Podcast – Perpetual Postdoc – Avoiding being an Ostrich, Tricky Conversations About Academia

Voice Over:

Welcome to the NIHR Dementia Researcher podcast brought to you by dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk. in association with Alzheimer’s Research UK and Alzheimer’s Society Supporting, early career dementia researchers across the world.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Hi everyone. Welcome to the Dementia Researcher podcast. Upon once again, you’re stuck with me, Associate Professor Yvonne Couch. I’m an Alzheimer’s research UK fellow at University of Oxford. If you’re joining us today for the first time, you’re in the middle of a miniseries on postdoc life. So, go back and have a listen to the first episode, where we use our experience to give helpful hints and tips for early career researchers and where we give more extensive introductions on our backgrounds and what we do.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

As before, I’m joined by Dr. Kritika Samsi, senior research fellow at Kings College, London. Dr. Sarah Kate Smith, research fellow at Sheffield Hallam and Dr. Kam Ameen-Ali at the University of Glasgow. I’ve personally titled this one, Avoiding The Ostrich Approach, because so much about the academic situation seems to result in us just sticking our heads in the sand. But talking about these things is important, otherwise, nothing ever gets changed.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Anyone who’s read or listened to any of my blog posts knows I love a good quote. So, I’m going to start this one with something from Jo Mitchell writing on the Global Academy Jobs website. She says that, “The instability of the academic job market means that some of the world’s most highly qualified people work in the most precarious, insecure conditions, with the expectations that they will continue to produce excellent work, publish regularly, win grants and demonstrate lasting impact.” Which is bang on and a very depressing description of academic life.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

So instead of talking about that first, what we’re going to do is discuss the upsides. We’ll come to everyone, but I think we’ll start with you Kam. You chose to come back to academia, having experienced life on the outside. What are the aspects of academic life that you particularly enjoy when you think about them in comparison to your other job?

Dr Kamar Ameen-Ali:

When I worked for the NC3Rs, so for those of you, if you haven’t heard the first episode, they’re a research funder in the UK, I was actually involved in many different activities, such as writing, sitting on ethics committees, organizing symposia, and just generally supporting researchers and animal facility staff in the universities that I worked in. So, part of what appeals to me about academia is the range of activities that you can be involved in day to day.

Dr Kamar Ameen-Ali:

My job as a program manager for the NC3Rs was actually quite similar in that respect, in that I was doing so many different activities and that’s something that really, really appeals to me, because I can lose attention quite easily on a task or an activity. So, I like the opportunity to be able to shift and do something that is really quite different.

Dr Kamar Ameen-Ali:

But as I mentioned before, I had to travel quite a lot in that job and I felt like that long term, it wasn’t sustainable, so that’s why I returned to academia. But it’s that wide range of different tasks and different activities that I can be involved in that really does appeal to me. Yeah, so I can go from being in the lab, to then writing, to then analyzing data and I just really, really like that aspect of my research.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Yeah, I enjoy the fact that I almost … It’s not that I don’t know what I’m going to do every day, but I like the fact that it’s very variable and if something isn’t working or something’s frustrating me, I can just jump, I can switch to another project. I can go, “Right, the lab’s not for me this week. Nothing’s functioning, my cells aren’t growing, my animals aren’t here,” whatever the case may be, and I can switch and I can go and sit and do some data analysis, or I can start writing a paper, or I can start writing some animal ethics stuff. There are opportunities for me to move around, depending on what I’m feeling on any particular day.

Dr Kritika Samsi:

I completely agree. I find that one of the best things about academia, but attached to that, I also feel the flexibility. So, no one’s really determining what you do on any given day. Like you said, Yvonne, if you don’t feel like it’s a day that it’s working out in the lab, you can take a break from it because there’s, first of all lots of other things you could be doing anyway, but it also is … Research in itself is one of those cyclical processes that, collecting a little bit of data can feed into a little bit of data analysis. You’re not waiting for the entire lot to be done. Or sometimes you’re not, at least in the field I work in, which is qualitative research. You can start off with a bit, you can move on with a little bit more, and the flexibility of the research process itself lends itself to you determining what you do on any given day, which I absolutely love about academia.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Definitely and for me, that research process is almost the bit that that makes me excited about coming to work. Sarah, your previous job was very different from what you do now. I don’t want you to compare the two, because that would be crazy. But what is it about academia that you particularly enjoy?

