How to get hired in academia

 I've recently left my job as Head of School to become a lecturer in AI and software engineering. After nearly ten years as Head, I have had to go through the process of hiring academic staff several times. Now that I am no longer involved in doing this, I am able to write this post about how to get hired as an academic, from the point of view of the one doing the hiring. Bear in mind that this is what worked for people to get hired by me, and might not work with other managers.

Firstly, I need to say that if you're looking for an academic job, don't bother with the "blanket bombing" approach of just emailing every Head of School / Head of Department that you can find in a simple Google search, asking them for a job. Every time I received one of these emails, I deleted it. This was especially true for new PhD graduates looking for postdoc positions. Firstly, the institution I was at did not have funding for postdocs. Secondly, most of the emails I received were from ecology graduates. Yes, I have published a number of papers in ecology, but anyone who had spent more than 30 seconds investigating my institution and myself would have found out that I'm not an ecologist.

The first part of the hiring process, from the point of view of the applicant, is advertising the position. Places advertise because they have a hole in their staffing, so they need to hire someone to fill that hole. If they don't have a hole, they don't need to hire anyone. If you see a position advertised that interests you, make sure you do two things:

1. Read the position description. 
2. Follow the application process.

The position description lays out everything about the role: what qualifications the applicants will have; what experience is required; and what specific skills the employer is looking for. This is a wish list. While someone who genuinely meets every one of the criteria will have a better chance of being successful, employers can be a bit flexible in that an applicant who is otherwise outstanding but doesn't meet all the criteria could also be attractive to them. On the other hand, if someone does not meet most or all of the criteria, then they won't have any chance at all. Their application will be skimmed and discarded. Applying for a position "on the off-chance" that you might get somewhere is ill-advised and mostly leads to wasted time. This is especially true if HR is doing the initial evaluation of the applications, as HR is less likely to have the domain knowledge to tell if an applicant is worth interviewing. In other words, HR will be looking for keywords and rejecting applications that don't have those keywords. I always reviewed applications myself, but being at a smaller institution I could do that.

Applicants must follow the application process. I have encountered cases in the past where the applicant sent their application to me directly. This is a big no-no, as recruitment is handled by HR, so HR should be receiving the applications. It also shows me that the applicant is either too careless to read the instructions for the application process, or they think the rules don't apply to them. Obviously, the rules apply to everyone, and any deviation from them is a bad thing as it opens the employer up to accusations of bias or favoritism, which can have legal consequences.

The process of reviewing applications is intended to identify the few (five or six) applicants who will progress to the interview stage. This really means that for each application, the reviewers need to be able to answer one fundamental question: can this person do the job?

When reviewing applications I always liked to read the cover letter first. This means that your cover letter should address the selection criteria for that position. If you can explicitly address every criterion in your cover letter, do so. This will help to make the point that you are able to do the job and make it easier for the application reviewers to answer the question above. While one page is best, close to two pages could be acceptable if you have a lot to say about your relevance to the position. Cover letters should be well-written and free of spelling and grammatical errors. After all, if I were recruiting for an academic position teaching at tertiary level, I expect someone to be intelligent enough and detail-oriented enough that they can use a spell checker and proof-read their application.

The curriculum vitae (CV) lists what you have done in your career so far. This should be up to date and detailed, however the first page should summarise the details in the remainder of the document. I never had any preference for any particular format, although I do prefer things to be simple and straight-forward. Fancy formatting never impressed me, I was only ever interested in the information contained in it. Personal statements or statements of career goals also never interested me, and in cases where these statements did not align with the position I was recruiting for they actually harmed the applicant's chances. CV should also be free of grammatical and spelling errors.

