Breaking up is never easy to do

While graduation from a PhD program is the culmination of your graduate schooling, it often doesn’t mark the end of your graduate research. Because of the foot-dragging nature of science, students often graduate while some or all of their papers are not yet published. There may be some loose ends hanging--control experiments not yet done, n to be added--or even some significant results to finish up--an experiment the thesis committee suggests, a follow-up to one of the implications of the thesis. Not to mention the review your advisor says you should really write as soon as those papers are out.

Writing a paper for submission to a journal (as opposed to writing it up for your thesis committee) can easily take a couple of extra months, depending on your writing ability, your advisor’s feedback, and your inner ability to glue your fanny to a chair for as long as it takes.

Finally, of course, even once the paper is sent out, there is a month or two delay while reviewers review, and then the dreaded reviewer experimental suggestions. Carrying out reviewer experiments, or arguing persuasively against the need for those experiments, can occupy another couple of months.

And let’s not even talk about what happens if you’re rejected and have to repeat these steps at one, or heaven forfend, two or three or four more journals.

All of which is to say: when should a graduate student take the leap to a postdoc or other job?

If you leave as soon as the experiments are (in theory) finished, you will spend the first six months or year at your new job trying to write a paper over email with your advisor.

If you wait until the paper(s) is(are) submitted, you are in better shape, until the reviewers come back with four experiments you absolutely need to do to publish. Then you must make your apologies to your new supervisor and return to GradLab for weeks or even months. Not a fun thing to do as you’re trying to impress a new boss, and to immerse yourself in some new experiments. Alternatively, you will share authorship with whatever grad student ties up your loose ends.

If you wait until the paper comes back from review, you have dealt with it as necessary, and resubmitted, you are in the best shape to leave; however, by this stage you are likely so tired of GradLab that you may have killed your advisor. (A fellow grad student and I once posted this article prominently in lab.) But more importantly, there is the opportunity cost of waiting this long--could you have been making some headway in a new lab? There is also the personal cost--often after 5+ years a grad student is burnt out, tired of GradLab, and can only revive her interest in science by going somewhere new. And don’t get me started on the two-body problem.

I am currently luxuriating in the excitement of a new lab that is geographically close (but scientifically distant) to my GradLab, so I can go back to do Grad experiments on weekends or occasional off days, but meanwhile reignite my brain with the new perspectives and ideas of PostdocLab. However, it is only a matter of time til Dr Hyde and I move somewhere new….and I’ll be hit with this problem all over again.