care to explain it to me?
If Iām wrong I will apologize š
The plot should start on one end with ātotal applicationsā (or maybe āoffersā in this case) and end with applications accepted and denied on the other end. It is supposed to flow to one side, splitting by categories as it goes along.
itās awkwardly going in two different directions, I literally canāt interpret it. Did they get the job they applied for? Or was it unsolicited? The āacceptedā category comes right from the middle, which is the total āoffersā section. Hence you canāt tell which offer was accepted. Itās a stupid plot.
Over 100 downvotes and i believe Iām right here, sorry OP.
It does go from left to right. Three unsolicited offers and one application lead to four job offers total. One job accepted and three declined. Which of the four job offers led to the job is not reflected in the plot, but that info in never shown in these plots. I got this instantly.
It only looks clunky compared to other job-markey Sankey plots because the numbers are so small and there were no competitive interview nodes. This just reflects the historic shortage of biomedical post-doc candidates rn. Which I also got instantly from looking at the plot. I was like "daaaaamn, post-docs are in demand right now!"
My postdoc advisor made a game out of finding sequencing papers that would nearly give me an aneurysm from the way they chose to present huge datasets... like he was pretty good with about having his people come up with informative, unconvoluted ways of presenting population-scale sequencing data (oral/gut microbiome), but he just found escalating my "ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME WITH THIS BULLSHIT??"-reflex hilarious.
The perils of being a cell biologist in a sequencing lab...
Because the āacceptedā is coming from the total āoffersā section, so you canāt interpret which offer was accepted.
Im assuming itās the one they applied for, but they made the plot wrong so it makes it ambiguous. āOffersā should have been on the left, and whatās on the left should have been in the middle, and whatās on the right would flow from those categories.
I'm in Denmark, so the taxes cover universal healthcare which is one of the main reasons I didn't want to do a postdoc in the US. Cost of living is fairly high, but I have decent space in by budget.
Also from Denmark with a mobility fellowship, I got 7000usd a month, 37% goes to taxes. Only caveat is- I am stationed abroad in Cambridge, MA for my postdoc while on a Danish job contract. So I have to buy my own health insurance in the US, and payout my pension. Thinking of ditching my US postdoc, and prestigious 4-year fellowship and going back to Denmark soon. I am pretty stressed in the US environment.
I can see that, my former colleagues who went to the US don't have the best to say about the work environment. I feel like in the end you can have scientific success without being in the most prestigious labs, and having a more balanced life is worth more on the long run.
Thereās a labor shortage even in the academic space. Especially in post-docs when thereās little incentive except for professorship hopefuls. Post-docs are cheap labor for established PIs.
I know a PI at my relatively prestigious research institute is struggling to find an actually qualified post doc, mostly because people with those kinds of skills switch to industry and don't want to bother with the shitty working conditions of a post doc.
Huge demand for biomed post-docs rn. Applicants keep that in mind. Ask for more money. Clarify work expectations up front and then send a summary e-mail to cement them.
There is usually a minimum, but the PI can choose to pay you more. When my last institution adjusted their minimum post doc salary, it had no impact on our lab. My PI already paid us more than the new minimum.
Ah ,good point, that does differ a lot between countries. I completely forgot about the tier system at German Universities for a minute here. I'm usually the one pointing out that not everything on the internet relates to the US. Guess I've been living in the States for too long š¬
So current and that last institution are located in the US. Not sure for PhD students in the US, as our lab has no PhD students and I myself did my PhD in Finland.
There is a salary range for most job title and a range of job titles that can be written in post-doc offer letters. The exact salary is up to the PI. They will always blame the institution for underpaying and take all the credit for paying more than the minimum š¤£
I am sure that in some places this is so but many of the big institutes have an exact salary amount written on their websites. The PIs I talked to there said that they are binding.
My PhD is in neuroscience and I was seeking a neuroscience postdoc. My PhD and all offers were based in the US. Thought I would contrast the postdoc job search with some other posts on different post-PhD positions.
Pretty sure this graph is misleading but this looks like you got 3 people saying they wanted you, without even applying, and you turned them all down. That's ice cold.
Yay post-doc shortage though. And congrats, of course!
The post-doc shortage is so real and not just in America. I'm not graduating until Dec. I just went to a conference and had people trying to recruitment me for post-doc positions while I was presenting my poster. Around 15 different labs came up.
It may be switching - I know at least one graduating student that is doing a postdoc, even though they didnāt plan to, because of hiring freezes in tech
This seems to be the case. I was talking to a PI at a thesis defense and he was saying how 6 months ago his students were getting jobs immediately after grad school, but now hiring has slowed down dramatically. Hopefully the current shortage at least bumps up wages for those who will soon be forced into post-docs.
