It doesn’t have to be like that. If you know how to navigate the system, you can emerge with the skills needed to progress to the next stage.

In the good old days, a postdoctoral position served as a one or two-year career builder between graduate school and a tenure-track position. Today, the postdoctoral population in the US has grown to over 50,000, thanks to a funding boom in the 1990s that swelled the number of science PhDs, while the number of tenure-track faculty positions has remained stable, so competition for these posts is fierce. The National Science Foundation says that only around 20 per cent of postdocs ever move into one of these coveted positions. Yet three-quarters want to apply for them, according to a survey conducted by the scientific research society Sigma Xi. A postdoctoral stint can all too easily turn into a holding pattern while waiting for a faculty position to open up. Biologists, for example, typically spend about five years as a postdoc.

Don’t let the odds discourage you. Somebody has to win those positions, and if it’s not you, there are always other options. For example, postdoc training in industry can help you stand out. Follow our tips, and you will be on track to get the most out of the postdoc experience.

Make the most of your interview

The interview for your position should be a two-way street, as it is the main opportunity to discover whether the position is for you. Your goal as a postdoc is to build your publication record, so ask the principal investigator (PI) what experiments you’ll be asked to perform and who will be first author on the papers. You’ll need to travel to scientific meetings to build your skills and network, so check there is a budget for this. Also ask about any extra training opportunities, such as new techniques that you want to learn.

Make the effort to talk to the other postdocs, grad students and technicians, preferably over a beer. Find out what previous postdocs are doing: have they gone on to faculty positions? This is also an ideal opportunity to find out what the adviser is like as a boss.

Choose your adviser wisely

You are probably already familiar with the names of the leading researchers in your field and you’ll no doubt want to work with them. But equally important are the mentoring skills of your adviser. A postdoctoral position is first and foremost a training experience, and you want a mentor who views you as a future colleague, not just another pair of skilled lab hands. “Choosing your mentor is far and away the most important decision a postdoc can make,” says Crystal Icenhour, a postdoc at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. The good news is that some universities have improved the quality of mentoring by including it in the PI’s evaluation for tenure and promotion.

Check for postdoc-friendly policies

Some universities have no postdoc policies whatsoever, and the worst offenders don’t even know how many postdocs work for them. “The postdocs have been shoehorned into the system in strange ways,” says Geoff Davis, who conducted the Sigma Xi survey. “They are not employees but they are not students either.” Thankfully, more campuses are now opening up postdoctoral offices that provide career counselling, grievance procedures and workshops. There may also be a postdoctoral association for support if you need it.

Set out your goals in writing

Once you’ve settled on a postdoctoral position, sit down with the PI to discuss mutual expectations. A written plan can ensure that lines of communication stay open, and prevent misunderstandings. Postdocs who write research or career plans at the outset are 23 per cent more productive (as measured by papers written) than those who do not, according to the Sigma Xi survey.

Besides research goals, the plan should include details about how often you’ll meet with your adviser, what scientific meetings you’ll attend and your career aims. “Think to yourself, ‘If I want to be a PI in five years, what do I need to do to get there?'” says Andrea Stith at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland, who has developed an advisory handbook for postdocs moving into faculty positions.

Assemble a team of mentors

Rather than relying solely on your adviser as a mentor, join professional associations, attend meetings, collect business cards and stay in touch with people, says Melanie Sinche, director of the Office of Postdoctoral Services at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. “You may find your primary mentor is a fabulous scientist but is not that good at networking or has few contacts in industry,” she says. “Learn how to approach other people in your department for advice.”

Consider an industry postdoc

If you plan to go into industrial research, a postdoc in the private sector could be a better option. Whereas academic postdoc salaries range from $30,000 to $40,000, industrial postdoc salaries are around $60,000. Health and retirement benefits are included, and a successful spell as a postdoc may turn into a permanent job offer.

Before you apply, make sure you really want to work in industry; if you change your mind later it may be hard to move back into a top-notch academic institution. Also, make sure your project is not proprietary and that you can publish papers on your findings, says Ron Webb, manager of doctoral recruiting and university relations at Proctor & Gamble in Cincinnati. “Otherwise your two years in industry will be a black hole.”

Take advantage of extra training

Many postdocs go on to careers in science policy, government, law, technology transfer, teaching, journal editing, journalism and industry. Some universities support this by offering additional qualifications. For example, Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, encourages postdocs to take concurrent classes to enhance their teaching or business skills. “They can mix and match, and put their career track together with help from their mentor and other co-mentors,” says Ann Richmond, professor of cancer biology at Vanderbilt and assistant dean for biomedical research, education and training.

Practise grant-writing skills

Increasingly, university hiring committees want people who will bring in grant money or who have funding already in hand. “It is possible to get a faculty position without having money in your pocket, but it certainly makes you more competitive,” says Icenhour.

