Nurse Mentor

Many faculty positions require a post-doc, but actually doing one isn't feasible for everyone. There are a lot of reasons not to do a post-doc. Here's a few core ones. It's Not Financially Feasible Post-doc salaries aren't always great. The minimum salary is $45,000. For many people who have already sacrificed for many years to finish their PhD, it's not possible to continue the sacrifice. Full time employment that capitalizes on the PhD credential may be the only alternative. It May Not Be Good for Career Progression, Depending on Your Age Nurses and midwives complete doctoral degrees at many ages. Candidates need to ask themselves if spending two more years in a post-doc is the right career move. Academic nursing, in particular, can have many career forms and depending on your life stage and goals, going right into a faculty position is a perfectly viable option. Programs of research can still be developed with this pathway through both internal and...

In 2019, we started a conversation about doing a Post-Doc (or not) . Life happens and so now I'm circling back to continue the conversation in 2020. A post-doctoral fellowship, for nursing, is an additional two to three years of training after you finish your PhD. A post-doc can be a great opportunity to build additional skills and expand your network of mentors. For example, if you did a qualitative dissertation then building your quantitative skills as they relate to your dissertation work is a logical next step in developing your program of research. A post-doc is also the perfect time to publish. Highly competitive candidates for faculty positions at top schools typically have between 5 and 10 publications resulting from their post-doc, sometimes more. To meet that goal, it is an ideal opportunity to go back to your papers that you wrote during your doctoral coursework and see which ones can be developed into papers.  Papers that demonstrate collaboration with your post...

Happy 2019! Much to my surprise, I realized I went all of 2018 without posting anything. I got tenure in 2018 so technically, I should have had more time with that monkey off my back. Yet as a wise colleague told me, tenure usually means more work. Sure enough. Nonetheless, let's start 2019 off fresh with a burning question I get from many of my PhD students: To post-doc or not to post-doc. For those of you not in academia, I post-doctoral fellowship (post-doc) involves additional training. You see, science has evolved so much these days that despite doing a PhD for 4 to 7 years, you might need more training. I went into my post-doc reluctantly. After 5 years of PhD study, I was really hoping to have a just one job and a regular salary that might actually allow me to travel and start paying down my student loans. A post-doc just seemed like more years being poor. It was, however, the best decision I ever made. I was lucky to have a great mentor who passed along many wonderf...