So I've been reading a lot of blogs lately that have been talking about where people do thier post-docs. And whether or not the institution matters as much as the lab.
It's been making me review the decision I made a year and a half ago. I'm very happy where I am and of the choices I had, I really think I made the right one. But it was HARD!
I got a lot of advice from a lot of different people.
I was fortunate. I had choices, which in this job market and this economy, is no small feat. I'm not sure how this happened. In my field I'm really behind in publishing. I mean REALLY far behind. And I was told repeatedly that it would hurt my chances of finding a job. ---In my defense, and I'm pretty sure that this is why it didn't matter, my lab just wasn't publishing a lot. Like maybe 3 papers in my 8 years. So I suppose that my lack of publications may have been chalked up to my lab. We'll see.
But I also came from a lab that wasn't well known. My PI wasn't a superstar, or a rising star. He was just, him. A nice guy who just started to fall out of love with science. I thought that would be a problem too...but it wasn't.
I did the job search almost entirely on my own. Well, really, all on my own. I started because I just got fed up with being a grad student and wanted to know if there were any options for me. So I emailed my research idol to thank him for a protocol he made available and then mentioned that if he ever needed a post-doc to let me know.
Well holy crap, it worked. We started emailing and decided to meet at a conference. The meeting went well and I was invited out to give a talk and see the lab.
While I was going to this conference, I decided to put my CV up on their job searching site and got another interview through that. It was with a lab that I had never heard of and didn't know anything about, but I figured I'd interview anyway. What could it hurt? I met with the PI from this lab at the conference too and had a great chat. It was interesting and the PI was really nice! Within a week I had an invitation to go out to see the place/give a talk. ---Spoiler alert---This is the job I have now.
Over drinks with my PI at the conference I was told that I hadn't applied for enough jobs and that I really needed to do more if I ever wanted to actually get a job. So I applied for a job at an Ivy League university, that I never thought I'd get. This way, I thought, I can say that I applied for more jobs. Well, suprise suprise! I got a phone interview. Which turned into a visit out to said amazing university.
The visits all went well. I gave talks at all of them. Got to experience each place, and decided, much to my suprise, to take the job with a lab that did some completely different work than mine and was a job I'd never even really thought to consider.
The whole point of this post, is to say that I had some faculty members on my committee who thought I made the perfect choice, and some that thought I'd made a HUGE mistake by not going to the Ivy League school. The truth is that the lab at the Ivy League school just wasn't a good fit for me. I didn't really like the PI and the research just wasn't that interesting to me. But I was told over and over that it didn't matter what the research was, that I really needed to have that school's name on my CV.
It's too early to tell if that's true. I'm only a year into my post-doc and don't really know yet what the next job search will look like.
I guess I just really wanted to say that all of this talk about institution vs PI/lab for post-doc has gotten me thinking again.
I'm still really sure I made the right choice, but sometimes, I do wonder...
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