In my almost twenty five years in American academia, I have only heard of one case (all assertions in this post will refer to my field, unless indicated otherwise) where someone was hired as a member of the faculty right after completion of the PhD. Even the superstars have to spend a year or two doing postdoctoral work before they can join a department as a professor. For most faculty hires, three postdoctoral stints are not unheard of (that was the case for me), with an average total of six years between award of the doctoral degree and start of a tenure- track position (also true for myself).
Postdoctoral years are therefore a crucial time in the career of an academic physicist. Since RIT does not yet have a doctoral program in physics, I have been relying mainly on postdocs for executing my research since I joined in 2011. This means I have mentored about 10 postdocs since joining - and I am currently looking to hire a couple more. Perhaps this gives me some credentials for speaking about functioning as, as well as supervising, a postdoctoral associate.
The first thing, in my opinion, that should be emphasized about being a postdoc is that it is very different from being a graduate student. Graduate school, as I indicated in my previous post, is an apprenticeship. During this time, the student is being trained in the techniques of the field, and becoming familiar with the literature. The ideas are mostly - at least initially, and in many cases all throughout - laid out by the thesis advisor. Typically, the student studies a single area of physics - if not a single problem - in depth, and produces one or two papers a year. Of course, there are exceptional students who take much more initiative and publish at a vastly higher rate.
As a postdoc, the expectations are rather different than as a graduate student. In my field a competent postdoc is expected to produce 3-5 papers in a year. I am not much better than competent and I was producing about 6 in a year, back around 2007, about fifteen years ago; the standards are higher now. It is allowed, of course, to have co-authors on these papers, and to be first or only author on only a subset of them.
But the point is that a postdoc producing at the rate of a graduate student would be a disaster for the program hiring him/her and not very competitive on the academic job market. One may of course object - what if (s)he writes a single brilliant paper a year? My answer to that is - how many such postdocs do you know, and who went on to get a faculty position? Only a few, I am guessing, if any.
In my group I spend a lot of time weaning postdocs fresh from their PhD's, away from their graduate student habits. After all, it is not easy to give up something you have been doing for half a decade.
For example, they may want to spend months writing an internal review paper. I then have to tell them as a postdoc everything they do needs to be publishable. (I used to have a postdoc advisor who told me that there are people who read papers and there are people who write papers - but of course this does not mean we should not read papers.)
Another example is when they are totally engaged with a single project. I have to tell them that at any point a postdoc needs to be involved in 3 projects - they paper they are writing up, the paper they are calculating, and the paper they are thinking up the idea for - and reading up on.
A postdoc has to learn up new subjects and techniques quickly and start being productive. (S)he has to learn how to collaborate effectively, and supervise graduate and undergraduate students in a productive manner. (S)he has to quickly learn how to become creative in a new field. Time management and efficiency are much more crucial than in graduate school.
Research-wise, the postdoctoral phase is probably the most intense period in the life of an academic. It requires total immersion in scientific research. At the same time, during this phase, the other demands which professors typically have to face - grantsmanship, teaching, sitting on committees, travel for giving talks, hosting visitors, outreach, and so on - are absent.
A typical postdoctoral stint lasts for two years. Take six months at the beginning for coming on board, and six at the end for wrapping up and finding a new position. With journal reviews and decisions taking months to turn around, you can calculate how much time is left for initiating and finishing physics projects.
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