After spending nearly ten years of training in academia, I realized a year into my postdoc that this career path was no longer an option for me — I no longer wanted to be part of the vicious cycle of publications, grant money and experiment-bending to fit a bottom line. Read more
Both supply and demand have contributed to an research-and-development (R&D) career bottleneck, according to a 15 December Science article signed by the 10 research leaders, who call themselves the Coalition for Next Generation Life Science. US federal research funding, when adjusted for inflation, declined by nearly 20% from 2003 to 2016, according to the article. Meanwhile, PhD candidates continue to enroll in doctoral programmes. The result is that only one in 10 trainees will gain a tenure-track position within five years of receiving their PhD. Many PhD holders then spend longer than they had anticipated in postdoc training positions, sometimes taking multiple fellowships while waiting for academic job openings to materialize. And the ones who do land such positions are taking longer to secure their first independent grant. Read more
The study, the latest in a lengthy string of gender-disparity findings in academia, quantifies a type of discrimination to which female scientists have long objected—the low number of speaker invitations that they receive compared with male scientists. One of the most egregious examples—speaker panels comprised solely of Caucasian males—has spawned the hashtag #manel (for ‘male panel’) on Twitter. Read more
No-one could fail to be moved by the video shared this week of a schoolboy crying over bullying. As adults we hope that we’ve moved away from school bullies. But in academia it seems that bullying is a persistent problem, with up to 42% of academics reporting some form of workplace bullying. In adult life, bullies rarely steal our lunch money or gum our hair. But they do steal our self-confidence, make us feel inadequate and question our work. My own experience with bullying has taught me how to recognise it, and what to do to overcome it in the workplace. Read more
Recently the House of Representatives essentially voted to destroy graduate education in the United States. By taxing tuition waivers as income — and therefore treating their taxable income as two to three times the amount graduate students are actually paid — the Republican tax bill would effectively put graduate study outside of the reach of all but the independently wealthy. While the Senate version of the tax bill does not include this provision, it is far from certain what the final bill after the reconciliation process will look like. Read more
A recent editorial in Nature described the harm that newly proposed changes to the United States tax code will have on graduate student finances. If passed, these regulations — ostensibly designed to simplify tax calculations — will eliminate benefits previously given to students. Of particular harm to graduate students and the scientific world would be the elimination of the tax-free status of tuition waivers. Read more
Congratulations on your faculty position at a newly established college! You think you know what the job entails: teaching, research, and some administrative service. As you read job advice, you wonder why so many pieces include the phrase “survival tips.” “Surviving” was your most-commonly-used word during your PhD and postdoc. Surely, there‘s no more surviving to be had in a brand new college? Read more
Female and Hispanic faculty representation in the United States increased significantly between 1992 and 2015, but more slowly for black and indigenous faculty members, according to a review study of personnel records from four large US land-grant institutions published in PLoS One . The small numbers of URM lack the data necessary to draw valid conclusions about retention. However, the study found, URM hiring is increasing, but not at the rate expected for the number of STEM doctoral degrees earned by the populations. Read more