Since I was always recruiting for teaching positions, I always looked for teaching experience. This didn't mean that someone had had to already worked as a lecturer: if they were a new PhD graduate, then experience tutoring undergrads was sometimes good enough. But I would not look at someone who did not have any teaching experience at all. I also favoured people with PhDs. This was not because I thought that having a PhD made someone a better teacher, but because having a PhD showed that they could do research. It is a legal requirement in New Zealand that the teaching of degrees or above (Bachelor's or postgraduate qualifications) be done mostly by those who are research active. There is also an expectation that teaching of postgraduate qualifications be done by those with a qualification one level higher than that being taught. Since we were teaching Master's degrees, that meant the teachers needed PhDs.

The one thing you absolutely must not do is claim that you are something you are not. This can be claiming to have a skill you don't have, experience you didn't get or a qualification you don't have. This kind of thing can be found out pretty easily these days, often with a simple Google search. This also means that you should be careful about what you put online, as a potential employer will find something controversial and it will harm your chances of employment.

Be careful about bragging too much in your application. New Zealand culture especially values humility and discourages bragging. It's enough to list your accomplishments, you don't need to decorate them with adjectives like "exceptional" or "outstanding". You might think you're great, but so does everyone else applying for that job.

If your application has convinced the reviewers that you could do the job, you will be invited to an interview. These used to be face-to-face or over the phone, but now technology is good enough that an online interview is just as good. Make sure that you are on time to the interview, and do your homework first! This means finding out as much as you can about the institution, the role that you are interviewing for, and the people doing the interview. 

The purpose of an interview is to answer two questions:

1. Can you really do what you claim in your application?
2. Could I stand working with you?

Regarding the first question, you can expect to be asked some questions related to the topics you claim knowledge about. I always liked to gently probe an applicant's knowledge with some questions about specific technologies or approaches. If you don't understand a question, it is better to ask for clarification than to burble on with a clueless half-answer. If you don't know the answer, it is better to just say that you don't know but could find out. 

Regarding the second question, that comes from your attitude during the interview, and the way you answer questions. I once interviewed someone who was very well qualified and had a lot of experience, but their attitude during the entire interview was just screaming that they didn't want to be there. They didn't get the position, because I knew that if I had hired them, in six months either I would be trying to get rid of them, or they would move on to someplace else.  

Personally, the three qualities I value the most in someone I work with are:

1. Competence
2. Hard work
3. Straightforwardness

Applicants who could demonstrate those three qualities in an interview were much more likely to be successful than those who did not. Regarding the third quality, straightforwardness, I always asked a "filter" question to establish this quality. An applicant who answered that question correctly would probably get the job. An applicant who gave the wrong answer, would not.

When all of the interviews have been completed, a decision will be made about which applicant will receive an offer. Do not email or otherwise bug the people who interviewed you about the outcome! You will just annoy them.

If the decision goes your way, then you will receive an offer. This means that they want to hire you, so now is the time to negotiate the conditions of the position. Don't be afraid to ask for a bit more money, they want you, so it doesn't hurt to ask. The worst they will say is "no", they are extremely unlikely to withdraw the job offer just because you asked for more money. 

If you end up not getting an offer, it doesn't mean you're not good at what you do, or that people don't like you. It just means that there was someone there who was better than you for that particular role. There have been cases in the past where someone didn't even get to the interview stage the first time they applied for a job with me, but when they applied for another position later on, they got the job. 

Job hunting in general is brutal and at times demoralising, and more so in academia. There are many more qualified people than there are permanent academic positions, so someone is always going to miss out. Hold on to the reasons why you want to be an academic, and keep applying.

Finding an academic job

Finding a job for any profession is difficult, but finding a job in academia can be ridiculously hard. Since I finished my PhD ten years ago, I've had two periods of unemployment, totalling more than six months out of work. Since I was the sole income-earner for my family at the time, those periods were particularly difficult and stressful to get through, but I got through them, as much by luck as by design.

I've come across a collection of articles on finding academic jobs, that I wanted to share and comment on. I tend to agree with what most of them have to say, even though they're not specific to computational intelligence in particular or even computer science or engineering in general.