Dr Sarah Kate Smith:

Do you know, I think it’s meaningful and I don’t mean disrespect anybody working in sales, because I did it for years, but I got to a stage where I needed meaning in my job, and really connecting with people in a more meaningful way than such a superficial way of selling them something. I know that that doesn’t sound great, but for me it was all about meaning and there’s so many positives about academia. I don’t want to say that it’s all negative because it so isn’t and I think the most important aspect for me is being a health applied health researcher, is actually applying my research and making a difference to people’s real lives.

Dr Sarah Kate Smith:

I’m passionate about teaching. That’s one of the big things for me in academia, that I can teach and use my research results to inform my teaching and that’s very, very important to me. I think other fantastic opportunities is the potential to travel. I’ve been Japan, I’ve been to Canada, I’ve been to Colorado, I’ve visited most of Europe through my research and that’s it. It’s not on holidays, it’s all been research. I think you have your favorite parts of the research process. My favorite isn’t sitting down and writing, which I don’t know if that’s just me, or I shouldn’t be in academia, but actually I love the networking. I love the connecting. I love meeting my research heroes. People laugh at me because they think I have an autograph book and get autographs from different authors who are my heroes, but it’s such a huge positive. I like chatting to people and that networking goes somewhere hopefully towards future collaborations and cementing something positive in the future.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the things that I almost … I’m not a natural networker, I get very nervous at networking events. I get very sweaty, I don’t like talking to new people, it makes me tense, but glass of wine down and I’m fine especially if we’re talking about science. I think that’s the one thing that I almost did miss a little bit, was getting together with people I know, people I don’t know and just going, “This is what I’m doing. What are you doing? Oh, look, we’re both doing the same thing.” Then you get snowballed into this exciting chat about something really nuanced and niche, but it’s fun. Like you say, getting to do that in somewhere like Barcelona or Kyoto, is absolutely amazing. When you get to chat science in somewhere stunning, I think that’s a fabulous upside to the job.

Dr Kritika Samsi:

Going back to Sarah’s point. I just feel like even just here, we’re all so different in the things we like. I think this is what I like about academia. My research unit itself is so diverse. It attracts different personalities and different types of people with a crazy eye for detail, or people who write really quick blogs that draw in readers. People who are really good at networking, some people who do slow scholarship. I just think you can learn so much. I feel like in a corporate setting, I’ve never worked in a corporate setting, but I feel like everyone might be a type, or might present a type, whereas in academia, you are a little bit more authentic or you’re allowed to be yourself because the research process allows different strengths to come out at different times, or different studies ask you to be a different type of person. So, I think the environment draws that out of you and I love that about academia.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Yeah. I think over time, it also allows you to grow a little bit as a person. I think that for me, maybe one of the reasons to stick around a little bit is to see how I can develop. So I remember during my PhD, I was roped into doing some teaching and I was terrified and I really didn’t want to do it. I had a very forceful boss who basically went, “Yeah, you’re doing this. It’ll be good for you.” I went and I really enjoyed it.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Then the same person roped me into actual academic teaching, so tutorials and things, whilst I was doing my postdoc and I continue to do them. I gripe about them a lot, but I do actually really enjoy them, and I love having students in the lab. I really love having PhD students because I love watching them grow. I think the idea of hopefully at some point becoming a PI and learning those kind of, I don’t want to say management skills, because that makes it sound really dull, but the idea of having a lot of projects on the go and juggling all the interpersonal skills required to have lots of different personality types in the lab and lots of different projects on the go. I think the idea of learning that makes me really excited about my future in academia.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

So, these are all wonderful things that we enjoy about academic life, but there are definitely some downsides and I think it’s important to highlight them, so we can have a good gripe about them so that the younger kids are aware of the issues. Kritika, I know you have younger children. How do you think an academic career has affected your work life balance?

