For many a newly graduated PhD this entails a spell as a postdoctoral
fellow, honing research skills, while basking in the new-found affluence
of remunerative employment. Although postdoctoral salaries may not represent
the riches of Croesus when compared with the average research student grant,
the first salary cheque is greeted with a warm inner glow by both the recipient
and the recipient’s bank manager.

The biggest obstacle to achieving this state of bliss is to find a job.
In times of recession and high unemployment, that is more easily said than
done. Career decisions can often owe more to Dames Fortune and Necessity
than to personal choice. However, one of the major advantages of holding
a PhD is mobility. Usually, only twice in an academic’s life are mobility
and career choice at their peak. Once you have proven your merit by being
elected as a fellow of numerous august bodies and maybe won a Nobel prize
or two, the world will clamour for your services. At the other end of the
spectrum is the fresh-faced PhD. Although having few scientific credentials
to boast about, the vigour of youth, and often the lack of family and mortgage
obligations, make the actual business of upping sticks and trying a postdoctoral
stint overseas a realistic possibility.

At times of economic downturn at home, casting a job search net worldwide
has some advantages. But these days few countries are immune from recession
and so a global outlook is by no means a panacea for the dole queue blues.
And working overseas is not without its problems, probably the biggest of
which is linguistic. While English is regarded by many English speakers
as the universal language of science, living somewhere where your command
of the local lingo is just beyond phrase book level can be tough. Professional
interactions in English may be satisfactory, but there is more to life than
work. You still have to buy half a kilogram of Bratwurst, or explain to
the repair man how and when your washing machine drenches the floor. And
even if life on a utilitarian level proceeds satisfactorily, the need for
discourse on matters as banal as the weather or last night’s TV is something
that many of us suffer from.

Two of my colleagues took the bold step of heading off to Europe for
a year’s postdoctoral work armed only with conversational German. Both reported
similar experiences. Dejection and isolation for the first six months, followed
by a gradual improvement in life as their linguistic skills came to grips
with coffee-time jokes and postpeople’s soundbites.

Forearmed with this knowledge, I resol-ved to pick up my doctorate and
walk as soon as I could. However, painfully aware of my own linguistic shortcomings,
I took the path of least resistance and moved to an English-speaking country
– Australia.

My first detailed extracurricular scientific study after arriving down
under was in the field of hydrodynamics. Living in Bondi, only a stone’s
throw from the world-famous beach, meant that it was obligatory to try my
hand at surfing. My lack of experience was evident from an inordinate amount
of time spent under the water and a complete lack of poise above it.

Apart from the savagery of the surf, the biggest surprise was the overwhelming
sense of deja vu when I started work. This was due to the similarities between
Australian academe and its British counterpart. Here were people struggling
with an insufficiency of modern equipment, working un-der heavy teaching
loads and struggling to win research funding from over-subscribed and under-funded
research councils. It could be nearly any British university, apart from
the obvious climatic differences and the large and unpleasant insects.

The climate took some time to adjust to. Summer in Sydney for a pale-skinned
Welshman can be a little harsh. I was often caught on the horns of a dilemma.
Do I work late in the air-conditioned cool darkness of the microscope suite
and be industrious, or retreat to the bar for cold beer and be indolent?
If you have ever wondered why Australian beer is best served at the temperature
of liquid nitrogen, a summer spent in Sydney soon makes the reason quite
clear. The ease with which I merged into the Australian academic way of
life is perhaps indicative of the similarities between the two systems.

My reflections on my spell in Australia, now that I am back in Britain
working on another short-term research contract, would be a little rose-tinted
if I didn’t call to mind a few gripes. My biggest is that Australian postdocs
are treated in the same way as those in Britain, being employed on short-term
contracts with no guarantee of extensions after they expire. Staying on
in Australia, even for a short period after my job expired, necessitated
all manner of visa hassles. The temporary residence visa that went with
the job at times left me feeling like a second-class citizen. I couldn’t
even get a credit card from an Australian bank. I was none too pleased at
having to retake my driving test either, but at least I passed.

These were but minor irritations, and in general my experience of antipodean
academe was very positive. The lifestyle, including the hydrodynamics experiments,
proved very enjoyable. I was also pleasantly surprised that, despite my
limited linguistic abilities, I managed to pick up some aspects of the
local lingo. These days my occasional extracurricular hydrodynamics experiments
may be restricted to the fluid flow of neck oil, but at least when I suck
on a tinnie of the amber nectar, I know why it is best served so very cold.

