Quarterly Summary: Guest bloggers and the road to solutions

Posted July 4th 2010 at 3:59 pm by Dave

Over the first six months of this site’s existence, a lot of virtual ink has been dedicated to highlighting the major concerns about the way we train scientists and how scientific information is communicated to the public and government. The next six months will continue to present this type of information, but will also focus on how to move forward while embracing the current trends within the system.

Importantly, we’ve now started our guest blogger section with two excellent entries from Carl Wonders and Marianne Stanford. We are certainly keen to expand this section as we go forward, using it to represent the diverse views in an attempt to build consensus and devise solutions moving forward – if you are interested email us here.

These two entries commented on the Canada Revenue Agency’s response to the CAPS letter of January 2009 and engage the major issue of Post Docs: Trainees or Employees? – this is a critical issue moving forward and the work of CAPS is beginning to gain clarity of how the post doctoral fellow is (and should be) classified. If Canada wishes to recruit and retain this class of researchers, major changes have to take place as the international reputation of Canada as a place to do a post doc is faltering and this uncertain status is a major contributor to such feelings. A personal take on it – Nobody in my current Institute complains about salary or vacation days… this might be because they are employees with standard incremental pay raises based on experience, have access to staff pension plans, and have 31 days of vacation.

While we’ve been very lucky to have such stellar guest bloggers, Beth and I have also continued writing on a multitude of issues:

Beth started the quarter with an entry on communicating science to non-scientists alerting readers to the metric of the “fog index” which approximates how difficult your writing is to understand. Many scientists would be shocked to know how difficult their writing is to interpret and should take note when trying to write for, or communicate to, a non-academic audience.

She also pulled on the heart strings of many PhDs and post doc prospective and current parents with her musings on having a family while undertaking academic science careers. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation showed that childcare at UBC would cost 38% of a post doc’s salary if they were being paid $35,000 (which is the situation of nearly 20% of post docs in Canada according to the November 2009 CAPS survey). The comment box was very active – Post Docs are often not paying into EI (and can’t get parental leave), contract working post docs often have to take a break in their contract and/or risk not getting it renewed, and my personal favourite:

My university’s policy on the matter is: “We don’t have a policy, talk to your supervisor.” What is this, the 1950s?

Most recently, Beth has taken a Q/A type approach, posing very open ended questions that have attracted a good deal of attention from our readers:
• Why does anyone think science is a good job?
• Why Do Scientists Blog?
• What Does A Graduate Degree Mean?

I started to spill over into the stuff that Beth normally writes about, starting off this quarter wondering: “If 80% of PhD holders do not become tenure track academics, what do they become and are universities helping them get there?” Looking at the Canadian numbers, we graduated nearly 5000 doctoral students in 2007 and 4000 of them will not become tenure track professors. Assuming we continue this trend (in fact it’s likely to increase as it has been doing), this equates to 40,000 workers over a ten year period who will have PhDs but will not be tenure track professors. The entry basically asked what resources were available to this large sector of workers to find this job while they were being trained and the answer was highly variable depending on the university you attended? Some great resources do exist though and I tried to highlight them in that entry.

Next, I touched on one of the things that I find most challenging about new groups with great ideas and mission statements. The Council of Canadian Academies has much to uplift one’s spirits in this way, but I am really concerned that this effort will not retain the support of the Government when its 10 year funding expires and has yet to convince me that they can sustain themselves on a cost recovery basis, so the hunt for new funds must begin. Why is it that such necessary programs (like an arms length scientific advisory panel) find it so difficult to cultivate support in Canada?

Finally, I wrote three entries that underscore some major themes of this site and the issues that are most pressing for science trainees in Canada:

1. Facilitating career mobility for senior lab based scientists – to become advisers, politicians, entrepreneurs, etc without being severely detrimental to the trainees?
2. Addressing the gap between policy makers and scientists
3. Focusing the training of PhDs on thinking and innovating rather than generating requisite amounts of information or data.

That’s it for this summary, stay tuned for a summer filled with ramblings from Beth and I as we try to bring new and exciting developments to the front page of the Black Hole site. Thanks, as always, for reading and spreading the word.

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Dave, July 4th 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in General

Doctors of Philosophy? I fear not…

Posted June 30th 2010 at 11:03 am by Dave

Quick Hit:
I now write for the Stem Cell Network’s blog and have published two entries for them. The first is on stem cell resources and organizations in the UK, and the second is of broader interest regarding a New Scientist article that did a network analysis of peer reviewed publication with some rather severe implications surrounding the process.

—

I haven’t done research at a University since 2003.
While my CV suggests that I obtained a doctorate at UBC and I am currently at Cambridge University for post doctoral training, I have lived and worked at least 30 minutes from the central university campus for almost my entire research career. I am a product of “hospital” or “institute” based research operations – where millions get spent on scientific research. No large university in Canada is without them these days – the BC Cancer Agency, Sick Kids Hospital, and the Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal are some examples that spring to mind.

The reasons for such an approach by universities are plentiful:

    Access to Clinical Samples – medical doctors who see patients are next door and sometimes affiliated directly with particular research labs.

    Interactions with Doctors – scientists meet medics and medics meet scientists… this allows an understanding and appreciation for the various stresses and operations of each career while also building strong collegial relationships.

    Concentration of Resources – Medical research often requires expensive machines and resources. Sometimes these even get organized into core facilities that many labs can take advantage of which would not be possible without close proximity to one another.

