review). In this case, lean slightly towards convincing them that you understand the limitations of the approach and that your background fits the problem. By contrast, university departmental fellowships will typically have committees of professors that will not be in your exact field. For this audience, lean towards exciting them with an accessible, clear problem motivation, provide only a broad overview of the methods you would use, and be very brief.

3) Spend time just thinking: resist the urge to open Microsoft Word and start typing. Spend time purely thinking and schematically charting out your research problem and anticipated results. If you sufficiently plan, the statement will write itself.

4) Less is more: your reviewers are just as busy as you are. They want to see your main idea fast. You may see a ten page limit and feel an urge to cram in as much material as possible. I did this initially, but the statement will quickly become noisy. Instead, prioritize reader friendliness. This means more pictures and less walls of text. Reviewers are thankful for 1.5 spacing, 12 point font, and schematic figures with question marks and arrows that clearly convey your research questions. Use parsimony in discussing methods – mention only the essential methods and main anticipated challenges.

5) Start early: I started formulating my research statement in June 2020. My first deadline was in early August 2020. While this seems early to start, it was not! Give yourself at least two months before your first fellowship deadline to formulate a problem with your prospective PI (or any co-PIs) and write your statements. Provide adequate time for your PI(s) to provide feedback on your ideas and statements. If applying to multiple fellowships with different PIs and/or different project topics, start even earlier.

Lastly, I encourage asking your colleagues for help. Folks around you regardless of career stage have likely spent a significant portion of their time writing research statements. The MIT Communication Lab was a great source of help for me that I used multiple times! Don’t be afraid to ask for help. I was always glad I did.

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Writing the Research Plan for Your Academic Job Application

By Jason G. Gillmore, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry, Hope College, Holland, MI

A research plan is more than a to-do list for this week in lab, or a manila folder full of ideas for maybe someday—at least if you are thinking of a tenure-track academic career in chemistry at virtually any bachelor’s or higher degree–granting institution in the country. A perusal of the academic job ads in C&EN every August–October will quickly reveal that most schools expect a cover letter (whether they say so or not), a CV, a teaching statement, and a research plan, along with reference letters and transcripts. So what is this document supposed to be, and why worry about it now when those job ads are still months away?

What Is a Research Plan?

A research plan is a thoughtful, compelling, well-written document that outlines your exciting, unique research ideas that you and your students will pursue over the next half decade or so to advance knowledge in your discipline and earn you grants, papers, speaking invitations, tenure, promotion, and a national reputation. It must be a document that people at the department you hope to join will (a) read, and (b) be suitably excited about to invite you for an interview.

That much I knew when I was asked to write this article. More specifics I only really knew for my own institution, Hope College (a research intensive undergraduate liberal arts college with no graduate program), and even there you might get a dozen nuanced opinions among my dozen colleagues. So I polled a broad cross-section of my network, spanning chemical subdisciplines at institutions ranging from small, teaching-centered liberal arts colleges to our nation’s elite research programs, such as Scripps and MIT. The responses certainly varied, but they did center on a few main themes, or illustrate a trend across institution types. In this article I’ll share those commonalities, while also encouraging you to be unafraid to contact a search committee chair with a few specific questions, especially for the institutions you are particularly excited about and feel might be the best fit for you.

How Many Projects Should You Have?

While more senior advisors and members of search committees may have gotten their jobs with a single research project, conventional wisdom these days is that you need two to three distinct but related projects. How closely related to one another they should be is a matter of debate, but almost everyone I asked felt that there should be some unifying technique, problem or theme to them. However, the projects should be sufficiently disparate that a failure of one key idea, strategy, or technique will not hamstring your other projects.

For this reason, many applicants wisely choose to identify:

• One project that is a safe bet—doable, fundable, publishable, good but not earthshaking science.
• A second project that is pie-in-the-sky with high risks and rewards.
• A third project that fits somewhere in the middle.

Having more than three projects is probably unrealistic. But even the safest project must be worth doing, and even the riskiest must appear to have a reasonable chance of working.

How Closely Connected Should Your Research Be with Your Past?

Your proposed research must do more than extend what you have already done. In most subdisciplines, you must be sufficiently removed from your postdoctoral or graduate work that you will not be lambasted for clinging to an advisor’s apron strings. After all, if it is such a good idea in their immediate area of interest, why aren’t they pursuing it?!?

But you also must be able to make the case for why your training makes this a good problem for you to study—how you bring a unique skill set as well as unique ideas to this research. The five years you will have to do, fund, and publish the research before crafting your tenure package will go by too fast for you to break into something entirely outside your realm of expertise.

Biochemistry is a partial exception to this advice—in this subdiscipline it is quite common to bring a project with you from a postdoc (or more rarely your Ph.D.) to start your independent career. However, you should still articulate your original contribution to, and unique angle on the work. It is also wise to be sure your advisor tells that same story in his or her letter and articulates support of your pursuing this research in your career as a genuinely independent scientist (and not merely someone who could be perceived as his or her latest "flunky" of a collaborator.)

Should You Discuss Potential Collaborators?

Regarding collaboration, tread lightly as a young scientist seeking or starting an independent career. Being someone with whom others can collaborate in the future is great. Relying on collaborators for the success of your projects is unwise. Be cautious about proposing to continue collaborations you already have (especially with past advisors) and about starting new ones where you might not be perceived as the lead PI. Also beware of presuming you can help advance the research of someone already in a department. Are they still there? Are they still doing that research? Do they actually want that help—or will they feel like you are criticizing or condescending to them, trying to scoop them, or seeking to ride their coattails? Some places will view collaboration very favorably, but the safest route is to cautiously float such ideas during interviews while presenting research plans that are exciting and achievable on your own.

How Do You Show Your Fit?

Some faculty advise tailoring every application packet document to every institution to which you apply, while others suggest tweaking only the cover letter. Certainly the cover letter is the document most suited to introducing yourself and making the case for how you are the perfect fit for the advertised position at that institution. So save your greatest degree of tailoring for your cover letter. It is nice if you can tweak a few sentences of other documents to highlight your fit to a specific school, so long as it is not contrived.

Now, if you are applying to widely different types of institutions, a few different sets of documents will certainly be necessary. The research plan that you target in the middle to get you a job at both Harvard University and Hope College will not get you an interview at either! There are different realities of resources, scope, scale, and timeline. Not that my colleagues and I at Hope cannot tackle research that is just as exciting as Harvard’s. However, we need to have enough of a niche or a unique angle both to endure the longer timeframe necessitated by smaller groups of undergraduate researchers and to ensure that we still stand out. Furthermore, we generally need to be able to do it with more limited resources. If you do not demonstrate that understanding, you will be dismissed out of hand. But at many large Ph.D. programs, any consideration of "niche" can be inferred as a lack of confidence or ambition.

Also, be aware that department Web pages (especially those several pages deep in the site, or maintained by individual faculty) can be woefully out-of-date. If something you are planning to say is contingent on something you read on their Web site, find a way to confirm it!

While the research plan is not the place to articulate start-up needs, you should consider instrumentation and other resources that will be necessary to get started, and where you will go for funding or resources down the road. This will come up in interviews, and hopefully you will eventually need these details to negotiate a start-up package.

Who Is Your Audience?

Your research plan should show the big picture clearly and excite a broad audience of chemists across your sub-discipline. At many educational institutions, everyone in the department will read the proposal critically, at least if you make the short list to interview. Even at departments that leave it all to a committee of the subdiscipline, subdisciplines can be broad and might even still have an outside member on the committee. And the committee needs to justify their actions to the department at large, as well as to deans, provosts, and others. So having at least the introduction and executive summaries of your projects comprehensible and compelling to those outside your discipline is highly advantageous.

Good science, written well, makes a good research plan. As you craft and refine your research plan, keep the following strategies, as well as your audience in mind:

• Begin the document with an abstract or executive summary that engages a broad audience and shows synergies among your projects. This should be one page or less, and you should probably write it last. This page is something you could manageably consider tailoring to each institution.
• Provide sufficient details and references to convince the experts you know your stuff and actually have a plan for what your group will be doing in the lab. Give details of first and key experiments, and backup plans or fallback positions for their riskiest aspects.
• Hook your readers with your own ideas fairly early in the document, then strike a balance between your own new ideas and the necessary well referenced background, precedents, and justification throughout. Propose a reasonable tentative timeline, if you can do so in no more than a paragraph or two, which shows how you envision spacing out the experiments within and among your projects. This may fit well into your executive summary
• Show how you will involve students (whether undergraduates, graduate students, an eventual postdoc or two, possibly even high schoolers if the school has that sort of outreach, depending on the institutions to which you are applying) and divide the projects among students.
• Highlight how your work will contribute to the education of these students. While this is especially important at schools with greater teaching missions, it can help set you apart even at research intensive institutions. After all, we all have to demonstrate “broader impacts” to our funding agencies!
• Include where you will pursue funding, as well as publication, if you can smoothly work it in. This is especially true if there is doubt about how you plan to target or "market" your research. Otherwise, it is appropriate to hold off until the interview to discuss this strategy.

So, How Long Should Your Research Plan Be?

Learn more on the Blog

Here is where the answers diverged the most and without a unifying trend across institutions. Bottom line, you need space to make your case, but even more, you need people to read what you write.

A single page abstract or executive summary of all your projects together provides you an opportunity to make the case for unifying themes yet distinct projects. It may also provide space to articulate a timeline. Indeed, many readers will only read this single page in each application, at least until winnowing down to a more manageable list of potential candidates. At the most elite institutions, there may be literally hundreds of applicants, scores of them entirely well-suited to the job.

While three to five pages per proposal was a common response (single spaced, in 11-point Arial or 12-point Times with one inch margins), including references (which should be accurate, appropriate, and current!), some of my busiest colleagues have said they will not read more than about three pages total. Only a few actually indicated they would read up to 12-15 pages for three projects. In my opinion, ten pages total for your research plans should be a fairly firm upper limit unless you are specifically told otherwise by a search committee, and then only if you have two to three distinct proposals.

Why Start Now?

Hopefully, this question has answered itself already! Your research plan needs to be a well thought out document that is an integrated part of applications tailored to each institution to which you apply. It must represent mature ideas that you have had time to refine through multiple revisions and a great deal of critical review from everyone you can get to read them. Moreover, you may need a few different sets of these, especially if you will be applying to a broad range of institutions. So add “write research plans” to this week’s to do list (and every week’s for the next few months) and start writing up the ideas in that manila folder into some genuine research plans. See which ones survive the process and rise to the top and you should be well prepared when the job ads begin to appear in C&EN in August!

Jason G. Gillmore , Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Chemistry at Hope College in Holland, MI. A native of New Jersey, he earned his B.S. (’96) and M.S. (’98) degrees in chemistry from Virginia Tech, and his Ph.D. (’03) in organic chemistry from the University of Rochester. After a short postdoctoral traineeship at Vanderbilt University, he joined the faculty at Hope in 2004. He has received the Dreyfus Start-up Award, Research Corporation Cottrell College Science Award, and NSF CAREER Award, and is currently on sabbatical as a Visiting Research Professor at Arizona State University. Professor Gillmore is the organizer of the Biennial Midwest Postdoc to PUI Professor (P3) Workshop co-sponsored by ACS, and a frequent panelist at the annual ACS Postdoc to Faculty (P2F) Workshops.

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Postdoc Best Practices Proposal

UW CSE's original CI Fellows Best Practices proposals are posted below.

Taking Collective Responsibility for the Postdoc Experience at the University of Washington

At the University of Washington’s Department of Computer Science & Engineering (UW CSE), as at other major programs across the nation, we have experienced a dramatic growth in the number of postdocs in recent years. And, as is the case with most of our peers, we have failed to develop processes by which the department as a whole—vs. individual faculty members—assumes a reasonable measure of responsibility for the experiences that these scholars have while they are members of our community and for their success in moving on to the next stage of their careers.

UW CSE faculty involvement in the Computing Innovation Fellows Project—in the conception of the project, serving as a PI, serving on the steering committee, serving as a source of CIFellows, serving as the host of CIFellows, and reflecting upon the unique attributes of the program that made it so successful—has made it clear to us that we can, and must, do a far better job of taking collective responsibility for our postdoctoral scholars.

Three of the five Co-PIs on this proposal are themselves postdocs. The UW CSE postdoc community took responsibility for reflecting on their experiences—good and bad—and working with the faculty to formulate a set of sustainable practices that we believe will result in a significant improvement in the postdoc culture in UW CSE and elsewhere.

We are eager for, and fully committed to, wholehearted participation in a distributed experiment coordinated by CCC that we expect will have tremendous benefit for our field.

1 Introduction

The University of Washington’s Department of Computer Science & Engineering (UW CSE), like many programs nationwide, has experienced a dramatic growth in the number of postdocs. Ten years ago, we had but 2. Today, we have 27. To place this growth in context, over the same period our faculty has increased by 24%, student enrollment by 50%, technical staff by a factor of 2.5, and research expenditures by a factor of 3. Growth in postdocs blows away these otherwise significant increases.

Exponential growth—whether in technologies, companies, or academic programs—almost always catches us unaware, and is thus accompanied by processes that lag by several years, and therefore by several orders of magnitude. This is undeniably the case with (UW CSE) postdocs.

In the case of our Ph.D. students, we pride ourselves on taking collective responsibility for their experiences and success. We have a full-time staff advisor, an annual two-day orientation, an annual welcoming party, weekly receptions (“TGIFs”) with the faculty, monthly lunches with the Chair, an active graduate student organization with specific activities and responsibilities, an annual Review of Progress for all students involving the full faculty, an annual autumn faculty meeting at which all graduating students are discussed (so that all faculty can assist in placing these students), a clear roadmap for progress through the program, a well understood set of expectations for faculty regarding how students are to be mentored and treated, careful consideration of mentoring when faculty members undergo annual reviews, reappointment or promotion, and a habit of trumpeting the successes of our Ph.D. alums.

In the case of our postdocs, little of this exists.

Postdocs are not the same as Ph.D. students, of course—they and their mentors can be expected to have considerably greater independence. However, the gap in our processes is far too great.

This proposal aims both to bring UW CSE’s support for postdocs in line with recently-developed community best practices and to experiment with several new proposed best practices. We will follow up our implementation of these practices by evaluating their effectiveness using surveys, interviews, and quantitative evaluation of postdocs and their collaborators, and report to the community on the results.

This proposal is a collaborative effort between UW CSE’s faculty and postdocs, and was in large part crafted by postdocs themselves. Three of the five Co-PIs are postdocs. Our proposed activities are informed by a series of discussions between postdocs and faculty and a recent survey of the department’s postdocs.

One of the key findings of our survey is that postdocs are generally satisfied with the support they receive from their postdoc mentors, but a significant fraction are not satisfied with the level of support from the department. There is currently no department-level support infrastructure for postdocs (in contrast to junior faculty and graduate students), leaving mentoring largely at the discretion of individual faculty. This proposal includes several steps towards building such an infrastructure. These include appointing a faculty member as a program coordinator to act as a third-party ombudsperson and ensure that each postdoc is receiving adequate support from their mentors, and conducting periodic reviews of postdoc progress.

A second part of our proposal is based on the observation that, in addition to mentoring, postdocs need an environment in which they can develop an independent research program. Towards this end, we plan to experiment with a program under which postdocs can apply for small grants from a pool of department funding, giving them experience with managing and funding their own research. We will also attempt to improve postdocs’ access to undergraduate and graduate research collaborators.

In the final part of our proposal, we present a plan for implementing these practices sustainably—with adjustments as necessary—should the evaluation throughout the grant period show evidence that their continued implementation is merited.

2 Current Practices and Their Effect

To gain an understanding of what needs to change for postdocs within the UW CSE community, we examine the current practices proposed and/or implemented for postdocs in UW CSE and how their effect is perceived by the postdoc community.

We do this in three steps:

1. We summarize previously published best practices for postdocs in Computer Science and other fields. We identify what they cover and to what extent they make sense to the growing postdoc community in UW CSE.

2. We conduct a case study of the postdoctoral position in UW CSE and compare it to the existing ideal.

3. We report on a survey conducted among current UW CSE postdocs to gauge how the currently implemented practices are perceived by the individuals most directly affected.

  2.1 Published Best Practices

Two existing documents outline suggestions for best practices for postdocs in the sciences [3] and, specifically, in computer science [1]. Concern about postdocs in computer science is very recent and is largely a reaction to the large recent growth in postdoc positions in this field [2].