The first discusses whether you should even go for an academic job. For computer scientists it is probably easier to go into industry with a PhD than it is for other PhD graduates. The tech industry is always strong somewhere, and it is always growing, so there are always jobs to be had. In my own country of New Zealand, at any one time there are usually between two and three thousand vacancies in the IT sector, and that's out of a country of around four million.

The second article discusses ways to improve your chances of getting an academic job. The authors mention engaging with the community, publishing papers and emphasising transferable skills. I've actually had one supervisor tell me that there is nothing more important than publishing papers, while this article argues that too much publishing runs the risk of establishing nothing more than an unfocussed research record, and this article argues that teaching experience, including experience designing and administering courses, is very important for getting an academic job. Even though I was more interested in the research side of things during my Honours year, I still worked as a tutor for a database course, and during my post-grad years I tutored computational intelligence courses. Near the end of my studies, I worked full-time as a teaching fellow (I believe in the USA that would be Teaching Assistant, but I can't be sure) and did re-work and administer courses. I am quite certain that this experience helped me to get the job I have now.

Having decided to stay in academia, and done the ground-work to enter the academic profession, the next step is to find an academic job. When you've identified a job you are interested in, the first thing you must do it get your academic CV in order. There are several common mistakes you must avoid in this document, since one mistake is all it takes for a recruiter (who are not academics) to discard your entire application. The previous two articles have some very good pieces of advice for laying out your CV, and I have applied several of them to improve my own CV.

Things like career objective statements should also be left out of a CV. My current job means that I regularly receive unsolicited emails complete with CV from people wanting a teaching job in my department, and most of them have things like career objective statements that have nothing whatsoever to do with my department or any kind of teaching job. Nothing says "desperate blanket bombing" like failing to do even a minimum of research about the place you are sending your job application to.

The other major component of an application for an academic job is the cover letter. This should also be specific for the position you are applying for, it should cover all of the criteria mentioned in the job advertisement, and it should be short. If you make it too long and detailed, then you run the risk of boring the recruiter before they finish reading, which usually results in your application being thrown away.

If you have a compelling CV, and have written a very good cover letter that shows that you are very well suited to the job, then you might get an interview. This article talks about how to prepare for an interview. One of the points in it that I would emphasise is the need to do your research before the interview. One of the fundamental rules in the Art of War is "Know yourself, and know others, and you shall have one hundred victories in one hundred battles". This applies to interviews as well! Know who is going to be interviewing you: have they published with anyone you know? Is there any other connection? What relationship does their research have to yours? This article also has some tips on how to handle tricky interview questions. Some questions just can't be answered well, like the question I got once about how I demonstrated an awareness of diversity in the classroom (I'm from the whitest district in New Zealand and I married a Chinese, I think that shows a pretty good awareness of diversity). Obviously, some self-confidence is very important, and I've been lucky in that a couple of times some really good people have boosted my self-esteem just before interviews.

Usually, by the end of an interview, I know whether I've gotten the job or not, just by the way the interview went. If I have struggled with any of the questions, then I probably won't get it. If it's gone smoothly, then I know I've got a much better chance. There have been a couple of cases where the interview went well and I still didn't get the job, but those were years ago and for positions that were probably above my skill level at the time.

Job hunting is brutal, and academic positions invariably attract a lot of applications (especially New Zealand positions, as for some reason a lot of people want to move here). The last time I was out of work, I sent off two dozen applications, which resulted in three interviews, which led to two job offers. And that was with a PhD, four years teaching experience, almost five years post-doc experience, and more than forty publications. But, if you stick to it, you will find a job. It might not be the job you first had in mind when you started, but it will be just as good, and any job is good experience if you're clever about how you do it.

Work-Life Balance

A video of a panel session of two young(ish) professors, talking about work-life balance. I used to work in the same lab as Corey Bradshaw, and have even published with him. He is a straight-speaking person who says what he thinks, so you can be sure that what he says in this session is his honest opinion. That being said, I do have some conflicted feelings about this discussion.



