Doing a postdoc is supposed to be sort of like taking vitamins. It’s healthy to do, but it’s not something to enjoy. I am not enjoying my postdoc. Good thing I only have about 16 months left to go… But even still, I think I am enjoying mine less than most.
I don’t fit in to my lab, and I probably shouldn’t have taken this job on that basis alone. I am a developmental psychologist in a developmental psychopathology lab. Developmental psychopathology is the study of mental illness in children, whereas I’m trained in children’s normal development between birth and adulthood. I don’t have the same training as others in my lab. I have no clinical training at all whatsoever, and I’m not really interested in psychopathology or clnical practice.
That being said, there is a hierarchy in psychology such that clinical training and research are viewed as “superior” to non-clinical training and scholarship. According to clinicians, non-clinical research is conducted for the specific purpose of informing clinical work. As a non-clinician who conducts research on normative development, who has no training and little familiarity with models of psychopathology, my place here is largely at the bottom of the hierarchy. At times, my worth is lesser than students’ worth, which is pretty pathetic considering that I already have my Ph.D.
Being in this situation for the past 20 months has almost entirely undermined me. I no longer feel a sense of accomplishment over finishing my Ph.D. (which, in retrospect, is a pretty big deal considering that I did it all with undiagnosed, untreated ADD). Today is one of those days that I don’t even think I should have been admitted to my grad program or allowed to finish. I can’t think straight enough to get hardly anything done in a full day, despite having meds now.
My academic writing is apparently so dismal that my supervisor can’t understand it. All my returned drafts are rearranged and edited to the point that it no longer sounds like I wrote it (NOT in a good way). I know I’m not a fantastic academic writer, but I’m not so terrible, either.
My only redeeming quality is that I’m okay with stats, including structural equation modeling and latent growth modeling (all non-stats folks need to know is that this is hard stuff. Not everybody can do it, and only a portion of those who can do it actually do it reasonably well).
I can hardly see a point in bothering with all this any longer. I don’t even know how I’m going to make it through this week at the rate I’m going. I don’t have enough to do, can’t do what I’m working on well enough to please my supervisor, and have very limited options for new projects that will keep me busy for the rest of my time here. Plus, I know that there will be gossip about my lack of productivity after I depart, whether it’s for another job or just to get away from here.
Between this and the comments in my article reviews, I’m no longer surprised that I’m losing interest in research and in my substantive areas of scholarship. I really need to get out of here and on with my life.