Dr Kritika Samsi:

So, my children are five and a half and eight. So, I had my children when I was lucky enough to be in a contract that allowed me to take maternity leave. I feel it’s important to say that, just because I recognize now that I’m some reporting junior researchers and we are thinking of this kind of advice and things like that. I realized that again, luck has played a part in it, where I had a contract and I got pregnant at a time that I wanted to and it worked out. Again, I don’t think it’s fair that we should be having to make these choices and decisions based on something that is out of our control in lots of ways.

Dr Kritika Samsi:

Now that my kids are at a certain school going age, I like the flexibility of academia. So, just to start with the positives, I really like that I can be really flexible about when I work, what I do, when I stop work, I can pick them up from school. If they’re having a bad week, I can be home with them. So, I like to say my work life balance is pretty good, but my work life boundaries are atrocious. I work after they’re asleep. I work till really late at night. So, I feel like it damages my health and my wellbeing, but I have the flexibility. So, I try to see the positives. I anyway, try to see the positives in most situations but I think I see the positives in that if I worked in a corporate sector, I would have to be at my desk till six o’clock potentially, or on call till six o’clock, and I wouldn’t get time with my family.

Dr Kritika Samsi:

So, I value the fact that academia allows me to have that, but I feel like the workload is getting more and more intense and your children still need you, however old they get. So, I feel in lots of ways, the boundaries are very blurred and damaging.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Yeah. I think that if you do have children, it is nice to be able to, I don’t want to say knock off at 3:00 to go and pick them up, but I know a lot of people who they have that flexibility to go and collect their children at 3:00. But like you say, then you end up going, “Well, I’d stopped at 3:00 And that means I’m two and a half hours short of a normal working day,” whatever that counts as. And so you then do another two and a half hours after dinner, rather than potentially spending time with your husband, or your partner, or whatever. I think that isn’t necessarily great for anyone’s mental wellbeing. Sarah, your children are slightly older, has this had any major impact on your relationship with them?

Dr Sarah Kate Smith:

No. I think that I feel incredibly lucky to be past the small child stage because it is a challenge, juggling but my youngest is 17. I feel that they have seen me working as a mom when they were little and writing up, certainly PhD work, writing up, they haven’t had a conversation with me for six months at a time because everything was left to dad and I was working full time and writing up. So, I was juggling then. But now my structure is very 9:00 to 5:00, Monday to Friday. I don’t work evenings. I do if I’m doing PPI group meetings, and then we’ll often meet in evening when it’s suitable. But generally, my day-to-day work is 9:00 to 5:00, Monday to Friday.

Dr Sarah Kate Smith:

But then, I’ve had my husband supporting in the sense that his job is flexible. When the kids are little, he was able to do school pickup and things like that and that makes such a difference. The biggest issue for me, I believe is the instability of the short-term contracts. So, I think that for me, it’s not really about flexibility because I’m not flexible, I like to be very structured in my working day. I do feel it is the instability of short-term contracts that’s the issue. That is going to be what pushes me out and COVID as well.

Dr Sarah Kate Smith:

My husband lost his job in the first lockdown and now I’m the only earner, the pressure is incredible. I still have dependents, my kids living at home, one of my kids living at home. I think it’s about reassessing what is the most important thing? Is it paying the mortgage and living in our house, or is it following the dream? And the dream is hard. It hard to follow when you’re on your own and in a unstable job.

Dr Kritika Samsi:

Just to follow up on your point, Sarah, sorry, I don’t mean to … if you were going to say something Kam. I don’t mean to paint a rosy picture, me working really late at night after the kids are asleep is because like you said, the instability leads onto feeling like the work is never, ever done. So, it’s not just about meeting your deadlines and getting the paper out from the project. It just feels like this constantness of doing more, doing more, the networking, the papers you write. It just never ends because of the instability. So yes, I don’t mean to paint the rosy picture of it’s actually okay, it’s just at least I get to pick my children up from school because the work is incredibly hard just for being so unstable.

Dr Kamar Ameen-Ali:

Yeah, I agree. The instability is totally the thing that is the most negative thing for me, but I don’t have kids, so it’s for that reason. It’s because I’ve had to move around so much and that can be really expensive. In a way, I’m lucky that I’ve only had to move within the UK. I’ve not had to have an international move, which can be even more expensive. Obviously, that can make it really difficult to get a mortgage if you’re moving around or if you’re on an insecure contract.