    All campuses have a limited amount of physical space to house research laboratories. Moving or creating certain theme based centres (Cancer, Engineering, etc) can definitely free up valuable real estate on the main campus.

It seems like such a simple no-brainer – put all the biomedical people together and they will do great things.

However, in this blog entry I will contend that while this silo based approach is effective at producing lots of data, it is having severe and lasting negative consequences on the well rounded training of scientists and we need to adapt training programs to deal with this sooner rather than later.

Location, Location, Location
The BC Cancer Agency in Vancouver is located at least 30 minutes by transit/bicycle to UBC. This means that any UBC campus service that is provided (counseling, recreation facilities, professional development workshops, university wide lectures, etc) cost the campus based trainee 5-10 minutes in travel and the off-campus trainee 1.0-1.5 hours. When coupled with the length of the event, this often results in a huge chunk of the day and typically results in most off campus students declining participation.

Workers, not Students
It was never more clear to me than the day I told my friend Graeme that I couldn’t stay out too late because I had to go into “work” early the following morning. He asked “but aren’t you a student?” and I replied “well yes, but…” and then trailed off realizing that most on campus students would have said “I have to go into the lab” or simply “start early”. It really is like a workplace routine – you go into a physical workplace every day, wouldn’t dream of staying home to read or research with giving prior notification, and you often have standard vacation days and reasonable compensation. This is a far cry from the English Literature doctoral student who is often isolated, completely flexible with their timetable, and critically under-compensated. The on campus lab based student finds themselves somewhere in the middle of these two extremes.

Too specialized?
I can imagine that many senior professors simply cannot relate to the degree of specialization that today’s trainees are forced to undertake in order to be at the cutting edge of their field. We do not get general science or even general biology degrees anymore, many do not know the names Karl Popper or Thomas Kuhn, and the divide between geneticists and biochemists is even widening to the point of not understanding each other. It is extremely frustrating to witness the complete lack of trainee enthusiasm to attend lectures and events that aren’t directly relevant to their exact field of research – I believe this is a product of their training and the increasing pressure to produce data and publications as opposed to being trained to think up the next big advances.

Pressure from Above
Professors at these institutes are not inculpable, though it can be argued that the tenure track pressures that they feel may lead them to cut corners in training as it is difficult to assign a metric to outside of “numbers of trainees” so is deemed less valuable. PhDs are often given cookie cutter projects pre-designed and pre-assessed for likely success.

Silo Mentality
The off campus situation reinforces the silo mentality and further fractionates scientists and this is beginning to bite us already. A great example is the increasing amount of engineering technology that is utilized in medical research – how many hospitals have on staff chemical or materials engineering professors? The systems biology approaches that are emerging from the reductionist single protein/molecule days of the 1980s and 90s risk being under-developed because the inter-disciplinary teams that need to be formed are often found outside of comfortable “informal coffee/chat” distance.

Possible solutions
Now that Canada has built many of these research complexes, I can hardly suggest razing them in an effort to let graduate students get one or two professional development sessions a year or to meet engineers over tea. What I think is necessary, however, is something that some groups have worked toward and all groups should work toward – building capacity at these research institutes to host such events and to facilitate broader thinking in their current programming. Engaging with university partners to enable off campus trainees to have some level of access to things like counseling, recreation, lectures, etc will greatly enhance the university experience and encourage more blue sky research.

As an example, I know that GrasPods (the trainee group at the CRC) has levied funds from the UBC Graduate Student Society to run off campus professional development workshops and networking events. This is exactly the type of thing that off campus research institutes need to create and support in an effort to compensate for the lack of a physical university campus.

Importantly, there needs to be space and time given to exposing graduate students and post docs (and professors!) to new lines of thinking outside of their field. Are we satisfied with training a cohort of lab monkeys that know how to sequence genomes and run PCRs without having the slightest idea (or desire) to engage or understand the social and economic implications of their research? I for one am not, and urge off campus research institutes and hospitals to assess and improve the quality of training that they are giving the next generation of scientists.

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Dave, June 30th 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in General

Two heads are better than one: Making a case for jointly run labs

Posted May 23rd 2010 at 10:05 pm by Dave

While I was completing my doctorate, I was in a “big” lab. At its peak, the lab reached about 25 people (~8 each of graduate students and post doctoral fellows plus technicians and research students). Competing for time and attention with the boss was a definite reality – and my particular supervisor was not exactly working a 40 hour week either… the double all nighter before a conference trip was not an uncommon sight with trainee meetings often running well into the late evening and weekends. Clearly this model can work as numerous professors have been spun out from this lab and others just like it, but it takes a pretty special person to be able to train and direct the research of nearly 20 junior scientists. Additionally, it does not exactly work toward reducing the major stresses caused by the changing human resources of science.

This blog entry is a pitch for the large scale adoption of an idea that could be used to put a major dent in the number of professor hopefuls that are currently drowning in a sea of competition that has more sharks added daily. The amount of physical lab infrastructure that has been added over the last 20 years (especially through the efforts of the Canada Foundation for Innovation and charities too numerous to name) has been exceptional in Canada – just look at the MaRS Discovery District in Toronto as a shining example. With this relative abundance of space compared to the 1990s, many more groups are growing to big lab status having major implications on the training and research workload thrust on a single lab head. What we have yet to embrace is a shift from the “top-down, one person runs this show” mentality and this blog entry details the benefits that might be gained from having jointly run laboratories.