The existing publications lay out a high-level description of the postdoctoral experience, by treating topics such as position and benefits, goals and expectations, performance evaluation, and career development. These are not necessarily specific to the field of computer science. In fact, even the more specific proposal [1] is generic enough to be applicable to any postdoc. We survey each of these to provide an overview of the proposed practices.

2.1.1 Position and Benefits

Current best practices call for the postdoctoral position to be created such that institutional recognition, status, and compensation commensurate with the expected contributions of the postdoc are awarded. Access to health insurance and retirement benefits should be provided, regardless of the mentor’s funding sources.

We believe this call includes that the salary and other benefits should be reasonable to support a family and meet expectations for a minimum salary after five or six years of graduate studies, so that one is not forced to choose other career options for these reasons.

Most proposals call for a limit (of approximately five years) to be set for the total duration of postdoctoral appointments including time served in the same position at any previous institution). The intended benefit is to advance the postdoc’s career early and effectively; a prolonged appointment can hurt the postdoc’s prospects, rather than benefit them.

In addition, the duration of an appointment shall be adequate for the successful achievement of its intended goals. A minimum duration of two to three years is typically adequate. Contracts shall not be unnecessarily limited to a term less than the adequate amount of time. At the same time, the postdoc should be given the opportunity to terminate his or her appointment early, should career advancement necessitate a move.

The department shall invite the participation of postdocs when amending further standards or conditions to the appointment. A postdoc appointment should be a desirable training opportunity, instead of merely a holding place for the next career step, or, worse, cheap labor. It is important to make the postdoc feel that his or her position is valued, and to allow the postdoc’s participation in the terms of his or her own appointment.

A significant fraction of the postdocs at top US universities are international scholars - some are graduates from US universities and some are graduates from universities in other countries. Under a temporary contract, many of the universities have certain restrictions for visa supports which may limit the personal and professional travels of international postdocs. It is important that the university be proactive in supporting the postdoc in professional travel, for example to conferences, which often take place internationally. For example, enable the postdoc to travel internationally by making sure the “travel validation” on J-1 visas, which many international postdocs hold, stays current.

2.1.2 Goals and Expectations of the Postdoc Appointment

As postdoc backgrounds, goals, and experiences are very diverse, existing proposals recommend that both postdocs and their prospective mentors write down a list of goals for the postdoc’s appointment, at or before the beginning of the postdoc. This list should then be discussed between the postdoc and his or her mentor.

This practice strives to create a common ground for the postdoc’s and the mentor’s goals and expectations. It can even serve as a ground upon which the postdoc can decide whether s/he wants to take up the appointment at all. The discussion should be carried out on equal ground and give the postdoc room to modify the mentor’s goals, within reasonable guidance of the mentor.

2.1.3 Periodic Evaluation

Given that the postdoc’s goals have been discussed and fixed at the beginning of the appointment, postdoc and mentor should meet regularly to discuss and assess whether the goals are being worked towards. This discussion might include changing the goals if it is determined that they are obsolete with respect to the postdoc’s current situation.

The department should conduct a recurring survey to gauge the postdoc experience. The survey can be released annually. This practice ensures sustainability of the proposed practices and informs the department of the potential for change of the practices due to a changing environment.

2.1.4 Career Development and Job Placement

Departments should mentor postdocs to help them develop their careers. Such mentoring may include general aid with job applications and interviewing, one-on-one counseling sessions with a career advisor to help the postdoc decide his or her next career move, and organized informal meetings with the mentor to discuss career prospects.

The department should make sure that the postdoc is well prepared for his or her next career step before the end of the postdoc’s appointment, similarly to how the department ensures that its graduate students are prepared.

2.2 The Postdoc Position in UW CSE: A Case Study

The practices published thus far certainly apply to postdocs in UW CSE and we strongly agree with them. But are they put into practice? As a case study, we compare a postdoc experience in UW CSE to the practices presented in the previous section.

Currently, the UW CSE community includes 27 postdocs - a number that has increased dramatically in recent years. Postdocs typically stay between 2 and 3 years, and most contracts are for a duration of 2 years and then extended. However, there is no upper limit to the total duration of a postdoc appointment.

UW CSE provides each postdoc with an appointment as Research Associate. Research Associates receive compensation within the average pay bracket for similar positions in computer science at other US universities (according to Glassdoor.com), and receive health and retirement benefits. The salary is roughly half of a comparable salary in industry for a person with equivalent training and experience.

With the exception of retirement benefits, the status of Research Associate is equivalent to that of a Visiting Scientist, which is a “placeholder” position for visitors to the department of all ranks (professor to visiting graduate intern). As such, postdocs are not involved in departmental decisions that might potentially affect their appointment. In fact, postdocs have no representation in departmental decisions.

Duties of the postdoc position and assessment of their fulfillment are at the discretion of the postdoc and his or her mentor. There is no formal schedule for evaluation of the postdoc’s progress, nor is there a formal requirement for a written description of the postdoc’s duties.

Unlike with faculty or graduate students, there is currently no independent third party responsible for ensuring the adequate mentoring of post-docs, nor any kind of institutional support infrastructure. All mentoring happens between the postdoc and his or her mentor, who is in almost all cases also employing the postdoc. Furthermore, no evaluation of the postdoc experience is conducted by the department. There is little information about postdocs inUWCSE available to the outside world. A webpage exists, listing postdocs in the department, which is updated only sporadically.

Mentoring on job prospects is either at the mentor’s discretion or done via workshops and classes that are consolidated among postdocs and graduate students. No mentoring tailored to postdocs is provided, except at the mentor’s discretion.

UW CSE does not have structured support specifically geared towards postdocs to gain and administer research relevant resources, such as recruiting students to work on their projects. There is a quarterly “research-night,” which gives graduate students, postdocs, and faculty the opportunity to pitch research ideas to undergraduates during a poster reception. Postdocs have to compete with faculty and graduate students in this scenario. This can be seen as an opportunity to learn how to recruit students as future tenure-track faculty. On the other hand, postdocs are members of the UW CSE community for only a short amount of time and as such need access to student talent quickly to facilitate their projects. At the same time, they might not be as effective pitching their ideas, as UW’s culture and what students expect is still new to them.

The experience, background, and expectations of postdocs joining UW CSE are very diverse. Postdocs join from other US universities, from abroad, and (rarely) from UW CSE’s own graduate program. Each postdoc potentially has had a very different graduate school experience and, depending on the academic system in his or her home country, different expectations of a postdoctoral career. To this end, the university provides an International Scholars office to help international postdocs with their needs. So far, however, the department does not automatically offer to pay for the non-trivial costs involved in obtaining and maintaining a visa.

To summarize, while basic provisions, such as salary, benefits, and duration of appointment, are in accordance with current best practices, many other of the proposed practices are missing. Postdocs have no representation in the department, it is not ensured that expectations of the position are clear from the start, and no assessment of their fulfillment is ensured from any side. Finally, career support is delivered only in limited form via advice by the postdoc’s mentor.

We conducted a survey of UW CSE postdocs to determine overall satisfaction with the current practices. The survey as well as the summarized responses are reproduced in Appendix A.

18 out of 27 active postdocs in the department responded to the survey, a 2/3 response rate. The survey itself focuses on the lesser developed parts of the postdoc experience in UW CSE, which fall into three groups:

1. assessment and fulfillment of goals and expectations,

2. career development, and

3. periodic evaluation.

Questions about salary and benefits were not asked.

2.3.1 Goals and Expectations

We began by asking postdocs what they expect to learn throughout their postdoc appointment. The survey shows that most postdocs expect and actively seek out opportunities to gain more research-related experience during their time by publishing research results (83%), writing grants (61%), and mentoring students (72%). Teaching is not as high a priority (39%).

The first three opportunities are typically provided as part of the postdoc appointment in UW CSE. The last one is typically not expected in UW CSE. Given that UW CSE is trying to prepare postdocs to become research faculty, this distribution is healthy.

None of the postdocs aspire to carry out another postdoc. This is understandable, as a postdoc should in all cases be a temporary training position and not a permanent career state. It has to be ensured that this expectation stays this way.

When asked whether their own expectations of the postdoc appointment were clear at the outset, the majority (79%) of postdocs believe this to be the case. Slightly less (70%) agree that their mentor’s expectations were clear and even less (43%) agree that the department’s expectations were clear. One postdoc points out that “it was clear that I would be doing research and little teaching (agreed from both sides). It was less clear what else I would be doing or what the support infrastructure would be.”

While the situation generally seems to be good, perhaps a written, mutual statement of the expected goals of the postdoc - as implemented in the CIFellows Project - would improve the postdoc experience. When asked about this directly, the vast majority (85%) of postdocs agree.

Things clearly have to change at the departmental level to provide a more streamlined postdoc experience, clearly stating the department’s goals. Specifically, when asked about support from the department, 66% of postdocs agree that they receive enough support from the department, but a significant number generally (27%) or strongly (7%) disagree with the level of departmental support. Specific points of complaint are the mechanisms for information dissemination, which seem to preclude postdocs from valuable departmental information. Postdocs also point out that guidance from the department on how to allocate time and what the postdoctoral culture in UW CSE is like would be helpful.

Our survey shows that postdocs in UW CSE either strongly (67%) or generally (27%) agree that their mentor is supporting their goals. One postdoc (6%) strongly disagrees, signaling that perhaps a departmental review of mentorial support is in order to ensure postdocs receive uniform support. Furthermore, when asked whether an independent third party would be valuable, such as an ombudsperson that postdocs can address about their progress and goals, the overwhelming majority (93%) agree.

2.3.2 Career Development

A rather large number of postdocs (40%) are unsatisfied with the provided mentoring on job prospects. Some explicitly point out that they feel feedback on job prospects is missing or insufficient. This clearly has to be improved.

To determine what kind of career counseling should be provided, we asked postdocs about the type of career they aspire to take up after their appointment has ended. 83% of UW CSE postdocs aspire to pursue either a tenure-track faculty or academic researcher position. 11% aspire to an industrial research position, with the remaining 6% (1 postdoc) wanting to take up an industrial engineering position instead. Thus, more counseling for academic faculty careers should be provided.

Gaining independence from their mentor is one of the important steps in a postdoc’s training and perhaps one of the biggest changes from being a graduate student. To what degree this occurs is mentor-dependent in UW CSE. Our survey shows that 73% of postdocs strongly agree that they have enough independence from their mentors. One postdoc strongly disagrees. Mentor independence should be encouraged as part of the postdoc’s career development to ensure it is uniformly provided.

2.3.3 Periodic Evaluation

We asked postdocs directly whether periodic departmental evaluation and some form of follow-up would be desirable and the majority (69%) agree. We conclude that periodic evaluation of the postdoc experience by the department is thus a good idea.

2.3.4 Summary

In summary, while the climate of postdocs in UW CSE seems to be good, there are certainly a number of things that can be improved, such as a better information policy between postdocs and the department, and the availability of an independent third party that postdocs can address.

Furthermore, postdocs point out repeatedly that access to student talent is scarce. 33% say they have insufficient access to resources and many comment that their access to (graduate) student talent is limited.

Some postdocs point out that their mentor is on sabbatical, which they did not know before starting their appointment. Advisors should be more proactive about their near future travel plans when offering to hire a postdoc, who depends upon their mentorship.

3 Proposed Additional Best Practices

The best practices proposed in the existing articles [2, 1, 3] are largely supported by the postdocs and their mentors at UW CSE. Based on our findings via the survey conducted, as well as meetings with postdocs and faculty, we find that this existing set is not complete and at times too broad to capture the needs of postdocs in UW CSE. In this section, we propose three additional best practices that serve to better support postdocs in UW CSE. We relate each proposal to our survey findings and describe their intended benefit to the postdoc.

3.1 Access to Funding

Funding for postdocs varies from position to position. Some postdoc mentors guide their postdocs through seeking and managing research funds; others simply fund postdocs through existing grants and shield them from funding concerns; and some allow postdocs the freedom to fund their own endeavors.

To do their research effectively and demonstrate they can do this independently, postdocs should have access to some of their own funds via their host departments, instead of being fully funded by their mentors.

We propose that it is helpful for postdocs to compete over a pool of independent research funding that is maintained by the department. Obtaining research funding would be subject to roughly the same procedures as is obtaining a government research grant. This practice helps postdocs attain more independence from their mentor and teaches them how to behave in the competitive environment of tenure-track faculty. At the same time, by having only postdocs compete over this money, we shield them from the stark competition with faculty over government research grants.

3.2 Access to Personnel

Perhaps even more important to research success is access to personnel. In discussions and in the responses to our survey, postdocs expressed a desire for greater access to students, both graduate and undergraduate. In particular, there should be no competition between postdocs and mentors over student talent. Instead, the mentor should help the postdoc in finding collaborators early, given the short duration of the postdoc appointment.

A way to foster collaboration with graduate students may be to assign the postdoc to help on an already on-going research project with some of the mentor’s graduate students. If the topic of the project is aligned closely enough with the postdoc’s research ideas, these students might be more likely to collaborate with the postdoc in the future.

Furthermore, faculty should make an effort to advertise the postdoc’s project to graduate students and give the postdoc the opportunity to advertise his or her ideas widely within the department. This has to be done early and effectively, such that students interested in the postdoc’s research can contribute to the project for a fair amount of time. A postdoc’s mentor should advertise a new postdoc joining the group and his or her research ideas before the postdoc has joined.

Undergraduate students can be another useful resource to help increase research productivity. UWCSE has a “research night” each academic term (quarter) at which established researchers in the department can recruit undergraduates to work on their projects. Including postdocs in this kind of event ensures that they have access to the same undergraduate talent pool as faculty.

The benefits of postdoc-undergraduate collaboration run in both directions. Postdocs can be good advisors to undergrads: they have recent experience to offer to undergrads who may be interested in the academic track. Postdocs may also have more time to offer undergrads than a professor could offer.

3.3 Periodic Evaluation

We note that answers to our survey were not uniform. This points to the fact that each postdoc’s experience and needs within our department are currently unique and largely driven by their respective mentors. For example, it is clear that some mentors put more emphasis on developing career-building skills than others. Also, mentors have different approaches to their involvement in the mentoring process.

To provide a more uniform experience to postdocs across the department, the orchestration of their experience should not be isolated to their individual mentor. At the same time, we do realize that each postdoc’s needs vary widely, based on their experience, goals, and research subfield. To this end, we propose that each postdoc’s progress should be discussed and evaluated at the departmental level. This can occur, for example, in a faculty meeting, similarly to how the progress of graduate students is discussed.

The emphasis should be on discussion, rather than evaluation. The intent is to provide the best support to each postdoc individually to help each achieve his or her potential and goals. A document about the goals of the appointment, jointly written by the postdoc and the mentor, can be used as a basis for the discussion of each postdoc’s performance and experience. The intended outcome of this discussion is to inform the mentor whether the experience of their postdoctoral mentees is facilitated enough by the mentor’s application of the proposed best practices. The mentor can choose to adjust his or her mentoring style based on the outcome of the discussion.

4 Plan of Implementation

We in UW CSE commit to implementing and evaluating the best practices proposed in the previous sections. The implementation will directly affect the ever-growing number of postdocs in our department.

We are not going to change departmental practices that are already serving postdocs well. For example, the average duration of the postdoc appointment in UW CSE of two to three years is already matching best practices and is not in danger of becoming prolonged. However, we will remind faculty to be wary of employing postdocs for longer than this amount of time. Also, given our survey results, it is highly unlikely that postdocs will take up another postdoc after their current appointment is finished.

The proposed changes for implementation involve the definition and evaluation of goals of the postdoctoral appointment and postdoctoral involvement in the department’s business, access to research personnel, a research training program, networking, and career counseling. Lastly, we are going to discuss applicability to the greater field and how we plan to collaborate with other awardees.

4.1 Goals and Evaluation

The department will change the involvement of postdocs in the department’s business by appointing a postdoc liaison to the department’s Chair and Executive Committee with full access to information, full input on decisions, and responsibility to communicate openly with the UW CSE postdoc community.

In addition we will appoint one faculty member to act as ombudsperson for postdocs. Postdocs can talk to the ombudsperson about any matter related to their position that they feel they cannot discuss with their mentor. (We have an analogous ombudsperson for commercialization activities: a faculty member whose responsibility is advising faculty and students, and ensuring that student rights are respected.)

