The (USA) National Postdoc Survey – A survey conceived and developed by postdocs, to benefit all members of the US postdoctoral community.
The academic community contains women and men, from a wide variety of backgrounds, who take on the roles of undergraduate students, graduate students, research technicians, professors (both tenure track and adjunct), and postdoctoral researchers. I believe that we are more productive as a community when we all have the basic amounts of support and opportunity necessary to be thoughtful learners, innovative thinkers and careful researchers.
As a community, we have gotten increasingly better at collecting data for driving policy changes and improving the support and opportunity of members of academia. However, there has been a dearth of data on postdoctoral researchers, relative to that concerning the wellbeing of undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty. To assist in rectifying this problem, I have worked with colleagues now located at the University of Chicago, University of Tennessee Health Sciences, and Washington University in St. Louis to design and implement the National Postdoc Survey, a short yet comprehensive survey to shed light on life as a postdoc in the USA.
Please check out our website: postdocsurvey.org
If you are interested in obtaining a copy of our survey questions for use at your own institution, or simply for your own interests, the final version of our survey can be found here.
Thanks to the over 7,600 postdocs and 350+ institutions who participated!!
It has been an incredible experience being part of this grass roots effort to gather postdoctoral data. This data collection effort would not have been possible without the help of many administrators and postdocs located across the country.
Please check out United States National Postdoc Survey results and the interaction of gender, career choice, and mentor impact , our first manuscript using data from this survey, covering postdoc career choice, mentor satisfaction, and the effect of gender on the postdoc experience, published here in eLife.
Our survey has also been featured in two articles in Science Careers, which can be found here and here. Co-author Dr. Erin Heckler wrote an article for the POSTDOCKet, the newsletter of the National Postdoctoral Association, about our survey, which can be found here.
Please stay tuned for upcoming reports and manuscripts addressing a wide range of topics concerning the postdoctoral experience, ranging from the relationship between mentoring, publication rate, and job preparedness, to the role of gender in job selection, to the importance of parental leave.
Relavent Publications
McConnell, S.C., Westerman, E.L., Pierre, J.F., Heckler, E.J., Schwartz, N.B. United States National Postdoc Survey results and the interaction of gender, career choice and mentor impact (2018) eLife 7:e40189 DOI:10.7554/eLife.40189.001
These materials are not endorsed, approved, or provided by or on behalf of the University of Arkansas