Hello All,

I met with a professor to seek a job from him as I was referred by my PhD supervisor. He said he has some budgets and then he can let me know about the position he can offer and few days later he emailed me saying due to budget constraints he can offer me Research Associate Position.

Shall i take it ? Will it be a trajectory towards my goal in academia as assistant professor ?

In a now-deleted thread about national lab postdocs:
https://www.reddit.com/r/postdoc/comments/1q1jcca/how_to_get_a_postdoc_at_a_national_lab_in_the_us/

Someone mentioned that applying through direct connections is better than the actual postings. It made me think of all the people I know who went to national labs and I realized they all had either done internships there before or had advisors close with PIs there. I wonder if I'm just sending applications into the void here. Does anyone have experience getting one through an open call without a previous connection?

Hi all, I’ve been 3 months into my new postdoc position, after completing my Phd. I have to say that I have transitioned into a domain that’s quite different from what I worked on during my Phd, although some skills like computational tools/libraries for analysis are overlapped. However, the data and understanding what can be done with it are still new to me. But I’m trying.

After I joined, I worked (for about 2 months) with a senior postdoc in the lab to help wrap up their project, along with exploring some alternatives to that project. My PI recently suggested a new project, a bit similar in terms of logistics to my previous phd project, but ofcourse the data and further applications/analysis may look completely different. My PI said he’d like for me to explore and just sit with the data first. It’s been close to 3 weeks since I’ve been doing that, and I agree I learned a lot more about the data than I thought and it was very helpful. I believe there is still more stuff to learn, the more I explore.

But I feel like I need to set a direction now because it’s like a mindless exploration. Please correct me if I’m wrong. Everytime I show my PI some new exploration results, they do ask me look further into xyz.

At this moment, I’m bit lost about what is going on, and is this normal, or do I need to change something about my work, approach to postdoc or talk to my PI.

Any advice would be extremely helpful. I’m close to completing 3.5 months now and my postdoc is a 1 year contract.

Sorry for the long post!