We will require faculty to discuss the goals of the postdoc appointment with each new postdoc candidate and write down these goals in a joint document together with the postdoc appointee as part of the appointing process. There will be a yearly review of the goals between the mentor, the postdoc, and the ombudsperson to see whether the goals are worked towards and to review whether the documented goals are still in accordance with the postdoc’s reality.

Also, we will discuss the progress of each postdoc appointee at a faculty meeting, analogous to the annual review of progress of each graduate student. According to our third proposed practice, this discussion serves to inform each mentor about whether their individual application of the best practices and mentoring style is effective to the success of each of their postdoc mentees.

“Graduating” postdocs - those going on the job market - will be discussed among the full faculty at the same time that graduating Ph.D. students are discussed: the full force of the faculty will be devoted to advocating for the appropriate placement of both Ph.D. students and postdocs.

4.2 Access to Research Funding

Using departmental gift funds and Industry Affiliates membership fees, we will establish a pool of research funding for which postdocs can compete. For example, the cost of an undergraduate research assistant (more than 50% of our undergraduates participate in supervised research) is exceedingly modest. This will provide postdocs with a degree of autonomy, and with valuable experience.

4.3 Access to Research Personnel

To broaden each postdoc’s access to research personnel, we are going to encourage faculty to advertise the postdoc’s research projects to graduate and undergraduate students. Also, we are going to include postdocs in prospective graduate student orientations. During these orientations, postdocs can give talks to pitch their projects to prospectives alongside faculty.

We are also going to encourage postdocs to participate in “undergraduate research nights” by advertising the event to them at a departmental level. During these research nights, postdocs can pitch their project in a poster session to undergraduate students.

4.4 Research Training Program

The environment in UW CSE is already such that postdocs are heavily involved in designing research projects, authoring quality technical papers, delivering effective research talks, and pitching research ideas. They learn these skills by participating in the day-to-day activities of the various research groups. This includes practicing their skills within the department and receiving feedback from faculty, other postdocs, and graduate students.

Whether postdocs are involved in writing grant proposals or managing their own independent research, however, is currently dependent upon their mentor. To make postdocs uniformly less dependent upon mentors and to encourage them to write grant proposals, we intend to make small grants available that postdocs can compete for without involving their mentors or other faculty as primary PI/co-PI.

We intend to make workshops available for postdocs that help them acquire the skills needed to craft effective grant proposals. This way the postdocs will be able to acquire skills for successful grant writing which will possibly strengthen their resume for academic job search, as well as have funding to support their independent research by acquiring resources and hiring or supporting undergraduate and graduate students.

4.5 Networking

The departmental culture in UW CSE is already highly collaborative and postdocs are encouraged to mingle with and learn from other postdocs and faculty. We believe that networking within the larger research community is best done at conferences within the field. This requires postdocs to travel. We commit to ensuring enough funds are available for each postdoc to travel to at least 2 conferences a year.

4.6 Career Counseling

The standard duration of a postdoctoral appointment is 2 to 3 years, and applications for a full-time faculty position typically consume on the order of 3 months, which further shortens the effective time to enhance the postdoc’s resume. Therefore, the postdoc would need to utilize the first 1-2 years of the appointment by enhancing his or her publication record, acquiring additional skills like teaching, mentoring and grant writing, and by building a stronger network in his or her research community. We intend to hold a quarterly orientation (to accommodate as many postdocs as possible since they may have different start dates) to advise postdocs about managing their time and provide them with an overview of what awaits them throughout their appointment.

We will encourage postdocs that are already on the job market to meet frequently to compare notes and experiences, and to give each other advice. These meetings should also include others at the institution on the job market in that year, such as graduate students. We believe that it is important to keep these meetings within the circle of those postdocs and graduate students that are actively seeking a job.

In addition, we will invite speakers from outside the department to talk about their career choice and job search procedure. We are going to invite both postdocs and graduate students to these talks.

Faculty should take pride in nurturing postdocs and demonstrate their postdocs’ success to the outside world. We will encourage faculty to post a successful followup job placement of their postdocs on their own webpage. In addition to the mentor’s posting, we will require the department to advertise postdoc job placements on their publication infrastructure, in the same vein as Ph.D. placements are advertised.

4.7 General Applicability to the Community, and Collaboration

The proposed practices can be implemented in any academic institution and should be helpful to all of the field.

In order to discuss our gained information and collaborate with other postdoc-employing departments, we plan to host panels and invite interested departments to discuss the state of postdocs and relevant measurement data. These panels can be held online and should occur at least once a year. UW CSE has experience with hosting such online panels.

To disseminate the results of our evaluation to the community, we plan to author joint publications with other awardees of the grant to publish in a high-impact, overarching publication venue, such as an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Communications of the ACM, or IEEE Computer. We also expect to talk about the state of our effort at the CRA Conference at Snowbird and raise the visibility of our efforts.

We also envision postdocs to give talks to the community about their experiences. These case studies can serve to encourage other departments to adopt the successful best practices out of our experiment.

Finally, we are happy to form consortia with other awardees and coordinate on the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of further best practices.

5 Evaluation

We intend to evaluate the proposed practices along three axes:

1. Qualitative, by conducting surveys of postdocs, mentors, and graduate students. 2. Quantitative, by evaluating postdoc performance metrics, such as number of publications, number of visited conferences, and awarded grants. 3. Investigative, by interviewing postdocs and mentors, as well as allowing outsiders to review the postdoc culture in the department.

We discuss each in this section.

We propose that all awardee PIs collaborate to evaluate results and use these as one source of baseline data for a joint document to be published (see Section 4.7). They should also use them to adjust the proposed best practices in the future.

5.1 Surveys

We intend to conduct semi-annual surveys involving the postdocs and their mentors. These surveys are primarily aimed at evaluating the experience of the postdoc appointment from both sides. Do postdocs feel good about the quality of their experience and hopefully better than before? Do mentors feel good about their experience with postdocs given the new set of practices? How did the availability of resources and personnel change with the implementation of the proposed practices? An exit survey will also be performed at the end of each postdoc appointment, asking postdocs and mentors about their total satisfaction with the postdoc appointment and the implemented practices.

Additionally, for each postdoc-graduate student collaboration, a semi-annual survey will be conducted with graduate students, to gauge how their experience of working with postdocs changes over the course of implementing these best practices and how their perception of postdocs changes in general. Do students see the postdocs they are working with as important contributors to their research group and the research enterprise in general? Do they believe that working with postdocs is a worthwhile undertaking for them? Do they themselves aspire to take up a postdoc appointment after they graduate?

Conducting these surveys semi-annually over the period of the grant of 3 years will yield a total number of 6 data points without becoming too much overhead for the postdocs and department to carry out. We do not believe it makes sense to collect this data more frequently versus the time it takes for the new practices to start being effective.

We intend to follow up with graduated postdocs half a year after the end of their appointments to investigate how helpful they feel their postdoc was for their current career and how they feel at that point in time about their postdoc appointment.

Finally, we intend to survey applicants for postdoc appointments to investigate whether they would choose a postdocin UW CSE over a postdoc at another department and whether this is due to some of the implemented best practices. Similarly, we will investigate whether they prefer a different job, such as a junior faculty position or a job in industry, over a postdoc appointment, and why. This survey will likely be carried out for each applicant, after the applicant has either accepted or declined an offered postdoc appointment.

5.2 Quantitative Evaluation

We intend the department to record the following quantitative data for each postdoc: the number of research publications, grant proposal applications, and awarded grants, conference and workshop visits and talks delivered, number of students mentored, and number of research projects supervised or co-supervised.

This information will be collected yearly by the department and serves to augment the data gathered via surveys, by providing hard data on how well each postdoc is performing within the department over time. This data will be used to evaluate the best practices and give hints on when each practice should best be invoked to support the postdoc during his or her career, by evaluating when postdocs were most productive along each of the skill sets we intend to train them in. For example, training of research skills, such as authoring papers and giving talks, might best be conducted early in the postdoc’s appointment when this still fresh in their heads due to a possible previous graduate school experience, while career advice might best be given towards the end of the postdoctoral appointment when this is most valuable due to an upcoming job search.

5.3 Interviews and Reviews

Finally, we plan to conduct interviews with postdocs and mentors to gain qualitative insight into their experiences and to receive direct feedback on the proposed practices. We intend to do this once a year with every postdoc and mentor. Such interviews may last anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour and should yield answers we can quote in research publications. We intend to investigate directly how satisfied postdocs and mentors are with each implemented practice. Ethnography - assessment - is a critical component, and one with which we have expertise from other projects.

We also intend to involve people outside the department to evaluate the postdoc experience. We believe this to be another opportunity for collaboration among awardees of the grant. Awardee institutions can evaluate each other to investigate how the implementation of the proposed practices differ within each department and how that impacts the postdoc experience.

6 Sustainability after Grant Period

We are committed to ensure sustainability of the - potentially adjusted - best practices after the duration of the grantwith reasonable financial overhead to the department.

We see this as entirely feasible.

The majority of what we have proposed involves putting practices and processes into place. The startup costs dramatically exceed the costs of continuing these practices and processes once they have been established and debugged. Activities become “routine” - part of the general “cost of doing business” rather than an added expense. Faculty duties, for example, become committee responsibilities.

To continue to allow postdocs access to research and career training opportunities, such as grant writing workshops, orientations, and a travel budget to facilitate networking, we propose to charge each postdoc mentor a yearly overhead “tax” of appropriate size (for example, $3000-$4000) for each employed postdoc. This overhead is small compared to overhead charged for supervised graduate students and should thus only minimally impact the day-to-day activities of postdoc mentors.

Funds to support independent postdoctoral research grants - if determined to be a successful practice - may be allocated via academic and professional societies and government institutions, such as the CRA, CCC, NSF, ACM, and IEEE. We intend to work with these societies and institutions to make such funds available. If this is not successful, departmental gift funds and Industry Affiliate funds will continue to be used, filling this gap. If the value is demonstrated, the funds will be available.

Our proposed implementation and evaluation includes measures to ensure that every postdoc receives a high-quality experience, such as the discussion of each postdoc’s performance in a faculty meeting and a thorough evaluation via surveys, interviews, and quantitative evaluation of each postdoc by the department and by outsiders to the department. We intend to continue the discussion of postdoctoral progress in the faculty meeting and to conduct periodic surveys and quantitative evaluation within the department, perhaps at a reduced annual frequency. We also encourage collaborating departments to continue the proposed cross-departmental evaluation, at a reduced frequency. For example, once every several years.

Despite the invested time, these measures will likely involve a travel budget to invite a small review board of collaborators to the department to conduct the cross-departmental evaluation, as well as a minimal staff budget to conduct the survey-based and quantitative evaluation on a yearly basis. Travel budgets for such evaluations are typically available in departments and should thus minimally impact any department’s business. Also, such cross-departmental evaluation might be conducted as part of the departmental assessment process that occurs typically every few years and would thus be consolidated with the budget allocated for this process. We project a staff budget for the creation and evaluation of an annual survey to not weigh heavily either.

We intend measures like the specification and evaluation of goals for the postdoctoral experience not to be a requirement after the grant period. This way the institution will be able to help postdocs with all levels of experience and maturity, maximizing benefits for postdocs as well as their mentors, and minimizing time and effort spent in official formalities. In any case, their implementation requires solely a time commitment of the involved faculty.

The duties of the postdoc ombudsperson is a natural faculty committee responsibility, analogous to chairing our graduate student review of progress committee, or our commercialization oversight committee; establishing the “routine” will be a significant undertaking, but sustaining it should not be.

7 Conclusion

Our field is experiencing an explosive growth in the number of postdocs. We find ourselves at a crossroad. We can choose to follow the path of fields such as the biomedical sciences, in which many individuals move from postdoc appointment to postdoc appointment in a holding pattern that seems designed to serve the interests of senior investigators far more than the career development needs of the postdoc. Or we can choose to blaze a new trail, in a limited-duration postdoctoral experience that is oriented towards serving the interests and needs of the postdoc.

Make no mistake - this is a choice. Right now, UW CSE, like most other Computer Science programs, is thoughtlessly choosing the former course.

The Computing Innovation Fellows Project has shown that the other path is feasible, and is beneficial to all parties. The current award process will enable a set of programs - hopefully including UW CSE - to expand on the CIFellows experiment, testing and institutionalizing best practices in postdoc mentoring that make Computer Science a model for other disciplines.

The time to act is now. We doubt that UW CSE is far behind most other programs in our postdoc practices, but the survey that we have presented identified a number of significant shortfalls, such as a lack of a clear definition of goals for the appointment, a lack of access to resources and personnel, a lack of external evaluation and intervention, and a lack of independence of postdocs from their mentors.

To improve the situation, we have crafted this proposal. Within it, we have identified the most important existing best practices. These include:

1. a clear definition of the position, including adequate salary and benefits, as well as a minimum and maximum time limit of the appointment. 2. Written mutual expectations and goals of the postdoctoral appointment. 3. A periodic assessment of whether the goals are being worked towards, both between postdoc and mentor, as well as by an independent third party. 4. A comprehensive training program for the postdoc’s career development.

We have also proposed a set of three new best practices that are particularly crafted to serve the needs of postdocs in our field:

1. Access to independent funding for each postdoc to ensure more research independence from his or her mentor. 2. Independent access to research personnel, such as graduate and undergraduate student talent, to aid the postdoc in carrying out independent research. 3. Periodic evaluation of each postdoc’s progress to ensure a more uniform experience among all postdocs.

We have proposed an implementation of these best practices within the UW CSE department and laid out a plan to effectively evaluate their merits. We intend to collaborate with other interested departments to jointly discuss andrefine our findings, and to disseminate them to the community via publications in overarching venues, such as theChronicle of Higher Education.

We also presented a plan for the sustained implementation of those practices that are shown to be beneficial, after the conclusion of the grant. The plan is designed to apply to any department, not just to UW’s.

We would like to point out, again, that our proposal has been, in large part, crafted by the postdocs in our department. Three of the five PIs of this proposal are also drawn from these same ranks.

There is a need for change. We intend to act now.

[1] Anita Jones. Computer science postdocs - best practices, 2013. http://cra.org/resources/bp-view/best_practices_memo_computer_science_postdocs_best_practices/.

[2] Anita Jones. The explosive growth of postdocs in computer science. Communications of the ACM, 56(2):37–39, February 2013.

[3] National Academy of Sciences. Enhancing the Postdoctoral Experience for Scientists and Engineers: A Guide for Postdoctoral Scholars, Advisors, Institutions, Funding Organizations, and Disciplinary Societies. National Academy Press, 2000.

A Questions and summarized responses of a survey conducted in UW CSE

We conducted an anonymous survey with the following questions and received 18 responses from the postdocs in UW CSE. The count of answers for different questions are given in parentheses *.

Q1 . What is your primary goal as a postdoc?

•  Tenure-track faculty (14 out of 18)
•  Academic (non-tenure-track) researcher (1 out of 18)
•  Industrial research (2 out of 18)
•  Non-research industrial work (1 out of 18)
•  Another postdoc (0 out of 18)
•  Other (please specify) (0 out of 18)

Q2. What do you hope to gain from your postdoc?

•  Additional publications (15 out of 18)
•  Grant-writing experience (11 out of 18)
•  Teaching experience (7 out of 18)
•  Mentoring experience (13 out of 18)
•  Other (please specify) (4 out of 18) (knowledge about a new area, visibility in the research community, self-estimation about whether one is eligible to be a professor)

Q3. My access to resources (people, funding) has been sufficient.

•  Strongly agree (3 out of 18)
•  Agree (10 out of 18)
•  Disagree (2 out of 18)
•  Strongly disagree (0 out of 18)
•  N/A (0 out of 18)

Q4. I have enough independence from my postdoc mentor.

•  Strongly agree (11 out of 18)
•  Agree (3 out of 18)
•  Disagree (0 out of 18)
•  Strongly disagree (1 out of 18)

Q5. My postdoc mentor and UW CSE have supported my goals.

Postdoc mentor

• Strongly agree (10 out of 18)
• Agree (4 out of 18)
• Disagree (0 out of 18)
• Strongly disagree (1 out of 18)
• N/A (0 out of 18)
• Strongly agree (6 out of 18)
• Disagree (4 out of 18)

Q6 . Expectations for my postdoc were clear at the outset.