Hybrid Vigor: The tag team effect
We all know professors who do some things brilliantly, and make a miserable mess of others. Some are excellent experimentalists but just can’t seem to nail that massive grant while others thrive on big picture blue sky thinking, but lack the ability to help their trainees troubleshoot the nitty gritty. In any case, finding the perfect combination is a rarity and it stands to reason that some of these deficiencies could be complemented by a joint lab head with those particular strengths. A nice analogy is found in something my brother used to throw at me whenever I thought a musical was entertaining – “good singers do opera, good dancers do ballet, a musical tries to combine them both and ends up wallowing in mediocrity”. While I still maintain that there are people who can do both quite effectively, I can also see that sometimes it’s a good idea to let the singers sing and the dancers dance.

Reduced down-time
Ask a new tenure track laboratory professor about their first two years of research productivity in the new lab. My guess is you’ll be hit with a barrage of “not much because it took a long time to set up _____, _____, and _____”. If a newly minted principal investigator were instead able to join a group that already has things running smoothly, the list of blanks would be cut down dramatically and they could get on with the research much more quickly.

Mentoring
If one of the joint lab heads is more senior than the other, there is a remarkable opportunity to benefit from close mentoring. Poor navigation of the institute, university or external politics and administration are the first things that come to mind for slowing down research for no good reason. If the senior professor derives direct benefit from a successful junior researcher, then the help from this end will flow much more rapidly. Additionally, the trainees in the lab would benefit from having multiple perspectives on their research projects.

Possible Career Changes
Why do very few experienced laboratory scientists enter politics, journalism, or industry? Because if they left their laboratory full of graduate students, post doctoral fellows, and current grants, they would never be able to come back. If you could take a year or two to try something out (something like what UBC based Nobel laureate Carl Weiman just accepted from the Obama team) and leave your lab and trainees in the trusted hands of your co-investigator, the decision would be made substantially easier. As it stands now, a 3-6 month sabbatical sometimes cripples a lab’s productivity or an individual’s aspirations to complete a thesis – in short… there is never a good time to leave the lab.

In the end, the jointly run lab model would create more jobs without unreasonable strain on the overall laboratory research budget, would allow more time energy for alternative projects and teaching by the top tier of researchers, and would result in a more diverse training environment for graduate students and post docs. Importantly though – this cannot be made into a short term training post and needs to carry the same stability that a standard assistant professor position would carry and hold the same potential for career progression. It’s time to change the old model of “one person in charge” as team science becomes increasingly prevalent and good scientific training is often the first thing to get cut from busy professor’s schedules.

Would love to hear your thoughts.

PS: A huge thanks to Philip B, Mike O, and Lindsay G specifically for some great chats about this series of thoughts.

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Dave, May 23rd 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in General, Jobs

Let the Discussions Begin!

Posted May 12th 2010 at 11:38 am by Marianne

—
Quick Hit:
A big welcome to our second guest blogger Marianne Stanford, current chair of the CAPS group. As a follow up to Carl’s excellent article on the CRA’s response to the CAPS letter on Post Doc status. This is exactly the type of discussion that needs to be had and The Black Hole site is happy to be able to give it some e-presence. Please weigh in and let us know what you think and look forward to summaries each quarter that will synthesize the ideas in these articles and your comments!
—

Firstly, I would like to commend Carl Wonders on a thoughtful and valid assessment of the potential implications of the CRA ‘clarification’ on postdoctoral fellow (PDF) taxation. I’d like to follow up on that discussion from examining the issue from a different angle. I personally have been a PDF for 6 years, at two different institutions in Ontario, a president of a postdoctoral association and more recently the Chair of the Canadian Association of Postdoctoral Scholars (CAPS). My opinions are my own, not solicited or contributed to by CAPS, but certainly formed by my many discussions with that group. I personally in the past 6 years have been classified as the typical ‘no distinct status’ that most PDFs in Canada share, an ‘employee’ PDF of a research institute and most recently as a ‘trainee’ or academic PDF receiving tax exemption on my stipend. The ideal situation for a PDF in Canada has in the end little to do with exactly how they are paid or taxed, but requires that they are appropriately compensated for experience, extensive education and enormous contribution to the scientific endeavour. Indeed, considering that many graduate students and technical scientific employees bring home considerably more than the average PDF indicates that this needs to change. How that change is enacted must be carefully and thoughtfully done so as not to penalize the current PDFs nor prevent new PhDs from entering the Canadian PDF system.
Having PDFs treated akin to medical residents is a wonderful idea, but no matter how it appears to be stipulated by the CRA it isn’t feasible in the current system. Why? Frankly, it is due to how we are compensated. PDFs, by in large, are paid from public research fund budgets through granting agencies – either directly through fellowships or indirectly through competitive grants earned by our mentors. Residents, who perform clinical duties are paid from health care budgets, not academic research ones. In our case, the granting councils, particularly the Tri-council of NSERC, SSHRC and CIHR have a lot to say about the nature of our tenure. They have explicitly said that the postdoctoral period is one of extended training and not one of employment. Thus, this explains the modest stipend levels and why like graduate student scholarships, PDF fellowships should be tax exempt. Obviously this message did not reach the CRA or the government of Canada. So, assuming that they rather than granting agencies, provinces and academic institutions gets to decide who is a legitimate trainee, where do we go from here?
The obvious choice is employment. The problem with this is the assumption that a simple change in status will result in higher wages, extended health benefits, job stability and overall better conditions for PDFs. It will by its nature allow PDFs to contribute to EI, CPP, RRSPs, but I emphasize the word CONTRIBUTE. That does not necessarily mean a higher wage to cover those contributions. Indeed, in my personal experience, employment status in and of itself only resulted in a smaller paycheque. That may sound glib, because it did results in significant changes to the nature of my relationship as a PDF, and provided me a number of basic rights that I lacked prior to the change. However, I was in a good lab, with a great mentor and a clear career path. When we approached our institute with our new found ‘employee’ status looking for benefits we thought we were due, we were promptly informed that we were a ‘temporary, contract employee’ not entitled to the extended benefits of permanent research staff. By its very nature, a postdoctoral period is NOT a career, thus is temporary, even up to 6 years. Thus, access to anything other than basic employee deductions is likely to require significant negotiations and will depend on employee relations within the individual institutions. This is not something that will be mandated nationally, unless instituted by those who provide our funds – the funding agencies. Thus, before any PDF seeks employment status they need to be clear of its implications. Unless and until we can first lobby for reasonable and well earned compensation (closer to the $70,000/year the government suggests we receive than the $38,000/year average stipend that currently exists) than a change in status will likely hit the individual PDF very hard, in the pocketbook. On the other hand, for the first time in history, both the government and the CRA have provided us with solid evidence that the current system is not appropriate and requires significant change. They must now mandate the national community (particularly the publically funded research councils) to enact this change in a reasonable and proactive way.