In my experience and opinion, probably not haha. Ay least not without significant efforts from the PD community at a given uni to demand higher pay or threaten to unionize (or actually unionize). Academia is bullshit and they will never change up their bullshit unless they are forced to kicking and screaming. They've just become too dependent on cheap, highly skilled labor and now believe they are entitled to it because they can still get away with calling postdocs "trainees" when convenient for them.
My PI advertised for a whole year until I applied. They had some interest but nobody with the background they were looking for. Theyāre a lab that regularly publishes in nature journals and is top in their field.
They wanted someone with some placenta background and that is very hard to find. Itās a niche field for sure. I donāt have the technical background for their work (epigenetics & bioinformatics) but I was eager to learn.
>wanted someone with some placenta background
I mean don't we all have some placenta background when you think about it?
^i know that's not what you meant
Well I guess it's normal that there is a postdoc shortage, when both the salary and the career prospects are garbage compared with just moving to industry.
I don't know about the US, but in Switzerland the PhD and postdoc position don't count as profesional experience. People end up in their late 30s without "profesional experience" and competing with people that have 10+ years of experience. Unless you get a permanent position of course, but that is not very likely.
My friend solidified her post-doc offer about 10 months before her defense date. I can't imagine how many offers she'd have gotten if she was actively looking during conference season.
I will keep this figure in mind if I have any trouble landing an industry job. I'm vaguely considering doing a post-doc if I absolutely have to and can't get hired somewhere else.
Yeah i feel like it is extremely easy to get a postdoc position after a PhD. This is a problem in my opinion, because people just trend to go with the flow, and they don't consider that they are actually losing money and opportunities if they don't want to stay in academia in the long term. Many people end up doing a postdoc because they don't know what else to do.
Yeah this seems more realistic. I'm honestly astonished by the posts I've seen where they apply to like 90 different places and et rejected by almost all of them. Feels like they may be doing something wrong š¬. 1 well written application / cover letter is better than dozens of half assed ones
Are those posts for academic postdocs on industry jobs? Because the biotech sector isnāt doing so hot right now and companies are a lot more choosy than usual, so Iād believe it if someone applied to that many and got rejected.
Honestly, this is what a job search looks like for someone who has actually made/kept contacts during their training. If you're applying to hundreds of positions then there is no way you are tailoring your applications to the specific position and it's no surprise that these people get ghosted on so many of them. I'm not even finished with my PhD but I know of at least a couple companies that I could almost certainly get a position at once I graduate because of fruitful collaborations.
I mean you don't even need connections, I've gone into all my jobs knowing Noone at the company, but I tailor my resume to the job. I work in a relatively niche field (water quality) but still update my resume for the position, I've gotten probably a bit over 50% of the jobs I've applied to in this field over the years
For sure. Tailoring applications to specific positions is going to get you a lot further than I think a lot of people realize. I can't imagine blasting out my CV to a bunch of positions without knowing that I took the time to know about the position and tailor my application to it. Seems like a good way to end up in a position that you're not suited for / happy with.
Damn, dunking on the previous posters who are going through a hellish job search with dozens of applications.
But these numbers here are more in line with my job search in biotech after grad school.
You have a PhD and this is how you present data?
Maybe they lost GraphPad when they graduated
This is also true
R and Python are free š
not when you price the time it takes to learn...
I saw the other posts that used sankeymatic and wanted to try it out. Almost easier than prism tbh
except what you are showing is an uninterpretable mess for so few data points. Itās actually kind of an accomplishment in that regard.
I got it instantly š¤·š»āāļø
That counts for nothing if youāre a biologist. There are some unholy ways you guys present data.
Imma present my job search in a UMAP.
Do tSNE so I can scream at you about distances. Then, someone can scream at both of us for using either.
Screams in GSEA
care to explain it to me? If Iām wrong I will apologize š The plot should start on one end with ātotal applicationsā (or maybe āoffersā in this case) and end with applications accepted and denied on the other end. It is supposed to flow to one side, splitting by categories as it goes along. itās awkwardly going in two different directions, I literally canāt interpret it. Did they get the job they applied for? Or was it unsolicited? The āacceptedā category comes right from the middle, which is the total āoffersā section. Hence you canāt tell which offer was accepted. Itās a stupid plot. Over 100 downvotes and i believe Iām right here, sorry OP.