Now many postdocs will have this extra bargaining chip to take to their desired institution. In January 2006, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a $400 million grant programme to ease the transition from postdoc to investigator. Called the Pathway to Independence award, it provides an individual with two years of funding as a postdoc and another two to three years of portable funding as a new faculty member. “Our goal is to shorten that period of time from mentorship to researcher status so that the individual hits the ground running with independent research,” says Walter Goldschmidts of the Office of Extramural Programs at NIH.

“A postdoctoral stint can all too easily turn into a holding pattern”

While the gap between the number of postdocs and the number of tenure-track faculty positions is likely to stay, new ideas like this should give an aspiring postdoc some cause for optimism. Funding agencies and institutions have stepped up their efforts to ensure that postdocs end up in satisfying careers, says Alyson Reed, executive director of the National Postdoctoral Association. “Postdocs who take control of their experience and take advantage of all the resources available to them will go on to very satisfying careers in science.”

While some celebrity marriages may fit this pattern, most men and women are seeking a mate who is similar to them in qualities such as income, beauty, and desire to have children.

The new study flouts the traditionally accepted views that, to maximise our ability to reproduce, men are seeking young, attractive women who are likely to bear them children while women are seeking older, successful men who have the resources to support and protect their young.

“Our results fly in face of these studies,” says Stephen Emlen, a behavioural ecologist at Cornell University, who conducted the study with Peter Buston, now at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Buston and Emlen’s study suggests most men and women in Western society look for partners with qualities on a par with their own. Attractive females, for example, are much more likely to seek a similarly healthy and good-looking mate than a rich one. And wealthy males are more likely to seek a rich wife than a pretty one.

Evolutionary perspective

Unions of “like” individuals are more advantageous from an evolutionary perspective, says Emlen, because they are more stable. This is beneficial because humans require long-term relationships both to produce a lot of children and to ensure that they survive to adulthood.

The researchers gave questionnaires to almost 1000 men and women aged 18 to 24. The volunteers were first asked them to rank the desirability of 10 attributes in a long-term partner, and then rank themselves on the same 10 attributes. Analysing the results, Buston and Emlen found a consistent match between the qualities ranked as highly desirable in a partner and in an individual themselves.

The new study confirms that before setting out to search for a mate, people assess their own assets and then look for a mate “in their league”. The implication, says Emlen, is that long and happy marriages are most likely for couples sharing similar values, education, physical appearance and intellectual interests.

Choosing a partner with far superior qualities would risk a future breakup, because such a partner would eventually be tempted away by a higher quality mate.

However, Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Liverpool, UK, warns against oversimplifying human mate choice. “It like a poker game,” he says. “You have to balance your preferences against those of your partner and the other players in the game.”

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073pnas.1533220100)

Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) is the leading preventable cause of mental retardation in children in the US, affecting up to three babies in every 1000 births. While stopping drinking is the most obvious solution, alcoholic mothers can find this very difficult – motivational programs have historically only been about 30 per cent effective.

A protective drug remains some years away, but the latest research shows how the fetal brain could specifically be shielded from alcohol. Michael Charness at Harvard Medical School and his colleagues found that a protein fragment called NAP stops alcohol from thwarting neurons’ ability to connect to each other during brain development.

Earlier work by the team found that alcohol interferes with L1, a protein that allows neurons to stick to one another (żìĂš¶ÌÊÓÆ” print edition, 28 September 2002). Also, scientists at the US National Institutes of Health have showed that NAP could abolish FAS in mice.

Side effects

But it was unclear whether NAP specifically blocked alcohol’s neurotoxicity, or resulted from NAP’s known ability to protect against neurological insults. Determining which was the case was important, as the more precise the action of a drug, the fewer side effects are likely to be seen.

But teasing out the anti-alcohol effect from the overall neuroprotective effect required some complex lab work, involving the creation of a series of slightly different NAP variants. Charness and colleagues then tested these and found one compound that protected mouse embryos in culture from ethanol but offered no protection against another neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin.

This showed that NAP blocks specifically blocks ethanol toxicity. Furthermore, only a very small amount of NAP was needed for protection, again meaning fewer side effects.

Magic bullet

Mary Velasquez, a behavioural researcher at the University of Texas-Houston Health Sciences Center, says a drug would certainly be welcome among women at risk of FAS. “All the clients I see are looking for a magic bullet,” she said.

But she expressed reservations about any treatment that would allow a woman to keep drinking throughout pregnancy because of the numerous other social and health-related effects of alcohol.

Some recent studies have reported that even light drinking may cause decreased attention span, poor motor skills and poor emotional development in babies. But the UK agency Alcohol Concern advises that drinking one or two units once or twice a week is very unlikely to cause harm.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1331636100)