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Marianne, May 12th 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Financial, General, Jobs

The CRA response to CAPS: Implications and where should we go from here?

Posted May 11th 2010 at 7:00 am by Carl

QUICK HIT:
The Black Hole team is thrilled to welcome its first guest blogger to the site. Carl Wonders is a post doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and one of the founding members of the UofT Post Doc Association. We are always open to ideas for guest blog entries on a one time or regular basis, so please do not hesitate to get in touch with us. Great article Carl, we’ll look forward to our readers’ responses!

The CRA response to CAPS: Implications and where should we go from here?

Last year, in response to the growing controversy over the taxation of postdocs in Canada, the Canadian Association of Postdoctoral Scholars (“CAPS”) submitted a formal letter to the Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA). The letter specifically addressed the lack of uniformity over what a “postdoctoral fellow” is and how their income should be treated. On April 28, 2010, the CRA responded:

“The CRA has never [emphasis mine] accepted that Academic PDFs [postdoctoral fellows] are generally students with exempt scholarship income for purposes of income tax. We have written several letters to this effect, both prior to and after 2006, when most scholarship income became fully tax-exempt. The focus of the letters has varied between the nature of the income (as scholarship income, employment income, or research grants), and the role of postdoctoral fellows (as students, employees, or something else), however, the answer has generally been consistent.”

The CRA took things farther:

“Generally, the CRA does not consider Academic PDFs to be “students” as that term is used in the Act. Rather, the CRA views Academic PDFs to be the same as other individuals who are required to undertake a period of paid training after completing their studies prior to pursuing an independent professional career. In our view, Academic PDFs are most similar to apprentices, articling students, and medical residents.”

While the consistency of the CRA can certainly be debated, it is now clear that the CRA does not view postdocs as students for the purposes of taxation, at least as far as the scholarship exemption goes. Lumping us in with apprentices, articling students, and medical residents is curious, but probably done to put us in a category of individuals receiving training en route to an independent career. Unfortunately, this shared categorization is not recognized by most universities. Medical residents in Ontario (and I believe throughout Canada) particularly are in a far better position than postdocs at the same institution. To use the situation at the University of Toronto as an example (http://www.pgme.utoronto.ca/tax.htm), medical residents:
• Are paid on a T4
• Receive a T2202A (they’re not eligible for tax exemption as they aren’t on scholarship, but they do get tuition/education credits)
• Are eligible to receive a T2200 and thus claim employment expenses (something that only salaried or commission-based employees can do)
• Get full employee benefits (supplementary health insurance, life insurance, etc.)
• Get topped up to 75% salary when they go on maternity leave
• Have their salary scaled according to how many years they have worked (http://www.pairo.org/Content/Default.aspx?pg=1094)

In other words, medical residents are employees who are also receiving training. Thus, U of T, and indeed the majority of universities throughout Canada, is treating two groups of “training professionals” (medical residents and postdocs) completely differently, despite the fact that the CRA is now on record as considering them to be in the same category! I would suggest using this fact as Argument 1 as to why postdocs should be considered employees. Consider that employee status would provide:
• The ability to pay into CPP and EI. This is especially important for postdocs looking to take parental leave, as you must work 13 consecutive weeks at an insurable (EI-paying) job to be eligible.
• The ability to contribute to RRSPs. Fellowship income does not count as “earned income” for the calculation of RRSP deduction room (although, see quotation below)
• Improved benefits including supplementary health insurance. While some universities do have a plan to buy into (e.g. U of T), it’s certainly not ideal. Some institutions have begun to remedy this situation, as the University of British Columbia in April 2010, started to allow postdocs to buy into the staff plan. Hopefully other universities will follow this example in the future.
• The potential for scheduled wage increases. Unless you receive a higher-paying fellowship, chances are you haven’t received much of a raise since starting. I know I’m making the same amount of money as when I started three years ago. Employee status would go a long way towards preventing this from happening, and open the door to potential unionization. In the UK, postdoc wages are scaled based on experience, and this scaling is also included in the NIH guidelines for postdoc salaries in the US.

