Postdocs

But to continue, with my experience in chemistry at three universities and now industry, chemistry is easily the most useful or practical PhD. They are also the most balance social and intelligent of the big three (bio, physics, and chemistry).

The post docs I encountered we're all good at what they did, had good personalities (generally not bitter at their situation). Most of what I learned was knowledge and techniques passed down from them rather than literature (unless specific to my projects or patents). A few of my friends from gradschool became post docs in their advisors groups while waiting to find employment.

Finding professorships is rare and extremely difficult but most people getting Chemistry PhDs are looking towards industry. Those that drop out of science completely typically had horrible experiences with their advisors for one reason or another or just couldn't have it post PhD (where their advisor likely coddled them the whole way through)

And to be more specific, Post Docs are rarely because people want to do them. It's because they can't find jobs yet for one reason or another.

Cite?

I did a post doc to learn more about my field. To get tenure you need 2 - 3 post doc positions, each 2 - 4 years in duration. Going straight from a PhD to professor is unrealistic.

In the end I did a stint as a programmer to pay down my student loans. These days I am a patent attorney and quite a lot of my colleagues have a similar background to mine.

That's the thing. You want to be a professor. In chemistry, almost no one wants to do it unless they
>Have no job prospects yet
>Are emotionally attached to their projects and want to stay
>Need the stepping Stones towards a professorship

Not many people want to go on to a professorship and in chemistry, the longer you stay in a post doc the more questionable of an industrial candidate you become.

>the longer you stay in a post doc the more questionable of an industrial candidate you become
The problem is that to become a professor you need so many years as a post doc that your industrial career becomes unlikely and effectively you become captive to the university and the people who can give you the promotion you need with increasing desperation. An acquaintance of mine has been hanging on for 20 years and I am pretty sure he is played for a fool.

We needed more people so I sent him an offer to come for an interview. About a week later he got tenure (though not full professor). Reverse blackmail, in effect.

In my line of work we are not adverse to people having done a few rounds as post doc.

I don't like the trend that to become a professor you need several post docs. That can absolutely fuck your career and life.

Yeah I agree it has become a high risk career. Part is due to finding for a lot of PhDs and far less funding for professorships. Academia, at least around here, is getting very toxic. Professors demanding to have their names on papers is routine but now post docs working on inventions are left off the list of inventors which is basically fraud. Academia is aggregating a lot of psychopaths and is unwilling to do anything about it.

>20 years a post doc
that’s insane

That's the main reason I decided against academia. Hell I made more entering into my first job than untenured faculty would. And I had stock options.

In my undergrad, my organic I&II professor pissed all over the desk of a younger professor for only putting him as a mid author for doing a few x Ray diffractions in the supporting information. That shit is fucking insane. The professor in the lab next to mine during PhDs would never put his students on patents because by his logic it's all his idea since he pulls in the funding and it's his equipment and has his name as first author on everything. He's a good don't lunatic that only employed foreigners so they can't say shit unless he kicks them out and they have to go back to their respective shithole.

I respect everybody with PhD (except in medicine).

Why do you respect someone with a gender studies PhD and not someone with a medicine PhD?

>God damn lunatic

He fucked everyone over and the university knew it but they didn't give a shit because his work bought the university two whole buildings and he's the guy in nonlinear optical materials design in the world.

Humorous tidbit though, when he gives talks he can't stop grabbing his balls and dick through his trousers. I like that he doesn't give a flying fuck and is brilliant but it's too bad he's an absolute destructive asshole.

It's the only PhD you do for the money and the social glory.

What's insane now is set to become the new norm, friendo. It's going to get worse as universities pump out PhDs faster than Africa pumps out babies.

do you mean a Medical Doctorate? what about people with a Juris Doctorate?

>that’s insane
I agree. Even 10 years means a lot of poverty, see which hasn't improved much in 10 years since the strip was made.

I'm currently a postdoc at a huge, public US university. I wouldn't consider myself to be bitter or desperate - I realize that this current appointment is just a temporary position, but it's also an important stepping stone to obtaining an actual career job.

this is why I’m set on going into industry, it’s still competitive, but a lot less than academia.

this is me. nih PI and fellow applied for patent after I left on something I was told not to patent by the PI. fuck them

How many post-docs are considered reasonable? All the profs I've worked with have 1-2 before tenure track job. On their CVs. I figured I'd try 1-2 max and quit if I didn't make it. (Starting cs Ph.D next fall, wanna be an academic)

Why is it like this? Why is there so little grant money for scientific research? Wouldn't it make more sense to just fund more research and get more people doing it?

