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.

Student Presentations: Anthropology and Geography

Linda Manjate is an anthropology student at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane. She is interested in the connections between environmental, community, and personal health. Her research will look at how the Reserva Especial de Maputo affects the health of Gala's and Madjadjane's residents, the status/abundance of medicinal plants within reserve boundaries, and whether differences exist between medicinal plants harvested for personal use and market sale. lmanjate at yahoo dot com dot br


Vânia Pedro is an anthropology student at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane. She is interested in traditional wild plant knowledge and how people acquire this knowledge. Her research is looking at how plant knowledge is transmitted and the relationship between types of knowledge transmission and plant management practices. vania.pedro at nambu dot uem dot mz


Sergio Julane is a geography student at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane. He is interested in the socio-economic and physical environment factors that influence where people choose to live and build their homes. His research will assess the spatial distribution of homesteads in Gala and Madjadjane; looking at the influence of factors such as water supply, soil fertility, and livelihood. sejojulane at yahoo dot com dot br

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.

Sunday Morning Parade

I just watched a parade of women workers march past my house this morning. They are protesting labor laws for domestic workers. Domestic laborers, usually women, aren't paid much to do some serious work that we pay a lot for in the US -- childcare, doing laundry, cleaning the house. I recently hired a young woman to come in once a week to wash my laundry and clean my floors and bathroom. I pay her $30 a week for one day a week(5 hours), plus lunch and bus fare, and feel guilty about what seems to me to be low pay. I spoke with Rebecca (another anthropology Fulbright in Moz. from UGA) before hiring Susanna, about what was a fair wage. My $30/week for one day/week is apparently considered a very good wage by local domestic workers. Paying more would be considered too much.

It really feels weird having someone do my housework. It is honest labor, and my own grandma cleaned other people's homes when she first immigrated to the US. But I feel like I am not paying Susanna much to do a lot of heavy work. The bathroom not so much (heavy work), but the floors and doing my laundry (especially)? I do wash my own underwear - having someone else do it creeps me out a bit - but laundry is done by hand in a big cement sink with a scrub board attached. Plus, all the laundry must be ironed just in case mango flies laid their eggs in it (they like to hatch and burrow under the skin). I know I'm getting a good deal because I did my laundry every night in various sinks and buckets the year Chris and I traveled around the world.

Susanna's mom works in the apartment next door. From what I can tell, the resident is a single man with no kids. Sra. Safiera washes his clothes, keeps his house clean, and cooks - she's there every day except Sunday. Other empregadas (domestic workers) in my apartment building watch the kids in addition to their other work. I've had 3 other people ask me about employment since I've hired Susanna. Compared to some I guess I'm easy to work for - plus I have cable. ;-)

Cable makes me smile, not that I particularly like TV, but because Susanna likes to watch Bollywood movies and Brazilian telenovellas during her break and while she is ironing. I didn't realize that I got Bollywood movies during the day. By the time I get time to watch at dinner, all that is playing are Bollywood music videos.

So why does it sit oddly with me to hire a person to do my housework? It frees up my time to pursue my research (Scouts' honor I am not surfing the web while Susanna works. I got a whole lot of data analysis done yesterday). It also provides employment for a local person, which is expected of foreign visitors. I think it really has to do with my personal struggle against gender expectations and being raised to be so freaking independent. Susanna is being paid to do something that I am capable of and normally expected to do - my laundry and house-cleaning. I had a friend in Oregon, a very busy NGO lawyer, who had the same issue when she hired someone to come in and clean her house for her. The first couple of times the cleaning person came, she cleaned her house first. Rationally, I'm paying for a service. Emotionally, I've been raised to do this for myself, and as a woman it is expected that I do these jobs. Living in a foreign country really forces you to examine your own biases - even if they are against yourself.

I don't think that I'd even be able to have this dialog with myself if I hadn't taken a course in Gender and Geography at UGA. I think that class was the first time I've ever really thought about women's roles and women's spaces. I did before, but the class provided a space to talk about it with other people - men and women.

A recommended read:

Domosh, Mona and Joni Seager. 2001. Putting Women In Place: Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World. The Guilford Press.

The parade carried on down the street. The women workers singing, clapping, and dancing along. Two motorcycle "cops" in the front and a pickup with 3 more "cops" following behind. I counted only 2 men marching with the women (about 100 in all). I'm not sure what that signifies, but I hope that the women get some positive attention for their effort. I gave them mine - a wave and a thumbs up.