Journey of a postdoc
When I started my PhD, the workload was big but everything was so mind-blowing. It was amazing to be part of a research team. But soon it became obvious the place was not such a haven. PhD students crying between or during meetings, postdocs obsessed with their contract finishing too soon and not having finished their project. By the end of my PhD, several friends were forced to finish their project on unemployment money. Of course, they had no choice given the importance of recommendation letters and the efforts they had already invested. My flatmate, after 3 years being paid 30% less that what she could have had if she was not registered as a PhD student, was kicked out in a parody of fair committee, comprising only friends of her PhD director who wanted to get rid of her. If she was not a good student, why wait three years? She was helping her family with money and was working hard. At that stage I had lost illusions on academia. Behind the facade ‘people living their passion’, there was instead a situation where people were taken advantage of. The publication process seemed also ridiculous and luck and rhetoric being involved in so many steps that the fierce competition was just an absurd comedy.
I still liked research in itself, so I went for a postdoc. The novelty of the topic and the team had a positive effect and reset my motivation. For a while. Then it was my turn to feel pressure and then worry about the renewal of my contract, with unsure funding or even unsure administrative possibility (with government threats of a new rule limiting postdoc to 4 years). I thought, maybe I will go back home. Would it be that bad? Abandoning research but being with friends and family again. My way to do research was also impacted. How can I go as fast as possible? What is the shortest path to publication? And instead of curiosity-driven research, it becomes publication-driven, which I think is good neither for the quality of research nor for our motivation. And now, what are the odds of finding a long-term position in academia? I oscillate between ‘anyway, there are so many people better than me, so be it’, and ‘is it really the last time I do research?’. I am lucky enough that my family has enough money, but I am getting older and the uncertainty of where to find a job in the future remains. And despite what I described above, I hope it will be in research.
Locked out
I am so used to work in academia with people from all over the world that I forget how special and interesting it is. However, this has a downside – people need to expatriate themselves. When I was a teenager, I really believed citizen of the world existed. That a country was a mere concept, an illusion. But later I realized what it implies with respect to one’s relatives, the time lost far away, the cultural and language barriers which makes one feel isolated. The way I can describe it best is seeing everything like through a glass pane. You are not part of your surroundings. After my PhD, that I did in my own country, people around me made it clear that I had to move abroad. I had rather not. But it seemed the rule to have a chance of finding an academic position. Of course, the pandemics made it all worse. I spent 5 months without seeing my partner. Well, without seeing anyone on weekends either, not knowing many people around. I felt very isolated, alone, and I was not really sure anymore what was life good for. This period of my life is still weird to think about and hard to process. I found particularly difficult what I perceived as a lack of support or understanding from the directorship. It seems they do not realize that their staff is not ‘home’ in Dresden. A striking example is when they lifted the ‘2 weeks mandatory home-office after traveling abroad’ and ‘forgot’ to let the staff know. This ‘2 weeks mandatory home-office’ was very bad for international employees. Adding this many days to say, one week of holidays, make it actually impossible to take holidays to go home. The minimum thing to do would have been to realize the huge consequences this decision had on people personal life and inform us. Anyway, I was lucky that only my grandmother died during this time, so I did not miss too many funerals. Some people have sick parents that they cannot visit.
This situation was deeply worsened by the pandemics, but is not specific to it. Being far from relatives, but also struggling to do basic things like finding a physician, or being yelled at by random people for not knowing the language, is part of the experience of being abroad. Which could be fun adventures if it would be chosen freely rather than following what is presented as the only option for not being kicked out of academia. Ironically, I just read an article saying that people doing postdocs abroad do not improve their chances of finding a permanent position.