On the one hand, I respect and envy their academic achievements. On the other hand, the sacrifices they have made to get where they are are just terrifying, and strike me as selfish. When Tanya Munro talks about dragging her two tiny babies to a conference, or skipping their end-of-year performance, or both of them talking about leaving their kids at home for the evening again, I can't help but think that that is just so much macho bullsh*t. For me, family comes first, there is no choice. My daughter is smart without being conceited, brave without being reckless, strong without being over-bearing, loving, caring and empathetic, without being clingy. She wouldn't be those things if she didn't have an extended family around her who were fully engaged in her upbringing. I'd rather be a "less-successful" academic, than risk losing what I have with her. She'll grow up soon enough, I can put more energy into my career then. Certainly I could achieve more if I sacrificed more, or if I slept a lot less, but if I worked an 80-hour week, I would die. It's as simple as that. One of the last things my father said to me, just a few days before he died, was "you're not a machine". I refuse to risk depriving my wife of her husband and my daughter of her father.

Another point at which I disagree with Corey is when he mentions telling his post-docs "Start publishing papers or I'm going to have to sack you". I think this is a poor management technique: if someone isn't performing, you as a manager must coach them to lift their game. Management by fear is a poor technique and just breeds resentment. Life may be too short to work with a*holes, but it's also too short to accumulate enemies.

The idea that everything you do should lead to an obvious paper is fine for someone who in only doing research, but personally I couldn't live without undergraduate teaching. I need the surge of energy I get from standing in front of a class and explaining complex concepts. I really love it when someone "gets it", when their face lights up with understanding. Even though I spend most of my time now in management, I'd never take another position where I wasn't teaching.

Finally, everyone's circumstances are different, so you shouldn't compare yourself to others. Tanya Munro may have met her husband during her first year of university, but I met my wife at 28, married her just before turning 30, and had my daughter, finished my PhD, and started my first post-doc at 31. I had problems with my PhD topic, I had health problems, and I had to work to support myself. Now I'm 40 and my career path is finally starting to settle down. I may have achieved less academically than them, but so have most people. What, really, does comparing myself to them achieve? Nothing, except perhaps to make me feel badly about myself.

One thing I do agree with is that you have to find your own balance, your own way. I think I've found mine, and I'm happier for it. The video is well worth the time to view it, if only to gain some perspectives from successful academics.

On the importance of a good supervisor

One day, a fox was walking through the forest when he met a rabbit sitting outside a rabbit hole reading a pile of papers. "What are you doing?" the fox asked the rabbit. The rabbit looked up at the fox and replied "I'm doing the literature review for my thesis. It's on the superiority of rabbits over foxes. Would you like to come inside and discuss it?". The fox hungrily licked his lips, followed the rabbit into the rabbit hole, and was never seen again. 

Some time later, a wolf was walking through the forest and saw the rabbit sitting outside of his rabbit hole making notes on a thick pile of paper with a big, red, pen. "What are you doing?" the wolf asked the rabbit. The rabbit looked up and replied "I'm revising my thesis". The wolf asked the rabbit "What's your thesis about?" and the rabbit said "It's on the superiority of rabbits over foxes and wolves. Would you like to come inside and discuss it?". The wolf hungrily licked his lips, followed the rabbit down the rabbit hole, and was never seen again.

Some time later, a hare was walking through the forest when he saw the rabbit sitting in the sun with a big, satisfied grin on this face. "Why are you looking so happy?" the hare asked the rabbit. The rabbit looked at the hare and said "I've just been awarded my PhD. My thesis was on the superiority of rabbits over foxes and wolves. Would you like to come inside and discuss it?". The hare, curious about such a topic, followed the rabbit down the rabbit hole into the warren. In one corner of the rabbit's room was a pile of fox bones. In another corner was a pile of wolf bones. Sitting between the two piles of bones was a lion.

So you see, it doesn't matter what your thesis is on, as long as your supervisor is a lion.

