Postdoctoral

Last night I went back home feeling bad about my throat. Therefore most of the time today I stayed at home. I was kind of nervous that someone will call me today about something happen in the lab.

In the afternoon, I read some articles on MITbbs. I usually like to stay on the boards like Faculty, Postdoc, Chemistry and Polymer. Biology is a board that I rarely go, but today spent sometime on it. People there recently discuss about retreat from the area of biology and change their major to others like finance. The conlcusion is that there are so many postdoc and very few opening there.

After coming to the library, I read the Nature articles. What a coincidence! There is also another article talking about a similar topic. But it mainly discuss the situation in Japan. At 1995, the Japan governorment start a new plan to increase the number of postdoctoral researchers. At 2000, there 15000 postdoctorals, whcih is exceed their goals of 10000.

They got a big problem now. There is not enough positions in academia for those postdoctorl researchers.

I think it is a very common situation and it makes me think more about my future.