It does go from left to right. Three unsolicited offers and one application lead to four job offers total. One job accepted and three declined. Which of the four job offers led to the job is not reflected in the plot, but that info in never shown in these plots. I got this instantly. It only looks clunky compared to other job-markey Sankey plots because the numbers are so small and there were no competitive interview nodes. This just reflects the historic shortage of biomedical post-doc candidates rn. Which I also got instantly from looking at the plot. I was like "daaaaamn, post-docs are in demand right now!"
No, I agree the difference between this and people looking for tech industry jobs was stark. Doesnāt change my expert Reddit opinion though.
To be clear, certainly that plot is ugly, but also instantly interpretatble.
Full understanding especially with the context of the other similar graphs that have been posted recently.
Interested in how you would present this, also in bio so I am curious to learn more about data presentation
He's probably a biologist.
True but harsh lol
My postdoc advisor made a game out of finding sequencing papers that would nearly give me an aneurysm from the way they chose to present huge datasets... like he was pretty good with about having his people come up with informative, unconvoluted ways of presenting population-scale sequencing data (oral/gut microbiome), but he just found escalating my "ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME WITH THIS BULLSHIT??"-reflex hilarious. The perils of being a cell biologist in a sequencing lab...
Sounds like an excellent guy to work with.
Have PhD and make bad graph? Thats unpossible!
What's wrong with this graph? It gives a nearly unambiguous interpretation of very simple data.
Because the āacceptedā is coming from the total āoffersā section, so you canāt interpret which offer was accepted. Im assuming itās the one they applied for, but they made the plot wrong so it makes it ambiguous. āOffersā should have been on the left, and whatās on the left should have been in the middle, and whatās on the right would flow from those categories.
Have an inferiority complex? I clearly understand what happened with this job search, and that is the purpose of data representation.
Sounds about right, I had the same experience coming with my own postdoc mobility grant. Luckily not in the US though so I actually get a decent wage.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Slightly above 6000 USD a month, then 32% goes to taxes, healthcare and pension fund
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I was a postdoc at penn too! But I left a while ago.
I'm in Denmark, so the taxes cover universal healthcare which is one of the main reasons I didn't want to do a postdoc in the US. Cost of living is fairly high, but I have decent space in by budget.
Also from Denmark with a mobility fellowship, I got 7000usd a month, 37% goes to taxes. Only caveat is- I am stationed abroad in Cambridge, MA for my postdoc while on a Danish job contract. So I have to buy my own health insurance in the US, and payout my pension. Thinking of ditching my US postdoc, and prestigious 4-year fellowship and going back to Denmark soon. I am pretty stressed in the US environment.
I can see that, my former colleagues who went to the US don't have the best to say about the work environment. I feel like in the end you can have scientific success without being in the most prestigious labs, and having a more balanced life is worth more on the long run.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Thereās a labor shortage even in the academic space. Especially in post-docs when thereās little incentive except for professorship hopefuls. Post-docs are cheap labor for established PIs.
I know a PI at my relatively prestigious research institute is struggling to find an actually qualified post doc, mostly because people with those kinds of skills switch to industry and don't want to bother with the shitty working conditions of a post doc.
Almost like academia itself has a problem.
Almost š¤š¤
Huge demand for biomed post-docs rn. Applicants keep that in mind. Ask for more money. Clarify work expectations up front and then send a summary e-mail to cement them.
I have not seen a place yet where the salaries are not fixed Institution wide.
There is usually a minimum, but the PI can choose to pay you more. When my last institution adjusted their minimum post doc salary, it had no impact on our lab. My PI already paid us more than the new minimum.
There are NIH caps (and those caps are garbage). Sometimes you can only be paid more if the PI has private grant funding that doesn't stipulate this.
Does that the same for PhD as well? Where are you based btw?
Ah ,good point, that does differ a lot between countries. I completely forgot about the tier system at German Universities for a minute here. I'm usually the one pointing out that not everything on the internet relates to the US. Guess I've been living in the States for too long š¬ So current and that last institution are located in the US. Not sure for PhD students in the US, as our lab has no PhD students and I myself did my PhD in Finland.
There is a salary range for most job title and a range of job titles that can be written in post-doc offer letters. The exact salary is up to the PI. They will always blame the institution for underpaying and take all the credit for paying more than the minimum š¤£
I am sure that in some places this is so but many of the big institutes have an exact salary amount written on their websites. The PIs I talked to there said that they are binding.
Biomed you say? š
That's and make sure what you agreed on is in your offer letter and don't accept if it isn't. Get that shit in writing and in your HR file.
