Disillusionment
It’s been 1 year now since I finished my PhD. After taking a month off, I started a postdoctoral fellow position in Seattle. According to Wikipedia, "In the US, a postdoctoral scholar is an individual holding a doctoral degree who is engaged in mentored research or scholarly training for the purpose of acquiring the professional skills needed to pursue a career path of his or her choosing.” In other words, a postdoc is another training period before starting a “real” job. I like to explain it as being similar to what residency is for medical students. So how has it been one year out of my PhD? I think overall I’ve been fighting a lot of feelings of disillusionment with my career choice/research for a few reasons: Failure- We deal with so much failure in science and research. As humans we’ve come a long way since caveman days but there is an infinite amount that we just don’t know about the universe. Despite our best efforts, 90% of drugs that even make it to the clini