Should I Even Do a Postdoc?
I spoke with someone recently who asked this question. They are at a decision point in their career, and are open to industry and hybrid roles, but don't want to close the door on academia, which is still their first choice.
When I defended my PhD in 2013, I briefly considered taking some time to recharge and to think through whether doing a postdoc was even the right next step. However, my supervisor was worried about losing momentum, plus I hadn't heard of anyone in my field actually getting a faculty job without one. So I didn't take the break. I did two postdocs back to back, in six years total.
I learned an enormous amount. But I also didn't think clearly about what I was actually training for. Looking back, I think that's the most important question to ask.
What are you actually training for?
My two postdocs were very different from each other. The first was at a large research institute funded entirely by grants, with multiple research groups running in parallel and many staff scientists who focused solely on research. It looked nothing like my PhD, which was a small university lab. At the institute, I learned how NIH funding works, how to apply for and execute grants, and how to lead high-profile multi-site projects. I built my network, and those connections ultimately led to my faculty job.
The second postdoc was much closer to a traditional university environment. I learned how to nurture a small research group, got more directly involved in data collection and administration, and watched my mentor navigate the balance of teaching, research, service, and clinical responsibilities — things I'd been largely shielded from at the institute.
Here's what's interesting: the faculty role I eventually got looked a lot more like my second postdoc in terms of environment and structure. But my current role as a data scientist maps more closely onto my first postdoc: the large research organization, the grant-driven culture, the juggling of competing priorities across parallel projects. I didn't anticipate that at the time, and it's made me realize how much the environment you train in shapes the work you end up doing.
Would I do it again?
Honestly, I'm not sure. Right after my PhD there's no way I was ready for the faculty role I got six years later. I needed that time. But those six years also directly contributed to the research drift I've written about — the gradual pull away from what originally drew me to the field. Had I started my own lab straight out of graduate school, it might have been more closely aligned with my actual interests.
It was also a genuinely challenging period. The pay is low throughout your late twenties and early thirties. The mental health toll is real. I relocated to the US for my first postdoc and I'm still here thirteen years later, so it's safe to say that doing a postdoc completely altered the trajectory of my life. And yet, because it was such an intense shared experience, I made some of my closest lifelong friends during that time. The transient nature of a postdoc means those friends are now scattered across the globe — but, as one of them reminded me, that also means that anywhere I go, I have a friend to visit.
Some questions worth asking before you decide:
What are you actually training for? Running a university lab, working in a research institute, or something in a hybrid or industry setting?
Are you curious about the applied aspects of your discipline and how it connects to real-world impact, products, or clinical translation? Hybrid postdocs are increasingly common in fields like digital health and offer exposure to both the research side and the commercial or translational side of the work you might be doing.
If you took a research position within an organization, would you be okay with it evolving into a more permanent staff scientist role? In my experience, once people get used to the stability and higher pay, they often don't end up applying for traditional faculty positions. That may be completely fine, but it's worth thinking about before you start.
What specific skills do you want to develop? Grant writing, leadership, a new technique, or something else?
And perhaps most importantly: are you choosing a postdoc because it genuinely serves your goals, or because it's simply what people in your field do?
That last question is the one I never asked myself. I'm not sure my answer would have changed, but I think I would have made more intentional choices along the way if I had.
You Need to Stop: The Cost of Saying Yes to Everything as a Postdoc
"You've taken on too much and you need to stop".
I had just submitted my very first NIH grant application, which ended up being down to the wire and submitted hours before it was due. I had lost a lot of sleep, and yet rather than rest and take a few days to enjoy the summer weather, I felt compelled to catch up on all the projects I wasn't working on when writing the grant. I immediately started sending updates to collaborators, apologizing for falling behind while the grant was consuming my time. To one of these emails, a senior colleague replied telling me I needed to take a break.
I am grateful to this colleague for even noticing how much I was working and for her deciding to tell me this. Many postdocs don't have anyone watching out for them in this way. But I do want to name the academic culture that made this feel necessary. I felt such pressure to produce, and felt like any time off would have a domino effect on everything that came after. That same year, even the five work days I took off to get MARRIED took a lot of willpower to quiet these voices in my head long enough to allow myself to disconnect from postdoc and be present in the moment.
I wonder whether a throughline would have helped me. At the time, I had no framework for evaluating opportunities. I was just trying to accumulate more papers, more collaborations, and more grants. What I didn't see was that the thread of my work was slowly disappearing under the pile. This grant, the one I had lost so much sleep over, wasn't even something I was excited about, but rather something I felt that I should write because it would allow a connection between two institutions to form, and I thought that was a good political move for me to make. It wasn't funded, but if it were, it would have taken my work in yet another direction unrelated to my scientific curiosity, and compounded the drift I was experiencing even more.
If I were to come up with it now, my throughline might have been something like understanding how the organization of the brain supports language learning. Considered in this light, this grant would have been a clear mismatch. What I might have worked on instead is a project that would have allowed me to further my interests, such as working with bilingual speakers. Instead, I tried to fit in cross-linguistic work in an unfunded capacity during both my postdocs, and because of that, it ultimately made up a small fraction of my CV.
What I Would Ask Now
Looking back, here are the questions I wish I'd been asking, questions that a clear throughline would have helped me answer:
If this grant were funded, would I be excited? If it weren't, would I be relieved?
Am I genuinely interested in where this work leads, or am I just trying to get a publication out of it?
If I were to get a position doing this type of work, would that interest me? Would I want to build a research program around this?
Am I saying yes to this because I want to, or because I'm afraid of what happens if I say no?
If saying yes to this means dropping something I'm already doing, what would I drop? If I can't answer that (or if nothing seems worth dropping), that's a clear sign.
If you want to work through these questions for your own research, I'm hosting a small group workshop on May 8 where we'll do exactly that.
Find out moreThere are real structural forces at play in academic careers, and a throughline won't solve everything. But having one gives you a filter, and a filter gives you permission to say no. If you say yes to everything, you risk burning out before you can do the work that actually matters to you. Or you end up drifting so far from your curiosity that you end up building a research program that doesn't feel like yours.