Setting Postdoc Goals

Prior to the weekly meeting with my mentor last Friday, Petra emailed me to say that we would be developing a one page mentoring plan for NSF.  Beginning April 2010, all NSF proposals that request funding for a postdoc will require a mentoring plan.  There was a little confusion, since ultimately this requirement doesn't affect me.  I'm funded by the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences.  However, we decided that this would be a good exercise for both of us anyway.

My immediate reaction to her email was to google what was out there.  Why reinvent the wheel?  Surely other postdocs have done this and someone has posted an example.  Nada.  I did find a nice IDP (individual development plan) at UCSF that outlines an exercise to help postdocs think about their skills, career goals, and annual goals.  The IDP is designed primarily for life science grads and postdoc trainees.  As I went through the questions on the form I could see that with some modification, it would also be useful for social scientists. 

I showed the IDP to Petra during Friday's meeting.  And she set in motion the exercise that brings me here - setting goals.  I spent the better part of this afternoon thinking about the projects I will be working on for Petra as part of ALCCAR, but also my own research in Mozambique that I need to continue analyzing and writing up for publication.   I filled four pages in my lab notebook and numerous pieces of scratch paper during my brainstorming session with the projects Petra wants me to work on as well as my own stuff.  Now that I think about it, I could have used the whiteboard in my office.  I only planned the timeline through May 2010 though.  Summer research in Ghana begins in June, and at this time I am not sure when I will be in Africa.  Planning out my field research schedule for Mozambique was sort of like this, but really I don't think anything in grad school fully prepared me for developing my career.

Eugene Russo writes in his 2004 Nature article that postdocs need to "map out their own path."

Successful, quick postdoctorates are most likely when students take at least as much responsibility for their own training as the institutions and faculty do.

Sitting down to think about my priorities - both for the year and for my career - wasn't something that I thought I would be doing.  But further reading on the internet suggests I'd be a fool not to do so, particularly given the current employment climate.   I like research and teaching, but do I want the high pressure environment of a Tier I research university or something a little less stressful?  What would that look like?  Will I fit into a traditional anthropology department?  Or is my interdisciplinary take a little to broad or narrow?  Would I be employable in say a geography department?  Is my interdisciplinary background a help or a hindrance?   Should I just give up on academia and look for work with an NGO or governmental-type agency?

Then there is the professional development component to postdoc skill growth that goes beyond the How to Write a CV, Give a Job Talk, or Create a Good Powerpoint.  These are all valuable skills but not the sum total of professional development.  I knew this and had tried doing some of this while I was working on my doctorate, but now these activities have become really important.  Networking, brainstorming future research plans and papers, attending a few interesting seminars that could inform my research, catching up reading that I missed while dissertating, and creating research and writing schedules/timelines are some of the things I'm now working on.

So far, I've attended seminars in indigenous knowledge, ethnohistory, and gender & climate change in my efforts to network with folks outside the geography department, and learn something new and different.  Yesterday I registered for a professional development conference at PSU sponsored by Graduate Women in Science.  I also sent in my dissertation abstract to an interdisciplinary working group, DISCCRS, that hosts annual symposiums for newly-minted scientists studying climate from all sorts of perspectives to network and gain additional research and communication skills.  It is the first step in their symposium application process.  All of these groups have already started sending me notices about resources online.  A definite next professional development step is to figure out how to be more efficient with my email.

My final step in this goal setting process will be to post my final IDP here as an example.   :)

Additional Resources:

Masur, S.K. and S.L. Schmid. 2009. Goal setting and time management for postdocs.  Presentation MSSM Postdoctoral Program.

Russo, E. 2004. Fast track: charting the course of your postdoc. Nature 431: 1126-1127.

Ali, L. and B. Graham. 2000. Moving on in your career: a guide for academic researchers and postgraduates. Routledge.  (online sample)

Feibelman, P.J. 1993. A PhD is not enough: a guide to survival in science. Basic Books. (online sample)

Searching for info on the postdoc experience

Now that I am heading into a postdoc I thought it might be wise to do some research on what I should expect.  Ha!  Like everything else I've done for grad school, it seems that I should have been working on this 2 years ago.  Never fear, the internet is here! 

There isn't a whole lot out there specifically relevant to social science postdocs - unless you are looking for one.  When I broadened my search, to postdocs and postdoc blogs (just trying to get a feel for others' experiences) I got a couple of hits from bloggers in biological and physical sciences.  Reading their stuff was rather depressing, and maybe I've been super-protected at UGA but the professors in the anthropology department here don't treat other people so poorly - colleagues, grad students, or the occasional postdoc.  I also did a search for women postdocs since I fit into that special category too.  Again, more depressing stuff.  I'm hoping that the nasty stuff I've read applies to the biological and physical sciences, and that social scientists have their shit together for the most part.  I get the sense that my new mentor and department do have their act together, but I may run make friends in other departments and it would be helpful to understand a bit where they might be coming from.  As my mom tells me, forewarned is forearmed.

