How Long are Postdoctoral Fellowships?
For a better analysis with more data, click here.
OK, apologies, chemblogosphere: today is apparently write-guest-posts-for-Chemjobber day.
He poses an interesting question in his "Ivory Filter Flask" post from earlier today:
" What is the median length of a postdoc these days, anyways?"
Well, I may have some answers to that question. Looking through the New Hires, I put together a list, and ran some basic statistics*:
MIN: 1 year
MAX: 8 years
(n = 38)
It's tough to make general statements about such a small cohort, but I noticed two trends:
1) Disciplines such as chemical biology, nanomaterials, P-chem, and computational chemistry tended to stay in longer postdocs.
2) About 20% of the faculty profiles were in more than one postdoc or other fellowship program prior to their faculty appointment.
Thoughts? Sound right, or wrong? Please let me know in the comments!
--
*Caveats:
These postdocs reflect pending faculty appointments; I'm clearly not counting those who went into government, pharmaceutical, industry, or left chemistry entirely. If someone has a good idea for how to capture that data, I'm all ears.
Counting time: If someone gave a graduation year - "Ph.D. 2009"- I assumed a postdoctoral stint until their faculty start date. For example, 2015 start = 6 years a postdoc. If, however, they provided a range - "postdoc 2012-2014" - I assumed that they postdoc'd the difference of that time, or 2 years, despite the fact that, depending on start and end dates, that could reasonably be interpreted as any length of time between 13 months (Dec 2012-Jan 2014) and 36 months (Jan 2012-Dec 2014).
Of the 73 new faculty starting in 2015 or 2016 (as of June 2015), I was only able to find bio-sketch information for half. The following people from my list are represented in the above statistics: Li, Engle, Hyster, Matson, Menard, Personick, Thoi, Tsui, Wasa, Blakemore, Browne, Devery, Gahlmann, Kempa, Limmer, Nelson, Sing, Thompson, Bantz, Hubbard, Garcia-Bosch, Huo, Wei Li, Miller, Rossini, Seiple, Wu, Anand, Boudreau, Genereux, Jiang, Sletten, Theberge, Fu, Ke, Conley, Raston.
OK, apologies, chemblogosphere: today is apparently write-guest-posts-for-Chemjobber day.
He poses an interesting question in his "Ivory Filter Flask" post from earlier today:
" What is the median length of a postdoc these days, anyways?"
Well, I may have some answers to that question. Looking through the New Hires, I put together a list, and ran some basic statistics*:
| MEAN: | 3.7 years |
| MODE: | 3 years |
| MEDIAN | 4 years |
MAX: 8 years
(n = 38)
It's tough to make general statements about such a small cohort, but I noticed two trends:
1) Disciplines such as chemical biology, nanomaterials, P-chem, and computational chemistry tended to stay in longer postdocs.
2) About 20% of the faculty profiles were in more than one postdoc or other fellowship program prior to their faculty appointment.
Thoughts? Sound right, or wrong? Please let me know in the comments!
--
*Caveats:
These postdocs reflect pending faculty appointments; I'm clearly not counting those who went into government, pharmaceutical, industry, or left chemistry entirely. If someone has a good idea for how to capture that data, I'm all ears.
Counting time: If someone gave a graduation year - "Ph.D. 2009"- I assumed a postdoctoral stint until their faculty start date. For example, 2015 start = 6 years a postdoc. If, however, they provided a range - "postdoc 2012-2014" - I assumed that they postdoc'd the difference of that time, or 2 years, despite the fact that, depending on start and end dates, that could reasonably be interpreted as any length of time between 13 months (Dec 2012-Jan 2014) and 36 months (Jan 2012-Dec 2014).
Of the 73 new faculty starting in 2015 or 2016 (as of June 2015), I was only able to find bio-sketch information for half. The following people from my list are represented in the above statistics: Li, Engle, Hyster, Matson, Menard, Personick, Thoi, Tsui, Wasa, Blakemore, Browne, Devery, Gahlmann, Kempa, Limmer, Nelson, Sing, Thompson, Bantz, Hubbard, Garcia-Bosch, Huo, Wei Li, Miller, Rossini, Seiple, Wu, Anand, Boudreau, Genereux, Jiang, Sletten, Theberge, Fu, Ke, Conley, Raston.
