It's been a while since I've posted here, but all good news: I've landed a tenured associate professorship at a national university (=research-focused) in Japan! It was not only my main aim when I started this blog, but a major life goal since I was a child. To celebrate, I wanted to talk about my post-doc journey. I was in two post-docs, Shanghai from January-September 2019 (write-up), and Edinburgh from September 2019-2021. At the tail-end of my PhD, I was furiously applying for next positions while sending out my first article to the Social History of Medicine, writing up my dissertation and preparing for the viva. I'll do an Early Career Researcher advice post later on, talking about writing chapters, sending out articles, deciding on your viva panel, how to decide which chapters would work as an article, etc., when I'm more settled in my new position: I'm still figuring out the balance between research, teaching, supervising, and administrative duties! For today's post, I want to talk about drafting the post-doc project.
The usual careers advice applies, so I won't bore you with them. Yes, please check your word count, follow the guidance, network and all that. If someone points you to a job post, go for it. One thing about the UK and perhaps this applies elsewhere: you are usually going to be a post-doc on a team of an established professor's grant, so brainstorm a project topic-wise wherein you, the lead Principal Investigator (PI-sounds like a crime scene) and the team are going to be a good match.
My main advice is to make the postdoc a statement about who you are after your PhD. You probably already know that it needs to have its own identity, and be a step above in terms of ambition and scope from what you achieved in your PhD. Your PhD is for figuring out the tools of the trade and understanding who you are as a thinker/research. Your tenured professorship is for representing the institution as a public figure and being a leading researcher in your field. A post-doc is in between that; think of it as training for your permanent position (whether in academia or not).
The post-doc research question expands on the PhD's and should feel wiser and deeper. Build upon your PhD findings to ask questions about bigger themes and theories. The method and data gathering process, if possible in COVID, should also be a step above: if you sat in archives in your home country, propose to do oral history interviews or fieldwork abroad. Or expand the kinds of conferences and networks you will develop, or the way you will communicate your research findings, ie: via social media. And most importantly, outputs: of course you don't know whether your article from the post-doc will be accepted before you've even got the job, but you want to be the kind of researcher who plans to do a solid stint of research, followed by a solid stint of outputting your thoughts from that research.
All this sounds wooly without an example, so I've attached a proposal I actually never had the chance to do. It was on civil society in India after the Emergency, which I really wanted to know about since my first paper was on Indian AIDS NGOs: so, kind of a pre-history of my first journal article (and one of my PhD chapters). It was for a wonderful project called 'Rethinking Civil Society' run by a historian of political thought at a university in the north of England. I was shortlisted as an alternate but ultimately didn't get it (cried like Mei from Totoro!). Instead, I proposed projects on international drug control to Shanghai and later Edinburgh, which turned out to be the right career decision in terms of networking, though the job I was shortlisted for got back to me later to ask if I was still available. We can talk about managing your emotions and stress during the job search process in another post.
Some takeaway points I would advise in drafting the post-doc project are: make a timescale of data gathering and outputs, including conferences and articles. Showing you can manage time, funds and outputs is good practice anyway for when you are applying for grants as PI. The person reading your application will likely know very little about the topic, so introduce it well but with depth: imagine someone saying, I didn't know anything about this before, but I got it after I read your proposal. Finally, make sure you understand the PI: how do they think as a researcher, what kinds of data do they draw from, what themes and questions are they interested in? And frame the project as contributing to but also building upon and enriching that.
I plan to be applying for grants for new research projects by the new academic year (this is when the semester begins in Japan), but for now, I'm finishing off bits of work from my previous positions. Good news I hope to be sharing with you soon: a couple journal article acceptances, a few more in the works and a book! Oh and my third peer-reviewed article came out recently :) check it out here! https://isiscb.org/special-issue-on-pandemics/essay.html?essayID=16
Drink tea and enjoy the changing of the leaves - autumn is such a cozy time!