 Postdoc mentor’s expectations were clear

• Strongly disagree (0 out of 18)

 My expectations were clear

• Strongly agree (7 out of 18)
• Disagree (3 out of 18)

 UW CSE’s expectations were clear

• Strongly agree (4 out of 18)
• Agree (2 out of 18)
• Strongly disagree (2 out of 18)
• N/A (3 out of 18)

Q7. I’m getting enough feedback on my job prospects.

•  Strongly agree (4 out of 18)
•  Agree (5 out of 18)
•  Disagree (5 out of 18)

Q8. Would it be helpful...  ... if you and your postdoc mentor were required to mutually formalize expectations at the outset of yourpostdoc?

• Yes (11 out of 18)
• No (2 out of 18)

 ... to informally talk to someone other than your postdoc mentor about your progress and goals?

• Yes (12 out of 18)
• No (1 out of 18)

 ... if there were some departmental followup on your goals and progress, either periodically or at the end of your postdoc?

• Yes (9 out of 18)
• No (4 out of 18)

Q9. What have you learned since starting your postdoc *that you wish you’d known at the beginning*? Feel free to add any other brief free-form comments or suggestions here. (how to involve and hire undergraduate and graduate into research projects of the postdocs without involving mentors, how to better market oneself in the job market, how to utilize the two/three years time the best possible way) * In some questions, multiple answers were allowed. Also any question could be skipped without entering an answer

Addendum for Option A – Postdoc Best Practices National Coordination Role

We propose to have the University of Washington also act as a national coordinator for the Post-doc Best Practices Program. We see the role of the coordinators as two-fold: (1) bring together all the CCC grantees in the program so that they are aware of each other’s activities and reduce duplication of effort by leveraging each other’s work, and (2) disseminate the work of all the grantees through workshops, activities at conferences, web sites, and publications. To accomplish this we propose to add two additional months staff support for our program coordinator. We already have a person ready and willing to take on this role, our professional masters program advisor, who has many years’ experience managing a program for over 120 graduate students. We expect to be ableto begin coordination activities immediately. Among these we will include establishment of metrics and evaluation of results from all program grantees to feed back to the programs.

Coordination

We see our coordination role as one of bringing together grantees in the program to start the process of leveraging each other’s work in an effective manner. We expect to begin with a one-day meeting co-located with the CIFellows program annual meeting in May 2014. We will use that time for each grantee to present their objectives, determine overlaps, identify missing elements, and begin the process of adjusting our activities in concert. We expect this meeting to be annual with presentation of activities and evaluation results since the last meeting. In later meetings (after the first), we expect to also invite other, non-grantee institutions to participate and act as critics and adopters of our collective work. Meeting participants will discuss the presented activities and results and, if merited, how they can be replicated at other sites or how they can be modified to evolve the program over time. We see this as a light-handed facilitation rather than a strict command structure. Some overlap is likely warranted as well when different approaches are proposed and could provide an opportunity for evaluation of different strategies.

Dissemination

Dissemination will be a central part of our coordination role. Many institutions with only a few postdocs can benefit greatly from observing our activities and adopting the practices that are likely to work best in their particular environment. We will work with a select few representatives to understand the best way to package our findings, such as creating manuals or guides for postdoc mentoring under different circumstances. We will also ensure the visibility of the program by proposing workshops or panels co-located with flagship conferences. We will be working with other grantees to prepare a major presentation at the Snowbird conference and an extensive article for Computing Research News or other widely disseminated publications in the community.

Addendum for Option B – Funding to Assist in Developing Postdocs’ Independence

We propose an innovative program to provide post-doctoral researchers at the University of Washington with the opportunity to propose their own research projects and to employ undergraduate research assistants that they will supervise directly. The intent of this program is enable postdocs to pursue a line of investigation independent of their mentor/PI. In addition, we expect it to help them develop skills in preparing a research proposal and in mentoring students.

Available Pool of Undergraduate Research Assistants

The University of Washington Department of Computer Science & Engineering has a long tradition of undergraduates involved in research activities with a large fraction (over 25%) being involved in projects for either research credit or pay. In addition, we have an expanding 5th-year MS program. These students are all involved in research activities as part of their 4th or 5th years. Thus, we have a large supply of undergraduate research assistants available with a strong track record of these students co-authoring and presenting papers at workshops and conferences.

Benefits for the Postdoc

For the postdoc, we believe this type of research program will have several important effects. First, it will allow thepostdoc to develop research directions independent of their mentor’s. Although the proposal will be relatively short (we expect something on the order of 5 pages), it will have all the elements of larger NSF-style proposals including placement of the investigation with respect to related work in the discipline and an evaluation plan. Thus, we expect it to be a good start at proposal writing. Second, by employing an undergraduate research assistant, the postdoc will have the opportunity to mentor a student who is truly their responsibility. Again, this is important preparation for understanding how to recruit, motivate, and engage a student to do their best work and learn the basics of research, presentation, and writing for publication. Finally, this funding opportunity will allow postdocs to start a somewhat riskier project if they choose, since the project may be conducted in parallel with better-established research for the mentor. The ability to turn a “wild” idea into published research is a key differentiator for faculty candidates.

We plan to run the program with an annual deadline in early Spring Quarter so that students can be recruited for the summer and the following academic year. Our ACM chapter has a quarterly “Research Night” when faculty and graduate students can present work for which they are seeking undergraduate assistants. This program will ensure our postdocs also take part in this activity and provide them with one avenue for recruiting. Funding will be on the order of $10K per project. We are seeking funding from CCC to seed the program, with the department providing the bulk of the funding in an ever-increasing proportion leading to 100% department support after 3 years. We anticipate funding approximately 10 projects at the $10K/project rate each year. This will provide enough funding for hourly pay for an undergraduate working up to 20 hours/week for the duration of the year as well as some funding to have the student attend a conference or workshop. The department will assign a committee of three faculty members to review the project proposals. Ideally, the top projects will have the highest degree of independence and new direction from the postdoc’s PI and current project.

  Evaluation Metrics and Methods

We propose to expand our evaluation to more effectively demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed “best practices” as well as their adoption and effect at other programs around the country. We will seek to develop a database of CSE post-docs through voluntary participation. We will begin by contacting department chairs and ask them to propagate our message to their post-docs and have them register in our system. Registered post-docs will be asked to complete initial and annual surveys about their career goals, mentoring, and research. Metrics will include quantitative measures such as the post-docs integration into the research community (conference attendance, presentations both inside and outside their departments, collaborations with students and faculty, publications, etc.) as well as how well their preparation for their eventual careers is progressing given their initially stated goals. In addition, we plan to conduct a series of interviews to provide qualitative data on their post-doc experiences and, in particular, their sense of community in the research enterprise at local and global levels.

To obtain meaningful results, we plan to assign registered post-docs to treatment and control groups based on the extent to which participating institutions have implemented the suggested post-doc interventions. This may be done at the grain-size of universities to avoid having members of both groups represented in a single institution. We will then compare the statistics from the treatment and control groups at strategic points over the course of the grant. Our hypothesis is that post-docs in the treatment group will show increased maturity and sense of community as well as having a larger number of specific citable accomplishments. A further measure will be the degree to which they feel they accomplished their initial goals and/or how their goals evolved.

To ensure proper survey design and statistical analysis we are adding to our proposal a co-PI, Elizabeth Litzler of UW’s Center for Workforce Development.

The Center for Workforce Development (CWD) at the University of Washington has a long history of formative and summative program evaluation and mentoring training, both of which combine to complement the work proposed here. CWD is an external evaluator for many NSF-funded programs, including ADVANCE, LSAMP, and the STEM Talent Expansion Program at UW. Dr. Elizabeth Litzler is the Director for Research at CWD and a sociologist skilled in both quantitative and qualitative analysis who currently conducts the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) external evaluation. She will provide evaluation expertise to the project team. Particularly, Dr. Litzler will help the team create a logic model to express the expected outcomes of the project and how the project plans to get there; help in the design of survey and interview instruments to ensure that the appropriate things are being measured; and finally, assist in the analysis of data to assess whether the expected outcomes have been met. The addition of the control group will enable a stronger understanding of impact; analyses will test whether the control and treatment groups differ on key variables. Appropriate bivariate and multivariate analyses will be used for survey analyses. Annual evaluation reports will be written and provided to the project team to summarize the results from the analyses.

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what’s a post PhD research plan, or research agenda?

You’ve passed the PhD. You’re past the PhD. Congratulations. And I hope that you’ve taken some time to celebrate and that you’ve got over– or are dealing with – the post PhD slump. You’re now applying for jobs and post-doctoral positions. And you notice that these teaching or a post-doc positions (inside and outside of a university) ask you about your research plan. What’s that, you wonder?

Of course you had a few future research options in mind when you finished the PhD. You’d spelled them out in the conclusion to your thesis – the implications for further research. There were probably at least one or two of those that you thought you might like to do yourself, given half a chance.

But this project, or even one or two of the projects you identified in your PhD, is not what the job and postdoc panels usually want to hear about. When they say plan they are signalling that they want to see something longer term. Interview panels often signal this interest by asking you what you hope to achieve over the next few years. They ask what you are going to contribute to their department or organisation. When they ask this question, they are not looking to see whether your next research project fits in with them. They are looking for you to talk about something longer term, and something bigger than a single project.

One of the challenges for new Drs is to move past thinking about the next project that they can do, a project that they can conceptualise as being something similar to the PhD. A singleton researcher working on a boundaried project with discrete publications and associated activities.

However, job and postdoctoral panels are looking for you to dream of doing something different, something more ambitious and bigger than the doctoral style of project. And the challenge the panels set is tricky. Even though you may still well need to be engaged with the PhD – publishing from it , you are being asked to move past the thesis and the immediate following project which you haven’t yet done.

The panels and organisations want you to develop a plan which has at its heart a broader area of concern. An area to which you can make a contribution through several projects and publications.

What do I mean by this? Well, I can say what this means for me- just as an illustration. I’ve had a long term interest in academic writing. Now, I’m not a linguist, so I’m not going to be able to contribute much to understandings about how language and texts work. But I am an educator, so the kind of contribution that I can make is – or ought to be – in learning and teaching. My particular interest in academic writing is educational – it is in the pedagogies of academic writing. My academic pedagogies research agenda – and that’s what I have, an agenda not a project – means that I generally take “stuff” from linguistics and build on work from writing scholars, and think/research/write/teach about how the “stuff” can be taught and learnt.

I’ve been working with this agenda for more than twenty years. I’ve sustained it through practitioner research and through various forms of publication. And there have been a few discrete research projects in there (abstracts, advice books, blogging, bio-notes) . I’ve not addressed this agenda on my own – I’ve often worked with other people, sometimes with colleagues from disciplines other than my own, and who work in other places. And I’ve had to learn a load of new stuff in order to develop the pedagogies agenda. And I hope I’ve made some kind of contribution.

So to abstract from my process a little – my writing research agenda has involved an ongoing and substantial line of inquiry. It’s involved strategically winning some funding, publishing a lot, collaborating, engaging with a wide range of people beyond my institution and developing my ideas and skills.

And it’s this range of activities that people are looking for when they ask you what your plans are in the longer term. Post-doc panels and employers who are offering real work (not Mcjobs) want you to think about running your own lab, your own research team, or building a platform. They want you to think about your development as a scholar and the contribution you will make. They want you to go beyond the project you identified at the end of the thesis. They want to know what your thinking about publications and public engagement. They want you to “profess”. They want you to finish the sentence…

(your surname here)’s work on (your long term agenda) shows that….

And they want to know how you will get from where you are now to that point.

And yes, there are real down-sides to dreaming beyond the single project. In these times it can be tough to dare to think that you might get to have an agenda, given the current lack of jobs and funded post docs compared to the number of people applying. An exercise in cruel optimism , to steal an idea and term from the late Lauren Berlant. And probably unrealistic, given then twists and turns of life. But if you decide to put yourself into this postdoc and job race, then spelling out your agenda and your plans is what’s expected.

Photo by  Tamas Tuzes-Katai  on  Unsplash

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2 responses to what’s a post phd research plan, or research agenda.

This is a beautiful post, Pat.

I seen this idea expressed in different ways. ‘Becoming independent’ is a phrase I’ve heard in the sciences, where researchers can undertake their PhD and post-doc in labs with strong leaders. Are you breaking away from that research leader, finding your own way and asserting your research independence? Or are you continuing to work within their research profile? Signals that you are finding your own way generally include working with new researchers and developing new projects. Sometimes it means leaving the lab, but it doesn’t have to. However it might include spending time in a different lab, perhaps in a different city or country.

An old boss who did very practical, action research would talk about ‘repeating your PhD for the rest of your career’ (and he didn’t mean that in a good way). In his mind, he wanted to see people take on new challenges and go in new directions. More importantly, he wanted people to look wider, rather than become more and more specialised. I think that specialisation can be a real trap – funding that is excellence-driven and peer reviewed can encourage researchers to focus, focus, focus. Research that is multi-disciplinary, uses creative methods and looks in new directions can be harder to fund, but probably has a lot more impact.

I often talk to people about the difference between a research project and a research program, particularly when I see a sprawling grant application that lacks definition. A research project (in my mind) has a clear scope that can be defined by (1) the people involved who are working (2) over a fixed period of time on (3) a problem that can be solved for (4) a specified cost. A research program, on the other hand, is (as you said) involve a long term agenda to address an open-ended question (often an intractable problem) through a range of approaches, generally involving diverse teams. Research programs get funded through a series of research projects. Research projects are fundable. Research programs (in general) aren’t.

Thanks again for a great post.

This is a really great thought! Thanks Pat

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NSF Postdoctoral Mentoring Plan Sample Template

From NSF Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG), January 2018: Postdoctoral Researcher Mentoring Plan. Each proposal that requests funding to support postdoctoral researchers must upload under “Mentoring Plan” in the supplementary documentation section of FastLane, a description of the mentoring activities that will be provided for such individuals. In no more than one page, the mentoring plan must describe the mentoring that will be provided to all postdoctoral researchers supported by the project.

View the  Postdoctoral Researcher Mentoring Plan sample template .

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The Professor Is In

Guidance for all things PhD: Graduate School, Job Market and Careers

The Postdoc App: How It’s Different and Why

By Karen Kelsky | May 28, 2013

For the next few months I will be posting the “best of the best” Professor is in blog posts on the job market, for the benefit of all those girding their loins for the 2013-2014 market.  Today’s post was originally published in 2011.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It has come to my attention that many junior people do not have a clear picture in their minds of the requirements of a postdoc application.

Some treat it too much like the job application. And some treat it too differently from the job application. The fact is, it falls somewhere in the middle. It’s quite different from a job application…..and yet many of the same principles apply.

For the purposes of this post, I’m going to assume that the postdoc application is requiring a cover letter, a 4 page research proposal, a description of a proposed course, and a brief statement articulating how you will participate in the scholarly community of the campus. While not all postdocs will require this exact set of documents, by discussing these here, we can address the major requirements, expectations, and potential pitfalls of the typical postdoc application effort. I will take them in order.

Cover Letter

This cover letter will be very similar to your job cover letter as explained in this post . It will contain the standard set of paragraphs to start: introduction, dissertation, dissertation import, publications.  In all of this first part, the relevance of your work to the stated mission of the postdoc will be emphasized clearly.  This requires carefully tailoring the cover letter materials. It’s difficult but it must be done.  If your topic is Mexican women immigrant workers, then for a gender postdoc, you will emphasize how the phenomenon reflects changing gender relations at home or abroad; for a globalization postdoc, you will emphasize how the phenomenon reflects changing labor mobility globally; for a Latin American Studies postdoc, you will emphasize how the phenomenon reflects new economic circumstances in Mexico.  This tailoring requires an original recasting or reframing of your work to meet the mission of the postdoc!  Failure to do this reframing means failure to get the postdoc.

After the discussion of research, the postdoc app letter will specifically discuss the plan of work for the postdoc year–ie, month by month, what new research and revisions will be made.

It will then include a very brief discussion of teaching experience (much shorter than for a regular job cover letter), followed by a discussion of the proposed class required by the postdoc, and how the proposed class will also advance the mission of the postdoc.

Lastly, in place of the typical tailoring paragraph, the letter will conclude with a brief paragraph explaining how the research and writing time of the postdoc will be used, how the scholarly community on campus will advance the project, and how the candidate will participate in said scholarly community.  The letter will be no more than 2 pages long.

