As an overall note for fellow nomadic academics I feel like reporting from a conference I recently attended. The hot potato topic was careers for young researchers. The first panel stressed the following points:
There are lots of grants out there for brilliant ideas, you just need to be aware of them.
The paradox: You need to demonstrate your ability to get grants for your research in order to get a tenured position in a university, BUT you need a position in a university to be eligible to apply for a grant (catch-22 situation… as a fellow researcher pointed out).
The advice: Be mobile! Spend the whole of your late twenties and thirties hopping from one country to the next wherever you find an available research job. A strategy that resembles seasonal agricultural workers, who follow the harvest map: oranges in Spain, strawberries in England, olives in Italy, grapes in France… and so on…
In the meantime we have to forget we are human. That we have families and social networks (more sophisticated name for friends and drinking buddies), partners and above all our favorite bakeries, coffee shops ect… From the outside our jobs look very glamorous (if someone has not looked at our paycheck that is), traveling around the world, researching stimulating ideas, meeting other brilliant (although often sort of autistic) people.
The tradeoff is that we never have one stable point of reference. We constantly need to build new social networks. Our best friends are normally in another country, if not spread around the globe and our family most of the times lives in a place without accessible universities. Our partner is having the same career path, which means (s)he is changing jobs and countries more often than a shirt, and we never (or rarely) are lucky enough to be on the same side of a river (or the Atlantic ocean come to that). Being on our productive age we need to focus on our career… but simultaneously being on the re-productive age too… we need to make some choices. The potential parents have about a thousand km or more between them, which does not constitute a healthy growing-up environment for any child.
So we are faced with a clear choice. Reject that post-doc position in the other side of the continent from your partner or freeze your eggs!