A newly published article (discussed in more detail by one of the authors here) has examined the influence of several factors that may determine how successful a scientist is in their career, where success is measured by the number of publications the scientist (biologists in this case) has. While factors such as gender and language had some slight effect, the factor that was most influential was the number of publications a scientist had before completing their PhD.

In other words, someone who has learned to produce papers before they finish their PhD is more likely to be able to continue producing papers after they have finished their PhD. To me this seems analagous to saying that someone who has learned how to drive can drive. Apparently, stating the blindingly obvious is original research as long as it uses statistics.

Who does a pre-PhD learn this paper-production skill from? Most of the time, from their supervisor. A supervisor who produces a lot of papers, and includes their students in the process of doing so, will produce PhD graduates who have the skills to produce papers post-PhD. If the supervisor doesn't teach the student how to publish, where else will they get this skill?

The most disturbing implication of this is that if a student chooses the wrong supervisor, they will have little chance of a successful career. The article linked to above states that the institution that the PhD graduates from has no influence on success and the influence of other factors is weak. As an aside, this reinforces something I've been saying for a while - that the reputation of an institution is good for marketing, but says little about the quality of the staff there.

The sentiment behind the story at the top of this post, is that as long as your supervisor is a good supervisor, you will be successful. This makes choosing the right supervisor probably the most critical decision an aspiring academic can ever make, yet they must make it when they have little knowledge and no experience on which to draw to make that decision. This is a huge problem - how many perfectly capable researchers have had their careers destroyed, before they have even begun, by a bad choice of supervisor? More importantly, how do those of us who are post-PhD stop it from happening in the future?

I really wish I had an answer to that question.

Rules for success

Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame has come up with a list of ten rules for success. Surprisingly enough, I think that most of them apply to success in academia as well as life in general, or at least life as a maker who blows things up on television. The rules (shamelessly copy-and-pasted from Boing Boing) are:

1. Get good at something.
Really good. Get good at as many things as you can. Being good at one thing makes it easier to get good at other things. 

2. Getting good at stuff takes practice.
Lots and lots of practice.

3. Get OBSESSED.
Everyone at the top of their field is obsessed with what they're doing.

4. Doing something well and thoroughly is its OWN reward.

5. Show and Tell.
If you do something well and you're happy with it, for FSM's sake, tell EVERYONE.

6. If you want something, ASK.
If something piques your interest, tell someone. If you want to learn something, ask someone, like your BOSS. As an employer, I can tell you, people who want to learn new skills are people I want to keep employed.

7. Have GOALS.
Make up goals. Set goals. Regularly assess where you are and where you want to be in terms of them. This is a kind of prayer that works, and works well. Allow for the fact that things will NEVER turn out like you think they will, and you must be prepared to end up miles from where you intended.

8. Be nice. To EVERYONE.
Life is way too short to be an asshole. If you are an asshole, apologize.

9. FAIL.
You will fail. It's one of our jobs in life. Keep failing. When you fail, admit it. When you don't, don't get cocky. 'Cause you're just about to fail again.

10. WORK YOUR ASS OFF.
Work like your life depends on it...

In my opinion, these rules apply to success in research and academia as well. Looking at them one-by-one:

1. Get good at something

While there is something to be said about the value of a generalist, everyone in research is a specialist at something. This is what the process of getting a PhD is about: becoming an expert, or specialist, in one particular topic. Of course, it's better to be good at several things, which is why I've been able to publish about computational intelligence and ecology as well as developing software. But I was only able to get into ecology because I'm good at computational intelligence, especially neural networks, and I was only able to get into neural networks because I'm a good programmer. So, being good at one thing can lead to being good at another thing.

2. Getting good at stuff takes practice

When I was an undergrad I was always programming - it was what I did to relax. But I got really good at it, which led me to neural networks and research. I've also written a lot of papers: the early ones were pretty bad, but after enough practice I got to be good at that as well. Even my experimental design has improved through practice. It's been said that mastering any skill takes 10,000 hours of practice, which doesn't seem too far off the mark to me.