The principle in operation here—and the one that too many applicants don’t seem to grasp—is that the campus is funding this expensive postdoc not so some random academic can come and sit in an office and write for a year, but rather, to “buy” the energy, contributions, and participation of an additional world-class scholar to their campus community for the period of that year. The postdoc, dear readers, is not meant to serve YOU. Rather, you are meant to serve the postdoc. That means, that in every document, you articulate how you will PARTICIPATE in campus/departmental scholarly life. You do this, however, as in all professional documents, without flattering, pandering, or begging. Rather, you identify faculty on campus with whom you would collaborate, and initiatives and programs on campus that are likely to house interdisciplinary conversations and debates to which your project relates, and you articulate clearly your interest in engaging with them in substantive ways.

4-Page Research Proposal

This research proposal looks very much like a grant application, and Dr. Karen’s Foolproof Grant Template will serve you well here, at least for the opening paragraphs. As in all research proposals you will want to open by proving the importance and urgency of your topic. Following the standard Dr. Karen template, you will construct the Proposal As Hero Narrative, with yourself in the role of Hero.

You may follow the Foolproof Grant Template all the way through to the point where it breaks off into things like budget and methodology. In place of those sections, you will focus entirely on timeline. The point of a postdoc research proposal is to, first, articulate an important and significant project, and second, articulate a coherent and feasible plan of work. It is this second element that most applicants fail to grasp.

Remember: the postdoc is not there to serve you, you are there to serve the postdoc. What does that mean? It means that the postdoc wants to see publications result from your time there. The postdoc wants to be mentioned in the acknowledgments of your book. The postdoc wants to be in the line, in the footnote, “this research was supported by generous funding from xxxxx.” The postdoc committee is going to judge the applications based on how likely it is that the applicant is going to efficiently and effectively use the time on campus to complete a specified set of publications. You will impress them when you include a month-by-month timeline/plan of work that shows explicitly what new archival/etc. research you will conduct, and when, what book chapters you will complete, and when, and what journal articles you will finish and submit, and when.

You will conclude this document with a strong and expansive conclusion that clearly shows how the postdoc year will play into your larger scholarly and career trajectory as a world-class scholar. Why? Because the postdoc wants to get part of the fame and glory that attaches to you as you move ahead in the world.

Postdocs are in the business of supporting the next generation of leaders in the scholarly world. To the extent that you represent yourself as a leader , you will do well. To the extent that you represent yourself as a little lost sheep desperately looking for a chance to get out of teaching for a year while you try and figure out what your book is about, you will do poorly. Be aware that the vast majority of postdoc applications are written by the latter.

Proposed Class Description

A point of vast confusion among postdoc applicants seems to be how to pitch the required class. Many applicants do not clearly grasp the difference between the postdoc and an adjunct. As such, the class they propose is one that is adjunct-level. Basically, applicants too often envision a course that is generic and basic. This is a mistake.

Postdocs are very expensive. If a campus wanted a generic and basic course, it would hire a cheap adjunct. There are many available. Instead, however, they are advertising for a postdoc. That means, they want a highly specialized course, that reflects the postdoc’s unique and distinctive scholarly program. The class can’t be absurdly specialized, of course. If the applicant’s specialization is the emerging gay male community in Jakarta, the course cannot be “Emerging Gay Male Communities in Jakarta.” Too narrow. Neither should it be “Introduction to Indonesia,” or “Gender and Sexuality.” Too broad. Rather, it should be pitched somewhere around, “Global Sexualities,” or “Gender and Sexuality in Southeast Asia,” or “Queer Globalizations.” The final choice for how to pitch the course will hinge on the climate of the department and the campus, and the postdoc mission itself—if it’s an Asian area studies postdoc, then you’d prioritize SE Asia, if it’s a gender postdoc, then you’d prioritize Global Sexualities, if it’s a transnational studies postdoc, then you’d prioritize Queer Globalizations. Get it? The tailoring happens here.

Statement of Participation in Campus Community

Here’s what the postdoc committee does not want: someone who arrives, walks into their allotted office, and is never seen again for the rest of the year. Here’s what they do want: someone who arrives and dives into the scholarly work of the department and the campus community. A postdoc is (should be) exempted from all service work on campus. However, the postdoc should make herself visible as an involved and interested departmental member. She should show up for brown bags and talks, symposia and conferences, and coffee and lunch with colleagues. In this statement, you articulate your orientation in that direction. Identify programs and initiatives in the department and on campus, by name, and discuss how you anticipate participating. Mention two or three faculty members by name, and how you look forward to engaging with them.

In all things, however, do NOT fall back into graduate student habits . You are NOT on campus to “learn from” or “study with” the scholars there. Rather, you ARE one of the scholars there. They may well learn from you. The proper stance here is that of a colleague who brings her own dynamic field of expertise to the campus, and who looks forward to energetic and innovative interactions with the colleagues there.

In sum, remember that, no matter how much you need that postdoc to get your book written, the postdoc is not there to serve you. You are there to serve the postdoc, but as a first-rank, world-class scholar and specialist in your field whose work speaks directly—DIRECTLY—to the mission of the postdoc. By virtue of your energy and brilliance, you cause the postdoc committee to pick you, out of all the competitors, to spend the year on their campus, sharing your work, and augmenting their teaching and intellectual profile and advancing their scholarly cause. Remember, make them want you.

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Reader Interactions

September 26, 2011 at 9:22 am

Good advice– and also great insight into the expectations for those who are fortunate to have a postdoc position!

September 26, 2011 at 4:52 pm

Great advice!

One little thing — are the font shifts in you posts intentional? I find them somewhat hard on my eyes and more difficult to read than they should be. If it’s intentional and for a good reason, by all means make my eyes work a little harder, but otherwise, a standard font and size would be much appreciated. Thanks!

September 27, 2011 at 6:56 am

what degree of font shifts are you seeing?? I type up the posts in word and then paste into the blog. I don’t use any font shifts in my docs, but I have noticed that after pasting into the blog, there is a very very subtle shifting of fonts, paragraph by paragraph. The fonts are so similar, on my monitor, as to be virtually indistinguishable, so I have never dealt with the issue. Is that not the case for you?

October 9, 2011 at 2:36 pm

I think the problem might be in the blog software that’s being used to generate your HTML for the site here – when I have a quick look at the source for the page the first paragraph block has both a font and a size specified, e.g. , whereas the second paragraph has only the font size specified.

My guess is that Firefox or Safari are using the specified font for the paragraphs where it is specified, and then defaulting to whatever the browser has set internally for the paragraphs where it is not. This is probably a problem with the HTML that Word is generating (if that’s how you’re doing it).

Perhaps one way to do it might be to put everything in in plain text? The other option would be to learn to use something like Markdown (it’s really easy – here’s a link to its article on Wikipedia ) and then generate the HTML from that. Most blog software will be able to handle Markdown.

P.S. Thanks for the pointers. I’m currently applying for postdocs here in Australia, and your tips have been really useful so far!

September 27, 2011 at 10:23 am

Thank you, thank you, thank you for this post!

P.S. I also wondered whether the font shift was intentional. It is a small issue, but it is a bit distracting.

September 27, 2011 at 11:29 am

If i understood why the font shift was happening, I’d take steps to make it stop, but I have absolutely no idea why a doc that is cut and pasted en masse from word would end up with different fonts in it in the blog! it’s a total mystery to me. if anyone has an idea, please do let me know.

November 12, 2012 at 1:56 pm

Perhaps you’ve already solved this problem, but Word is notorious for including lots of hidden styles and junk code when pasted into web interfaces. One solution is to write your pieces in a plain text editor (such as Notepad), then do your formatting in the blog interface after pasting.

Thanks for your excellent site!

September 27, 2011 at 12:50 pm

Dear Professor:

I was wondering if you could comment specifically on how to pitch the research proposal aspect of the postdoc in a way that is both different from but still speaks to your dissertation research. I am having trouble understanding how to manage the fact that I still will be publishing articles and working on turning my dissertation into a book, and yet they are asking for a research proposal that is distinct from that. Would it be something like researching the historical background of phenomena that you didn’t get to fully analyze in your dissertation? Especially for a field like anthropology where “research” typically means a fieldwork project (yet postdocs aren’t fieldwork grants) I’m curious about what to say. I find myself re-explaining my dissertation research and I’m worried I’m not making enough of a distinction between dissertation and postdoc research. Is it okay to do phrase it as a continuation of the dissertation project, as long as you highlight the work you will be doing, stating it as “new research” rather than what I would otherwise consider revisions to and expansions upon my dissertation? Or is it really supposed to be an entirely new project?

Thanks so much!

February 23, 2012 at 11:41 am

I share Nicholas’s concern as I draft my post-doc research proposal. Any suggestions?

March 6, 2012 at 1:37 pm

I wonder this as well, is it understood that most people don’t tackle the “next project” until later in the post doc as they are still dealing with their first project even thoug that was the project they pitched?

March 6, 2012 at 9:25 pm

Nicholas, first off, I sincerely apologize for taking so long to respond. I sometimes lose track of comments and queries on the blog, when a large number come for different posts at the same time.

Here is the answer. In most cases, in the humanities and social sciences, what a one year postdoc calls “research” is in fact the transformation of your dissertation into a book or series of articles. This is NOT the case for science postdocs, so for information on those, please seek advice of specialists in your field. But when they ask for a statement of research, what they mean is that you articulate the dissertation research in terms of its topic, its methods, and its significance, and you then describe its individual chapters. You follow that by a timeline that articulates exactly how you will revise each individual chapter into an appropriate book chapter or article, as well as write any new chapters/articles that are required by the project once it is launched in the public sphere. Many postdocs have a light teaching load and some limited research funding precisely to offer you the opportunity to do a bit more research in the archives or your field site, perhaps over winter break or a short visit, but it is understood that this is merely to augment the research you have already done for the dissertation. You will mention this in the 4-page proposal as precisely that—a short-term research stint to provide you with needed materials to complete your revisions of Chapter 4, for example, or to form the basis of a new final chapter, etc.

If the postdoc is a two year postdoc, then the situation changes to some extent. Then, typically, your research proposal will clearly articulate a plan not merely for completing the new manuscript(s), but also submitting them to presses/journals. That is typically planned to occur at the end of the first year. The second year is then to be spent developing ideas and materials for a second major project. Nobody expects the project to be finished in one year, but the second year provides the opportunity to write perhaps one major article on the topic, attend a couple of conferences, begin the archival work, etc. to launch the second major project of your career.

September 27, 2011 at 4:41 pm

I’m not sure what platform you’re using for the blog, but I *think* the easiest thing to do would be to copy and paste, and then “select all” and pick the font + size you want. Weird things happen when cutting and pasting, so I find handling it post-paste is often the simplest solution.

September 27, 2011 at 10:57 pm

i’ll try that.

September 27, 2011 at 7:56 pm

this (as always) sounds like great advice!

One thing you said made me think of a tangential question: How should a postdoc initiate casual meetings to get to know individual faculty members? Something like: “I would like to chat with you over coffee about subject X?” Is it necessary to have read something by that person before the meeting? Or can it just be more casual than that? –Forgive me, I know I am acting like a grad student here…

September 27, 2011 at 9:06 pm

No apologies necessary HERE! This is where you ask the grad student questions so that you don’t act like one out THERE!

So yes, it goes like this: “would you be free for coffee one day next week? I’d love to hear more about your work. It sounds fascinating!” And then, maybe try and skim something ahead of time, or at least visit their website. They’re flattered, and you think about ways that your work and theirs might have some productive connections. But don’t treat the coffee like an interview! Just a nice casual talk, starting with a bit of small talk about families and settling in, and so on, and then, “so, I saw that you’re working on/giving a talk on xxx. That is so fascinating! How is it going?” They talk. Eventually they’ll say, “So, enough about me. Tell me about YOUR work. I was so intrigued when I read your application, and I’m really glad you’re here.” Then you answer in a relatively brief and conversational (non-interview) way. And then it goes from there.

February 12, 2012 at 7:39 am

I am applying for a postdoc at an R1. The postdoc announcement calls for “a statement of interest, curriculum vitae, sample publications, and three letters of recommendation.” Would including a research proposal be too much to include with the standard 2-page cover letter? Since they didn’t ask for it, I don’t want to send too much; on the other hand, I don’t want to send too little. Your thoughts?

February 12, 2012 at 10:59 am

the phrase “statement of interest” is ambiguous here. It is not a “letter of interest” and it is not a “research statement.” I’d strongly advise that you contact them and ask which they want. And send that, and nothing else! Nothing alienates a committee more than extra materials that they don’t want.

May 3, 2012 at 8:59 pm

Hi Karen, I have decided to go back on the job market after four years in a tenure-track assistant professor position. My department changed leadership and the department is headed in a new direction, which does not suit my strengths. I plan to apply for postdocs, but I am in research transition and my new research is not related at all to my past research. My past research is purely scientific and my new research is headed towards science education. Although I have worked with people in the new field, gotten grants, presented at conferences, I have no science education publications. How can I make my application more competitive for a science education postdoc?

May 3, 2012 at 10:01 pm

I think you should seriously rethink this decision. I don’t know the details of your case, obviously, but it seems to me you’re about to completely derail your career. I’d suggest you stay at the current place and get tenure. Then move to a tenured position. Postdocs go to more junior people, typically, and you’d be unlikely to get one. If you did, once you took one, you’d be very unlikely to read tenure track land again afterward.

September 23, 2012 at 7:06 pm

Hello Karen,

I am in a similar boat. 4th year TT at an R4 in a department in the humanities. My research has steadily become more science-y in nature and I am not at all content with my current job. Because there are very few jobs in my area and I would like to work in a related, but different, discipline, I am considering a postdoc to get the training that I would need to do so. Is this categorically a bad idea? What does someone in this situation have to gain by getting tenured, getting loaded up with service so they can’t publish much and ultimately getting stuck in a job that makes them unhappy?

Thanks, confused

June 12, 2012 at 10:31 am

I am curious how you would adjust the postdoc cover letter to cater for a postdoc fellowship that is working on someone else’s project. It would seem logical to dispense with the month by month plan, but can I replace this with a paragraph addressing the specific skills the job ad mentions? This seems to not fit with the tone of the cover letter, but I’m not sure how else to pitch the letter.

June 12, 2012 at 1:02 pm

good question. I’d still be specific–if the other project has a timeline, reveal that you are familiar with it. If not, then as you say, speak to the specific skills required by the job.

June 13, 2012 at 3:08 pm

Great! Thanks!

And of course “I am familiar with software xyz” is telling, while “I worked with xyz software while working on abc project” is showing?

June 13, 2012 at 8:05 pm

yes, exactly.

August 1, 2012 at 11:22 am

I’m a lecturer in computer science department, got my PhD in April 2011. I was accepted as an academic visitor (3-12 months) in Warwick by a professor there who asked me to propose my own idea, secure my own funding and he will supervise and support my research. My government offers postdoc fellowships and I’m supposed to submit a proposal, get Warwick approval, then send it to them to get the funding. I never wrote a postdoctoral proposal before and made a lot of research and came to the conclusion that it ranges from something like a graduate research proposal, to something with cover letter, and budget. Then I came across your above post, which is by the way, very helpful. I think in my case it’s sufficient to have a 4-page research proposal, including the abstract, intro (state-of-the-art, limitations), objectives, work plan (methodology, timeline), and references. No? One more thing please. I’ve read the comments and questions above, some imply that postdoc is intended as a continuation of parts of the PhD work into books chapters and articles. Does that mean my proposal can include my future plans I had in my thesis?

August 2, 2012 at 3:21 pm

Your understanding seems to be accurate—but generally any postdoc competition will be very clear about the required docs and their length! So check that thoroughly and don’t hesitate to call someone at the agency to ask.

Your proposal must reflect the work you’ll actually do during the funded period. If your previous phd work can be brought to completion with time left over, then the proposal should clearly indicate what new research you’ll be doing.

October 3, 2012 at 6:01 pm

Hi Karen, One of the post-docs I’m applying to requires the following application materials: a curriculum vitae a detailed statement of research interests and teaching methods a writing sample of 20-30 pages detailed proposals for the two courses mentioned above three letters of recommendation

What is the “detailed statement of research interests and teaching methods”? A cover letter or a combination of research statement + teaching philosophy? Thanks !

October 4, 2012 at 11:04 am

Ah, I’m asked this so often I should write a blog post! The ‘detailed statement’ may be understood as a way of saying “cover letter.” It is ambiguous enough, however, that you would be justified in appending your RS and TS to the package as well, as optional additions.

