Last updated on 16/10/2025
Hey y’all, exciting news! I’m taking a post-doctoral research position.
When I tell people this, I get a range of reactions. Some people don’t hear quite right and say “but you already have a doctorate.” My old grad school buddies offer me their condolences, mostly in jest. Mostly. Others are more practical, and they think it’s a stepping stone to becoming a professor, or a desperation play because I couldn’t find a “real job” in the current market. A few people, mostly other academics, understand it as what it is: a strategic career move that serves specific goals.
Let me explain.
Why I’m Doing This
I had a professor in undergrad who would occasionally reference his time at Bell Labs. This was genuinely impressive. Bell Labs was the place for fundamental research in computing and telecommunications. Immensely cool job. Immensely cool war stories. Genuinely nice guy.
Here’s the thing though: Bell Labs hasn’t been a thing in my lifetime. By the time I was born, it was already in decline. When I eventually met this professor, I was struck by how dated his experience felt, even as I respected what he’d accomplished. That left an impression. I didn’t want to be a professor trading on decades-old war stories. I wanted recent, relevant industry experience to share with my students when I taught.
So after I defended my dissertation, I went into industry. I’ve spent years building AI systems, consulting with clients, managing teams, and solving problems that matter to businesses. I’ve done my time. Now I want to go back and teach. Unfortunately, I can’t just walk down to my local college, slap my CV on the desk and a print out of every paper I’ve written and patent I hold and say “I would like one tenure track position please.” I mean, I could, but it would be exactly as ineffective as it would be comical.
The Academic Reality
Here’s something people outside academia don’t always understand: professorships are a pyramid scheme.
Think about it. How many PhD students does each professor graduate over their career? Dozens, easily. How many new tenure-track positions open up each year? Not nearly enough. The math doesn’t work. Most PhDs won’t become professors because there literally aren’t enough jobs. Post-docs exist partly because of this bottleneck. Different people use them for different reasons, but the goal is always to differentiate yourself from other applicants. A young career researcher might need to:
- Bulk up their publication record to be competitive
- Build their academic network and collaborate with new researchers
- Gain mentoring experience with graduate students
- Prove they can manage independent research programs
- Learn new techniques or pivot to adjacent research areas
Me though? I’m a middle career academic. For me, it’s primarily about teaching experience. That’s the weakest part of my tenure-track application. I have publications. I have citations. I have industry experience. What I don’t have is a recent track record of teaching courses and mentoring students in an academic setting. The best I can do is point to a laundry list of industry conference talks and internal trainings, and I’d like to remedy that.
What Actually Is a Post-Doc?
So what is a post-doc, anyway?
It’s a temporary gig, usually 1-3 years. You’re doing research, but you’re not a student anymore. You’re expected to define and drive your own research agenda, which is different from a PhD where you’re working on your advisor’s problems (or at least problems they helped you frame). But you’re also not faculty. No tenure track. No job security. You know from day one that this is temporary and you’re auditioning for whatever comes next.
Day-to-day, you write grants. You mentor junior researchers. You publish. You teach, sometimes. You’re trying to prove you can sustain a research program, not just finish one big project. It’s a sprint, and the clock is always ticking.
The big difference from a PhD is what you’re proving. During your doctorate, you’re demonstrating you can complete a major research project under guidance. Maybe you’re executing your advisor’s vision, maybe it’s a shared vision, maybe it’s your own vision with their support. But either way, you’re operating within someone else’s lab, someone else’s grants, someone else’s institutional framework. As a post-doc, you’re demonstrating your ability to one day run a lab and to have other researchers contribute to your vision. Fundamentally, the difference is that as a PhD you’re expected to be an individual contributor, and as a post-doc you’re in a leadership and mentoring focused role.
Why This Particular Post-Doc?
My situation is unusual. Most people doing post-docs need additional publications, proof that they can manage teams and their own time, mentoring opportunities, or a stronger academic network.
I need to show I can teach. I need to rebuild and refresh my academic network after years in industry. And honestly, I need some recent publications on top of an existing record. My current stats are solid; I just need something from the last two or three years to show I’m still active in the research community.
The lab I’m joining does research directly related to my thesis area: learning for heuristic search. That’s a big part of what made this place the clear choice. My specific goals are to expand my initial approaches in light of recent machine learning advancements, explore how large language models can provide explainability in planning settings, and investigate whether LLMs can help capture planning domains more effectively. This should all dovetail exceptionally well into the lab’s current research agenda.
But there’s another factor that makes this particular opportunity valuable, one that’s harder to talk about: America is increasingly unwelcoming to me and to my family. In the last year, every time there’s been a high profile public shooting, the news and pundits are looking to find the shortest distance between the shooter and trans people. Were they trans? Did they ever date a trans person? Have a trans uber driver? Own a trans-am? The obvious undertone there is “we’re looking for justification to enact violence against transgender people”, and the constant drumbeat of it is terrifying.
In addition to “I, personally, am a wedge issue and would like off the fucking ride please,” I’ve got a little kid to worry about. A daughter, which makes the current arguments about reproductive care concrete rather than abstract. Will she have access to birth control in a few years? That doesn’t look so crystal clear anymore. Even if she does, she’s growing up in a state where a miscarriage could result in sepsis before a hospital is allowed to treat her. More immediately, she’s in school. In America. A place where we advertise bullet proof backpacks and have active shooter drills and resource officers rather than dealing with the horror of gun violence in more effective ways, by which I mean legislatively.
The steady march right and the implied threat of state sanctioned violence, sometimes as subtext but increasingly as just plain text, has made it clear that we’re not safe here, not in the long term. So now, in the proud tradition of my family’s ancestors, we’re fleeing a regressive, ultra conservative theological movement and an oppressive government for safety, opportunity, and a better life in a foreign country. This post-doc is in Sweden and is as much a way out of the states as it is a way back in to academia and the job I’ve wanted since I first stepped foot on a college campus.
What Comes After
I’m aiming for a faculty position. I want to teach, I want to mentor graduate students, and I want to continue contributing to the research community. If this post-doc goes well, I’ll have recent teaching experience, an active research program, and the credentials to compete for the positions I want.
But I’m also a pragmatist. The academic job market is brutal, and I’m not willing to take just any faculty position anywhere. Location matters now in ways it didn’t when I was younger, single, and CIS presenting. If the right academic opportunity doesn’t materialize, I’ll likely end up back in the AI consulting space, having spent a handful of years refreshing my bona fides as an expert in the field. It’s not what I’m shooting for, but it’s certainly a comfortable and desirable option for someone like me.
Either way, I won’t be that professor trading on decades-old experience. Whether I end up teaching AI or building AI systems, I’ll have recent, relevant work to draw from. The post-doc ensures that.