I've done my postdocing and moved a step or two up the ladder. Briefly took half a step out of academia and quickly came running back, it's just a great way to live and work.
>>6473 Chemistry - worked in industry for 6 or so years after my PhD, but then a PD project came up just after I was made redundant.
It was after about 4 weeks after I started when I realised that if I won the lottery or something I'd still want to carry on working there, even if I never needed to work again.
>>6474 I'll get slack for saying this, but keep an eye on jobs in the US.
Postdoc salaries are practically double, lab budgets are orders of magnitude bigger even at lesser universities, and there's far more openings for academic positions without even mentioning the cash cow that is the national laboratory system (which is desperate for young scientists, and pays an unimaginable sum of money in a job which is set for life).
As a PhD student in England, my supervisor and I went out for a beer to celebrate getting £10k thrown our way so we could finally fix the only important instrument in our lab. It's really incomparable how well funded the sciences are state-side, and with it the infrastructure for networking and all that, so a few years stint as a postdoc there will have your CV completely transformed.
>>6475 Yeah it's very disheartening to look at how much I could be making in the USA or Germany, but I'm pretty locked into the UK now - my wife is the main breadwinner and we have kids and a mortgage.
I love being a post doc but know I only have a few more years before I will have to start thinking about the future, and if I should try for a lectureship, or go back to industry. I've got to be honest, the amount of politics and teaching gives me second thoughts about academia
To resurrect an old thread, how are my fellow academia lads feeling about the current strike situation?
I'm still striking, but am starting to get a bit disillusioned with the lack of any apparent progress, bar a stream of cringworthy twitter posts from the UCU.
