The Awesomest 7-Year Postdoc or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-Track Faculty Life | Scientific American
The Awesomest 7-Year Postdoc or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-Track Faculty Life BY RADHIKA NAGPAL Join Our Community of Science Lovers! This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Scary myths and scary data abound about life as a tenure-track faculty at an "R1" university. Scary enough to make you wonder: why would any smart person want to live this life? As a young faculty member at Harvard, I got asked such questions a lot. Why did you choose this career? How do you do it? And I can't blame them for asking, because I am scared by those myths too. I have chosen very deliberately to do specific things to preserve my happiness, lots of small practical things that I discovered by trial and error. So when asked by graduate students and other junior faculty, I happily told them the things that worked for me, mostly in one-on-one meetings over coffee, and a f