Postdoc survey reveals disenchantment with working life

Anthropology's Disenchantment With the Cognitive Revolution

Beller, Bender, and Medin should be congratulated for their generous attempt at expressive academic therapy for troubled interdisciplinary relationships. In this essay, I suggest that a negative answer to the central question ("Should anthropology be part of cognitive science?") is not necessarily distressing, that in retrospect the breakup seems fairly predictable, and that disenchantment with...

Postdoc Labor Love

I look back fondly on my years as a postdoctoral fellow (1993–1995) as a period of heightened intellectual growth, clarity and optimism. After 5 years as a PhD student, I was finally set free to explore ideas more of my own creation, to start from scratch a new research project but this time with greater wisdom, experience and vision than was possible as a dazed and confused first-year graduate...

The 2-A postdoc.

D a long discussion of our favorite enzyme mechanisms, Gene Sander advised me that the easiest way to obtain a true picture of the transitory steps of a reaction would be to ‘‘hire a 2-Å postdoc.’’ In the mid-’70s, when this whimsical conversation took place, molecular and structural biology was just beginning to exert an effect on mechanistic enzymology. Whereas the advances of the past 25 yea...

Postdoc Annual Report

Standards for postdoc training.

Postdoctoral (Postdoc) training has become virtually institutionalized in many parts of the world as a discrete stage in the career progression in most science and engineering fields. However, there is far too much variability in what such training involves, across institutions and among the laboratories within them. Given its importance and pervasiveness—there are over 50,000 postdocs in the U...