Post-doctoral Fellowships

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edieb

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I was looking through APPIC's list of post-docs and the pay for post-docs as a whole is highly variable. Which begs the question: If you are planning on doing private pracitce and working in a medical school (research) for your career, would where you do your post-doc really matter? For instance, would I make more $$/be able to charge more in substance abuse if I worked at the Univ of Washington versus joe-schmo mental health center??

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working in a medical school is not a part time position for the most part.


but, where you do your post-doc is not that important if you are one of those who is not seeking to attaching harvard to your name. some people are bothered by it though.

in my experience, in the real world no successful person in practice cares, as long as you are good. then again, if you are an idiot people will make fun of you and your program.
 
Anecdotally, it seems to matter less and less the farther you get along in your career. With that being said, I am planning on doing an official post-doc because the kind of jobs I want expect people to do formal post-docs, and at good places.

Neuropsych who want to get boarded need a formal post doc, though other people don't really care....they just want to get out and work. Unfortunately the money isn't that great, which is another hold over from the training model.
 
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The med school absolutely would care - these positions can be extremely competitive, so you want a solid post-doc with tons of opportunities for authorship, and the potential to establish your own research line and get extramural funding. That doesn't mean anything besides Harvard = failure, but I imagine a good one would open doors for you that wouldn't be there otherwise.

Whether you could charge more in private practice probably depends on a huge number of factors - I imagine your post-doc is pretty far down that list. With insurance companies....seriously doubt it would make ANY difference, unless you're gaining competence in a specialty you otherwise wouldn't be qualified in.

I'm nowhere near the post-doc stage yet, but I can't imagine taking anything below the NIH payline (37k or thereabouts right now for the first year) unless something drastic changes. Plenty of places pay more, and from everything I have seen and heard, postdoc positions are plentiful and not overly difficult to find.
 
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^ really? I heard differently (they are hard to find). Hopefully you heard right and I heard wrong!
 
Only folks I've heard of who had troubles were those with serious geographic restrictions.

I mean, you obviously still need to be qualified - they'll leave them vacant before taking an unqualified person.

Like I said, I'm not there yet so who knows, maybe I'm wrong. Relative to finding faculty jobs, I'm not expecting much trouble on the post-doc market. Can anyone go anywhere they want? Of course not, but I've never heard anyone say its hard to find "a" post-doc - though maybe not their first choice.
 
The post-docs for clinical neuro can be tough simply because of the numbers issue. Too many people being trained in neuropsych and not enough post doc positions to accomadate. If you go to a solid neuro track program and have all your ducks in a row, its not that bad...but there are just alot of requirements you have to meet during training in order to be competitive for them. Post-docs in other areas are probably not quite as bad as clinical neuro post-docs.
 
I agree with what the others have said in terms of it depends on where you want to end up. I don't think it matters very much for a private practice, though having a good post doc might set you up for a higher referral rate. Just a guess. I don't think the average person cares too much where we do our post-docs. I'm not sure they even know we do them quite honestly.

However if you want to work in an academic hospital, then it probably behooves you to do a post-doc at a similar institution as Ollie pointed out.
 
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