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.