Dr Kamar Ameen-Ali:

I think that can make it difficult for you to buy somewhere, but also it can make you feel like, “Well, how can I feel settled in this place if I might have to move in two years’ time?” It’s not only that you might not be able to get a mortgage. It might be that actually you don’t want to because you don’t want to have that feeling of being settled. I know some people, they don’t invest in buying their own furniture because why would they feel that this is going to be a home for them, when they don’t know that they’re going to be there longer than, sometimes even 12 months? I had one contract that was 16 months long. So yeah, definitely instability is the biggest negative thing for me, even though I don’t have children to have to factor into that.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Yeah, I completely agree with that one. I feel like it was almost childish of me when I wanted to get a job in Oxford. I almost felt guilty saying, “One of the reasons I want a job here is because I bought a house.” I mean, that sounds silly, but actually buying a house is an expensive process and if I had to sell the house and move somewhere else, that’s £5,000, £10,000 down the drain in solicitor fees and that’s just … Academics are not paid well enough to lose that kind of money. So you do have to think about these things before you choose this kind of career.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

I know that Sarah, you said that you commuted a lot for some of your jobs. Do you think that was … Did you enjoy that? Because I don’t mind my commute. So, my commute’s about an hour and a half and it involves bit of cycling. I like cycling and the bus I use as an opportunity to mark essays and sometimes take a nice nap, but I appreciate that a long commute is not everyone’s cup of tea.

Dr Sarah Kate Smith:

No. I think that it was the dream job, so I sucked it up because I wanted this job and it was at the Institute of Dementia in Salford, and the reputation was great and meant I could do exactly what I wanted to do, and that was why I did it. But again, it was a contract, and again, I’m not saying that it’s senior academics’ role to get permanent contracts in, but things are promised done, things are alluded to. “Do a good job and this will happen and we’ll get this and we can do that.” The future was really quite solid, even though I live in Sheffield and it was in Manchester. So, I thought the train was fantastic, 40 minutes and I have a local station down the road, it’ll be great.

Dr Sarah Kate Smith:

But actually, it was £33 return. I know that’s not a lot, but when you’re doing it five days a week, £600 a month to get the train. So, I started driving and I was exhausted. I was just exhausted and the traffic in Manchester, it was four hours a day and then a day’s work. So, four hours, two hours there, two hours back and then a day’s work. It was worth it for the job but I don’t think I could do it again, not at my age. I’m too old.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Yeah, the commute can definitely be really tiring. I think if you live with someone, that’s not the right phrase, if you work with someone who lives within the confines of the city, they tend to not get a commute. So, I start work very early, so I come in at about quarter past seven in order to miss the traffic. If I leave later, I will sit in traffic for easily an hour and 15 minutes. I think that’s massive waste of time, when I could just get up early and have a shorter commute. So, I come in very early, but that means I would often leave at like 4:00ish because I started at quarter past seven. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to leave it 4:00, but then there are people who work within the city who have a five, 10 minute commute. They’ve turned up at nine and they’re looking at their watches at 4:00 going, “How come you are leaving?”

Dr Yvonne Couch:

You’re like, “Well, if I leave now, I’m not going to get home till half six. So, if you leave now you could be home before the half past four news, so don’t judge.” I feel like there’s a lot of differences that can be gained … You can get a lot of insight from a commute.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

So, you said something that I think is really important. So you said you basically moved to … Well, you went to the job in Manchester because it was your dream one. You basically said you had to suck it up and be resilient. I know in our pre-podcast chat, Kam, you said that one of the things that we almost have to do in academia is to just suck it up and be resilient. I wonder whether you think that’s a good idea or not?

Dr Kamar Ameen-Ali:

Yeah. I don’t like this narrative that the people that do stay in academia are the so-called resilient ones, because it suggests that those who leave are not resilient. You have to take into account that we’ve previously talked about, those that leave academia because they’ve discovered what they’re interested in and they’ve found what they’re really, really good at and they’ve left academia to follow that. But there are also the group of people that leave academia because they’ve worked in a very toxic and very unsupportive environment during their PhD or during their first postdoc, and they’re choosing to leave for that reason.