Dave Mitchell is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of
Leeds.

Whatever the motivation, the major stumbling block to obtaining a PhD
(apart from finding a source of funding, a project that sounds interesting,
a department with all the equipment you are going to need, not to mention
a supervisor who is not going to treat you like a galley slave, or worse
still like the invisible man/woman), is to write a doctoral thesis. Once
you have overcome that hurdle, chances are that the PhD is in the bag.

‘Writing up’ sounds trivial, but those of us who have been through the
process know it for the real horror story that it is. For some it is a
misery that can go on for eight or nine years. I am not a particularly fast
writer, but what a blight it must be to write that slowly. Those who prolong
the agony in this way, and at the same time bore their rapidly shrinking
circle of friends senseless with the excruciating birth pains of their thesis,
are suffering from some bizarre and unclassified form of sadomasochism.

To cap it all, a doctoral thesis is an inefficient means of assessing
doctoral candidates. Different universities have slightly differing requirements,
but they all boil down to much the same thing. ‘Please produce a large tome,
written on the most abstruse of topics, in the most boring prose imaginable,
and guaranteed to have a readability index of about 1.5.’ This index is
equivalent to the sum of the number of people, who within your lifetime,
or the lifetime of your thesis (did you use acid-free paper?), will actually
read the thing, multiplied by the proportion of the thesis that they actually
read. The author contributes as much as 1.2, the supervisor around 0.25
and the external examiner around 0.05. In unusual circumstances the external
examiner’s component may be considerably greater, if for instance his or
her train is delayed en route to the examination. Mums and grannies make
token contributions, but seldom progress beyond the acknowledgments, and
rarely if ever embark on a detailed critique of the scientific minutiae.

There is always the final trauma of the oral examination, and failure
at this stage is bit of a rarity, unless you have found out that the Earth
is flat, or that Einstein got it all wrong. How many PhD candidates have
failed to convince an external examiner that they, and they alone, were
responsible for the great chunk of black-bound tedium laying open before
them? Even the most fastidious of examiners will invariably allow a dodgy
candidate through, subject to alterations. The lesson is clear, it is a
lot easier to pass a PhD oral than, say, a driving test.

The day after the oral exam the magnum opus is doomed to a life of obscurity
on the library shelf with countless others. Next time you walk into an academic
library have a look at the thesis shelves. You will see whole walls clad
in black volumes. There are some revolutionaries who have their theses bound
in blue, green or even purple. I am never quite sure if this is some thinly-veiled
form of iconoclasm. When you consider the tens of thousands of hours of
work that have gone into producing that wall of black-bound tedium, it makes
the Bayeux Tapestry seem like a darned sock.

Not all theses are created equal. There is the occasional svelte volume
about the size of a Beano annual – sometimes with a not too dissimilar content.
But the majority of theses are big. Some even come in two or three volumes.
Lengthy trilogies, with the exception of those by, say, Douglas Adams, are
unlikely to be a compelling read. Where PhDs are concerned, it is almost
certain that size does not correlate with quality. Unlike commercial authors
who hope to sell their work, theses writers are under no such stricture.
With no requirement to compete for a readership, the law of natural selection
breaks down and this inevitably leads to the survival of the fattest.

Is there an alternative? Well, in these times of low-fat everything,
how about a low-fat thesis? Instead of a corpulent, systematic tome, a more
lissome report could be prepared, with journal and conference papers that
nowadays are appended to a thesis speaking for themselves, instead of duplicating
material already in the thesis. With time wrested from the chore of tome-making,
more time would be available for writing up research papers for publication
during the postgraduate’s studies when the work is still fresh, rather than
long after as frequently happens now. And instead of a final, often token,
oral examination, the student should be able to present a seminar on the
highlights of his or her work, followed by a more conventional viva on the
final report.

The current system does nothing to encourage students to write a concise,
readable thesis. If ‘thesis readability’ were to be included in an overall
assessment of the research work, then theses might soon become leaner animals.
But perhaps PhDs should be graded. Departments often find themselves on
the horns of a dilemma. Standards are absolute, and strenuous efforts are
made to ensure that only those up to the mark get through. But what if they
are not? What if by throwing out a few dud postgraduates, you have to lose
a staff member? And what if the student is from overseas, funded by his
or her national government? Can the department stand the loss of the student’s
fees, and will the funding agency feel inclined to send any more students
to the University of Rigorous Standards? Grading would solve all these problems.
This way everybody gets to call themselves ‘Dr’, and employers get the bonus
of a quantitative yardstick, with which to judge prospective employees.

