Should I pursue a postdoc? | Cell Mentor

To postdoc or not to postdoc, that's the eternal question.

At our recent Cell Symposia: Hallmarks of Cancer meeting in Seattle, we asked a panel of cancer experts to give advice from their experience. In this Cell Mentor video, Catherine Wu (Dana-Farber and Harvard Medical), Igor Astsaturov (Fox Chase), Simone Anfossi (MD Anderson), Kornelia Polyak (Dana-Farber), Gang Xiao (City of Hope), and Allison Nixon (Phenomic AI) look back to that critical point in their careers and make suggestions based on their own choices.

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TRANSCRIPTION:

Catherine Wu
Professor of Medicine, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School

My simple answer is "absolutely."  There is so much that one gains from a postdoc. It's an opportunity to really delve into an area, to expand your horizons, to learn about an area of science in greater depth. There are a lot of skills that come out of this time of apprenticeship where you're learning how to network, how to collaborate, how to form teams, how to lead. All of these skills come together in whatever professional direction you choose to pursue there after. It's not restrictive to just academic science.

The more nuanced answer is "it depends." One shouldn't ever do something you really don't want to do, because a postdoctoral fellowship is an act of passion. You need to be really passionate about what you do, and if it's something that's not interesting to you, you shouldn't go down that direction.

Igor Astsaturov
Associate Professor, Fox Chase Cancer Center

Yes, absolutely. When you finish your PhD, you're really not qualified to take an leadership role, in industry or the academic world. Most graduate students who finish their formative training would probably benefit from at least three or four years of a postdoc. Then, if you decide to move to industry, you'll already be equipped with the basic skills of doing independent research. It's a highly important part of the training of a scientist.

Simone Anfossi
Instructor, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center

The postdoc experience is very important if you want to pursue a career as an academic, if you want to become an independent PI. It gives you the opportunity to build up your background, your experience, and publish more papers, which is the most important thing for letting people know what your abilities are and what you can do in research.

Allison Nixon
Lead Experimentalist, Phenomic AI

That is a loaded question. I always answer "no." I tell everyone not to do a postdoc, and I'll tell you why. If I tell you not to do a postdoc, and they choose not to do a postdoc, they should not have done a postdoc. If they're like, "No, wrong, I'm totally going to," they should a postdoc. It's really like a Sorting Hat situation. I do the same thing with students when they ask if they should go to grad school and pursue a PhD. I'm like, "Probably not," and they need to argue back with why they want to. That's when they sort it out. I don't think that nobody should do postdocs, obviously.