Dr Kamar Ameen-Ali:

I think that actually, that makes them incredibly resilient to have endured that. So, I think for those who leave, because they’ve discovered what they love doing, then resilience doesn’t even come into it. So yeah, it’s just something around the word resilience that really bothers me.

Dr Kritika Samsi:

That’s it, exactly. I feel like the term resilience could mask putting up with something that’s really unpleasant. Resilience is seen as a source of strength, and I do think there is an element of that, but I don’t know if it is fair to make it seem that those who are unable to put up with it because it is a really toxic … or something else is going wrong, are weak or resilient in some way. It just goes back to the same thing. If I don’t think the structure’s in place actually support postdoc life very well. I think there is a massive push for grants. The way the deadlines are getting quicker. The number of people that need to be on grants, the percentages people have, are getting smaller and smaller, so more and more people are doing less and less in grants.

Dr Kritika Samsi:

I just feel like the whole structure in itself is collapsing and postdocs as this middle community, or senior postdocs more like, are this middle community that is having less and less support because I feel like again, early career researchers get a little bit more support. There is a little bit more of these mentoring schemes for early career researchers. Whereas the more senior you get, the more you’re seen as resilient and coping. I don’t think I am, I think I’m just got to where I am and now I don’t know where to go.

Dr Sarah Kate Smith:

I couldn’t agree more. There is this ethos, isn’t there, in academia that suggests you have to be resilient in order to progress? I’ve been told in the past to grow a thicker skin, we’ve spoken about this before, or to be less sensitive, which is absolutely unacceptable. I will not change my personality for any job, but I think a lot of the academic career path is seen as a competition, a battle, even. I always refer to the Hunger Games as working in academia. Because only the resilient will succeed, or the fastest, or the best, and I think that we can’t excel with our own potential because we have to be these all-rounders. And if we don’t tick that box and we don’t tick that box, we’re going to fail, basically. I think that it’s quite a ruthless context to work in.

Dr Sarah Kate Smith:

I’m not sure all academic institutions are like this, but I’ve worked in a few and there are, for sure. But then, I have worked in ones that are much more supportive and more collaborative environments, but it’s still the short-term contracts. So I think, for me, that’s the thing that has to change about … I think we’re going to talk about that a little bit, enabling people to have some job security and some stability.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

Yeah, definitely. I think this almost harks back to the previous episode, where we talked about careers that were not necessarily within academia. So, I spoke to a friend recently and she’s more senior than me in terms of she’s been in academia for much longer, but her contract is coming to an end. She’s not got a grant, she’s not sure what to do. So she went to chat to a very senior academic and the senior academic just said, “Why don’t you just go into industry?” It almost feels like, “Because that’s not the job I want to do,” is not a good enough answer. I think that generally, there needs to be some kind of culture change to allow people to stay within this field, and being resilient is not necessarily a good thing.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

There was big Wellcome Trust study last year, year before, can’t remember when, that basically said something like 40% of academics have sought help for anxiety and depression. I think that’s a horrific number. That’s nearly half the workforce, is seeking help for mental health problems. And the mental health problems are probably induced by the working environment. I don’t think that’s a good thing. Hopefully, I’m not going to say we’re going to fix it on the next episode, but hopefully next time, we will come up with some ideas about what needs to change, what we think needs to be instigated in order to change things.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

So, I want to put it out there once again, that there are lots and lots of things that are positive about career in academia, like Kritika said, it’s very flexible. We can get really passionate about our research questions. There’s lots and lots of things that are positive, as we just discussed up top. But the independence and creativity are absolutely amazing, but the instability makes it a very challenging career course. Hopefully, this episode has made all of you early career researchers out there aware of this.

Dr Yvonne Couch:

So once again, I’d like to thank our panelists, Kam, Kritika and Sarah. Join us next time where we’ll try and sort out this mess, by discussing what we think needs to change. Thank you all for listening and remember to like and subscribe to the Dementia Researcher podcast at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Stay safe and keep researching.

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Brought to you by dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk, in association with Alzheimer’s Research UK and Alzheimer’s Society. Supporting early career dementia researchers across the world.

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