Last week was the culmination of an incredible amount of volunteer labour through the CAPS-ACSP group who produced their 2013 Survey of Canadian Postdoctoral Scholars. Done in collaboration with Mitacs, a not-for-profit group aimed at facilitating the transition from academia to industry, the survey emphasizes the need for urgent action at universities and research institutes in order for Canada to remain competitive on the world stage.
Many articles have been written already about the survey, including great pieces from University Affairs’ Leo Charbonneau and Beryl Lieff Benderly at Science, highlighting administrative ambiguity, poor remuneration and benefits, and low access to career development training.
Over the coming months, we will be using this survey data to take a more in-depth look at some of the key issues and to compare the situation of early career researchers in Canada to other countries – we hope you will enjoy this series and our proposed solutions. As part of a panel at this year’s Canadian Science Policy Conference, I have organized a panel discussion that will feature a presentation of this survey data alongside comments from leading researchers, non-profits and government members. It is entitled Training the Next Generation of Scientists and should produce some excellent discussion on this topic and these new data.
Guest Post: Dr. Eddy Kent
Jonathan
- Funding repercussions of U.S. debt showdown – 2013 edition
- Reversing the brain drain
- An open letter to Stephen Harper on the status of science funding in Canada
- The PhD Placement Project
Dave
- Measuring the non-academic impact of your science
- Impact factor ‘eligibility window’ skews the system
- Open access is “a journey not an event”
- Incredible promotion tool: student and postdoc outcomes
Other activity
Dave continued to write for the Signals blog with:
Commentary
Our guest blogger, Dr. Eddy Kent attracted some stories of frustration with SSHRC’s new policy on fellowships. The article on student and postdoc outcomes made the rounds on reddit with a long list of comments around whether or not such statistics would provide a valuable resource for prospective trainees.
It’s an incredibly busy autumn, but as always I encourage people to consider writing on the issues they feel most passionately about, the Black Hole is a forum for discussion and the proposal of solutions to the problems in training early career researchers. Email us at [email protected] if you are keen.
