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:

1. 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 clinical trial stage fail. So on top of the reality that most of my experimental ideas will very likely be wrong, with those odds, it feels like whatever it is I’m working on most likely will never lead to a treatment. 
2. Failure part 2- I don’t know how many times I’ve been rejected for fellowships/scholarships, or have seen grants and papers get rejected. And my research career is still relatively short. I don’t think there is any way I can describe how much rejection you go through as a scientist. It’s something everyone talks about but you don’t understand until you’re doing it. 
3. In a similar vein to feeling like my work doesn’t matter, I often feel like other people’s work is much more interesting and meaningful than mine. I suppose it’s just part of the imposter syndrome, which in a nut-shell is feeling like everyone is doing better than you are and that you're not qualified for the job.
4. My work has been much slower than I'm used to- I work independently so I pretty much decide my own pace, but I’m still in the early stages of figuring out what my project is. I have several project ideas that I’m testing out right now but it takes time because I still have a few important preliminary experiments to run before the project can really take off. It’s just that it would be a waste of time to test all of my ideas before I’m sure my results were not a fluke and are meaningful. And to run those experiments I'm still in the process of breeding the mice I need with the right mutations. Sometimes I feel like I'm doing something wrong and a little useless not being super busy with experiments but one of my biggest pet peeves is also filling in my time with meaningless “busy” work.
5. Money- I just found out today the average postdoc apparently are paid less than mail workers and librarians. People assume PhDs get paid a lot so I feel a little embarrassed about that. I knew this going into a PhD however and I’m not really in a position to complain about money so this one is a minor issue. I’m mostly just jealous that others are saving more money than me (haha) but it is also a bit demotivating. I also know I can always leave academia and move into industry as soon as I want to, so there’s that. The reason I don’t however is that I still enjoy the intellectual freedom that you get since academic research is curiosity driven rather than money driven (to a certain extent, you can't do research if no one wants to fund it). I figured this is my last hurrah to get to study what truly interests me since (1) less than 10% of life sciences PhD's become professors and (2) I'd most likely have to move again because you have to be willing to pretty much take whatever job you can get if you want a tenure-track faculty position. I am also taking these few years to have kids since I get to work independently and make my own schedule. 
6. Feedback- you just don't get much of it. And if you are to ask for any, scientists tend to be critical so its almost always something they think you should improve on. So I generally don't ask unless I think I really need feedback but I think getting more genuine positive feedback would help with the motivation. 

My strategy for dealing with these feelings

1. Learning new skills- I’ve been trying to take advantage of the fact that I’m not super busy with work to learn some bioinformatics. In an age where everyone is interested in big data, science has not been immune to it. We are generating a lot of DNA sequencing data and there are not enough biologists who know how to analyze it, so I’ve been taking online courses to learn about the concepts and I've picked up some basic coding skills using python. It helps because I find it interesting and I do enjoy learning new things. It makes me feel accomplished to be able to understand and do something that I previously was not able to do even if it’s fairly basic. 
2. Networking- I’ve attended two small conferences and they have both been fairly helpful for me to think of exciting ideas for my projects. It also helps me keep the bigger picture in mind from seeing examples to remind me that the work I do is still important. The second part to this is that I also feel like I haven’t made much effort to get to know the professors of the other labs at my work since I’ve started. But I’ve been trying more the last couple of months and feeling connected at work has helped a lot. It also helps pass the time at work. 
3. Time and patience- as always, time is my friend. Slowly but surely, as long as I stick with it and keep trying I will get better and improve in my field and the thought is always comforting.

Things that are good:

1. Even though I feel like my work is slow, I have produced a fair amount of data and have a good approach to my projects. At least that’s what I’ve been told. Another good thing is that I’ve kind of gotten used to this slower pace. Part of it is that I don’t have any commitments like I used to in graduate school which often took away from my time doing research. So the less busy schedule might just be that I’m more efficient now, which I had heard happens during your postdoc. 
2. When I first started I had a lot of doubts. I thought perhaps I just got lucky with a good adviser and maybe that the work that I did before was not that hard or useful. But now I've gotten over that and feel much more confident in my abilities. 
3. I was able to troubleshoot and learn new lab techniques on my own; to a point where I feel fairly confident that I know what I’m doing based on what I’ve seen from studying other people’s data
4. I still find good scientific talks interesting which I think is a sign that I’m not completely done/bored with biology
5. I’m pretty busy with my life outside of work with getting married and buying/remodeling a house so that keeps me excited and helps pass the time quickly 

I'd be interested to hear if anyone else ever feels disillusioned about work or life? How have you gotten over it or do you just get used to it?