Apparently you CAN level up beyond the PhD bonus round

October 18, 2009 7:47 AM

How does one apply for a postdoctoral position/fellowship/job?

I have a cousin from overseas who would like to come to a school in the Boston/Cambridge area for postdoctoral work in Chinese. Since I hadn't even imagined there was such a thing as academic work after getting one's PhD, I also have no idea how one might go about applying for it. Is this done through the school, or department, or should she contact a professor directly, or … ?

posted by Busoni to education (12 comments total)

They're listed on the websites of the departments offering the postdocs. Like this. Or this.
posted by MsMolly at 7:59 AM on October 18

Or you contact an established faculty member whose work compliments your own and ask them about opportunities.
posted by ohio at 8:05 AM on October 18

In some fields there's a centralized place where these jobs are advertised. (I'm thinking of math, where there's mathjobs.org.)
posted by madcaptenor at 8:07 AM on October 18

In science, they're advretised on specialized jobs sites, like Nature Jobs, which is run by one of the leading journals in the field. Maybe his field has something similar?
posted by chrisamiller at 8:16 AM on October 18

I'm a postdoctoral researcher (in Physics) right now. In my field, openings for postdoctoral jobs are published in "trade magazines" (Physics Today and Physics World); there also exist a couple of more specialized websites and mailing lists that are more specific to my sub-field. When I was starting my job hunt, I had a chat with my doctoral advisor about where to look for these postings; I would assume that your cousin's advisor could help her out with information specific to the Chinese field.

Usually you send in a CV, a list of publications and a summary of your research interests, and arrange for three or four letters of recommendation to be sent to the committee/faculty member doing the hiring. Then you sit back and wait. It's very much a "shotgun approach" type of procedure — I probably applied to 30 or 40 such positions when I was on the hunt two years ago.

In your cousin's case, limiting herself to the Boston/Cambridge area is both a blessing and a curse. Since she's limitng herself to a single geographical area, it's entirely feasible to go through the list of colleges and universities in Boston, look up the Chair of the department that teaches Chinese, and e-mail them to ask whether there are any postdoctoral opportunities available. However, even though there are several dozen colleges and universities in the Boston area, I wouldn't expect there to be more than four or five postdoctoral openings in all of them combined in any given year. Postdoctoral research is not a large job market; in physics, prospective postdocs can generally afford to limit themselves to a single continent, but they can't afford to limit themselves to a single metro area.
posted by Johnny Assay at 8:35 AM on October 18

Yeah, postdocs usually cannot limit themselves to specific regions, even in the sciences. Postdocs provide an opportunity to gain research experience and publications while seeking an academic appointment, but they generally make the person less employable outside academia.

Why Boston? Is it academic reasons?

If not, I doubt she has any chance, so she should look for visiting professor or adjunct positions. So then the question becomes : Is she a U.S. citizen?

If so, she can even apply for a Fulbright. You see, postdocs are often hired based upon their needs rather than simply the university's needs. So she'll need to write a proposal saying "I need to work with Professor X at Harvard". Of course, people who referee her Fulbright proposal will be professors of Chinese at other universities.
posted by jeffburdges at 9:20 AM on October 18

To build on Johnny Assay's comment, one part of the blessing is the Harvard-Yenching Institute who may offer positions but definitely know who to talk to in the area. They are good people and they do lots of neat stuff; I learned Mandarin from two of their scholars. The curse of course is that it's Harvard-related, so anything would be incredibly competitive...
posted by whatzit at 9:29 AM on October 18

Is your cousin affiliated with an institute of higher learning in the U.S.? If she is, there should be a dedicated counsellor or office at that institution where these sorts of opportunities are collected. These services are often under-used, so even if she is not affiliated with any institution, the counsellor in the offices of any given school in the Boston area might be willing to offer advice. Try calling the career service offices of schools in Boston, find out if there is anyone willing to help out.
posted by Sara Anne at 9:39 AM on October 18

I got my postdoc position (biochemistry, UK) by writing directly to the lab groups in which I wanted to work.

In my experience, a significant proportion of jobs that are advertised in my field are only done as a formality (ie work permit, green card issues) so they can hire the person they have already recruited.

The humanities may well be a different kettle of fish, but there is a lot to be gained by cold calling people you are interested in working for.
posted by TheOtherGuy at 2:28 PM on October 18

There's two ways to get a post-doc: one is to apply for them after they've been advertised (or, if you have good connections, to hear about them before they're advertised), and the other is to contact researchers you'd like to work for, and offer to write a grant proposal. It would be very helpful if your cousin's adviser could be involved.

As an example, I heard that a colleague had been offered money to do something if he could start the project immediately; I happened to have a postdoc finishing up who had the training to do that project. Therefore, my colleague hired my postdoc. The project was short, but they had the opportunity to write a grant proposal to continue it.
posted by acrasis at 2:29 PM on October 18

Most of the advice here appears to be coming from scientists--which is not surprising, because most academic postdoctoral positions are in the sciences.

Science postdocs are usually funded by the research grant of the person who hires them. There are very, very few such grants in the humanities, and I can't think of any in the modern languages. The humanities just aren't structured around external funding the way the natural sciences and many of the social science disciplines are, in part because our research usually requires more time than money (in relative terms).

If your cousin's Ph.D. is in Chinese language and literature, and she is looking for a postdoc, it will almost certainly be a teaching position. There are some organized humanities postdocs that are highly competitive and provide a decent salary and benefits while requiring limited teaching, freeing up the recipient to work on research (usually continuing the research that led to the Ph.D.). Otherwise, though, there's a fine to nonexistent line between a postdoc and a non-tenure-track lectureship--which in the languages generally means teaching introductory and intermediate language courses to undergraduates, since at places that hire a lot of lecturers, tenured faculty usually teach the more advanced courses.

Job listings in Chinese are available to members of the Association for Asian Studies on its website. Your cousin could also write to the chairs of all the colleges and universities in the Boston area that have departments of Chinese or Asian Studies, or that offer courses in Chinese, to inquire about possibilities.

And just to clear up a potential source of confusion: a postdoctoral position is not a course of study that leads to another degree. It's a job teaching, doing research, or a mix of the two. Ideally it provides experience that will help the postdoc get a longer-term position afterwards; in many science fields, a postdoc allows a newly minted Ph.D. to get experience with a kind of research method or equipment that he or she did not use in the Ph.D. advisor's lab.
posted by brianogilvie at 3:45 PM on October 18

Oh, and jeffburdges's recommendation of applying for a Fulbright is a great idea, if she's qualified.
posted by brianogilvie at 3:47 PM on October 18