Weblog of Quotes and Rants

I am nearing the end of my first two years as postdoc and I think this article brings up some really good points on the current "career structure for scientific research":

Give postdocs a career, not empty promises

Graduate students and post-docs get paid notoriously low. Partly because of this, the system these days favors labs with a few professors/senior scientists, and a lot of post-docs and grad students. But given the low ratio of faculty to trainees, those trainees inevitably will not all find themselves more permanent faculty (or even senior scientist) jobs. This also means that the turnover in many labs is high. I feel like a lot of human resources are being wasted, needing to train new people every 2-5 years.

“To force a highly trained postdoc from research is a terrible waste.”

Unfortunately, convincing the community to change is a huge challenge.

Edit: Another interesting article on what "failure" means in academia: A Ph.D. and a Failure