I’d like to say going out with a bang, but the mix of news round here has been rather middling….<\/p>\n
Our joint-PI R01 with Keith Nehrke<\/a> looks like it’s going to be picked up for funding by NIGMS, which is awesome! However, it seems we have to take a haircut on the budget. We applied for $250k\/yr standard modular budget (which as everyone knows just doesn’t buy the amount of science that it used to<\/a>). We’re going to be funded at $165k\/yr (34% cut), split between two labs! Naturally, any money is good, but one can’t help thinking if this is the new normal, even being in the lucky “funded” column doesn’t take away the pressure to write more proposals.<\/p>\n On the topic of proposals, a big area of discussion round these parts and all over tha intarnets is attrition of post-docs (post-docalypse<\/a>) and the hard time people are having to get a foot on the tenure track ladder.\u00a0 Here are some “tales from the trenches”…<\/p>\n – After 8 years of post-doc’ my wife’s contract was not renewed. She’s now doing adjunct teaching at a handful of local community colleges, in the hope of landing a TT position some time this millennium. Like several of her colleagues from the same department, she started adjuncting part-time while still post-doc’ing. A neighboring lab’ there just got an A1 grant dinged, so that will possibly add another mouth to the adjuncting trough.<\/p>\n – A former post-doc’ who left last year (PI’s grants ran out) is now teaching at a small college 2 hours’ drive away, and commuting weekly. A neighbor of mine is a post-doc’ split between here and another town 2 hrs. drive away – he has 2 young kids and has to commute every week.<\/p>\n – One of my former grad’ students is now 4 years post-doc’, all along has wanted to get into teaching, and is having an incredibly hard time finding a job despite part-time teaching for over 2 years now.\u00a0 Plus the major science outreach program here for getting high school students interested in mol bio’ didn’t get renewed, so the post-doc’ who was running that is out looking for “alternative careers”.<\/p>\n – A K-grant applicant in my department got a score but not fundable. His contract was renewed for 6 months to allow him to resubmit. No grant = no job after July. Meanwhile post-doc’ and MD\/PhD both got AHA grants trashed (the payline was well into the single digits), and a similar grant from the student also crashed as an NRSA app’.<\/p>\n – 3 very successful former grad’ students back here for interviews this fall, hoping to get recruited as junior faculty after VERY successful post-doc’s (multiple C\/N\/S papers). Dean says that’s simply not going to happen.<\/p>\n It’s a frickin’ wasteland out there!<\/p>\n Meanwhile, yesterday the house passed <\/a>the Defense Authorization bill, giving the Department of Defense $544.4 billion in discretionary spending, plus another $80 billion for overseas operations (aka Afghanistan). As this beautiful series of InfoGraphics from Mother Jones<\/a> shows, 1 in 5 federal tax dollars is defense spending, and the Pentagon’s gas bill is bigger than the entire NIH extramural research budget.<\/p>\n Yes there are problems with our economy beyond just rampant military spending, but it’s so disheartening to see good young scientists struggling for a slice of the pie, and then also see 3 entire pies being pissed down the drain in a place most people couldn’t even locate on a map. Taking a leaf from the defense lobbyists’ book, how do we position science spending as the patriotic thing to do? <\/strong>(rant over).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’d like to say going out with a bang, but the mix of news round here has been rather middling…. Our joint-PI R01 with Keith Nehrke looks like it’s going to be picked up for funding by NIGMS, which is … Continue reading