One final point. The CRA makes a curious statement towards the end of their letter, which may prove somewhat useful (emphasis mine):

“…Academic PDFs often asked for amounts to be classified as research grants, rather than employment income or scholarship income, as research grants were allowed deductions for certain expenses (unlike employment income), while still qualifying as eared income for purposes of contributions to registered retirement savings plans (“RRSPs”) (unlike scholarship income)….In some cases, the income received by an Academic PDF could be properly included in income under paragraph 56(1)(n); in most cases, we would expect either section 5 (for employment income) or paragraph 56(1)(0) (for research grants) to apply.”

My interpretation of this is that the CRA is saying that postdocs have the option of treating their income, which is reported as a scholarship/fellowship (T4A, Code 05) as a research grant (Code 04) even if it is not reported that way on the postdoc’s own T4A. Indeed, the tax code does include a provision that would allow someone receiving a fellowship to report it as a research grant if the money was received “solely for the purpose of conducting research.” This is something that I had advocated two years ago to the University of Toronto Postdoctoral Association. At the time, the concern was that, should the CRA rule in our favor regarding the tax exemption, switching back to a scholarship might be problematic. Now that that door is officially closed, I see no reason to not re-classify fellowships as research grants in the future and perhaps to go back and do the same for prior years.

In summary, I feel that the best course of action to take is to begin lobbying for employment status for postdoctoral fellows across Canada. The fact that the 2010 Budget says in no uncertain terms that postdoctoral fellowships are not tax exempt should put to rest any ideas of fighting for classification as students for tax purposes. Furthermore, I believe that the long-term benefit to employee status (EI, scaled salary, better benefit packages, etc.) far outweigh the shorter-term benefits of tax exemption. I would strongly urge CAPS and the rest of the postdoctoral community to consider this as they continue to move forward.

4 Comments

Carl, May 11th 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Financial, General, Jobs

Making Little Scientists: The Plight of the Postdoc Who Wants To Have a Family

Posted April 22nd 2010 at 6:29 am by Beth

A comment on one of Dave’s recent postings got me thinking about an “issue affecting trainees” that we haven’t yet talked about here on The Black Hole: babies.  Specifically, the having of babies and where to keep your babies while you are in the lab.

Having Babies

PhDs take a long time and by the time you are done that and have started a postdoc or two, you might start thinking you are getting to an age where you’d like to have a family!  So, the discussion about whether postdocs are “employees” or “trainees” has implications beyond the “taxable or not” question.  What kinds of benefits trainees get is important because maternity/paternity/parental leave is funded primarily by Employment Insurance (EI) and, if you are lucky, a top-up from your employer.  If your pay isn’t counted towards EI insurable hours, you won’t be eligible for EI should you decide to have a kid and take some time off for maternity or paternity leave.  And even if you are eligible for EI, it only covers a portion of your income, and given that postdoc salaries are already low, it may not be a livable amount.  If your employer doesn’t provide a top-up to this amount1, it can be a big problem!

Where To Put Your Baby Once You Have It

If you manage to survive your maternity/paternity/parental leave on your meager EI (should you be lucky enough to get EI) and head back to the lab, you face something that all new parents who work outside the home face: daycare.  Daycare spots are hard to come by2 and the ones that are available are expensive – I saw a poster recently that pointed out that a year of daycare costs more than a year of university!.  For example, at UBC ChildCare Services, a month of daycare for a child between the ages of 4 and 18 months will cost you $1,105 – that’s $13,260 per year!  And if you are taking home $35,000 a year with an NSERC/CIHR scholarship, that’s 38% of your take home income!

Beyond the Money

Even beyond all the financial implications of having a kid, there are implications to taking time off that are particularly important for academics.

I remember being in my Masters program and hearing one of my profs lament that so many females who could have gone on to be excellent scientists left academics to pursue other careers because they wanted to have a family.  In his experience, a lot of females who did their Masters degrees went on to do a health profession degree, such as medicine or occupational or physical therapy, instead of doing a PhD because in those other fields, “if you take a year off for maternity leave, you can come back to your job and start up where you left off. In science, if you take a year off, you are left in the dust.”

Fast forward to my doctoral program: I remember having a conversation with a prof while we were putting together a grant application and her CV noted her two six-month leaves of absence for maternity leaves for her two kids.  She said, “Things are better now than they used to be.  Now you can put a maternity leave on your CV as a “reason for gaps in your productivity” and they have to accept it. You are still disadvantaged because if it comes down to you and someone else who didn’t take a leave, they have more papers and they’ll get the grant (or the job), but at least now you can write in your mat leaves.”

Academics is fast-paced and if you take time off during your postdoc to have a kid or two, you’ll have gaps in your publication and grant record and you’ll be behind on the latest advances in your field.  Waiting until you’ve attained a faculty position – when you’ll at least have a more reasonable salary and probably even a maternity/paternity/parental leave top up – isn’t ideal either, as a new faculty member needs to be focused on getting tenure, so again gaps in your publication/grant record and getting behind in your field will be a problem.  Wait until you have tenure, especially if you’ve done several years as a postdoc or research associate before landing that tenure-track job, and the fertility train may have passed you by!

Of course, all of this is just my thoughts on the prospect of having a baby while being an academic, based on discussions I’ve had with colleagues (some of whom have done it, some of whom have thought about it).  I’m curious to hear what others’ thoughts/experiences are with this?

