Beyond the PhD

Project Snapshot

Client: National Science Foundation's Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) Program

Goal: Understand how identities and professional development experiences influence the career motivations of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) postdoctoral trainees over time

Impact: Gain insight into issues that can be addressed through interventions designed to potentially curb the attrition of women and underrepresented minorities from STEM faculty careers

Duration: 3 years 9 months

Research Methods: Literature reviews, cross-sectional and longitudinal web-based surveys, in-person and phone interviews, focus group interviews

Analytical Approaches: Descriptive analytics, t-tests, chi-square analyses, regression analyses

Tools: Qualtrics, SAS, Atlas.ti

My roles: Collaborative project - conducted literature reviews; retrieved and created survey items for survey development; kept the project's IRB application status current each year; managed study recruitment and participant gift cards; recruited schools to distribute the survey to participants; piloted the survey; cleaned, recoded, and prepared data for analysis; conducted quantitative analyses; scheduled and conducted in-person and phone interviews; conducted focus group interviews; conducted qualitative analyses; suggested collaborative paper topics; wrote and edited papers for peer-reviewed publications; translated findings into infographics; presented findings at conferences and symposiums

Description

• The Beyond the Ph.D. research group analyzes career motivations, academic and professional identities, and graduate and postdoctoral experiences, to understand and forestall the atrophy of academic research identity among many women and underrepresented minorities (URMs) in STEM.

• As a member of the team, I sought to understand and uncover the mechanisms that may handicap the impact of current and future interventions.

• Specifically, we aimed to understand how academic-professional cultures in STEM departments, postdocs’ social relationships, institutional contexts, and the intersection between “science identity” and other important social identities (e.g., race, gender, etc.) either promote or hinder the development of a professional research identity among URM postdocs, and especially among women of color.

• Our analyses are based on cross-sectional surveys, three years of longitudinal surveys, and a series of one-on-one interviews in order to gain a comprehensive understanding of the processes that facilitate, sometimes inadvertently, the kinds of choices women and URMs are making.

Findings

A Selection of Top Insights

• Career Goals: Although most STEM postdocs do not end up in academic careers, this is not due to a lack of interest in one. More than 80% of our respondents say they are strongly considering an academic career and 64% say they are definitely planning to pursue one.

• Academic Entrepreneurship: Characteristics usually associated with economic entrepreneurship—innovativeness, tolerance for ambiguity, optimism, competitiveness—are also associated with science identity, efficacy, and motivations to do science. We suspect interest/success in academia is tied to holdings of entrepreneurial orientations.

• Pros and Cons of Academic Careers: While postdocs agree that academic careers come with more respect (90%), autonomy (90%), and opportunity to have an impact (73%), they also agree that academic careers come with worse pay (97%), work-life balance (73%), and job security (68%). Which (dis)amenities matter more when choosing careers?

• Trailing Spouses: More than 75% of our respondents are in committed relationships. Whether partners also have post-baccalaureate degrees, are willing to move (again) after the postdoc appointment ends, and understand academic work culture are important components of STEM postdocs’ decisions to pursue an academic career. They don’t make career decisions alone.

• STEM Teaching: We look at the relationship between more than 200 different variables and interest in academic careers. One of the strongest relationships is the one between teaching experience and interest in an academic career. Only 9% of STEM postdocs have that experience.

• Problematic Principal Investigators: Most postdocs come to campus assigned to or selected by a lead researcher on a project. Faculty in those roles often have priorities that are contrary to those of the trainee, the postdoc office, and funding agencies. Some of this is ignorance of the role of the postdoc as a trainee. Individual Development Plans (IDP) do not resolve these problems.

Infographics

Click on the images below to scroll through the full infographic

Conference Presentations

2019. Values and Decision-Making: How Value Conflicts Inform Career Interests among STEM Postdocs in the Academy. National Postdoctoral Association Conference, Orlando FL.

Research Website

For more details, check out this project's website