October 6, 2012 at 9:15 am

There’s no “research project” mentioned among the required documents so I’ll just assume this is more than the usual cover letter; I did a 3-page document following the structure you suggested for the research statement + 1 page teaching philosophy. BTW, thanks for all the blog posts, I really appreciate what you’re doing.

September 23, 2016 at 7:56 am

Dear Dr. Kelsky, I am applying for a post-doc that asks for 40 page writing sample. The best piece of writing I have that directly relates to my research proposal and is under the 40 page limit is a combination of two chapters of my dissertation. Is it appropriate in this (or any other) case to include a note at the top of one’s writing sample that contextualizes the piece?

September 23, 2016 at 8:53 am

i should clarify that by combination of two chapters of my dissertation, I do not mean that one chapter simply follows on anther. I mean that I blend the concepts of two chapters into one shorter piece of writing. It is, frankly, somewhere between an article manuscript and short dissertation chapter.

October 10, 2012 at 6:53 am

Hi, I am trying to prepare a postdoc research proposal and my discipline is Education. I am a bit con fused that shall my proposal aim at doing something new or i aim or concentarte on the aspect of my research which i think needs further unfolding. For example, creating an educational model ina specific context. Can you pleae guide me in this respect. Furthermore, the template link in the above blog has not worked for me is there any other way of getting it. Pleae let me know. Many thanks the blog has cleared many other confusions i had in mymind.

November 8, 2012 at 12:30 pm

Great post!!! I am trying to write a proposal and tried the link above for the template to sort of get me started but it is not working. Can you kindly send me the working link or the template? Thanks

November 9, 2012 at 5:18 pm

the link is fixed now.

November 11, 2012 at 2:09 pm

Thanks a lot to the effort you have invested here. I am nearing the end of my PhD (in Germany) and I was brought in contact by my Prof with a Prof at Standford. He is looking for a postdoc and we have had a very nice chat, so after experssing my interest in his work he asked me to submit a detailed CV and a (statement of work). What I came to understand from him is that I should submit a project proposal, provide a summar of my skills and explain how would I fit in their group.

My question is how detailed should the statement of work be? I have looked on the web and I have found recommendations ranging from 2 pages to 15 pages. I am confused, in particular that I wont be applying for funding for example, since he has the funding already.

thank you again,

November 12, 2012 at 10:07 am

This is not a standard document, so we have to judge by what’s being asked. If you’re putting a project proposal, summary of skills, and a brief statement of fit, then that could certainly be 4-5 doublespaced pages long.

November 26, 2012 at 2:48 pm

Thank you again for the speedy reply. Well I honestly do not know if I should submit a detailed proposal, since the Prof. has already a project he wants to hire someone to work on and we have discussed that project actually. Also, I have seen on the web that its recommended for (statement of work) to use the (bullets) style, does that apply for such a case as mine?

November 22, 2012 at 7:14 am

thank you for your interesting description of Postdoc application requirements. I am just wondering what “A cover letter with an indication of (and justification for) the level of support requested” means (the application is for a Visiting Scholar Fellowship, suitable also for Postdocs) ? Should one write the “exact” amount of financial resources needed? Or simple the months (5 or 10) needed for your research?

November 27, 2012 at 12:21 pm

This should represent both the months of support you need, as well as the amount requested per month—in other words, the total amount needed and why—this would cover cases such as replacing a salary you currently get, supporting a family, paying for research…whatever your circumstances are. Presented without drama, self-pity, or rhetorical flourish–just the facts.

November 28, 2012 at 3:28 am

Thanks for the great post. I have some question regarding post doc app. In Europe, most of postdoc app require the candidate to demonstrate “how you meet the criteria of the post” (generally there is a list of essential and desire criteria), rather than a research proposal, or teaching statement etc.

Do I still need to do project and teaching plan or I can just “show” them how I have met the criteria.

In general, the postdoc/direction topic is already given when they advertised the job.

Any advice for this type of application?

November 28, 2012 at 12:32 pm

Hi Karen, I’m applying for a post-doc that specifically asks for a bibliography as part of the (3,000 word) research statement. How much of a bibliography should it be? I suspect that more than 1-2 pages is over the top. I’m a literature scholar, so the bibliography could be quite long… Thanks!

November 29, 2012 at 8:31 am

The biblio should be one full page max.

October 7, 2014 at 4:59 pm

Thank you so much for your post. I have a bibliography-related question as well. The ad for the postdoc I’m applying to asks for a Research Statement of no more than 2000 words, without specifying whether or not I should include bibliography in those 2000 words. What is the usual praxis? Could I write a 2000 word statement and then append a bibliography?

Thank you in advance!!

October 8, 2014 at 4:10 pm

The blbio will not count against the word limit.

December 12, 2012 at 7:36 pm

Hi! Thanks for the information here, it has really been helpful in getting my post-doc applications together . I still have a couple of doubts: 1) I’m interested in labs which are not directly related to my field of work (I’m from a biochemistry/signal transduction background, but the position is in immunology). They always “prefer graduates with a micriobiology/immunology background”. In my cover letter, after I outline my research ideas, should I still justify why I should be considered? Or will my research plan speak for itself?

2) It’s getting close to the holidays! Will it be sensible to send my applications now (by the 18th of Dec, latest) or wait until Jan? There are no deadlines per se, the lab websites only request post-doc applicants to write to the PI.

Thanks a lot!

January 13, 2013 at 5:21 am

I appreciate your post and have an atypical query I was wondering if you could answer? I earned a BS, MS, and Phd in molecular biology (5 1/2 year)s at UGA after a BS in psyhology and MS in neuroscience. I then did a post doc from 2006-11 but finances cut so my position was eliminated…that would be fine but my marraige was going south as we had a new child an I was working hard to save that, had a trauma based degenerative issue requiring several surgeries, my father died at 59 in a protracted death in 2011 which I spent with him blah blah. So in trying to be with my daughter after his death, I started a business that the humerous period continued (details if needed). SO HOW should I approach my letter and statements? My references are all solid, I am reasonably published, have comments extolling a great skill in research design and work ethic. But I REMAIN flummoxed as to how to assemble a professional letter when personal elements encroached on my tenure and I have been away for year (to be close to my daughter…a tough wrong move). Anything you can suggest would be most appreciated. Warm regards, Rich

January 13, 2013 at 10:46 am

When circumstances are this distinctive, only individualized work will help. I suggest you get in touch with me. However, to give a general rule: the most important thing in any job doc is to simply focus on what you’ve done, with no mention at all of what you haven’t, with no detailed explanations/justifications/excuses for any supposed “gaps.” At most you might say, after a substantive and factual description of your research and pubs, “A deaht in the family/a health issue required me to take a year’s hiatus in 2011. I am now returned to active research, and will be publishing….”

January 24, 2013 at 5:50 am

I’ve just discovered you’re website. It’s so helpful!

I’m currently applying for a three year UK post doc. You specify the differences for a one year and two year position, how would a three year position differ further?

The position is interdisciplinary, but I’m an anthropologist (researching ‘at home’), would it be appropriate to propose further significant ethnographic research?

Also have you written anywhere about realistic time periods to propose for chapter revision, article submission etc?

January 30, 2013 at 12:06 am

Thanks for the tips. The post doc position I am applying for includes a question of “advantages of doing post doc at the University”. Do you think it is reasonable to write that the position will provide a basis to revise my thesis and the opportunity to publish it as a book? Or do you think it sounds selfish?

March 14, 2013 at 7:12 pm

I wonder if there is any difference in applying for so-called “Teaching Post-Docs,” where the aim is to support the post-doc as s/he increases his/her teaching experience, with some research being expected but not specified… in fact, the one I’m thinking of doesn’t even want a research outline, just a cover letter and CV!

April 16, 2013 at 8:09 am

thank you for this great piece. I had no idea on how to apply for a post doc, but I followed your suggestions and not only did I get the job, my application was very complimented! Thank you so much!

May 3, 2013 at 6:44 am

Great advice, I appreciate your post. I have a question regarding IP and revealing an idea through a research proposal. I have a bad experience when I sent a comprehensive research proposal with full technical details of my own idea to one of the “great” professors in one of the top east coast universities. My application was rejected and the professor said he is not interested in my proposal. But, few months latter I found out one of his students is working on my idea with my proposed research methodology and technique! Now, I am considering applying for another lab, with another topic and proposal, but I afraid if the same experience happen. My question is, if I don’t send a proposal and just send a cover letter including my research interests would be workable?

Many thanks

August 26, 2013 at 6:40 pm

I have just come across this blog post as well as your previous one for crafting cover letters for academic positions. You mention the importance of tailoring your statements to the institution. Although you discuss the importance of mentioning specific faculty, how do you tailor your cover letter for different types of institutions, more specifically a research vs. a teaching one?

I apologize if you’ve dealt with this in other comments, there are just so many comments because of the fantastic quality of your posts. Thank you for your time!

September 19, 2013 at 6:47 am

Is it possible to sound too far along with turning your diss into a book for a postdoc? I’m applying for several 3-year postdocs, and they generally say that typically the first 2 years are devoted to turning the diss into a book and the 3rd year to a new book project. I finished my diss over a year ago, am in conversation with a major press about publication, and ideally plan to send them the manuscript for review next summer, before the postdoc would start. That may not happen, of course; maybe it will take me 2 years from now. And even if it does there would obviously be revisions based on the reviews from the press. So there are a number of ways I could lay out my 3-yr postdoc research plan. But are postdoc search committees more interested in your first than your second book, in terms of their place in your acknowledgments, etc? Or would the fact that an applicant is relatively far along with the first book be a plus?

September 20, 2013 at 9:24 am

I am curious about how ambitious a research proposal for a 3-year postdoc should be. I am ABD in Anthropology, finishing in June, and currently applying for two 3-year postdocs. Should I propose one year for submitting the book manuscript plus two years for new research? Also, because I’m an anthropologist, most new research would involve travel for data collection. Should I assume (and write into the proposal) that I can travel and collect data in the summer and analyze during the year? Thanks for your advice.

September 20, 2013 at 2:03 pm

yes, what you’ve described here is good. It is also possible to spend 2 years on book 1. Whatever you do, be sure and articulate a clear term-by-term timeline of work.

September 24, 2013 at 12:31 pm

This is incredibly helpful. Thank you! I’m currently applying for a post-doc that does *not* ask for a cover letter, but it does ask for a “personal statement” of 2000 words “outlining their completed research (including dissertation), work in progress, professional goals and plans for publication, and any other information relevant to their candidacy.” In this case, would you suggest combining the first few paragraphs of a standard job letter with a more detailed research proposal (as outlined above)? Many thanks for your help!

October 2, 2013 at 2:23 am

Hi, Karen- Thank you for sharing your expertise!

I’m applying for a writing program postdoc. Would you recommend changing the order, content, and length of my discussion about my research & teaching? I’ve been drafting a letter that goes into teaching for my 2nd & 3rd paragraphs, then goes on to discuss dissertation and research that I plan to pursue in the 4th paragraph. Thank you in advance for your response.

November 4, 2013 at 7:24 am

Do I need different letters of recommendation for postdocs and job applications? It took me 2 months to get the job rec letters from my advisers and dissertation committee members, so I am reluctant to ask for additional letters…

November 6, 2013 at 4:07 pm

This is so helpful. I am late to the party but perhaps Dr. Karen has insight on the “Personal Statement,” which is required by many post-docs and dissertation year fellowships? I’m currently working on two post-doc applications, for example, that ask for statements of research, teaching philosophy, and a “personal statement.” as both of these are minority post-docs, I’m tempted to infer that they want applicants to tell them stories about overcoming racism/sexism, and how these struggles inform their research. But perhaps I’m wrong? Thank you for this blog, it is very helpful!

November 10, 2013 at 11:49 am

the personal statement is a constant headache, and I don’t yet have a post on it, although I definitely will when I’m back to blogging (or in the book that I’m writing). The critical thing with the PS is that it folds your background into a NARRATIVE OF RESEARCH FOCUS! In other words, just telling about your childhood and all your hopes and dreams and struggles —which is what EVERYONE defaults to for this wreteched doc—is unhelpful. It has to still be an academic document, which merelyties together your personal background with the work of scholarship and teaching that you hope to do.

January 19, 2015 at 1:56 pm

Hi Karen: Have you addressed the personal statement yet. I showed a draft to my advisor & she indicated that I needed more specifics about what I expected out of the postdoc than the personal related narrative. Also, I received my doctorate in 1993. Since I have published a little but spent most time working in the public health field I am applying for – project managing, presenting, providing TA, conducting workshops, evaluating, consulting, conducting research – very actively engaged. But…how do I explain the many reasons for not going back into academia that will be acceptable & show I’m a valued candidate. Truth is, I wanted practical experience, had children, had to work, take care of my parents etc. & back then didn’t have a mentor to show me the value.

November 11, 2013 at 1:55 pm

I also have a quick question that is related to the PS or rather, via PS, to the diversity postdoc positions. I am seriously considering applying for one, I feel I can address the requirements very well but was wondering how much recruitment for these relies on candidates’ ethnicity. I am a white European from a former Eastern block country and not sure if I count as ‘diverse’ enough…? Any thoughts?

November 27, 2013 at 1:44 am

Dear Karen:

Thanks so much for this entry. It is extremely helpful. I am in my last year of a social science PhD program and was lucky enough to secure a tenure-track job for next year. One of the conditions I negotiated was being able to postpone my start date for a post-doc. I was wondering if you had any strong feelings about whether or not to include this new job in my post-doc application as I’ve received mixed advice from my dissertation committee and colleagues. If you do think mentioning it is a plus, how much emphasis should one give (i.e., list on the CV only, or also mention in the CL, PS, and/or RP)? Again, thanks for this and all your other posts!

January 5, 2014 at 3:58 pm

I stumbled across this website the other day while searching for tips on writing job and post doc applications. I can’t tell you how delighted I am to have found it because it is filled with heaps of useful advice. Thank you!

January 9, 2014 at 11:58 am

I am applying for a 3 year post-doc in history for recent PhDs. I finished my dissertation one year ago. My quandary: the application asks for a 500 word project description and a 2 page CV. In such a short proposal, what is the most essential information to include?

(Writers of successful proposals will be asked to later submit a longer application that includes a writing sample–but not a more detailed proposal–for the final selection process)

Thanks in advance for your advice!

February 12, 2014 at 7:51 am

Hi Karen, I am a finalist for a postdoc and I have a Skype interview scheduled. Is there a major difference between preparing for a postdoc Skype interview and a tenure track one?

February 12, 2014 at 9:04 am

Yes and no. All the regular interviewing rules apply (read all my posts on interviewing) but you’ll be focused on the specific things to be accomplished during the postdoc term, and in terms of teaching–ONLY the course or courses that are required under the postdoc (if any).

March 29, 2014 at 1:31 pm

Thank you for the thoughtful advice and insights. I am writing my first cover letter to apply for a postdoc at MIT. I was pretty stressed that I dont have a chance to be accepted there, but reading your post helped me to make sure I have done my best in preparing a cover letter which speaks of my experience and presents my personality well. The rest is out of my control 😉

Best, Helia

June 9, 2014 at 6:20 am

Dear Prof Karen Thanks for all the great informations. I am applying for the post-doc positions. Can you advise me on writing a cover letter to a post-doc positon, where its research is new for me, and not connected to my previous researches. I can quickly adapt to the new techniques.

Thanks a lot in advance

June 9, 2014 at 8:36 am

Email me at [email protected] to discuss whether I can help you or not.

June 28, 2014 at 4:27 am

Thanks for the info. I was very interested in what you were saying about showing willingness to participate in the intellectual life of the university. I am currently writing an application for a Philosophy postdoc and find some parts of it rather difficult (BTW, it is a pure research position, which is a good thing because I do not have the people skills to be a teacher, even “participation” is a stretch for me). The research proposal is fine. I think the work plan is OK, even if a bit repetitive (I write a journal article on this, on that etc.) But methodology? I’m a philosopher — I read stuff, think about it a while, and write something. Benefits of the project to the host institution? Why don’t you ask them? Qualities of host organization? Somewhat at a loss I just went through the staff list and had a quick look at their lists of publications. Is this the way to go, or is it too obvious? Transfer of knowledge? Writing articles again.

July 14, 2014 at 12:39 pm

On the Cdn front postdocs are highly centralised (mostly done through the federal tri-council online application system). On this end proposals are evaluated independently (and paid from govt funds) and we can choose where to hold them (assuming that department is willing to host us).

