The intellectual and practical development of a post-doc.
Intellectual: When a newly minted PhD chooses a post-doc lab, he/she has the opportunity to change fields, learn new ways of thinking, and explore different areas of science. I definitely made a leap when I started my post-doc – moving from yeast cell biology to zebrafish developmental biology. After a bit of frustration and feelings of “lostness”, I realized that I was building on a very firm foundation of knowledge and critical thinking skills gained in grad school. I took more ownership of my new research and I’ve now established my own unique experimental repertoire – based on my various experiences and interests – so that I can design and perform experiments to address interesting questions about cell behaviors including proliferation, differentiation, and migration. By choosing to pursue a post-doc in a new and different field in a new and different place, I’ve grown personally and intellectually. I’m happy to report that I’ve become a scientist who loves reading papers, who enjoys thinking about all the stuff that we still don’t understand, and who can generally hold her own in many different scientific discussions and debates.
Practical: In addition to the basic wet-bench experience you gain as a post-doc, the most essential part of post-doc training is the opportunity to develop what I call “scientific ESP”. This extra sense enables you to know when projects should be pursued and when they should be dropped faster than a stinkbug. It helps you discern which is the “killer experiment” – the one experiment that will let you know if your research is destined for publication in a top journal, a respectable journal, or the rubbish bin. And it reveals which areas in your particular field are ripe for investigation. Some may also say that “scientific ESP” helps you seek out the departmental seminars where gourmet snacks are served.
Skills gained through activities like talking with experts, thinking, teaching, mentoring, and organizing journal clubs are sometimes are called transferrable skills since they can be applied to anything and everything.
-If you can explain your science to a non-scientist, you might convince them to vote for more science related funding. Ok. That might be wishful thinking, but at least you might convince some kid that learning and exploring the microscopic world can be a really cool (and a way to know more than their parents).
-If you can plan your experiments and budget your time so that you get a result each week (not necessarily a good result or a very meaningful one…but a result or a pretty picture), then you might just be able to plan other aspects of your life.
-And most importantly, if you can follow a protocol, you can learn to follow a recipe and cook yourself a decent meal.
Being a post-doc provides all kinds of learning opportunities. For this post, I’ve highlighted some of the good learning experiences I’ve had as a post-doc. But, in the interest of full disclosure, being a post-doc is not always fantastic. For some insight into that matter, I refer you to the cartoon below and others from a former post-doc, Alexander Dent.
Thinking about the next step...
Well said!