The potential spin-offs from all these changes would be considerable.
First, the megathesis would disappear. This might be bad news for typists
and others, but it would save months of tiresome slog for the student, and
would make it more likely that supervisors and external examiners would
read what the student produces. The student would then have more time to
develop skills in writing concisely – skills which are valuable whatever
career path is chosen, and especially so if the student stays in science.
And the environment would benefit. Numerous trees would be saved from being
turned into black-bound pulp.

Dave Mitchell is the author of a two-volume PhD thesis, and is a research
fellow at the University of Leeds.

A few rough-and-ready calculations on the back of an envelope soon confirmed
what I already knew: from a financial point of view, my two higher degrees
and four years as a postdoctoral fellow had cost me dear. Had I abandoned
the alma mater for industry after graduating in 1984, I would have started
on a salary of approximately Pounds sterling 9000 a year. A quick survey
of friends who work in industry suggests that a graduate with eight years’
work experience would earn about Pounds sterling 20 000 a year. The average
of these two salaries is Pounds sterling 14 500 a year, which over an eight-year
period comes to Pounds sterling 116 000. This of course ignores any fringe
benefits such as private health care, pension and company car.

As a postgraduate I studied for a one-year MSc ( Pounds sterling 4000
a year) and a two-year PhD ( Pounds sterling 5000 a year). At the end of
these studies, my accumulated income was less than half what I would have
earned had I started working after my first degree. Few of us object to
short-term pain for long-term gain, but had my prolonged privations as a
postgraduate enhanced my earning capacity? The answer is a resounding no.

My first research job was a two-year postdoctorate in Britain ( Pounds
sterling 11 000 a year), and my second, a two-year postdoc in Australia
( Pounds sterling 14 000 a year). I have also been ‘unemployed’ for a year
altogether. While looking for my next job, I was an ‘honorary research fellow’
tidying up loose ends on research projects, writing up papers and so on
(salary nil).

So my accumulated income since starting postgraduate studies is around
Pounds sterling 64 000. This is about half what I might have earned had
I rejected postgraduate education and a career in academic research and
chosen to work in industry.

If I had stayed on at university with a view to improving my earning
capacity, I might well be a bitter and twisted man. However, even with the
benefit of hindsight, I doubt I would change anything if I had my time again.
I pursued a career in research because it interested me, and because it
is something I enjoy doing. I knew before I started that it would never
make me wealthy. It seems that scientists, like artists and actors, are
destined to suffer for their craft.

Postgraduate qualifications in science may not enhance earning capacity,
but do they make it easier to find a job? That is a hard question to answer,
particularly in the middle of a deep recession. I seem to have been lucky
in recently finding a third postdoctoral job, but I have postdoctoral colleagues
who have been unemployed for a year. A postgraduate qualification is clearly
not a passport to a job.

What prompted this line of thought was my most recent appointment. My
delight at being in work after several months ‘resting’ was tempered by
the realisation that I have hit the upper limit of the postdoctoral salary
scale – according to recent advertisements. This effectively means that,
unless I am prepared to be underpaid in a future postdoctoral job, my career
as a postdoc may soon be over. Being paid less than the industry norm I
can accept, but being underpaid on the postdoctoral scale is a nettle I
would rather not have to grasp. The only solution is to find a permanent
job between now and then – easier said than done.

So what conclusions can we draw? First, if you are seeking postgraduate
qualifications in the belief that they may act as a springboard to bigger
and better things, do your sums first. The cost of postgraduate education
could be higher than you think. Secondly, the optimum time to leave university,
if you are interested in earning large wads of cash, is immediately after
a first degree if you are studying science, or after an MBA or such-like
if you are studying commerce.

Postgraduate qualifications in subjects such as dentistry may well prove
cost – effective, though probably not so in the case of medicine. Conversion
courses to become a barrister rank among the most potentially lucrative.
However, postgraduate stipends for scientists help to acclimatise potential
postdocs to the financial realities of a career in academic research.

I await with interest the White Paper on science that William Waldegrave,
the science minister, has promised. But I can foresee little improvement
in the career structure and prospects of the average postdoctoral researcher
with the government so strapped for cash. For those who aspire to join this
merry band, be warned: the law of diminishing returns is here for some time
yet.

Dave Mitchell is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Leeds.