My Experience on the Postdoc Market in Astrobiology/Astrophysics

I’m writing this as an autobiography. There may be some advice sprinkled in, but this isn’t an guide on how to successfully snatch a postdoc position. This is just my story, take it as you will.

Let’s start at the end of the story, like a Tarantino film. The happy ending: I was lucky enough to get 3 postdoc offers; one of which was a big fellowship and my top choice. Now, let’s roll back time.

I knew I wanted to pursue an academic career pretty much as soon as I started graduate school. One thing that made me so certain is that I had tried industry already. I worked as a software engineer for three different tech firms and those experiences taught me that I wasn’t happy unless I was learning things that interested me. These particular jobs didn’t involve much learning, and the products they sold were also not very interesting to me: software for oil & gas analysis, identity management, and e-readers. Academia is exactly the opposite: I can research exactly what I’m interested in (astrobiology/the origin of life) and I’m constantly learning. To quote my colleague and friend Prof. Michael Gaylor: I’m a learning addict!

I started mindfully preparing for my academic career as a Masters student. In 2017, I attended the AbSciCon pre-conference career workshop run by Prof. Jen Glass. She gave me loads of good advice on how to prepare for an academic career, but one of my biggest takeaways was that I started building my professional website right after I returned home from the conference.

Around this time, I started to think about what I wanted my life as a scientist to look like. What was I working towards? Would I become a professor? Would I do theory, or experiment? What’s my dream job?

I’m really good at theory, but I admire experiments like nothing else. There’s something about the reality of experiments that has drawn me in for a long time. Somewhat tragically, I never got a good opportunity to incorporate experiments into my graduate research. My supervisor is a theorist, and he did what he could to try to connect me with experimentalists, but I was never able to add an experiment to my thesis. I could go on about why, but I’ll just say that as a graduate student, you are not in complete control of your destiny. If I could go back and re-apply to grad school, I think I would try to be co-supervised by a theorist and an experimentalist.

I’m not complaining. I’ve had a great run as a theorist. I’ve written nine, soon to be 10 theoretical papers as a student. But I needed to follow my heart in my postdoc applications, so I decided I was going to focus my energy trying to get a position that involved doing experiments. This is a bit hard to do without much experimental experience, but as it turns out, it’s not impossible.

I applied for 12 postdoctoral positions between October 2020 and January 2021, nine of which were fellowships. I asked academic Twitter about how many positions I should be applying for and boy did I get a range of answers: 50, 20, 100, 10. It seemed to me like there wasn’t a special number, so I only considered the handful of positions that really excited me, and poured all my energy into those applications.

Seven of my applications were for solely theoretical positions, and I ended up getting two interviews out of those applications and one offer. One of these interviews felt like a thesis defense, and the other felt like a research chat among colleagues and friends. The latter was the offer. I would have been happy to accept the offer, but a week before the decision deadline, I got a big fellowship offer from the Canadian science funding agency to do the experimental work of my dreams in a really amazing lab and connect it with the theory I’ve done.

So that pretty much brings us up to today. I feel extremely fortunate that it worked out the way I wanted. I’m still a bit dumbfounded, actually. I’m not yet allowed to announce my fellowship publicly, but maybe by the time you read this I will have been able to reveal it.

I really want to thank all my academic mentors, colleagues and friends on Twitter who helped me through this process. I had a lot of support and I’m extremely grateful.

If I have to sprinkle in some unsolicited advice from my experience, I’d say:

Following your heart is the best thing you can do. Don’t let others define who you are—they will try. Only you get to say who you are.