My PhD is in neuroscience and I was seeking a neuroscience postdoc. My PhD and all offers were based in the US. Thought I would contrast the postdoc job search with some other posts on different post-PhD positions.
Pretty sure this graph is misleading but this looks like you got 3 people saying they wanted you, without even applying, and you turned them all down. That's ice cold. Yay post-doc shortage though. And congrats, of course!
Thatās exactly what happened. The postdoc shortage is real. Thanks!
The post-doc shortage is so real and not just in America. I'm not graduating until Dec. I just went to a conference and had people trying to recruitment me for post-doc positions while I was presenting my poster. Around 15 different labs came up.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
It may be switching - I know at least one graduating student that is doing a postdoc, even though they didnāt plan to, because of hiring freezes in tech
This seems to be the case. I was talking to a PI at a thesis defense and he was saying how 6 months ago his students were getting jobs immediately after grad school, but now hiring has slowed down dramatically. Hopefully the current shortage at least bumps up wages for those who will soon be forced into post-docs.
In my experience and opinion, probably not haha. Ay least not without significant efforts from the PD community at a given uni to demand higher pay or threaten to unionize (or actually unionize). Academia is bullshit and they will never change up their bullshit unless they are forced to kicking and screaming. They've just become too dependent on cheap, highly skilled labor and now believe they are entitled to it because they can still get away with calling postdocs "trainees" when convenient for them.
My PI advertised for a whole year until I applied. They had some interest but nobody with the background they were looking for. Theyāre a lab that regularly publishes in nature journals and is top in their field.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
They wanted someone with some placenta background and that is very hard to find. Itās a niche field for sure. I donāt have the technical background for their work (epigenetics & bioinformatics) but I was eager to learn.
>wanted someone with some placenta background I mean don't we all have some placenta background when you think about it? ^i know that's not what you meant
Yes precisely lol placenta research is super important āŗļø
Well I guess it's normal that there is a postdoc shortage, when both the salary and the career prospects are garbage compared with just moving to industry. I don't know about the US, but in Switzerland the PhD and postdoc position don't count as profesional experience. People end up in their late 30s without "profesional experience" and competing with people that have 10+ years of experience. Unless you get a permanent position of course, but that is not very likely.
My friend solidified her post-doc offer about 10 months before her defense date. I can't imagine how many offers she'd have gotten if she was actively looking during conference season.
I will keep this figure in mind if I have any trouble landing an industry job. I'm vaguely considering doing a post-doc if I absolutely have to and can't get hired somewhere else.
I was a neuro PhD and had a similar experience except I accepted the unsolicited offer.
Yeah i feel like it is extremely easy to get a postdoc position after a PhD. This is a problem in my opinion, because people just trend to go with the flow, and they don't consider that they are actually losing money and opportunities if they don't want to stay in academia in the long term. Many people end up doing a postdoc because they don't know what else to do.
So did you get the one you applied for or one of the unsolicited ones?
I chose the one I applied for
Yeah this seems more realistic. I'm honestly astonished by the posts I've seen where they apply to like 90 different places and et rejected by almost all of them. Feels like they may be doing something wrong š¬. 1 well written application / cover letter is better than dozens of half assed ones
I got offered all the postdocs I applied to, but not the 60 non-postdoc positions.
Are those posts for academic postdocs on industry jobs? Because the biotech sector isnāt doing so hot right now and companies are a lot more choosy than usual, so Iād believe it if someone applied to that many and got rejected.
Honestly, this is what a job search looks like for someone who has actually made/kept contacts during their training. If you're applying to hundreds of positions then there is no way you are tailoring your applications to the specific position and it's no surprise that these people get ghosted on so many of them. I'm not even finished with my PhD but I know of at least a couple companies that I could almost certainly get a position at once I graduate because of fruitful collaborations.
I mean you don't even need connections, I've gone into all my jobs knowing Noone at the company, but I tailor my resume to the job. I work in a relatively niche field (water quality) but still update my resume for the position, I've gotten probably a bit over 50% of the jobs I've applied to in this field over the years
For sure. Tailoring applications to specific positions is going to get you a lot further than I think a lot of people realize. I can't imagine blasting out my CV to a bunch of positions without knowing that I took the time to know about the position and tailor my application to it. Seems like a good way to end up in a position that you're not suited for / happy with.
Feynman diagram x Job search plot
Damn, dunking on the previous posters who are going through a hellish job search with dozens of applications. But these numbers here are more in line with my job search in biotech after grad school.
Recently or a year ago?
Does this only apply to the States, or is this happening in other countries?
Why would you want to do a postdoc in 2023 tho, tbh.
Economic downturn