A couple of the postdoc blogs from my search:

Dent Cartoons: NIH Post-doc Life


YoungFemaleScientist 

I also looked for books and came up with a couple of good reads.

Gray, Paul and David Drew.  2008.  What they didn't teach you in graduate school: 199 helpful hints for success in your academic career.  Stylus: Sterling, VA.
This book was not only funny, but useful in terms of looking at the entire academic career arc (not just the postdoc).

COSEPUP.  2000.  Enhancing the postdoctoral experience for scientists and engineers: a guide for postdoctoral scholars, advisers, institutions, funding organizations and disciplinary societies. National Academy of Sciences.  National Academies Press.
This entire text is available free on the National Academies Press website (linked above).  You do have to create an account, but it is free and gives you access to other free book pdfs.

Other articles and links:

The National Postdoctoral Association

Best Places to Postdoc in 2006 (most up-to-date stats I found)

The 3 Worst Places to be a Postdoc

Penn State also has their own Postdoctoral Office and Postdoc Society.

Given all the resources out there on the web (despite the under-representation by social scientists, or maybe I'm not looking where I should), it is interesting that most of the information is about finding a postdoc, rather than the day-to-day experience of a postdoc.  Perhaps this is a byproduct of the amount of work postdocs are expected to do - I hope it is the work and not something else.

If anyone finds this and wants to leave a message about their experience - particularly if you did a social science postdoc, I'd love to hear about it.

Research Preparations & Presentations

From L to R: me, Vania Pedro, Linda Manjate, Angelo Francisco, Márcia Langa, Leocadia Naene, and Sergio Julane

My research group finally got to present publicly today. Even if the public that turned out consisted of 4 professors and a geography student. I was very disappointed. We originally planned to present our research proposals last week, and I had sent out emails early last week in anticipation. About an hour after I got out the last email, I got a call from Cornélio requesting that we move the presentation to this week because people at the Dept. of Natural Area Conservation (Ministry of Tourism) wanted to attend. He wanted to give the students an extra week to polish up their presentations since they would be presenting to more than just the department. Okay. That sounded good. DNAC is a potentially good connection for students who are looking for work or internships after they graduate. So, I emailed everyone again. Unfortunately, two of the people that would have definitely attended were in the field today.

Students got their titles to me by Monday. I forwarded the flyer to Cornelio for posting in the biology department. I came in Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday to help polish the presentations as best I could, but some of the language stuff still flys over my head. Late Wednesday, I received 2 flyers for posting in Geography and Anthropology. Angelo and I walked them over to the other departments and posted them, but I didn't have a good feeling about it.

Anticipating that people would be a few minutes late, we used our extra time to upload everyone's slide shows and correct last minute typos. I learned that attention to detail surpasses national boundaries. Mozambican biology, anthropology, and geography students are just as picky as their US counterparts when it comes to making presentations look good. They might even be more detail oriented. Angelo spent 10 minutes making sure all his fonts matched and were large enough for easy viewing. Linda and Vania (picture) looked over their presentations to anticipate potential questions - which they then proceeded to ask one another.

Angelina Martins, a botany professora that I am working with, showed up about 20 minutes before we were to start. Cornélio had asked her to introduce our group, and make sure we had a projector set up. Already done (that was me being anal retentive). A colleague of Sergio's from geography showed up a few minutes before 2PM to see what we were planning and to support Sergio who was pretty nervous about presenting. (He did a fantastic job BTW.) Then Esmeralda Marianas, an anthropology professora, arrived a little late but she had just gotten out of a meeting and rushed over. Esmeralda is going to be teaching ecological anthropology next term and co-supervises Vania and Linda with me. Cornélio Ntumi and Eunice Ribeiro, both biology professors, arrived an hour into the presentations, but they had warned me that they might be late because they had to attend a thesis defense for another student.

That was our audience. I can't tell you how disappointed I was - pissed off might be a better term. The students worked very hard to improve their presentations - practicing, rewording slides, reformatting to make them clearer, etc. We presented to ourselves and our audience of one. I am not counting the professors because we've been working with the students all this time already. Well perhaps Esmeralda counts since she didn't know too much about the biology projects in advance. But no DNAC, no other professors or students from biology, no professors from agronomy (they were invited). Remember, I didn't have a good feeling about posting the flyer so late in geography or anthropology. One can always hope, but the pragmatic part of me did prepare to be disappointed from that direction.

I can post their work here and reach a huge audience. Over the next couple of days I will be posting a description of the projects (and linking to presentations if I can figure out how to do this). I will post a picture of each member of our Maputaland Landscape and Culture Research Group (the link goes to a separate but related project), with the title of their research, a brief description of the project, and contact information (they requested the last part). If you are interested please comment.