3. Get OBSESSED

Obsession can be dangerous, it can keep you from your family, ruin your health and drive away your friends. But obsession also drives you to find the last bug in your code, to run just one more experiment, to refine your writing just that little bit more. Obsession leads to great results and great research.

4. Doing something well and thoroughly is its OWN reward

This is really close to the heart of research. Academics don't get paid for the journal articles they publish (despite the huge profits the journal publishers make, the content is provided for free). For an academic, doing your work well enough to get published is its own reward, and only research done well and thoroughly gets published.

5. Show and Tell

If you're an academic or a scientist, you should have something to say to the world about your work. That is why we publish our research, which is just the grown-up, scientist way of showing and telling the world about you've done.

6. If you want something, ASK

Some bosses, the good ones, will want to develop their staff. Development means pursuing something that you are interested in, something that you can do well and something that will help you do your job better. Even if it's only peripherally related to your job, it's still worth asking for support.

7. Have GOALS

Everyone in academia should have goals. Everyone in academia with goals should know that you're probably going to end up with something that is completely different to your goal, but just as good. Two years ago my goal was to get a permanent lecturer / senior lecturer position at a university. Now I'm the head of department at a private college. A different role to what I was aiming for, but just as good, if not better.

8. Be nice. To EVERYONE

My best friend likes to say that good things happen to good people, and it's true. Not because of any mystical, karmic nonsense, but because people who are nice to others make more friends and are the kind of people that others like to help out. Treating people badly might achieve short term goals, but long term, it's a self-defeating strategy.

9. FAIL

You learn more from your failures than you do from your successes. There are certainly people who don't fail early in their careers, and become professors in their early thirties, but they also unfortunately tend to be insufferably arrogant people. Failure teaches you humility, and it teaches you persistence. If my nine-year-old daughter is trying to learn how to do something, and is doing it wrongly, I don't stop her because she needs to learn through failure, and she needs to learn persistence. An academic is the same: you need to fail to learn what doesn't work.

10. WORK YOUR ASS OFF

The people who are most successful are the ones who work the hardest. Which is why I'm sitting at my dining table typing on a laptop at 11:15pm instead of dozing happily next to my wife.

On Being a Postdoc 2: Postdoc survival

One of my favourite quotes from the television series Babylon 5 is: "You do not make history, you can only hope to survive it". As it is with history, so it is with being a postdoc. You do not make history as a postdoc, you can only hope to survive being one. I have done three postdocs, one in New Zealand and two in Australia. Now I'm in a permanent academic position, a head of department no less. But I have seen people destroyed by the postdoc system, who have not just lost their jobs but been pushed out of academia completely. Make no mistake, the postdoc process can be brutal, but there are some techniques that I found useful for surviving.

Be nice. While some people seem to think that the ends justify the means, if you mistreat people, eventually you will get a reputation such that no-one wants to work with you. There is no point in being able to attract research funding if you can't find staff to employ with it, and there is no point being a professor in your early thirties if your research group collapses by the time you're forty, thanks to mismanagement of staff. Be nice to people, and they will be nice to you. As my best friend is fond of saying, good things happen to good people. This isn't due to some mystical Karmic process: rather, people will go out of their way to help someone who is nice to them. Loyalty is something that can only be earned, it doesn't magically spring forth from the payment of salary. On the other hand, some people see niceness as weakness and will try to exploit you. Beware of the users!

Be diplomatic. Your supervisor may be egregiously wrong about something, but you don't have to point it out. Far better to subtly lead them to this conclusion, to let them think that they have worked it out by themselves. While it is nice to think that science runs on the free and frank exchange of ideas and opinions, it is in reality a very delicate egosystem. Beware of the toes you step on-they may be connected to a fragile ego and a peevish personality.

Get everything in writing. It never hurts to have written evidence in case everything goes wrong. People break their word, sometimes you need a little bit of evidence to remind them of what they promised.

