Postdoc Job Description
"Postdoc" refers to someone taking part in a postdoctoral program. These programs are for Ph.D graduates, and serve as a stepping stone between their Ph.D programs and their academic careers. They are mentored by academic staff and get the opportunity to work on their own research, thus increasing their amount of publications and making themselves considerably more marketable for academic positions in the future.
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Definition
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A postdoc is a position that doctoral program graduates take in order to enhance their professional skills in academia. It is essentially an academic apprenticeship program. It is beneficial both to the graduate and the professor who supervises him --the supervisor gets a highly-qualified research assistant, while the graduate gets to work on her own research and publish her findings. To this end, 43 percent of first research articles published in 1999 were done by postdocs.
Length
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Postdoctoral fellowships are not careers in their own right. For this reason, it is generally understood that they are to last less than five years. Any more than this and the postdoc is not only not developing his own career, he is also taking up a postdoctoral space that could be occupied by someone who does want to develop her academic career.
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Fields
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Postdoctoral programs are mostly present in the "hard" subjects: science and engineering. Social sciences do not generally have postdoctoral programs, mostly because social science research is not as labor-intensive and does not require the specialized skills that science research does. Therefore, there is not as much of a need for postdocs to assist professors. This is not to say that social science postdocs are nonexistent--they make up four percent of the total number of postdocs.
History
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While postdocs have been around since the 1890s, they did not begin to be prevalent until the 1950s, and they have been on the rise ever since. The primary reason for this is because while the amount of science doctoral graduates has been steadily rising since the 1950s, the amount of academic and high-level science positions has not. Postdoctoral fellowships have filled this hole in the employment market by giving graduates not only a place to work, but also a place to develop their skills, thus making them more competitive for the few academic positions available.
Salary
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According to a survey done by Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society, published in May 2005, the average salary for a postdoctoral candidate was $38,000 per year. While this is certainly on the low side--the average salary for someone holding just a bachelor's degree is $45,000 per year --it is important to note that the average salary for doctoral holders as a whole is $71,000 per year. Since a postdoc is a part of almost every science doctorate-holder's career, then the relatively low $38,000 can be seen as a stepping stone to the relatively high $71,000 per year.
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References
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