PhD Student to Postdoc: Those Awkward Growing Pains by Alexa Ferdinands, PhD RD
Hello Qualitative Mind,
As qualitative researchers, and as researchers in general, we often move through career transitions where we feel like we are leaving some skills and practices behind and having to learn to excel at something entirely new.
For today’s blog post I have invited my friend and colleague, Alexa Ferdinands, PhD RD, back to the Quali Q blog to share her experience with us as she is currently doing just that!
She will be sharing her perspective on what changes when you move from being a graduate student to a postdoc in preparation for a professional academic career. I love how she was able to identify and share with us the things she took for granted in her PhD, like the time she had to fully immerse herself in her research, and how things have changed now that she is in her postdoc.
Let’s give Alexa a warm Quali Q community welcome…
Happy new year Quali Q readers! Thank you for inviting me back into your space.
I wrote my last post for Quali Q at the end of 2019 while in the thick of my dissertation research. Now, I’m a postdoc in public health working with a qualitative researcher often discussed on this blog—Dr. Maria Mayan (Maira’s former PhD supervisor). Over the last several months, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on the “growing pains” associated with this transition. I am curious if any of my thoughts will resonate with you.
In my PhD, I used institutional ethnography (IE) to examine how people’s experiences of “weight stigma” (i.e., the blaming and shaming of people based on their body weight) are socially organized. Supervised by Dr. Kim Raine, I was fortunate to have the freedom to independently design and carry out my project. I’m not sure if I will get another chance like I had in grad school to fully immerse myself in a topic and methodology. By the time my defence rolled around, I felt like I knew my research inside and out.
Several months ago, I began a postdoc with Dr. Mayan, shifting my research focus from weight stigma to poverty. Despite this change in topic, the engaged scholarship approach to doing research remains unaltered. Both my PhD and postdoc supervisors are community-based, qualitative researchers working to understand and address health equity issues. Holding a clear concern for the real-world impact of our work, I’d consider all three of us pragmatists at heart.
During my PhD, I spent years digging into my topic and research approach. In contrast, my experience as a postdoc suggests that beyond grad school, the pace of research is much quicker. As someone who worries about doing everything “correctly,” the lack of time (in the case of my PhD, years) to dive deeply into the theoretical underpinnings of new methodologies is challenging. But, I’m slowly learning that I don’t necessarily have to read every book and article under the sun about a methodology in order to use it confidently. Despite operating under distinct theoretical assumptions, I’m discovering that many skills I gained from using IE are transferable to other qualitative research approaches too. I’m also learning how to carve out dedicated time for the “sitting and thinking” work I took for granted in my PhD.
I know that these challenges are all part of the deal if I want to pursue an academic career. What better time to face them than under the mentorship of brilliant, compassionate researchers like my PhD and postdoc supervisors? As a postdoc, I have plenty of opportunities to dabble in multiple projects and find out what my strengths are, and which skills need improvement. Learning how to generate and analyze qualitative data rigorously for multiple projects simultaneously, and supervising research assistants and students in doing so, is another excellent training opportunity, mimicking what it might be like to lead my own lab one day. Much of my PhD was a solo adventure, but I gather in the “real world” (or as real as academia is, anyway), team environments are more the norm. I am grateful for the camaraderie and ability to divvy up responsibilities and work with bigger, more diverse teams in all phases of the research.
A postdoc is often perceived as an awkward in-between time between a PhD and the unknown next step. But with growing pains come, well, growth! How have you brought your qualitative research skills with you into new academic and non-academic venues? How have those skills evolved?
- Alexa Ferdinands, PhD RD
If you have any questions for Alexa, feel free to email us at info@qualiq.ca and we will pass them along to her. We would also love to know if you enjoyed this style of blog post and would like to see more content like this on the blog! Our first goal is, of course, to provide information that is interesting and useful to you, our Quali Q community.
Talk soon,
Maira