Because the American people deemed government funds for basic research to be unimportant and undesirable government spending that produces nothing.

>Muh free market will fix it!

Leaving out inventors on a patent application is fraud against the USPTO and is sanctioned by making the patent unenforceable. That is quite drastic, yet overly feudal professors never learn.

And the pattern you describe is one I know rather well. It happens often that junior researchers are deceived this way. If you have kept the documents you are in a position to bring the house down on them.

t.Patent Attorney.

American oligarchs (Koch, Mercer, etc) literally spend billions of dollars propagandizing to a dumbass electorate that science/education are useless, unrelated to daily life, not pertinent to the health of the nation and even fake. Half of our 2 major political parties genuinely think science and education are fake news.

>so why dont you vote them out
Because they also spend billions of dollars cheating to stay in power using tactics such as gerrymanderring and voter suppression.

Americans are too fucking retarded to understand that the economy is not partitioned into distinct, unrelated parts. They think that a private company investing in research won't affect them but using tax dollars to invest in research will. They can't figure out that A) private companies will not fund significant and long term research (big American drug companies just recently defunded ALS and other research despite having record profits and a huge tax cut) and B) when private companies do research, that cost affects everyone involved in the economy. When a private research firm goes under, tax money bails them out. When a private company funds something, they expect to sell it no matter how junk it is. So they will launch multimillion dollar marketing campaigns whose cost gets absorbed into the cost of the product. And so on. There's lots of ways private company research is costlier than government research. But Americans are fucking retarded.

Its barely worth trying to explain to people that science is the reason their lives are the way they are. Government science created computers and the internet. Science is why they're alive after trips to the hospital. And so on. Most of the time they just deny it and act like technology just poofs out of thin air. And dont even bother trying to explain that the most successful societies of all time heavily valued science.

I hope I can move out of this hellhole soon. Glad I learned German in college.

>Glad I learned German in college
If you have a problem with America the last place you would want to go is Germany. I mean, unless you are a cuck. And if that is the case then knock yourself out.

>pursuing a PhD for any reason beyond knowledge
>staying postdoc for any reason beyond knowledge
You already fucked up. It is not a way to get a career or make money. Going that far is strictly to pursue knowledge, or because you couldn't find work elsewhere. That's the end of it. You're better off becoming a high school teacher if you care about financial stability.

There is no better position to pursue knowledge than as a full-time professor. You either die a professor or live long enough to become Geometric Unity, shitposting his research on vixra and Veeky Forums because no one else will listen to him.

The pure pursuit of knowledge is impossible nowadays. Even if you are a genius, you need connections with the wider academic community and you can only get that with a prestigious position that establishes your dominance. If you don't get that, you end up as Geometric Unity.

>this is what greedy PIs want PhDs to believe

>Yes, GOOD GOY! Do not seek financial stability! Do not sell your skills! Instead, give them to us for free. Do it for the "pursuit of knowledge", goy.

>post doc in advisor’s group
Yikes.

Wrong board

Relax dr goldstein, nobody's coming to take away your tenure. That was merely a joke spoken on every board on Veeky Forums.

you do realize that operating outside of the ((($$$))) paradigm is exactly what the jew fears, right?

It's not bad if you don't stay for more than a year. You basically get stability to find a job after defending and get a pay raise for a short time. But you need to get the fuck out asap and not linger there.

German is also used in parts of Switzerland.

The cucked parts of Switzerland, I must assume.

I was not aware that any such part existed in Switzerland. After all they wanted to ban minarets.

Fuck why is Switzerland so woke and I don't live there yet :(

>He fucked everyone over and the university knew it but they didn't give a shit because his work bought the university two whole buildings and he's the guy in nonlinear optical materials design in the world.
One of the most prolific professors here in terms of publications was a fraud. He participated in a ring of other "scientists" pumping out junk articles in dubious journals "peer reviewed" by other members of the ring, and later returning the favour for other frauds.

The university must have known as they paid a lot of these junk journals. Still, he was so prolific and other professors were not publishing much at all so the university didn't want to rock the boat. So that scam went on for years until a newspaper started digging into it, probably tipped off by a disgruntled student.

The morals around here is at the same level as your average alley cat.

they also want to eradicate publicly funded broadcast. so in a couple years all they have is switzo-FOX just like ameritards.

Post docs are great. I have worked in several labs and the majority seem willing to help out with a project or talk out a protocol/new experiment. Maybe you are the problem or your lab environment is just toxic.

THIS, no money=poor jews