S03E02 | Postdoc Appreciation

It's Postdoc Appreciation Week! But what are postdocs anyway and how do they differ between STEM and the humanities? What comes after the dissertation? Liz is now an NIH postdoc at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, while Xine is a SSHRC postdoc in Vancouver at the University of British Columbia. In this episode we talk about our new postdoc lives on different sides of the continent. We break down the differences between postdocs in different disciplines and the role that postdocs play in the current structure of academia. Increasingly, people are having to go through not just one, but two or more postdocs before getting to tenure-track professor positions. It can feel like we are in a strange liminal space between graduate student and faculty. How do we make the most of this time for our personal and professional lives?