Write everything down. A career is not built on a single action or accomplishment. Instead, it is built on a long list of actions and accomplishments. If you don't write down everything you do, then you might forget something vital when you go for your next job. In other words, having a comprehensive and up-to-date CV is vital for keeping track of the evidence that shows that you have built a worthwhile career.

Be diverse. Work in different fields and expand your horizons. Each field of research has its own way of doing things, if you work in a different field you will gain fresh perspectives on your own field of study. I spent eight years working in ecology, and what I learned has made me much better at designing experiments in computational intelligence. Beware of staying in a different field for too long: your own field may move on so much that you can't catch up again.

Get involved with professional organisations. For computational intelligence, the best organisation to get involved with is the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), especially the IEEE computational Intelligence Society (CIS). Volunteering for service on committees of professional organisations is a great way to develop your reputation as a competent, hard working professional. It is also a great way of building your network of professional contacts.

Be useful. Work with other people and broaden your network of research collaborators. Help other people out where you can. Not only is this a great way of increasing your publication output, it's also a good way of diversifying your research experience. Collaborating with other researchers can also lead to other research and employment opportunities.

Know when to get out. Sometimes a field is no longer worth pursuing. Sometimes, you have simply gone as high as you can in that field. This is partly why I left ecological modelling, as I'd risen as high as I could without an ecology degree (something I had no interest in acquiring). Sometimes groups get mismanaged to the point that they can't survive, and start losing staff at such a rate that you have no choice but to flee. There is no point being the last person on the Titanic. In other words, don't go down with the ship

Get enough sleep. I have found that every hour of sleep I miss at night costs me two hours of productivity the following day. It is important to sleep during the night: after the sun comes up, the quality of your sleep is cut in half. Missing sleep also depresses your immune system which makes it more likely that you'll get sick. You might miss out on a bit of work time by going to bed early, but how much work time will you miss if you're sick every three weeks?

Work hard. But not too hard. Success comes to those who work the hardest, and in many ways hard work is more important than native ability. But don't work so hard that you miss out on too much sleep. You especially shouldn't work so hard that your family suffers. At the end of they day, your job is just a job, it's not worth sacrificing your quality of life over. You can always catch up on work later, but missed time with your kids is lost forever.

Plan your next move. Within six months of starting a post-doc position you should be planning the move to your next position. This means that you need to have some idea of where you want to go in your career.

You also need to be flexible, you probably won't end up with your dream job, but you probably will end up with a job that is just as good.

Being a postdoc is hard, and really it is best for young, single people. I was thirty-one when I started my first postdoc, and had a brand-new daughter, which made it much harder for me. But I survived, and I'm a better person for it. I hope these strategies are useful for other people.

What I've learned so far about management

I'm almost three months into my new position, a position that involves managing several lecturers. So, what have I learned about management so far?

An old Chinese proverb goes something like this:

If a king treats his ministers as his arms and legs, they will treat him as their heart and mind.

If a king treats his ministers as his cattle, they will treat him as a peasant.

If a king treats his ministers as grass and mud, they will treat him as an enemy.

I think that this applies just as much to managers as it does to rulers. So, with that in mind, here is what I have learned so far about managing people.

1) To manage others you must first manage yourself. You cannot manage other people's time and tasks if your own time is being taken up with tasks that you have allowed to accumulate. This also means that you need to control the tasks that come your way: if you need an hour of uninterrupted time to get several tasks done, then close your office door, put up a Do Not Disturb sign, and get them done. If you have too many tasks to do, then don't take on anything new until the task list is more manageable. If some members of your staff can do a particular task better than you, then delegate.

2) You have to be nice to the people you manage. If you are indifferent to them, or even bullying to them, you will fail. I actually knew this a long time ago, so I never even thought about trying this approach (also known as the Marquis de Sade school of scorched-earth management). Managers who try to manage through fear engender the hostility of their staff, and hostile staff love to see their manager fail. You must manage your own frustrations and anger (see point 1).

