What is a postdoc?

Today's post is for everyone wondering "what is Rory actually doing in Paris? What is a 'postdoctoral researcher' really?" Since you asked the question, you get to learn about the wonderful world of academia and higher education.

The answer is, on one level, quite simple, but also quite complex as there are many caveats and exceptions. The simple answer is that a postdoc is a form of temporary employment for people with PhDs, which allows them to gain extra training and experience before (presumably) moving on to a permanent position as a professor.

For the longer answer, we have to consider the traditional career trajectory of someone with a PhD. This trajectory is roughly (a) get a PhD, (b) be hired into a professorship. (By "professorship" I mean being hired as an "assistant professor" in North America, or as a "lecturer" in the UK. The positions are broadly equivalent. (Confusingly, "lecturer" in the North American context has a different meaning.)) However, there are two problems with this traditional trajectory:
1) There are very few professorships, and quite a lot of people with PhDs
2) Some fields of knowledge are so very specialized that even after getting a PhD, your knowledge is not complete or effective enough to do groundbreaking original research.

So, as a partial solution, a "postdoctoral" period of additional training is common. Postdoc positions are very diverse, but traditionally they involve working with a mentor (usually an established, famous researcher) on some new project that is related to but not the same as your previous research. Along the way, you will learn new skills, theories, and frameworks, and acquire valuable experience in writing up research articles and supervising students. Some postdoc positions involve working on a specific, pre-determined project, some are open-ended. Some positions involve a little (or a lot) of teaching, to postgraduates or undergraduates, while some have no teaching. Some involve a lot of committee work, organizing, and managing, while others do not. Some postdocs don't even have an explicit mentor.

In some fields, such as the natural sciences, doing a postdoc is all but mandatory if you want to stay in the academic game. (In natural sciences, there are also a lot of job opportunities for PhDs in private industry, so that's where many people go instead of professorships.) In the humanities, postdocs are somewhat rarer. In the social sciences (like linguistics and cognitive science), they're fairly common. Postdocs also appear to be more common in Europe than in North America, although I think that's more to do with the volatile nature of higher education funding in Europe than an actual cultural preference. Indeed, it's not uncommon for academics in Europe to be sustained purely through research funds acquired from grants, rather than through a direct contract from a university. They're still affiliated with a university, but their salary comes from a research foundation (usually funnelled through the university, who skim money off the top so they can pay their electricity bills). This kind of precarious academic situation is becoming more common, and all it takes for them to face unemployment is a few failed grant applications or research budget cuts. It's scary.

So, postdocs are really diverse. What's mine like? Well, I have a supervisor (or a mentor), and together we are working on a project that is largely of my own devising. I do not have any teaching responsibilities, although I've been informally mentoring some master's and PhD students, and I'm otherwise free to pursue my research in whatever way I like. All in all, it's a great position, and very conducive to learning new skills, getting papers published, and making me more attractive for landing that coveted professorship job.

What do postdoctoral researchers actually do, though? For me, there is a lot of variability in my day-to-day activities. Here's a rough outline of the sorts of things that I do:

• Attending discussion groups. Someone may seek expert feedback on a research proposal or a draft presentation for a conference.
• Meetings. Yes, you can't escape meetings, even in higher education. Meetings with collaborators to discuss our projects (and assign tasks and keep people on schedule); meetings with students to review their progress; meetings with the whole lab to discuss administration; meetings with visiting scholars to talk about their latest project; and more.
• Reading articles. Staying up-to-date on the current state of the field is very important - new findings are always being published, and new methodologies and techniques developed. I spend a lot of time simply prioritizing what I need to read closely, what I can simply skim, and what I can ignore. There's a lot of good science out there!
• Designing and planning experiments. This can be a long process and is often one of the most varied aspects of my job. It can involve making recordings, combing through dictionaries for words with just the right combinations of sounds, creating huge spreadsheets to make sure your designs are "balanced", tweaking hardware to ensure that stimulus presentation is correct and that responses are accurately recorded, learning new programming techniques for presenting stimuli, and more.
• Analyzing data from experiments. This part can also take a while, depending on how much (or little!) work I did in the planning stage. This usually involves a lot of statistics and a little programming. For many experiments, acoustic analysis is also necessary (and invariably tedious).
• Preparing presentations to give at professional conferences. Sending work-in-progress for consideration for presentation at conferences is all part of the job. The feedback you get at conferences can really improve the work that you do, and the personal connections you make with people can be really important too. Before the conference, of course, many hours are spent perfecting the presentation - you only have your audience for a brief time, so you have to be sure that you convey your message well.
• Writing (and re-writing) articles for publication in scientific journals. This is a big part of the job. Academics are judged to a large extent on the quality (and quantity) of their publications. Finished articles are sent to a journal, who sends them out to reviewers (other academics) who write critical reviews of the article, saying whether it's good enough to be published. Usually, it isn't, and they demand particular changes - incorporate a particular theory into the discussion, run another experiment, change the statistical analysis. Sometimes they simply reject the article as inferior. It can be a slow, gruelling, and soul-crushing process. Still, getting published and contributing to humanity's understanding of the world is pretty great.

I won't do all of those things in a single day, but they're all things I do. There's usually a fair degree of overlap - while I am planning my next experiment, I'll also be analyzing the data from the previous experiment, and writing up the results from the experiment before that. My job is self-directed and generally very flexible, which is great in some regards. It also means it's easy to procrastinate or skive, so I usually try to impose a fairly rigid structure to my days with clear goals so that I actually get things done.

I definitely enjoy my job, but there are times when I wish the system were simpler, or that the process of proving your worth as a researcher didn't involve so many hoops to jump through. Still, that discussion is probably better saved for another post. Sorry for the lack of pictures today. Next week, we'll be talking about Rouen (in Normandy), so you have that to look forward to!

