Giulia Glorani, who is doing postdoctoral research at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) at the Humboldt Graduate School, says she is happy to have “escaped” the Italian scientific system. In the stately building not far from the Charité, the MDC organized a career and networking day for postdocs, where Glorani presented a poster. Almost all of the approximately 170 participants come from the natural and life sciences.
“In Italy, the job situation is pretty bad, at least in my area,” says Glorani. She came to Germany in 2018 shortly after completing her doctorate in biology, for which she was doing research in Verona and London – since then she has been more hopeful about her career prospects.
Biology postdoc Philipp Popp is more pessimistic about the German system. Popp has had a temporary position in bacterial physiology at Humboldt University since 2020. He doesn’t yet know what will happen to him after that. But it’s not just the lack of permanent positions in his area that bothers him. “As an employer, the university has shockingly little to offer for junior staff,” he says. Compared to the free economy, which simply has much more to offer from career advancement to discounted fitness club subscriptions, the universities are in a bad way.
And go into business? In companies like the pharmaceutical company Bayer, which advertises with a stand at the Postdoc Day to attract young people, there are hardly any attractive research positions for his profile, says Popp. “Job offers from Bayer and other companies are often about quality management, so it has more to do with bureaucracy than with research.”
Everyone wants to do research, but not under every condition
Claudia Crocini, who organized the Postdoc Day at the MDC on a voluntary basis with other colleagues, also says that there is “a lot of frustration” among young researchers given the job situation in science. She herself had already accepted a job in the private sector because a research position after completing her doctorate didn’t work out at first, she says. “Then I was promised to take over a group leadership at the MDC, I changed my mind at the last minute,” says Crocini.
With a lot of enthusiasm, she is now committed to supporting others in planning their careers. In her managerial position, she is now experiencing this as well: “Given the precarious conditions, it is paradoxically not that easy to recruit good postdocs for one’s research group.”
Paradoxically, it’s not that easy to find good postdocs for your research group.
Claudia Crocini, Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin
The quantum physicist Sinan Gündogdu is also looking for “a way out of science”, as he puts it. Participate in the event at the Humboldt Graduate School to exchange ideas with other postdocs. He and his wife, also a physicist and from Turkey, were very lucky, he says. Both were able to get a postdoc position at the HU.
But Gündogdu doesn’t find the employment conditions at German universities attractive either. “All the postdocs that I know here have positions that are limited to only two years,” says Gündogdu. With a colleague, he has now founded a start-up for photonic, i.e. based on light particles, 3D printing from research. “We have a number of applications for funding for the spin-off going on,” he says with confidence.
The fact that Berlin’s higher education policy is currently working on creating more long-term perspectives for young researchers gives some people hope, it is said when asked. However, many – especially those from abroad – are not aware of the details of the planned job restructuring from the doctorate onwards. Others, like the biologist Popp, who have followed the debates about the amendment, are skeptical as to whether “the likely rather isolated waivers” can defuse the currently very competitive situation.
From October 2023, the amendment to the Higher Education Act will come into force, obliging universities to offer postdoc researchers permanent contracts. Implementation models have already been developed at the Humboldt University, the Technical University and the Free University, from which a joint final version must currently be created. Science Senator Ulrike Gote (Greens) requested this from the university management – and set them a deadline of the end of January.
To home page
