alt Hacker NewsYou should absolutely only do a postdoc on the supposition that you will get a tenure track faculty position afterwards. It makes no sense financially or emotionally to do one if your goal is to go into industry.
Replies
shellfishgene • 01/22/2025
A large percentage of phds do a postdoc because it's easy and familiar, not because it's part of strategic planning of their career...
robwwilliams • 01/21/2025
Depends on the industry. If planning to shift from biomedical research to pharmaceutical R&D a postdoc can be a major win.
Davidzheng • 01/22/2025
life isn't all about the endgame? sometimes you just want to do research for a few more years
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But how can we know that we picked the right person for the job if we aren't at the very least absolutely sure the alternatives were worse?
The human mind resists accepting decisions made without a proportional amount of effort put into those decisions. If we only get one candidate for the job, we will either hire them and deal with constant nagging doubt, or we will lower our standards to get more options we can reject to feel good, but at which point we've now created false hope in the remaining candidates and an illusion of more opportunities existing than actually do.
Humans are messy, and so everything is always fucked. Even when it's not, we find a way to make it so.