  1. I don’t have any data on this, but I’m willing to bet that few, if any, universities provide maternity/paternity top-ups as a benefit to their postdocs [↩]
  2. people start to get on wait lists for daycare during their pregnancy, even if they aren’t planning to send the kid to daycare until after a full year of maternity leave [↩]

7 Comments

Beth, April 22nd 2010 | Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Jobs

Old Debate, More Participants: What do 80% of PhD holders do for a career?

Posted April 12th 2010 at 12:59 pm by Dave

I received a pamphlet the other day entitled: Careers Support for Life Science Post Docs
Page-2Page-3Page-4
(thanks to Anne and Lynn for letting me post this!)

This got me thinking and building on the momentum from Beth’s Why do PhDs leave and What Types of Jobs are out there entries along with the heated discussion around my Say No to the Second Post Doc entry I decided to have a look around Canadian universities to see if programs were present for the 80% of PhD holders who will pursue an alternative career.

Through that search, I identified great variability, with some universities having good institutional support (e.g.: University of Alberta) and others doing an impressive job on their own as concerned post docs (e.g.: University of Toronto). Many still lag far behind though… so I’ve selected highlights that are generally applicable and worth a visit:

University of Calgary
A newsletter that looks sharp, is generally relevant to post docs and could easily serve as a model for other post doc (or research institute) newsletters. One of the themes that I see here and recurring throughout the country is a lack of role models for PhD holders – hence the interview approach… find a handful of people who have PhDs and ask them where they are and how they got there. I’ll look forward to reading future issues.

University of Toronto
If you’re going to have a post doc association… follow this lead and have a Career Development Coordinator. The majority of your members will not be going down the professor route, it makes absolute sense to have someone who knows what resources are available at your university and in the city for them to speak with.

University of Alberta
Institutional Support… for real. It looks like there was Killam money put into establishing something permanent for post docs – this is a great way to ensure the long term stability of information/resources and avoid the problem that many trainee groups cannot get their heads around – how to do succession planning. There are many organizations that get started with the energy of a handful of interested people and then fade into oblivion. Institutional support (i.e.: an office, a contact in senior admin who is permanent, a mailing address, etc) is critical to the long term success of these organizations.

McGill University
Has emphatically stated that Post Docs are trainees… in fact, they are all mandatory members of the Post-Graduate Students’ Society at McGill. This comes with a good array of career services, though it does seem that they are mostly tailored for graduate students. Not all post docs would want this status, but it is certainly a way of handling things like group benefits and access to facilities.

University Affairs
A great set of resources for post academic career planning in Canada including great articles, podcasts, blogs (Career Sense and Margin Notes), and news/events pages.

The best set…
There are many great examples in Canada that Universities can mimic in their own institutes, but the best set of alternative career resources to be found for PhD holders seems to be on the American Association for the Advancement of Science website under the Careers Section. These booklets are a MUST READ for PhDs looking for a non-tenure track career path. The other sections of the AAAS careers page are also quite extensive (again, why does Canada have no equivalent to the AAAS for its scientists?). Granted, this is US-centric, but it still far outweighs the type of resources available in Canada and offers great advice for those struggling with the decision between 80 and 20.

Here in Cambridge, they’ve really put a lot of effort into ensuring the success of their academic trainees. It makes so much sense too, because every person that comes through your university is a reflection on your university.

Canadian Universities need to learn this and invest in their people.

Some great examples from a post doc’s point of view:

First – a dedicated full time office for life science post docs (another for physical sciences and another for social sciences/humanities)

Second – a vibrant post doc society that provides numerous guides (finding a post doc, finding accommodation, how to supervise, etc), hosts social events, and organizes professional development seminars.

Third – an idea I’d never heard of, but again makes a whole lot of sense… they have a database of Cambridge alumni who have agreed to be contacted for advice/questions about where they ended up with their PhDs. It’s a free service called GradLink – I’ve browsed it and it covers hundreds of different disciplines from across the world.

Another interesting follow up question that I’ll certainly blog about on another occasion:

Are Canadian Institutions training Post Docs to have the core competencies suggested by the National Post Doc Association?
1. Discipline-specific conceptual knowledge
2. Research skill development
3. Communication skills
4. Professionalism
5. Leadership and management skills
6. Responsible conduct of research

Admittedly, most of these depend on a good supervisor who cares more about training the next generation of scientists rather than getting the next paper out. It seems so short sighted (and a little self-centred) to think that a single lab’s productivity with respect to “knowledge learned” could outweigh that of multiple labs run by well trained scientists…. but like I said – another time perhaps.

3 Comments

Dave, April 12th 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Financial, General, Jobs

Quarterly Summary: “CAP”ital Action and Effective Communication

Posted April 1st 2010 at 5:38 pm by Dave

This quarter has been a very active one for the Black Hole site, marked most notably by a tripling of site traffic in the month of March. Admittedly, most of this increased traffic was due to Budget 2010 and the sheer panic it invoked in the post doc community. Fortunately, the momentum that I hoped would continue has certainly done just that. Two prime examples of this forward movement over the last quarter have been:

1. The Canada Foundation for Innovation model of autonomy and flexibility was named “world’s best practice” and the contribution to developing both the quality and quantity of research infrastructure was highlighted. The matching investment in people needs to be the focus going forward, let’s hope the policymakers realize this. They have built it… will the scientists come?

