Professional development or an academic refugee

Despite the dark clouds above Finnish academic horizon, my personal future still has some hope left as I received a post doc scholarship from Finnish Cultural Foundation for 12 months in Lund University in Sweden. I started applying for the post doc in January 2015, when I received an invitation from professor Ståhl in Lund. After 15 months and dozens of applications, I finally managed to secure the funding. I have to admit that I was starting to lose the hope of getting funded, but in the end, it was the quality of the application that I had to improve to get accepted. It could be that I was a bit arrogant at first, because I had received nearly all of the grants I had applied for during my PhD. I understood that I still have to give my 110% to stay on the game, especially now that I am competing with other already graduated doctors.

LU4

Main Building of Lund University

I will start my post doc period in September working on energy efficiency of metal cutting in the Faculty of Engineering, Laboratory of Production and Materials Engineering. I would expect that the whole experience will be quite educating and challenging in both personal and academic levels, despite the fact that I have previous experience on living abroad. When I was in Germany for 6 months, I was in PhD student exchange, so it wasn’t as much of a challenge as going abroad as independent researcher and this time for a one full year.

Even though I am advancing in my career in the most high-flying manner, I have never before been in a situation where I can’t see further than a year in my future. The academic system of producing PhD’s in a mass and setting them loose in the world to see whom of them can fly has been criticized by many in academia. The major difficulty in Finland is that beyond academia, there are only so many positions that require research degree and the industry has not started to take an advantage of the resources available. The Finnish Government has been bashing the reputation of academic researcher with condescending comments about the academic work ethics, motivation or lack of impact on GDP and at the same time cutting academic funding directly from Universities budgets and indirectly from the funding of Finnish Academia and industry collaboration fund TEKES.

In September I will say goodbye to Otaniemi Campus, where I have spent more than 1/3 of my life so far, and start trying my academic wings on my own. I don’t know what will I do after my time in Sweden, probably another post doc tour in some other university, and if and when I come back to Finland, but I hope the attitude towards academics in Finland will change for better by then.

postdoc

(http://ecoevoevoeco.blogspot.fi/2015/08/how-to-be-postdoc.html)

Not to end with a rant, I have to add that I am extremely excited to go and work in top ranking university in a field of my interest and that I have already been given the opportunity to do a PhD and continue even further in academia. With some luck, the hard work will be paid off in the end, but I still have much work before I can even think of settling down somewhere. The post doc length expectancy is 3.5 years calculated from statistics, so I guess that is ahead of me as well.

Posted by Sampsa

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *