When the pandemic struck in the US last year, a group of researchers from the University of Chicago was in the process of analyzing the results of a 2019 survey about the job satisfaction and career plans of more than 6,000 postdocs.
“We realized that we needed to do another quick follow-up survey on the impact of the pandemic, because we thought that our 2019 results were not reflecting the situation at all,” says Andréanne Morin, a postdoc in human genetics who is involved in conducting the survey.
She and her colleagues resurveyed 1,942 of the postdocs who had participated in 2019 to see how the pandemic had affected their health and wellbeing, career progression and trajectories, and goals. That follow-up survey was conducted in October 2020, capturing postdoc experiences at a time when COVID-19 case numbers were soaring and vaccines had not yet been released.
The results, which have ...
