Penn Science Policy and Diplomacy Group

By Ian McLaughlin Earlier this month, postdocs and graduate students from several fields met to candidly discuss the challenges postdocs are encountering while pursuing careers in academic research.  The meeting began with an enumeration of these challenges, discussing the different elements contributing to the mounting obstacles preventing postdocs from attaining faculty positions – such as the scarcity of faculty positions and ballooning number of rising postdocs, funding mechanisms and cuts, the sub-optimal relationship between publications and the quality of science, and the inaccurate conception of what exactly a postdoctoral position should entail. From [15] At a fundamental level, there’s a surplus of rising doctoral students whose progression outpaces the availability of faculty positions at institutions capable of hosting the research they intended to perform [10,15] .  While 65% of PhDs attain postdocs, only 15-20% of postdocs attain te