Two keys things I was told (and perhaps made the difference between an unsuccessful application last year and a successful one this year are: 1) to emphasis your suitability for a project and feasibility clearly (ie you’ve used this method, been to this country before, etc. etc.) 2) be very clear about outputs (how many articles, in what type of location?). Teaching is not usually required, but showing “fit” with the department you choose is important (list others doing related work, for example).

Gauging the relative enthusiasm of the department that would host you is also important (and sussing out what kind of space they have for you, whether they will have other postdocs, what kinds of opportunities there may be).

July 24, 2014 at 7:52 am

This is really helpful to hear – I am in the process of preparing my SSHRC postdoc application and trying to understand what aspects seem to really count. The consensus definitely seems to be that feasibility and fit matter greatly.

When you say gauging the enthusiasm of the department, do you mean this might be expressed in your own program of work or in the letter from your potential supervisor/the institutional nomination form?

August 20, 2014 at 5:08 am

Hi Karen, Thank you for your post, which I find extremely helpful. I am applying for a one year postdoc in social sciences which puts particularly emphasis on the training it offers to develop skills for future academic career. A 2 pages “Academic Career Statement” and a 2 pages “Research Proposal” are among the requested documents. I am particularly puzzled by the statement which requires indicating (in this order): (i) why I think that the programme in general, and its academic practice training/activities in particular, will benefit me; (ii) my research and teaching interests and experience, and career plans. Is this statement a kind of cover letter that requires putting significant and particular emphasis on why and how the programme will benefit my career plans? How would you suggest I structure it?

August 20, 2014 at 8:19 pm

You’ll want to sketch your research, then discuss why the program, dept and campus will serve that research program (be specific, name names!), and then articulate the longer-term career plan you envision. Finish with a conclusion tying it all together.

August 22, 2014 at 12:11 pm

September 17, 2014 at 1:54 pm

Hi, Karen. Thanks for this post. It was extremely helpful! I’m applying for a postdoc that requires both a research proposal (and assumes that you’ll be revising your dissertation into a book manuscript) and a dissertation abstract. My manuscript plans are to adapt my dissertation for an area studies audience, which will make the project less theoretically compelling but more marketable. With this in mind, I’m unsure of what “problem” I should highlight in the proposal–the one geared for the manuscript, or the one that drove the dissertation. Can I use the dissertation problem, but then explain how I’ll adapt it to an area studies audience? Thank you.

September 29, 2014 at 11:55 am

Question about the cover letter for postdoc

Mid cover letter you state: “After the discussion of research, the postdoc app letter will specifically discuss the plan of work for the postdoc year–ie, month by month, what new research and revisions will be made.”

At the end of the letter you say: “Lastly, in place of the typical tailoring paragraph, the letter will conclude with a brief paragraph explaining how the research and writing time of the postdoc will be used, how the scholarly community on campus will advance the project, and how the candidate will participate in said scholarly community.”

I am wondering if there is a distinction between “research and writing time” and plan for the postdoc year re: research and revisions? I assume that perhaps the later statement of yours is more of a summary statement? My postdoc CL has a limit of 1.5 pages so I’m trying my best to not be redundant. Any thoughts here?

September 29, 2014 at 3:44 pm

Right, the latter, tailoring part is not a timeline per se, it’s just a general statement of ways you envision contributing to life on campus and/or drawing from the resources there.

October 2, 2014 at 3:12 pm

I am currently applying for a 3-year post-doc at a university with two faculty members whose research and theory has been very influential on my own. I know one of them very well and the other not at all. Is it appropriate in a research proposal to mention that I would welcome interaction with these scholars, or does that sound too grad-studenty? The online application does not accommodate a cover letter.

October 3, 2014 at 8:57 am

All postdoc proposals will have a paragraph on contributions to/interactions with the faculty and programs.

October 4, 2014 at 11:22 pm

The 3-yr. postdoc I am applying to requires just a single, 3,000 words or less personal statement that summarizes everything (it’s a nightmare to write). As for the future research section, how specific should I be on my timeline? I would imagine that a month-by-month summary would take up too much of the document. Should I do semester-by-semester?

October 14, 2014 at 4:19 pm

I have a similar question. How should one structure the publication timeline over the course of three years? Paragraph form? A spreadsheet? I’m also asked to write 1 personal statement (2,000 words).

October 15, 2014 at 7:41 am

paragraph form. Just write, “in Fall 2015 I will….. In Spring I will turn to….”

October 25, 2014 at 6:27 am

Hi, and thank you for the post. I was wondering about whether it is appropriate to include chapter breakdowns for the book, and where they would go in terms of the breakdown you suggest. This was the advice I was given by a faculty member. The idea was that this would give some sense of the project as a whole, which could also be part of the timeline by including information about whether chapters had been published as articles, were still in draft form, needed to still be written, etc.

November 2, 2014 at 12:47 pm

Thank you Karen, very good tips! I have one question: the program I am applying ask to describe expected products. I expect to write a book manuscript during one year. It is sufficient? Or would be good to mention the submission of a paper to peer-reviewed journal also? Thanks!

December 3, 2014 at 11:00 am

Hi Karen, thanks very much for the extremely useful website! I recently applied for a Mellon Post-Doc at UofT, I did not, however, know about this page before. From what I’ve read, I might have most of what you are describing here, in the sense that I TRIED to convey these things in the application, but the work plan (so, as you say, what most applications fail to do), is only divided into years (2), and not terms, let alone months. I was wondering whether you’d think this implies immediate rejection of the project by the Committee and if so, what do you suggest should be the level of detail in the plan, for future reference? Month – journal I wish to publish in/title or theme of the article + topic to be researched during that month?

best wishes and thank you!

December 3, 2014 at 7:53 pm

I don’t think that issue alone would disqualify your application. Good luck! Let me know how it goes.

December 12, 2014 at 10:10 am

Uff, that’s a relief! Thank you, I’m keeping my fingers crossed for myself! 😉

December 10, 2014 at 1:52 pm

Hi Karen, Thank you for writing this helpful article. I’m applying for a post-doc that is specifically focused on conducting archival research for a broader project (in the humanities). Basically, the professor in charge of the project needed additional support. This seems to be a lot different than many of the post-docs I’ve seen. Since the research is for a bigger project, I was thinking of writing my statement as such: 2 paragraphs on my current research; 2 paragraphs on how my research and experience ties into the overall project and its goals; 1-2 paragraphs on how I intend to become an active member of the scholarly community at the university; 1-2 paragraphs on my future research plans. Any thoughts?

December 13, 2014 at 3:59 pm

I have a question about writing the research proposal for a research postdoc in which the plan is to turn the dissertation into a book. I know you very helpfully outlined this already in your comments, but I’m trying to tease apart the differences in how the dissertation is presented in the cover letter and the research proposal in this case.

I’m wondering whether it is (a) better to focus more heavily on the content of the dissertation in the paragraph in the cover letter and then refer to that in the research proposal, or (b) whether to be more brief in the cover letter and go into the details of the dissertation in regards to how it will be turned into a book in the research proposal. I guess what I’m asking is in this case, since the research proposal is about the dissertation + new/additional research for additional chapters, how do you recommend avoiding being too redundant when talking about the dissertation in both the cover letter & research proposal. Thanks so much!

January 10, 2015 at 3:11 pm

Dear Karen, I find your comments being very interesting and informative. Reading through them one can learn so much! I just completed my PhD in creative writing and am contemplating to apply for two year postdoctoral research in Europe. Would you be so kind as to advise what would be more beneficial for me: 1. make a two year proposal and in the first year work on the publications from my theoretical PhD exegesis; then embark on creation of another novel in a second year?

2. work on my Master of Arts by research book publication that has been in progress since 2009. Is it appropriate so to speak “step back” into the past study during the postgraduate research? 3. make a fresh proposal for a new novel and the theoretical exegesis and start all over?

Looking forward to hearing from you Many thanks Kind Regards Grazina

February 23, 2015 at 4:12 pm

One thing to keep in mind in 2014: A few departments (such as the one I am teaching in) have begun pitching the post-doc to the administration as the more humane alternative to an adjunct or series of adjuncts. Therefore we are seeing more post-docs expecting a 1/2 or 2/2 teaching load as well as research and publication requirements. If your post-doc ad wants you to teach more than the one course, it’s probably best to assume that you are replacing a lost tenure track line, and that teaching is really going to matter.

February 23, 2015 at 5:05 pm

This is valuable insight. thanks.

February 24, 2015 at 4:54 pm

Thank you for this very helpful post.

I’m working on a postdoc application right now that asks only for a letter, CV, writing sample, and references. The postdoc is heavily focused on raising the department profile (so thanks for your discussion of that in your post!), so applicants are asked to include a discussion of the proposed research project — along with a discussion of how we meet each of the six requirements.

In a case like this, would you still suggest sticking to two pages for the cover letter? It seems like quite a lot of information to squeeze into two pages, and I don’t want to shortchange any of the requirements or my research proposal. What do you think?

February 25, 2015 at 2:38 pm

My guess is if we worked together we’d accomplish it in two pages. 🙂 But if it requires the res project, pubs, timeline, AND proposed course(s), as well as the six requirements, I can see it might edge onto a third page, but I’d stop it at 2.5 pages max.

February 25, 2015 at 2:42 am

Hi Karen, I obtained my PhD in 2012. I’ve been self employed since then and doing ok. I also have 2 extra publications since my PhD and a book about to be published. I am told it is impossible to get a Post doc in North America due to the number of yours spent outside academics since 2012. Do you think it is still possible to get a post doc? I really want to return to academics. Regards, Richie.

June 4, 2015 at 8:36 am

I COMPLETED MY PHD LAST YEAR IN FOOD SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY MAJORING IN FOOD QUALITY CONTROL AND ASSURANCE. CAN YOU GIVE ME IDEA OF AVAILABLE POSTDOC POSITIONS SO I CAN APPLY?

June 5, 2015 at 8:01 am

No. I don’t find or suggest postdocs. I help people on their proposals.

July 30, 2015 at 4:18 am

Dear Karen, I find your blog of much help and I am following your rules to tailor a good postdoc application. However, I am partecipating to a call for a postdoc position that requires a project of only three pages. I followed Dr. Karen’s Foolproof Grant Template and I think I achieved a good proposal but I do not have any space left for a proposed timetable/timeline. What you suggest to sort out this issue? Thank you S.

July 30, 2015 at 2:35 pm

You have to reduce all parts after the first two intro paras so that you DO have room for the timeline! If you worked with me, that’s what we’d do.

July 31, 2015 at 2:08 am

Dear Karen thank you very much for your kind help and for your answer. Honestly, am thinking about working with you

October 22, 2015 at 7:27 am

I have a question about the Academic Career Statement that is required to apply for a post-doc. Should the career statement be written in a cover letter format of the kind “Dear Mr. x” ? Thank you!

October 23, 2015 at 6:48 pm

i’m not sure what you mean by career statement, but docs for postdocs are not written as letters unless there is specifically a cover letter requested as part of the application.

November 15, 2015 at 10:07 am

Dear Karen,

I’ve searched your blog and read your book (thank you for both!), but I don’t see very much on crafting Personal Statements for postdocs. I’m working on one now that requires me to explain “why [I] should be selected for the program.” Following your general postdoc guidelines, I made a case for how my work both fits with what they already offer and injects some new blood. However, I’m finding a lot of advice about using the Personal Statement to “address strengths and weaknesses,” explain gaps in one’s CV, and “humanize” one’s application on other academic websites. For the sake of the insecure and broke, can you do some debunking and break down the Personal Statement the way you break down the Research Statement and Cover Letter?

Many thanks, Amber

November 28, 2015 at 2:22 am

Dear Karen, Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge. I completed my PhD in 2011, and supervisors too busy (and important h’mm!) to discuss next steps. So I worked from home to turn my thesis into a book and happily it will be published in 2016. I would really appreciate your views on how to approach a potential mentor for post-doctoral research under some form of affiliation if no funding available. One scholar I would like as a mentor is inviting potential PhD applicants with research ideas to make contact. I wonder what sort of cover letter is appropriate to ask for post-doc support and whether to include a detailed research proposal. I am prepared to research without any funds as I have struggled this far without support. It’s the intellectual input I need to take forward new research. Any suggestions welcome, thank you. Sal

January 5, 2016 at 3:27 am

Thank you very much for this very useful and helpful blog post, and for your very useful book.

I am currently finishing my PhD and applying to postdocs. For two applications, they request me to submit a CV and a research proposal, but no cover letter. I decided to ‘integrate’ a cover letter in the research proposal (400 words over the 1500 requested for the research proposal). Is it a good solution? what would be your advice in such situation?

These two positions are fellowship where we can join as pre- or postdoc, and they main ‘obligation’ to the fellows is to publish/complete a writing over the year, either completing a chapter as pre-doc, or publishing the PhD as postdoc, or write and publish an article. They ask for a 1500 words research proposal, I allocated 500 words to the publication of my thesis, giving some details on its content but mainly focusing on why I should have it published and why this publication is needed and timely, and then 9 have about 700 words and on a new project, for which I clearly state that it will be a long-run project to be completed over several year and I intend solely to initiate it during the postdoc and participate in conferences to present it. First, do you think this is a good idea to say that i will ‘only’ initiate the project with them? may be i could argue this will then constitute a good asset for my future ‘world class career’ as you mentioned in the blog post? Also in such case, how detailed should be the work plan?

Thank you very much in advance.

I wish you a nice day.

September 14, 2016 at 3:18 pm

Hi Dr. Kelsky,

Thank you so much for your work – it has been so helpful to me as I navigate the stressful job and postdoc application process.

I have a specific question about how to format the documents for one postdoc in particular. This application asks for a “personal statement” of 1500 words max, which details “completed research, works in progress, professional goals and plans for publication, and other relevant iformation” in addition to a 500-word statement discussing (essentially) “what the institution can do for you and what you can do for the institution”.

My question is this: Is the “personal statement” more like a research statement, or should it be written more like a cover letter? Incidentally, there is no cover letter requested with this appliacation.

October 17, 2016 at 12:03 pm

Hi Dr.Kelsky. Thank you for the post, I found it useful. But I have specific question, what is an academic career statement? Is it different from cover letter or research statement? Thank you in advance

November 27, 2016 at 11:34 am

Thank you so much for this post. I’m not sure if you are checking comments on this post anymore, but just in case, I have a question. I am working on my application for a post-doc position that asks for a “a 3-5 page (double-spaced) statement of research interest/research proposal.” What kind of document do you imagine they are looking for here? The research proposal that you’ve outlined here, that sort of resembles a grant proposal? Or a more traditional research statement?

Many thanks.

February 28, 2017 at 4:49 am

Dear Karen, a word of thanks for the tips and advises on how to compile a postdoc application. I hope to apply for a postdoc and the tips you shared here have been helpful

August 26, 2017 at 8:03 pm

Hi Dr Karen, Brilliant post, edgy and very informative. Thank you so much!

A couple of small suggestions: – the link to the ‘writing the cover letter’ post seems to be broken, though i found it through a site search. – I’d place this reply box before the other comments – since there have been many commenters (which is the best possible problem, isn’t it?! :D) scrolling to get here takes a while.

I’m so glad you wrote this post since I’m about to write said proposal and have no idea. Now i have some idea how to position myself.

September 5, 2017 at 11:18 am

Hi Karen! Thank you so much for this very helpful post.

I have a question about pitching courses for the postdoc. I am applying to a humanities postdoc that asks for two courses: one, an introduction to a topic of my choice for first and second-year students from different fields, and the second, a more advanced seminar in my own discipline aimed at juniors and seniors in my host department.

Your post above recommends designing a specific course that bears a clear relationship to your diss work, while speaking to a broader field. I have done this for the advanced course, but wonder if, in this case, it might be a nice complement to offer something more general for the introductory-level course. I am considering proposing an introductory lecture on film & media theory (my field), which I do not see offered in any of the university’s departments (but they do state film as one of the fields appropriate for the postdoc).

My line of thought is that this could offer something new to the university, and since film is an inherently interdisciplinary field, it speaks to the call to offer a class that could draw students from different departments. (In my current university, we get tons of students from sciences and other humanities in our courses.) I have also already sole-taught a version of this course, which I am eager to develop further.

Thanks for your input!

