This post is part of our series, The Unwritten Curriculum. Check out previous posts: Paths to Ecology Parts I, II, and III, How to Apply for Grad School, The Grad Student Life, How to Submit a Paper, and Demystifying the Qualifying Exams.
Eloise Skinner is a second-year postdoc in the Mordecai lab and the McCallum lab at Griffith University, working remotely from Gold Coast, Australia.
Devin Kirk is a third-year postdoc in the Mordecai lab and the O’Connor lab at the University of British Columbia, working remotely from Vancouver, Canada.
Let’s be honest. By the time you’ve finished toiling through your undergraduate degree, maybe even your masters, and then your PhD, life in some way or another has probably happened to you. After all of that time, you might love the place you live, the relationships you have, or maybe you’ve even bought a house (kidding, you probably haven’t bought a house on a PhD salary, but maybe you’re dreaming about it). Yet the nature of the academic beast means that it is very normal and widely accepted that you’ll need to consider moving to find a postdoc in your field. That may not be a problem for some, but uprooting every two years (the usual length of a postdoc) is not ideal for everyone.
But what if you could stay where you are? What if you could still be employed by a university abroad as a remote postdoc, and successfully grow as a scientist and feel connected to your new lab? This may have seemed like an abstract concept to most until COVID-19 swept through the world, bringing with it a shift to remote work for many. But prior to the pandemic, both of us were already working as remote postdocs in the Mordecai Lab at Stanford University, working from the Gold Coast, Australia (Eloise) and Vancouver, Canada (Devin). With both of us 1.5-2 years into our postdoc, we wanted to summarize a few things that have worked for us, but we acknowledge that this is in no way an exhaustive list or would work for everyone.
TL/DR: Remote postdocs allow you to carry on with your life outside of academia but aren’t necessarily an easy option. You must be intentional about building your connections, working collaboratively, and jumping through some administrative hoops.
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1. Connect with your local university
Having a home base to work from can go a long way towards making your remote postdoc successful. This could be in the form of an unofficial arrangement in which you collaborate or visit with a local lab, or through an official arrangement in which you sign a contract as a visiting scholar or an employee at the university, allowing you to take better advantage of resources such as office space and health insurance alongside the new expertise you gain visiting with the local lab. Connecting with a local university can also broaden your collaborator network, thereby improving your science, and can provide in-person socializing with fellow early career researchers that you may have been missing working remotely. Both of us signed contracts with our local universities, though we also note that this can create additional administrative and time commitments for the postdoc.
2. Time zones are important
You might be fortunate to land a remote postdoc where the differences in the time zones are minor or non-existent (Devin), or you may find yourself on the other side of the world to your employer where there are only a few hours that overlap (Eloise). Whatever the case, it is very important that you consider the overlap in working hours. So much of our work in research hinges on discussions which often take place in meetings. In the Mordecai lab we have weekly lab meetings, journal club, and fortnightly diversity and inclusion meetings, not to mention project planning and meetings with students or supervisors. For us, many of these meetings are scheduled between 2-5pm PST time which lines up perfectly with 8-11am in Australia. It would be fair to expect that with different working hours you might miss some interesting seminars or important meetings. Yet, for the most part, I (Eloise) have found that if you can find at least 3 overlapping hours, you are still able to contribute and collaborate productively with your lab and other external colleagues.
3. Plan regular visits
No matter how close or how far away your remote postdoc is based, it would be less than ideal to work the duration of your contract without ever visiting the people that you are working with. Plus, visiting can be a great excuse to see a new city! Prior to the pandemic, both of us visited Stanford and found that these trips helped strengthen our connections both within the lab and across the wider department with those that we would less often connect with over email or Zoom. We strongly suggest setting expectations for the frequency and duration of visits with your supervisor before starting your postdoc, as well as discussing whether any travel expenses can be reimbursed. How often you should or need to visit will likely depend on a range of factors, such as distance, costs, and family responsibilities, and there is no ‘one size fits all’. In our cases, prior to the pandemic Devin had planned to travel the (relatively short) 2.5 hour flight from Vancouver every six weeks or so and to visit for one week at a time, whereas Eloise had planned to visit from Australia twice per year for closer to a month at a time.
4. Communicate, connect, contribute
If it isn’t evident yet, all our tips are rooted in ensuring that working remotely doesn’t mean working in isolation. Not being there in person means that you have to be intentional about connecting and communicating with the team. Before starting a remote postdoc it might be helpful to ask a current lab member how the lab stays in touch: is it mostly through e-mail? Slack? Teams? Whatsapp? Carrier pigeon? Whatever it may be, be sure to get set up across platforms and set time aside to be responsive. We mostly use Slack in the Mordecai lab, and have a number of non-work related channels which help facilitate informal conversations that ease the feelings of isolation.
5. Contract and finance matters
For both of us, the toughest part of working as a remote postdoc may have been dealing with contract and financial matters, especially in terms of administrative processes around renewing our contracts and visas. How tricky this can be will likely depend on a few different factors, including if your university has rules about remote postdocs, whether you are working from a different country than your home institution (as we both are), and where the grant or award funds that pay your salary and benefits derive from (as the grant institutions may have strict rules about how this money can be awarded). Though this has been a complex process for both of us, we’ve also found that our official partnerships with local universities can help make this work. This is because certain grants and awards can be transferred between universities, allowing your salary to be paid out by the local university despite the funds originally stemming from the lab that you are working with as a remote postdoc. This can also help avoid needing to apply for a visa. However, depending on how your contracts work at your local and remote universities, this may also mean that you are officially only an employee of the local university, rather than a remote post doc, per se. Like much of our advice here, the best way to deal with contract matters will be determined on a case-by-case basis, though we suggest that you and your new supervisor start working on these administrative processes as early as possible as it can be a drawn-out process. Also, if your salary is paid in a foreign currency to a separate bank account, we have both found the TransferWise app to be very helpful for sending the money to our local bank accounts, as the app is quicker and less expensive than a typical wire transfer.
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The pandemic, at least in its current phase, will eventually end. When this occurs, people in a range of professions who have worked primarily or entirely remotely will return to in-person work, some happy to do so, others not so much. In academia, we may see an uptick in domestic and international movement as early career researchers relocate for either a postdoc they had already begun during the pandemic, or a new postdoc position that they will just be starting.
In our cases, we’ll both be staying put in Australia and Canada as we continue to work with the Mordecai lab at Stanford. A remote postdoc is not for everyone, and while we both feel incredibly fortunate to have the support of our supervisor and fellow lab members to pursue this type of work, it can also be tough. We hope some of the tips we’ve picked up along the way can be helpful for others, and that remote postdoc work continues to be possible for those who’d like to try it in the post-pandemic academic world.