In the agonizing months** between interview and job offer at Oregon State University, I gave a lot of thought to “what do I do if I don’t get an academic job?”  I had the option of staying on as a postdoc through summer 2010 – an option that made me cringe.  ”If I stay as a postdoc and next year’s market is terrible and then take another postdoc … where does the cycle end?”

I have many friends in the biosciences where two 3+ year postdocs is the norm.  One has started a blog devoted to advocacy for postdocs; a recent post encourages the cycle of postdocing to end.  I worry that CS could “get worse” and end up like bio.  I hope that the competition offered by industry will help keep the postdocking length down.  But Ph.D. enrollment is going up – where are these students supposed to go?  Does anyone know if there are stats on the average postdoc length in computer science?

* I officially propose postdocking as the verbal of postdoc much like trafficking to traffic.
** Days became months due to budget hoop-jumping.

In algorithms, there have been a lot of postdoc positions advertising on the two main email lists, TheoryNT and dmanet.  In my experience, many of the positions are in Europe.  I’ve found that a lot of postdoc’s get their position by word of mouth.

I think, by far, the best thing is to get a postdoctoral fellowship.  Freedom!  It seems NSF doesn’t have a fellowship program for people in computer science.  (Is that actually true?) But I have seen (and ignored, as I am not an American citizen) plenty of postdoc fellowship programs for Americans.  If you aren’t American, try your home country.  NSERC has great fellowships for Canadians that you can take out of the country if you got your Ph.D. in Canada and is tax-free if you take it to McGill.  The short of it is, if you have a fellowship you have the academic freedom to study what you want to study.  You can work with whoever you want, whether or not they have a research grant to pay a postdoc.

I’ve also thought that if you plan far enough in advance you could contact someone you really want to work with and convince them to write a grant with your help that includes funding for a postdoc.  Any thoughts of whether that would work?  I know NSF now asks for an “advising plan” when requesting funds for a postdoc salary.  Would having the potential postdoc involved in the writing process help?

And there are schools and departments that have their own postdoc program – I think U. Penn and U. Toronto do.

Any other suggestions?