We are now a few weeks into the “NCAA March Madness” of the college basketball championships. In my past experience outside of the government, filling in the tournament brackets and following the events served to build community among co-workers, encouraging friendly competition and camaraderie.
Prior to its start this year, I received an interesting email addressed to all Health and Human Services staff in regard to March Madness.
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Postdoctoral fellowships provide budding scientists with the advanced training necessary to prepare us for the next step in our careers. Traditionally, these fellowships are geared toward a future in academic research. For most of us, however, as I described in my first post, our career paths will likely take a different route.
I am excited to serve as a guest blogger for Bio Careers. Please allow me to introduce myself - my name is Meghan Mott, and I am a postdoctoral fellow at NIH. I work in the Laboratory of Molecular Physiology at the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Our lab uses zebrafish to model synapse development and function. Specifically, I study the role of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors at the neuromuscular junction.
How many of us have heard that getting grants is much harder now than it was in the “good old days?” Well, I have only been researching full time since I began my postgraduate research, which was 11 years ago, and I don’t think I see a change. Maybe I am not old enough to really see the difference, but I honestly think getting funding has always been, and will always be, challenging. However, I think most scientists are open to finding alternative sources, and apply for many more grants than previously.
Recently, I consoled a fellow postdoc during her latest crisis. Her problem was not that her PCR primers didn’t work or that her paper just got rejected for the 5th time. No, her problem was that she was a single mother of two adorable girls, and one of them was sick with a fever. Therefore, baby girl couldn’t go to daycare, and my postdoc friend needed to cancel a meeting with some very important people with whom it had taken months to schedule.
That choice wasn't anything that I thought about when leaving academia for government research. Perhaps because my first government post, with the US Army, actually involved a whole lot of creativity. Probably even more than I got to use during my dissertation work.
In the anxious era of government budget cutbacks, everything is on the table: federal employee salaries have been frozen; postdoctoral fellow contracts have not been renewed; research projects have been scaled back; and my travel funds have been cut by 33%. Yet, at the NIH, we persevere, doing the best research in hopes of bettering the nation’s health.
My roommate recently regaled me with tales from her pharmaceutical company’s holiday party, complete with lots of food and booze and entertainment. I was rather envious at the time because I was busy making baked goods for my office’s potluck holiday party.
You finally see the light at the end of the graduate school tunnel. The frustrations and triumphs of your dissertation experiments have only whetted your appetite for more research training. Or, perhaps, you’ve sprinted toward the broad and diverse “alternate” career horizon, but haven’t landed a paying job in this current pessimistic economy.
As a Cancer Prevention Fellow at the NCI, I have a generous $3000 “travel and training budget” for attending conferences to present research results, taking training and academic courses, as well as purchasing textbooks that are pertinent to my research. Many labs or research groups at the NIH provide funding to their postdoctoral fellows for similar purposes.