If you are a prospective post doctoral research fellow, the answer right now is “probably not” as a flurry of bad press surrounds Canada as a place to complete this part of one’s training. It’s curious because Canada definitely has excellent core components in place for research success with great equipment and buildings, internationally heralded expertise, access to other scientists and patient samples, etc etc. So what’s wrong with the picture? The answer lies in the second burst of momentum from this quarter

2. What exactly is a post doctoral fellow? – in Canada there is certainly no easy answer and it seems that they are classified as trainees, students, or employees depending on which status benefits them the least. In Britain and Australia, a post doc certainly leans toward the employee side of the coin with good wages (often 25-35% higher than Canadian post docs), benefits similar to other employees at the institute, pay taxes, etc etc. In Canada, however, post doctoral fellows often get terrible wages (78% earn less than $40,000 after 10+ years of university training), benefits are inconsistent at best and often absent (though UBC just made an impressive announcement about PDF benefits), and Budget 2010 proposes to make post doctoral fellowships taxable.

The momentum from the Canadian Association of Post-Doctoral Scholars in recent weeks has produced the following:
- An FAQ entitled “What is a post doctoral fellow?”
- An online petition to maintain the competitiveness of a postdoctoral research career in Canada
- A campaign that has gotten recognition for post doctoral fellows in Parliament

Great to see this kind of effort being put forth to improve the trainee environment in Canada. Let’s hope we get some results!

This quarter also saw The Black Hole become even more connected as exemplified by our growing toolbar of excellent links to check out including recent additions of:

Canadian Programs
CIHR Science to Business Program – Program to encourage and enable individuals who have obtained a recent health-related PhD to pursue an MBA
The Science Creative Quarterly – UBC based online collection of scientific articles that are spiced up for a general audience

Excellent organizations/resources for Canada to learn from
The Royal Society – The UK’s national academy of science which is leaps and bounds ahead of the Royal Society of Canada when it comes to public and governmental interaction
The Society of Biology– A whopping 80,000 members who support the strong presence of biology in academia, industry, education and research

Other blogs of interest
Margin Notes – University Affairs blogger Leo Charbonneau tackles many of the institutional issues that are discussed heavily on this site – great insights and wonderfully in touch with the hottest topics.
rENNISance Woman – Self described Cancer Research grant wrangler Cath Ennis and her thoughts form a frequently updated Nature Network blog worth reading!

As for blog entries, Beth has been squirreling away on entries related to the theoretical (What is Science? and Evaluation vs. Research) and the very practical (Talking Science to Non-Scientists and Community Collaboration) sides of science. She also introduced us to the CIHRs Science to Business program which aims to equip PhDs in the medical sciences with MBAs.

I’ve been (again!) a little less focused and was certainly side-tracked in Budget season with entries related to taxes, moving forward from the budget, and the CAPS campaign.

The story of how DNA and genetics became buzz words on everyone’s lips is one that I often share with people about the importance and long term impact that public outreach can have (especially when it comes to a general willingness to support research in the area) – this tipped off two entries ( >The Least Work Principle and
Getting Involved in Science and Society) and was followed up with an entry on my current pet peeve in Britain which is going to consistently underwhelming climate change related talks.

Other entries on the lack of science policy in Canada and the importance of scholarships and networking to one’s future career generated good buzz, but also resulted in a strong criticism of our blog and other blogs for being far too focused on complaining about the situation. While politely disagreeing with this being the case for the Black Hole site, I have made a mental note (and followed up with physical entries!) to give credit where credit is due on the many great things happening in the country and continue to keep an extremely open mind to future solutions.

Hope you’ll all continue to read and contribute, it’s been a fun six months so far!

PS: If you’re interested in writing a guest blog entry or a regular blog column, please do get in touch.

2 Comments

Dave, April 1st 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Financial, General, Jobs, Science Communcation

CAPS Getting Progress in Parliament

Posted March 24th 2010 at 7:40 pm by Dave

I just thought I would quickly bring it to people’s attention that the Canadian House of Commons has been hopping with activity regarding post doctoral fellows and the repercussions of Budget 2010. A quick scan of the comments in March can be found here and if you want to keep track on your own, check out the Hansard records.

The Canadian Association of Post Doctoral Scholars has spearheaded this charge by contacting ~20 relevant Members of Parliament, two of whom have directly brought up the taxation of post doctoral fellowships matter in the House as an area of grave concern for promoting research in Canada.

What do these early comments tell us:

1. There is massive confusion as to the status of post docs – are they students? employees? trainees?

- Responding to a question of why a particular Post Doc in Quebec should have to deal with a $4000 tax increase, the Hon. Diane Finley responded by saying that the Conservaties have done a lot for students and then listed off several benefits, none of which post docs can benefit from.

- Numerous other MPs referred to post docs as “post doctoral students”

2. There is also confusion as to how much of the scientific workforce post docs represent and how well they are compensated:

- There are ~5700 post doctoral fellows in Canada
- According to a 2009 survey, over 50% of post docs make $40,000 or less and nearly 80% make less than $45,000 before taxes
- Prior to beginning a post doctoral fellowship, the vast majority of PDFs will have just emerged from 8-12 years of university and student loans are extremely common

The Hon. Mr Flaherty’s statement about “pure scholarships” is quite confusing. What exactly is a “pure scholarship” – is it the kind of thing that is merit-based, awarded by an external organization, and awarded to an individual? If so… please explain to me how a CIHR, NSERC, or SSHRC post doctoral fellowship award does not belong in this category?