Weekend festivals

The French do seem to love a good festival. It seems that every weekend is full of some exciting public event. Here's a rundown of what we've been up to in the last few weekends.

Journées du patrimoine

The journées du patrimoine ("days of heritage") are actually a Europe-wide program, a celebration of culture and history. This manifests itself in various talks and events, but principally in that many public buildings and museums open their doors for people to come inside and have a look around. You can visit the Senate, the Italian Embassy, or even see behind-the-scenes at the Métro stations. This year's heritage days were three weekends ago, the 19th and 20th of September. We knew that it was coming up, but I must confess that we had just forgotten about it and neglected to go anywhere interesting! Still, it didn't stop scores of French people from having a relaxed and culturally enlightening weekend.

Journée sans voiture

The Sunday of the following weekend was the journée sans voiture ("day without cars"), a new experiment in Paris where cars were banned from the streets. The ban was only applied in some of the central arrondisements, and buses and taxis were still able to drive around, although there were a few streets where vehicles were banned entirely. You can see some before-and-after videos here.

Talia and I cycled down from our flat (where we had contend with cars on the road, how ignoble!) and headed into the centre of the city, where the atmosphere was like that of a public festival. There were street performers, musicians, and a load of people walking and cycling around. We took some time to pop into a Scottish Pub to watch the rugby (which Talia has agreed is a lot more fun to watch than American Football). We were able to see the second half of Scotland's victory over the USA in the Rugby world cup, which was very fun.

Inside the Scottish pub, rugby on the TV.

Paris is normally a very easy city to cycle in, and I'll probably write a post sometime about cycling here. But on the journée sans voiture, it was even easier. With no cars around, no thundering masses of traffic, it was simple and relaxing to bike from place to place. I certainly hope that this becomes a regular Paris tradition.

Nuit blanche

The next weekend, this most recent Saturday was nuit blanche. The name literally means "white night" but it's the French expression for an all-nighter. Here, various public buildings open themselves up to the public, and there are several arts and musical events put on all around the city. The difference here is that it begins at around 7pm, and continues until around 6am!

A short from beneath the Arc de Triomphe.

We found an event we wanted to go to, la Nuit du Quator à l'Orangerie (night of quartets at the Orangerie), a series of string quartet performances in an art gallery surrounded by Monet's paintings of water lilies. It began at 7pm, finished at 6am, and had a different quartet playing each hour. How exciting! However, once we got there, the queue was huge and they were only letting in so many people per hour. There was very little chance that'd we'd get to go in (at least not before 1 or 2am, and we didn't really want to stay out that late), so instead we went for a wander through central Paris. Instead of going to a rugby pub and watching Scotland's defeat at the hands of South Africa, we instead walked up the Champs-Elysée to the Arc de Triomphe, one of the few major Paris monuments that we haven't yet visited. Afterwards, we slowly made our way home, stopping for dessert in a local café. Not the night we had planned, but an extremely enjoyable one nonetheless.

Dessert! This is a café gourmand, a coffee (espresso) with three different miniature desserts to sample.

Free museums

For Americans, the sheer number of free or discounted museums in Paris may seem overwhelming. For Brits too perhaps, although some cities (notably Glasgow) have made a strong commitment to keeping a preponderance of free museums. Notably (and relevant for today's post), there are several museums in Paris which normally charge for entry, but are free on the first Sunday of the month. (There are a few also which are only free on the first Sunday of the month at certain times of the year. For example, The Louvre is free on the first Sunday of the month from October to March.)

Yesterday, the day after nuit blanche, was the first Sunday of the month. Not wanting to squander this opportunity (there are, after all, only 12 first Sundays every year), Talia and I biked down to the Musée des Arts et Métiers. Its name literally means "Museum of Arts and Crafts", but it's basically a museum of science and industry, with exhibits on scientific instruments, materials, energy, mechanics, communication, construction, and transport. Each section takes you on a historical tour from the pre-industrial days (before 1750) up to the modern era.

The outside of the Musée des Arts et Métiers. Yes, that's a converted church on the left.

Although we got in for free, we paid to get a little audio guide, which gives you extra information on each exhibit as you go through. It was well worth it; as well as providing extra background information on some of the more interesting artefacts (such as Clément Ader's steam-powered aircraft), it also provided historical and economic overviews of the importance of particular innovations in industrial processes, such as the use of regenerative heating in blast furnaces, or how precisely a Koenig Sound Analyser works. (The sound analyser pre-dates the oscilloscope, yet allows for frequency decomposition of sound, which is really cool.)

After the tour of the museum, we then visited the nearby Musée Carnavalet, a museum which chronicles the history of Paris. This museum is free all the time! We didn't spend a lot of time there, although we got to see several rooms full of various historical artefacts, and then a large exhibit on the history of the French revolution. The revolution exhibit was very interesting since it held lots of contemporary ephemera from the era - paintings and cartoons, newspaper printings, popular ceramics made to commemorate particular events. Given how rapidly public and political opinion changed between 1789 and 1795, it was fascinating to see those little snapshots of history memorialised for the future.

Finally, on our way home we bumped into another demonstration. Unlike the previous one documented on this blog, this one was in Place de la Bastille and was in support of immigrants and refugees. There were various people there from all sorts of organizations, although sadly no tractors this time. We snapped a few pictures, but you can see some professional ones here.

His sign reads "no person is illegal".

Next weekend

What exciting festival is in store for us next weekend? Thursday the 8th to Monday the 11th is in fact la fête de tournez les taureaux, "the festival of turning bulls". Yes, the Turnbulls are coming to visit - we'll be hosting my parents for a long weekend. If it's anything like the last few weekends, we're in for a treat!