My postdoc: The first six months

It's the end of the semester, the end of the year, and the end of my first six months as a postdoc. Seems like a good time to reflect, yes?

I didn't originally want to do a postdoc. Everyone I knew who was a postdoc absolutely hated it and warned me against it. They didn't like their bosses, or they didn't like the research assigned to them, or they were treated badly, or their work was taken for granted, or in one case their work was actually stolen from them. It really didn't seem like a good idea, after hearing all of that.

When I applied for this job, I was running out of options, and the job was listed as primarily a lab manager position. I didn't care; I needed a job and this work sounded interesting. My boss has taken this department-funded permanent line and turned it into a post-doc, though, which is pretty cool. So although I am in fact a lab manager, and I do some administrative-type work for my boss, I also get to do my own research. I designed a project that I was interested in, that used her study species and built off of data that this lab has collected (though I could have worked with a different species if I wanted to), and presented the project to her. It is not in her area of expertise, but she has given me a lot of feedback and is helping me to find people who can assist. She has even offered to pay for much of the research out of her own grants. I also collaborate with other people, and I anticipate getting many publications out of my time here.

I love my job. I am ridiculously happy here. This university is a great place to be; there are almost too many interesting classes and talks and seminars and visiting speakers. My boss is a fantastic woman, and she is successful (she has many grants, and the rank of Distinguished Professor). She is also very nice, and very ethical, and very supportive. This appears to be quite rare. But it is incredibly refreshing, and has restored my faith in academia. About a year ago, I was thinking that I didn't really want to pursue a research and teaching university job, that maybe I should just focus on the teaching. I looked around at the professors in my program in New York and thought, My god, I don't want to be like these people. Their lives are miserable, they totally mistreat their grad students, and some were engaged in seriously unethical behavior. I don't want that life.

My new boss is a great role model, and she has shown me that it is possible to be an academic and still be happy, and be a nice person. It is even possible to do these things while being a woman - and not get walked all over. Am I a woman scientist? wrote about another professor who made her realize:

So, it is not necessary to be a supercompetitive asshole who denigrates the work of others and takes all the credit to be successful. You can be a nice person and a great scientist.

I am having the same experience, and for that I am grateful. I know how lucky I am to be in such a good place, with great people. It seems that the key element that determines whether a job is good or bad is often the people you work with. This was not something I took into account during my job search; I wanted a job and didn't care who I had to put up with. When I go back on the market in two years, I will have a very different attitude.