On Wed, 13 Aug 1997, aloisia schmid wrote:
> I disagree. i don't think any of us see our post-docs as low-paid entry
> level jobs. Far from it. It is all too clear these are jobs with NO
> FUTURES.
My point was that postdocs were never intended as "jobs" at all.
They were intended as short-term training periods, accompanied by
stipends, which are always lower than the salary a job would pay.
> The days of Linus
> Pauling and James Watson ARE long gone,
But the days of postdoc-as-training are not LONG gone. Gone for maybe
the last ten years, maximum. For the previous 90 years, that's exactly
what a postdoc was, a way to get additional experience in a new
field/technique/way of thinking. In light of this, I found Bart's
assumption that "a postdoc should not be and is not a training period"
puzzling. It SHOULD be. If it's not working out that way, you should
rage, rage against the dying of the traineeship.
> What I think we all find so appalling is that we are expected to
> continue to train and train with so little MONEY!
I'm right behind you on that. It's awful that the scientific enterprise
is in such a state that people are compelled to spend years as low-paid
postdocs because there are too few jobs available. I just think that some
historical perspective on how the situation developed would be useful,
and might help direct efforts to try to remedy it.