3) You have to be humble. An old saying goes something like "Humility means never getting a door slammed in your face... or ON your face". New Zealand culture is still quite egalitarian and particularly values humility. Arrogant managers will lose the support of their staff, and fail. Humble managers, managers who freely admit that they don't know something and defer to the staff who do, will win the support of their staff. You must admit it when you make a mistake. If mistakes are out in the open, then they can be fixed.

4) You must listen to your staff. Most of the time they know what they are talking about, and most of them will know how to do at least one thing better than you. Apart from the fact that listening is the nice, polite thing to do, it also lets you know who you can delegate particular tasks to.

5) You must lead from the front whenever you can. Anyone can tell others what to do, but if you want to be respected as a manager, you must show that you can do it too.

6) You must explain why you want someone to do something. If you are giving someone a task, then you must tell them why the task must be done, why you are giving it to them, and suggest how you think it could be done. If I tell my young daughter to do something "because I say so", she won't do it. If it doesn't work on a child, why would it work on an intelligent adult?

I'm sure I'll learn more about management as time goes by, and I'll share what I learn.

On Being a Post-doc

After completing a PhD, most people who wish to stay in academia end up doing one or more post-doctoral positions. Experience as a post-doc is a prerequisite for a career in scientific research, as it is during your post-doc career that you get exposure to ideas and techniques outside of your PhD, and work with a wider range of people than you did during your PhD. The chances of going into a permanent academic position, without doing at least one post-doc, are very slim (most people who manage to do this tend to wind up in the same department they did their PhD in). I've done three post-docs, at Lincoln University in New Zealand, at the University of Sydney, and the University of Adelaide, both of which are in Australia.

So, what's it like being a post-doctoral fellow?

Basically, it sucks. Most post-docs are for two or three years. This term is fixed as the position is usually tied to a particular research grant, which is itself of fixed duration. This means that even if you do extremely well in your research, there is no guarantee of further employment after the contract ends. This means that as a post-doc, you will probably be changing jobs and cities every two years. If you're young and single, that's not entirely a bad thing: travelling and living in different places broadens your mind, can build a wide network of friendships and helps you appreciate different ways of life. Things get harder if you are a couple, as your partner also needs to find work in your new home. If you have even one child, it's a nightmare: you need to find a new school, your child faces the awful wrench of leaving their friends behind, if they're in after-school activities they need to be organised all over again, and if they have even minor health issues, finding adequate care for them can be very challenging. The stress that this can place on your relationship is enormous. In short, being a post-doc is a young (single) person's game.

If your post-doc is tied to a grant, then you will be working on someone else's project. In other words, you'll be working on something that is interesting to someone else (the grant holder). This also means that the outputs you produce (that is, papers) will be of benefit primarily to the grant holder rather than you.

While you should concentrate on doing the work you are paid to do, if you want to move up the academic ladder, then you also need to demonstrate the ability to do independent research. So, in addition to working a full-time job, you're also working part-time on your own research programme.

On top of the above are the dangers of any workplace: while most post-doc supervisors are good and kind people, they get their positions by being good researchers (or occasionally good politicians), not good managers. In the worst case, you might end up working for a narcissistic sociopath. Doing a post-doc with the wrong supervisor (or supervisors) can make your life a living hell. Sociopaths can be pretty hard to spot, too.

My experience is that it can take six months or more to find a new position, which means that shortly after starting a post-doc, you need to start looking for another. If your career is a chess game, then you need to start getting your pieces into place sooner rather than later.

To sum up, being a post-doctoral fellow means a semi-itinerant life of uncertainty and upheaval, serving the research needs of others, while also planning a future career that might not happen.

Was it all worth it for me? While there are many things I would do differently if I had the chance to do it all again, I don't want to live my life in regret: the things in my life, the good and the bad, the joy and the hurt, have all made me the person I am. But I do regret the hurt it has caused my family. Being a post-doc is hard on everyone if you have a family. It's not all bad news, though, and in a future post I'll be discussing ways in which you can make your post-doc career successful.