Recommendations for developing a peer-led postdoc program
Others have provided thoughtful and useful suggestions for what universities, professional societies, and academia as a whole can do to support early career researchers in this vulnerable and often lonely career stage (e.g., Stephan 2013; Powell 2015; Shaw et al. 2015; Burgio et al. 2020). Here, we complement these suggestions with our recommendations for how postdocs can create their own peer-led community. While we have benefitted from the investment and support of our institution, we believe these recommendations can be useful for building and investing in a peer-network regardless of external support.
In reflecting on the process of creating and implementing our postdoc program, we have generated a series of recommendations for groups of postdoctoral scholars who wish to develop robust, supportive programs (Figure 1). These recommendations fall into two broad categories: 1) program structure and management and 2) institutional interactions. Regardless of scale and funding, these recommendations emphasize the importance of building a democratic and accessible venue for postdoctoral colleagues to work together to grow their abilities and relationships.
We do not intend our recommendations to be prescriptive. Rather, they can serve as guidelines to develop specific actions that best meet the needs of your group. Looking inwards, we found that the creation of multiple “entry points”, collaborative design and management, and a structured format with built-in flexibility resulted in an effective program that met the needs of postdocs at our institution (Figure 1). Looking outwards, building institutional memory and speaking as a collective built bridges between the institution and postdocs, thereby fostering communication and helping us advocate for ourselves and for institutional progress in other areas, including racial justice.
Given the transitional nature of a postdoc, it is important that incoming postdocs need not reinvent programs when a new cohort begins their positions. Elements of the structure and management we have implemented in our program contribute to its consistency, and sharing and adapting our goals, progress, and successes with our group of colleagues serves to sustain the program over time. We hope that other groups will be empowered to use the lessons and strategies we offer here to alleviate some of the known obstacles facing postdocs and further grow professionally through the development of a peer-led postdoc community.
Acknowledgements : We acknowledge contributions from the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies Postdoc committee, which is chaired by I. Fischhoff and includes M. Wong, M. Fork, K. Weathers, S. Batterman, and S. Findlay. We thank S. Batterman, S. Findlay, J. Ginsberg, C. Solomon, and K. Weathers for feedback on an earlier version that improved our communication of these ideas.