Postdoctoral fellowships, long common in the natural sciences, now increasingly important in humanities and social sciences

By Cynthia Verba
GSAS Director of Fellowships

While the pursuit of a postdoctoral fellowship has been a well-traveled path in the natural sciences for some time, it has recently acquired considerable importance in the humanities and social sciences, with major foundations, such as Mellon, as well as research institutes within universities, creating new opportunities in these fields.

The attractiveness of the postdoc received strong testimony during a recent panel discussion, featuring speakers who are currently holding postdoctoral fellowships and who shared their experiences with an overflowing audience. While the speakers, assembled by the GSAS Fellowships Office on September 27, represented a range of fields, they were similarly motivated in pursuing a postdoctoral fellowship: it provided an opportunity to engage in further research, and it helped to expand the number of available options for which to apply, which is of major importance in a weak academic job market. One panelist, who had applied for jobs as well as fellowships, actually has a job awaiting her when she finishes her two-year postdoc. The job was attractive enough for her to pledge to take it if the hiring department were willing to reserve it for her. Her skillful management of these negotiations required a very clear sense of what mattered most to her: she was truly reluctant to give up the postdoc, but she also cherished the thought of having a job waiting, especially a job that she found attractive. (Some wondered if there is such a thing as an unattractive job in a bad job market!)

The appeal and competitiveness of a postdoctoral fellowships means that these opportunities require the same careful preparation demanded by the job hunt. Fortunately, there is considerable overlap in the necessary steps.

All postdoctoral applications require a research proposal. In writing this, whether for a multiple or single year, it is important to make it clear that your intent goes further than simply editing your dissertation; that you plan to expand certain themes and reorganize the whole in the manner of a book rather than a dissertation. What this also means is that a discussion of your dissertation is inevitably an important part of the postdoctoral essay, just as it is in the job hunt. This provides a valuable opportunity for highlighting how your dissertation contributes to the field, and also to highlight some important findings in your dissertation. If you do this effectively, then you are already in a good place for moving forward in your proposal essay and showing how your plans for expansion or revision are also of value to the field.

If you are applying for a multiple-year award you will also need to describe plans for a new project, and this often presents a challenge for the many who are still hard at work on finishing the dissertation and have little sense of what they want to do next. The most conservative and probably the most effective strategy is to use your dissertation as a point of departure. Surely, you had further ideas that you thought of pursuing, perhaps a change of geographic locale, or a change of century, or a shift in methodology to lean in a more interdisciplinary direction, or adding a new comparative dimension, among other avenues. Using this strategy allows you to talk more knowledgeably about your next project than you would otherwise be able to do.  

In the opening of your essay, you can help the reader to get the bigger picture about your plans, especially helpful in a more complicated multiple year award, if you start by saying that you have two goals with your postdoctoral fellowship, one will focus on reworking the dissertation into a book; the other, launching a new project. You can then proceed with the explanation of the dissertation and revision plans, and then move on to the new project, approaching them as suggested above.

Panelists agreed on some advice of a more general nature:

• The importance of entering into an active mode. Instead of waiting to see if you are being nominated for a competitive fellowship, ask your adviser to do so.
• The need to do your homework to make yourself well informed about the current interests of the scholars in a lab or research center so that you can make a strong case for how well you would fit within that environment.
• You should network to become well informed about the research climate in a particular lab or group, how well the people get along with one another, how much mentoring or guidance occurs, and how much opportunity typically is allowed for pursuing some of your own interests.
  
  

When the panel turned to student questions, most tended to revolve around how to manage all of this while also working on the dissertation and fulfilling other responsibilities. None of the speakers made it sound easy, but the very fact that they were there to tell their story, looking like perfectly normal human beings rather than supermen or women, provided proof that it could be done.

Many thanks to our panelists!

Tiffany Joseph, PhD in Sociology, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation fellowship in health policy
Buelent Kiziltan, PhD in Astrophysics, Fellow at Institute for Theory & Computation, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics,    
Sarah Johnson, PhD in Anthropology, Society of Fellows
Rozy Vig, PhD in Education, Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Harvard School of Education