Or perhaps he would argue that PhD students are training for a degree while post docs are graduated and therefore no longer training (i.e.: “part of the workforce”) – if this is the case, then that’s fine… but again I beg to ask as I did in a previous post:

What other career path recognizes more training and more experience with less pay and little to no benefits?

This lack of defined status is exactly what causes the problem because the powers-that-be will always decide to classify post docs as students when it suits them and as employees when it suits them. If all PDFs are to be classed as employees and tax paying citizens, then their wages and benefits need to reflect that.

- Make fellowships worth more (and not the $70,000 kind – something civilized like $45,000 or $50,000 would be fine and clearly distinguish them from the majority of graduate student stipends)
- Establish minimum salaries for post docs paid from a grant
- Scale the wages based on research experience

Funnily enough, it would almost certainly be less expensive for the Government to simply grant the scholarship exemption to post docs.

Until then, please consider writing Jim Flaherty and/or your MP to explain your story. You can also sign the petition if you haven’t already.

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Dave, March 24th 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Financial, General

Budget 2010: Post Docs, be careful what you wish for…

Posted March 10th 2010 at 1:55 pm by Dave

Last week Canadians were treated to another Harper Government budget where the post doctoral stage of developing highly qualified researchers was finally recognized as an important part of the research enterprise. Post docs shared a grand “hurrah!” as this was a good thing, and long overdue.

Oddly enough, it was not just lip service as Jim Flaherty was “especially pleased to announce in the Budget, new funding for post-doctoral researchers” proposing to create a program for post docs akin to the Canada Graduate Scholarship (which recently gave select graduate students an excellent stipend over their studies at $35,000/yr) which would earmark $70,000 per year for select PDFs over the next five years.

BUT… look a little more deeply – say…somewhere around page 349 in Annex 5, it couldn’t be written more clearly:

post-doctoral fellowships will be taxable

We hear you, and thank you for the clarity. It’s been a long haul through the murky waters since 2006 when post docs were unsure whether or not their fellowships would fall under the scholarship exemption. See previous blog entries here and here to get a sense. Budget 2010 proposes to straighten this up.

So, yes – lots of post docs are upset as this represents an instantaneous $4000-$6000 pay cut. If you are getting a $38,000 fellowship from SSHRC, you get knocked down to ~$33,000 and if you get a $40,000 fellowship from NSERC/CIHR, you now take home ~$35,000. So, as of 2010, a fellowship funded PDF will take home the same or less than a PhD funded by a Canada Graduate Scholarship.

I ask you – What other career path recognizes more training and more experience with less pay and little to no benefits?

You say – what about these newly conceived $70,000/yr fellowships? I say – there aren’t enough of them to go around as there are 6000 PDFs in Canada and only 140 fellowships (2%). Also, Post docs don’t just last two years (in fact, some single experiments on their own last two years!), so after your glory years of funding, you take a 50% pay cut…sounds fun doesn’t it? Add all of that to the reality that just about every advertisement in medical science related faculties at McGill, Toronto, Alberta, and UBC amongst others has a requirement for 3-6 years of PDF experience. I had to ask my brother with the mathematics degree to figure this complicated stuff out for me.

Seriously… who thinks up these policies? Why not ask someone (oh I don’t know… maybe someone like the Canadian Association of Post Doctoral Scholars) about what a post doc actually does and would such a program work?

There are 6000 PDFs in Canada that are critical to the research enterprise and the human resource shift over the last 15 years is staggering. Will this program keep the best and brightest in Canada and attract new international fellows?

NO

The reasons are simple
1. The program is for 2% of PDFs
2. The funding lasts for two years only – the average PDF length is substantially longer
3. The wide discrepancy gives a major financial disincentive to stay longer than two years

And really… I don’t know what kind of hot shot junior scientists you think are out there, but picking post docs is not like a hockey draft where a selection like Sidney Crosby will change the fate of your entire lab. Research happens in incremental bits through the hard work and dedication of teams of scientists. Telling 98% of them to “suck it up” so 2% can enjoy an excellent salary is not sending the right message.

What the government really needs to do is improve the entire trainee environment and cultivate Canada’s international reputation as a great place to do scientific research, full stop. Stop grabbing headlines with superstar scholarships… it does very little practical good, especially at the graduate student and post doc levels.

So, in the end, the real problem is not whether or not PDFs should be scholarship exempt it’s whether or not they take home a fair wage. So the solution could be a tax exemption, but it could also be a national raise in PDF salaries.

The latter would be reasonably easy (and not so expensive) to achieve by doing three things:

1. Making fellowships worth more (and not the $70,000 kind – something civilized like $45,000 or $50,000 would be fine and clearly distinguish them from the majority of graduate student stipends)
2. Establishing minimum salaries for PDFs paid from a grant
3. Scaling the wages based on research experience (as the National Cancer Institute of Canada already does successfully with both its fellowships and for PDFs paid off NCIC program grants)

Funnily enough, this type of change would not cost the Government much more than the $45 million promised for the superstar fellowships – but of course it wouldn’t be nearly as sexy to release in a Budget, it would merely make sense.

What I hope you’ll do to push this issue:
1. Sign the online petition to maintain the competitiveness of a postdoctoral research career in Canada
2. Write your MP using the template on the CAPS site
3. Tell all your research friends to do the same and if you know a sympathetic person in politics or the media, put them in touch with CAPS.
4. Join the Facebook Group

18 Comments

Dave, March 10th 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Financial, General, Jobs
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