September 9, 2017 at 6:29 am

I’m currently in the process of applying for a post-doc at a major R1 three years after the doctorate. I would like to use this time to convert my dissertation which I feel has strong publishing potential (and already has a chapter in the works with a major publisher)into a book. In the “project plan” description can I describe my dissertation, current publications, and my timeline for converting it into a contracted book, or do I need a whole new “study”? If the latter, is there any way that I can “connect” a “new” study to my underlying objective of publishing my dissertation manuscript into a book? My current position does not grant me the time or resources to commit to this project to the same degree a post-do would. THANK YOU!!

October 17, 2017 at 11:26 am

Thank you all, especially Dr.Karen. I am writing postdoc RS and still learning about it.

I have some questions: How do you calculate the budget that you need for turning of the dissertation into a book? Or budget for a future research? Also I read elsewhere “include potential funding partners”, is it requirement to find a funding source to apply a postdoc?

January 29, 2018 at 1:42 pm

Dear Dr. Kelsy,

I learned a lot concerning postdoc applications thanks to your blog posts and your book.

I do have a question though regarding certain postdoc fellowships that only demand a cover letter (and no research proposal or statement). How not to exceed two pages in that case, when you need to address past and future research as well as teaching experience and goals in one document?

Any advice? Thank you in advance.

October 4, 2018 at 5:23 am

The link to the general job application cover letter post (“Why Your Job Application Cover Letter Sucks”) is broken; this is the correct link: http://theprofessorisin.com/2016/08/26/why-your-job-cover-letter-sucks/

February 8, 2020 at 12:24 am

This is amazing. Thank you very much. I had been looking for advice about a postdoc application and never found anything valid out there.

Thank you so much for this post.

August 20, 2020 at 2:02 pm

I understand why it is important to present yourself as a colleague rather than a student. However, I’m seeing postdoc calls that ask applicants to identify a “faculty mentor” which, to me, suggests they’re thinking of the postdoc more like a student than a colleague. Is this a sign that an application written in the tone of a confident colleague would not be well received? Are they instead looking for sentences communicating sentiments like “I want/need mentorship?” Or should the language of “faculty mentor” just be disregarded as a quirk?

August 26, 2020 at 12:25 pm

this is a v. good question. In this case, yes,they want youto imagine a mentorship relationship but even there, it should be less like: “I’m a studetn in need of teaching” and more, “I’m a junior scholar who will benefit from some conversation and support.”

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• CAREER FEATURE
• 02 April 2024

Africa’s postdoc workforce is on the rise — but at what cost?

• Linda Nordling 0

Linda Nordling is a freelance journalist based in Cape Town, South Africa.

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Nature’s postdoc survey

This article is the fourth in a short series discussing the results of Nature ’s 2023 postdoc survey. The first article looked at the state of postdocs in 2023 and the reasons for a generally brighter outlook on job prospects. A second article covered how postdocs are using artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbots in their everyday work. The third looked at the career experiences of postdocs in their thirties . The survey, created with Shift Learning, an education-research company in London, was advertised on nature.com, in Springer Nature digital products and through e-mail campaigns. The full survey data sets are available at go.nature.com/3rizweg .

Lire en français sur Nature Africa

Johnblack Kabukye struggles to explain to his colleagues back home in Uganda why he’s doing a two-year stint as a postdoctoral researcher in Sweden. “If you say you’re doing a master’s or a PhD, it’s clear what that means,” says the digital-health specialist, who worked as a physician for a decade before switching to research. But a postdoc? “It’s not a thing that is understood,” he says.

The skills he’s learning at Stockholm University while building electronic health tools tailored to patients’ needs are certainly useful for his job as a physician and informatician at the Uganda Cancer Institute (UCI) in Kampala. But the postdoc format itself — a short-term position designed to bridge the gap between doctoral student and tenured academic — makes little sense in Uganda, where it is common to have a permanent teaching job at a university before even embarking on a PhD.

“I have not heard of a single postdoc opportunity in Uganda,” Kabukye says.

Career resources for African scientists

That could soon change across Africa. The number of people gaining PhDs in the continent is growing, and so is the need for postdoctoral employment. “There is definitely greater awareness of the postdoc position, and more and more postdocs,” says Gordon Awandare, pro-vice-chancellor in charge of academic and student affairs at the University of Ghana in Accra.

But as the continent’s postdoctoral employment needs have grown, so too have fears that the problems created by a proliferation of postdoc positions in other parts of the world — which critics say trap young researchers in a cycle of poorly paid, short-term positions with no job security — could also arise in African countries.

Breaking ground

Postdoc frustration is a recurring theme in studies that look at early-career researchers. Two global surveys of postdoctoral students by Nature , one published in 2020 and the other last year , found that more than one-third of respondents were dissatisfied with their lot. A lack of job security, career-advancement opportunities and funding were the most-cited reasons.

Nature ’s surveys underscore the dearth of postdoctoral researchers in Africa. Of the 3,838 postdocs surveyed in June last year, only 91 were based on the continent. The number of respondents (who were self-selecting) were too few, and too geographically concentrated in three countries — South Africa, Nigeria and Egypt — to be viewed as representative of the continent. Yet, they offer tantalizing glimpses of an emerging segment of the global research workforce.

For example, African postdocs were older than the global average, with more than 40% aged 41 or older. They were also more likely to be doing their postdoc in their home country (68% in Africa compared with 39% globally) and they were much less likely, than the global average, to be employed on fixed-term fellowships or contracts (see ‘Employment matters’). Their pay also stands out: 60% said they earned less than US$15,000 per year — the lowest option survey-takers could tick, and a fraction of what most postdocs are paid in Europe and North America. Lower costs of living play some part in the lower salaries, but not enough to justify the gap (see ‘A continental shift’).

Postdocs in Africa were also more likely to report having a second job alongside their postdoc than were other respondents, on average (33% of respondents in Africa, compared with 10% of respondents overall). The most common reason was to provide extra income (71%), while 57% said their second job gave their skills and career prospects a boost. However, notes Awandare, the tendency of many African postdocs to have permanent academic positions before becoming a postdoc could be a confounding factor in this measure.

Yet, and perhaps surprising given their low pay, Africa-based postdocs were the most optimistic about their futures of all respondents from the geographical regions represented. Overall, 64% of Africa-based respondents reported that they felt positive about their future job prospects, compared with 41% globally. Postdocs in Africa were twice as likely to say that their postdoc roles were better than they imagined (25% compared with 12% overall). And 42% of respondents in Africa felt that they had better prospects than previous generations of postdocs, far exceeding the 15% global average.

That optimism makes sense to Awandare, who thinks that postdocs in his country might feel more important than do their peers who work in large laboratories overseas. In addition to his leadership role at the University of Ghana, he founded and runs the West African Centre for Cell Biology of Infectious Pathogens at the university. He says postdocs at the centre are treated the same as faculty members. “In some advanced institutions, they wouldn’t get that recognition and status,” he notes.

And even though their salaries are low by international standards, postdocs at his centre can be better paid than entry-level permanent university staff who only teach, he says. This is because postdocs tend to be paid out of lucrative international grants. “Ten to fifteen years ago, many of these positions would have been overseas — but now funders, to their credit, increasingly provide positions on the continent,” he says.

A different set-up

Employment structures also differed between Africa and the rest of the world, according to Nature ’s survey. Although similar proportions of postdocs were employed in academia in Africa as they were globally (around 90%), the proportion of part-time postdocs was higher in Africa — 12% compared with the global average of 5%. One of them is Felista Mwingira, a parasitologist at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. She exemplifies how African early-career researchers have been forging ahead in their research careers in the absence of a formal structure of postdoc positions.

Mwingira obtained her PhD in 2014 from the University of Basel in Switzerland at the age of 33 — which she says is very young for researchers in Tanzania. By the time she started her studies, she was already permanently employed by her university in Tanzania, and was able to return to that post after finishing her PhD. Back home, she could take three months paid maternity leave for each of her two children, born four years apart. And although juggling pregnancies and bringing up children with the demands of an academic career was a challenge, it meant she had job security — something postdocs at the same stage in their lives in other parts of the world often lack .

Falling behind: postdocs in their thirties tire of putting life on hold

Mwingira’s work after her PhD was not technically a postdoc. But as her children got older, she sought out a mentorship arrangement at her university that provides her with research training and, sometimes, extra money from the projects she works on. It’s not a formal postdoc, but she hopes it will help her to attain the publication ‘points’ required in the Tanzanian university system to progress up the academic career ladder — something that does not depend on more-senior positions becoming available. She hopes to be promoted in the near future, but says she would also like to embark on a full-time postdoc position to “sharpen my scientific skills”.

So far, Mwingira considers herself lucky. Her children are now four and eight, and while she says that her life as an early-career academic still has ups and downs, she is thankful for the stability she has enjoyed so far in her career. “I think that I’m better off compared to postdocs in high-income countries.”

That feeling of being better off than people elsewhere certainly does not translate to sub-Saharan Africa’s most prominent research nation: South Africa. There, postdoc numbers have been rising for a couple of decades, growing from around 300 in 1999 to nearly 3,000 in 2019 (ref. 1 ), and national surveys reveal postdoc frustrations that mirror those raised globally, with some country-specific gripes to boot.

Heidi Prozesky is a research scholar at the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology at Stellenbosch University. She is one of the people behind South Africa’s first PhD tracer study , published in its final form in July 2023, which tracked the whereabouts of nearly 6,500 PhDs who had graduated in the country between 2010 and 2019. That survey found that around 20% had accepted at least one postdoctoral fellowship, either at home or abroad, on completing their PhDs, with a steady growth seen over the two decades. The postdocs spent a median of three years in the position, although one-quarter reported spending more than four years. One-third reported having accepted more than one postdoc — often, they said, because other work was not available.

Career resources for postdoctoral researchers

A common refrain in the South African survey, which echoes the findings of Nature ’s global surveys, is that postdocs feel like they are in limbo: neither students nor staff. In reality, postdocs in South Africa are technically students. This saves them from paying tax on their income, which are stipends, not salaries. But this designation also breeds resentment, because it means postdocs are treated like students: they can’t apply for grants and typically have no funding to travel to conferences or attend workshops.

In addition to the lack of opportunities, postdoc pay in South Africa is low compared with living costs. Last year, the National Research Foundation’s non-taxable postdoc stipends started at 200,000 rand (US$10,700). Female postdocs are allowed up to four months paid maternity leave. However, basic private medical insurance does not come as standard, meaning that postdocs have to pay for it out of their stipends if they want to avoid state health care, which many people in South Africa view as woefully inadequate. The stories of some postdocs “would make you cry”, says Palesa Mothapo, who heads research support and management at Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. “These people have PhDs. And they end up going hungry.”

Growing pains

South Africa’s predicament stems partly from bottlenecks in the academic careers system. The number of people with a PhD graduating annually more than tripled between 2000 and 2018, increasing the demand for postdoctoral work. Postdoc positions have also increased, but further up the career ladder, the number of roles has been static. A study published this year 1 in the South African Journal of Science found that the number of postdoc positions grew ten times faster between 2007 and 2019 in the country than did the growth in entry-level permanent jobs in academia.

Palesa Mothapo at Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, says there needs to be more discussion around transferable skills for African postdocs. Credit: Stefan Els

But many also view South Africa’s postdoc malaise as a consequence of incentive structures in the country that place a premium on research publications. Postdocs have become cheap, low-commitment hires for universities that want to boost their output of research publications, which in South Africa earn the host institutions or departments cash subsidies from the government. Postdocs often have publication targets written into their appointments, Mothapo says. “But those papers don’t translate to money for the postdoc. It goes to the institution, to the host.”

There is some cause for cheer. Last December, the National Research Foundation announced it would raise its minimum annual postdoc stipend to 320,000 rand per year for new fellowships from 2024. But simply increasing postdoc stipends is unlikely to create more academic positions for postdocs who are looking for more job security. And the bottleneck seems to be worse for some groups. According to Prozesky, South Africa attracts a lot of postdocs from the rest of the African continent. Most come with the expectation that it will lead to a permanent job. The PhD tracer study found that many people from the rest of Africa end up disillusioned and feeling discriminated against. They struggle to move on from the postdoc status, and can face long delays in visa approvals when moving between posts. “They call it academic xenophobia,” says Prozesky.

Charles Teta, a Zimbabwean environmental chemist who did two postdocs in South Africa after a PhD in his home country, says that he noticed that South African citizens were less likely to take the postdoc route than were immigrants like him. “South Africans are more likely to get lectureship posts,” without having any postdoc experience, he says. In addition, a growing number of funding streams are not open to non-citizens — even those who are permanent residents. Eventually, those restrictions cause people to leave, he says.

Teta left South Africa last year to cover the maternity leave of an environmental-science lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. There, he enjoys the opportunity to teach — something he wasn’t expected to do during his postdocs. It’s been a happy choice so far, and he hopes to find another, similar position when his current one ends. He doesn’t miss the research treadmill, which, he says, “did not translate to mental and financial well-being”.

A call for creativity

Mothapo says that the rigid focus on research in South African postdoc roles is part of their problem. “The universities are not creative,” she says. Because postdocs are limited in how they can teach, and can’t apply for their own funding, she notes, they are missing out on learning skills that are beneficial for staying in academia, and that could open up alternative career paths in industry.

More-creative programmes have been trialled across the continent. Since 2019, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington and the African Academy of Sciences have been running the African Postdoctoral Training Initiative (APTI). The programme combines a two-year postdoc at a NIH institute in the United States with a two-year research grant that fellows can take back home to build their own research programmes. Notably, it is open only to researchers who have permanent positions already.

Postdoc career optimism rebounds after COVID in global Nature survey

Daniel Amoako-Sakyi, an immunologist at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana, embarked on an APTI fellowship in late 2023. He is a postdoc in mid-life, and the fellowship has proved to be a good fit. He is a few months into his position at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, where he will spend the next two years looking at biological reasons for the variance in efficacy seen in new malaria vaccines. His 15-year-old daughter has enrolled in a US high school, and his spouse, a fellow academic, aims to split her time between the United States and Nigeria.

In Bethesda, Amoako-Sakyi has none of the resource constraints that limit him in Ghana. Antibodies that would take months to ship to his home country arrive on his doorstep overnight. He expects the opportunity will supercharge his career, and hopes he’ll be able to take on some postdocs of his own when he returns home. He doesn’t expect it will be difficult to find them. “I think most researchers are looking for the right environment to flourish,” he says.

What comes next?

There are few certainties about the future of African postdocs. Those who spoke to Nature hope that their postdoc training will accelerate their careers — by helping them to win grants, get promotions and expand their research networks. In Uganda, Kabukye hopes to have organized funding and collaborators by the end of his postdoc so that he can carry on his research designing and implementing digital-health tools in resource-constrained settings. “Ideally, I would have positions at the UCI and at another university, to foster collaboration and exchange,” he says.

Physician Johnblack Kabukye from Uganda is doing a postdoc building electronic health tools at Stockholm University in Sweden. Credit: Johnblack Kabukye

However, with most of the continent’s research funding still coming from sources outside Africa — with the exception of a handful of countries, such as South Africa and Egypt — it’s likely that foreign funding will keep driving the creation of postdoc opportunities. And that can mean the positions aren’t always tailored to local needs.

Mothapo says that she often hears research funders talk about the need to create more postdoc positions. However, there is not enough discussion around the particular needs that African postdocs will have, especially the transferable skills that they will need if they want to transition to sectors such as industry. “I’m worried about their destinations,” she says.

Mwingira echoes her concern. She thinks that more formalized postdocs in Tanzania could lead to bottlenecks in the training system, as has been seen in South Africa and elsewhere. “Those problems will arise in Tanzania, too, but worse, because of the low salaries,” she says.

But Amoako-Sakyi does not think that the creation of more African postdocs has to result in frustration as they compete for rare academic posts. Many might already be employed by universities at that point in their careers. A postdoc could allow them to win grants from funders so that they can set up their own research groups and create opportunities for the next generation. He also thinks that the biotechnology industry in countries such as Ghana will grow, further increasing the demand for researchers in the country.

Nor does Amoako-Sakyi think that African postdocs need to end up in the same negative landscape that postdocs occupy elsewhere in the world. Such fears are not unfounded, he says, because concepts are often brought to the continent and adopted without thinking about the local context. But as his own fellowship shows, there are ways to tailor postdocs to African settings. “We should be very intentional about how we do it and try to correct old mistakes.”

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00980-2

Prozesky, H. & van Schalkwyk, F. S . Afr. J. Sci. 120 , 15898 (2024).

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