How Long Should it Take to Get a Lab Off the Ground?
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Many events in life come with defined timetables. It takes 21 years to buy alcohol, four years to avenge an Olympic loss, and 11 seconds to lose your lunch if watching a Real Housewives episode. Yet in our scientific lives the time required to complete our most important milestones are undefined and arbitrary. Is five years just right for grad school, too much for postdocs and not enough for tenure decisions? Catalyzed by numerous conversations with fellow scientists, we’ve decided to examine each phase of our career development pathway to determine whether the phases are truly optimized for our success, or whether it’s time to overhaul the system.
We’ll kick this series off with one of the most sought after achievements in the academic career – tenure. The day a newly hired (assistant) professor steps into the lab, the clock starts ticking. Depending on the institution, individuals are given between five and seven years to demonstrate their ability to establish a lab, obtain funding and perform successful research. How “success” is defined in any of those categories varies from department to department.
The merits of tenure and the additional factors that go into the decision are a topic for another article. Here we want to focus exclusively on the period of time we think professors should be given to prove their ability to perform research at a level expected by the respective institution. We would probably all agree that 10 months is nowhere near enough time, while 10 years is beyond fair. So where’s the sweet spot – how much time is fair to both professor and institution?
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pervnert
wrote on February 6, 2012 at 12:01 pm
it takes five years to get a phd, but we start knowing almost nothing. seems to me starting out as an expert, as an assistant professor should be, four years would be plenty of time to set up a lab and demonstrate whether an idea has long term merit or not.
NewProf
wrote on February 6, 2012 at 12:16 pm
Three or four years! There is a LOT more to setting up a lab than "ideas," and this is what you're being judged on. Ideas are part of it, but ideas are cheap. Implementing ideas takes creativity, persistence, organization, management skills, budgeting skills, and lots of things that are not taught in graduate school. Having just started the process myself (I'm 6 months in), 5 years seems about right to take a brand new project, carve out graduate theses, post doctoral positions, and undergrad projects, get them all hired, working, and getting along (hopefully), and then get them writing and get it all published. You also need to teach, serve on committees, and in your free time you'll be reviewing papers and writing grants.
Matt Ritter
wrote on February 8, 2012 at 4:42 pm
Not to be depressing, but it might be more generally accurate to define the length of pre-tenure professorships as a function of time, since the ratio of PhDs to tenure-track positions is steadily increasing. I can't say for sure whether it's impacting the amount of time that it would take to achieve tenure, once your foot is in the door, but it seems pretty likely. The Economist had some good statistics on the situation:
http://www.economist.com/node/17723223