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[willow16]

I am an assistant professor at a SLAC and I can go up for tenure next year (and everybody from the chair of the tenure committee to the provost has told me I will have no problem getting tenure). I don't particularly like my current institution for a number of reasons, and am not considering staying here for my career, but it is has been a good first real job.

I am looking for a job as an Asst Prof in a better academic environment than I am currently at.  However...

I just saw a post doc advertised at an Ivy that I am very well qualified for under a very prominent name in the field, and I think it could help lead me to a much better university in the future. I honestly think I would be a strong candidate for it for many reasons.

I am concerned it could be a large salary drop from what I have now that my spouse (a tenured associate prof) and I could not afford in the short-term, especially if we had to live separately for a year and had to pay for rent plus travel. So that leads to my main question:
What kind of salaries do post-docs in the Ivy (in the life sciences) generally make?  Any personal experiences?

Does anybody consider it a red flag for somebody who is a TT assistant professor for a few years at a SLAC with a budding research agenda to leave for a postdoc?

Even though I don't particularly like my position here, X years down the road, I still have a job with a decent income if I can't find a better one, which leaves us in control of a stable life. But if I were to apply to this postdoc, get it, and accept it, I'll have to start the job search again 1-3 years down the road, and we are both fully at the mercy of the job market.

Any thoughts or personal experiences in similar situations?

[prof_smartypants]

This sounds like it could be a good position.

I was shortlisted for a postdoc at Brown a couple of years ago when I was ABD - the salary was $50K (this was a social science position, though, not life science).

If you can do it personally (i.e. moving family for a short term position only to move again in 1-2 years) then I say go for it. If you want to move from a SLAC to a research-oriented university, I think this could be a good move.

I would, however, call the very prominent name and ask whether he/she thinks you'd be a good fit for the position given your credentials. Others may disagree with this, but I think doing so would a) answer any questions you may have and b) let the VPN know you are serious about the position.

[arizona]

What is your field? In the humanities, Mellon postdocs are typically $50K plus a research budget.

[mozman]

If you are lucky, NIH scale.  If you are 7+ years post-PhD, this is a bit over $50K.

I doubt you will get that, however.  I wouldn't hire you at that pay unless you brought some AMAZING skills and publications to the table, when I could likely get some young turk almost as good with a still-wet PhD for $37K.

I actually had an assistant prof at some podunk uni in Texas apply for a post-doc with me a few years agp.  he was actually pretty good but the salary was the sticking point.  I was willing to go to about $45K, but he wanted a touch over $60K "since he was a prof!".

I wished him good luck with his future endeavors and hired someone from China for half that.

[mleok]

Does anybody consider it a red flag for somebody who is a TT assistant professor for a few years at a SLAC with a budding research agenda to leave for a postdoc?

In the biological sciences, I think it would be very difficult for you to move to a significantly better (R1?) institution unless you have a transferrable external grant funding your work. Just on the basis of research productivity alone, I find it hard to imagine that you could really compete with a person who is the same number of years past the PhD as you are who spent the time as a postdoc at a top notch lab  (and hence had little teaching obligations and dramatically more lab equipment and resources) as opposed to a faculty job at a SLAC.

My suggestion would be to get tenure at your SLAC, and perhaps use your sabbatical year (and maybe an additional year's leave without pay) to work at a prominent PI's lab. This would achieve many of the same research goals, at a significantly lower risk to your long term financial stability.

[afm_man]

My suggestion would be to get tenure at your SLAC, and perhaps use your sabbatical year (and maybe an additional year's leave without pay) to work at a prominent PI's lab. This would achieve many of the same research goals, at a significantly lower risk to your long term financial stability.

Ditto. 

FWIW, I currently have a postdoc who was a professor at another institution.  I had no idea of their salary but found out that I pay more than they were making.  My only other data point was that I was originally offered a position at a school in the Dakota's and I pay postdocs more than what they offered me as an Asst. Prof.  This is in engineering though.

[anon99]

So that leads to my main question:
What kind of salaries do post-docs in the Ivy (in the life sciences) generally make?  Any personal experiences?

Biology salaries seem to be up to $45 or low 50K. "Up to" being the key word.

[mozman]

So that leads to my main question:
What kind of salaries do post-docs in the Ivy (in the life sciences) generally make?  Any personal experiences?

Biology salaries seem to be up to $45 or low 50K. "Up to" being the key word.

Pretty much.  The NIH post-doc sale salary scale tops out at about $51K, and that's for someone with 7+ years of experience post-PhD.  Scale starts at about $38K.

And many people don't pay scale.

[snowbound]

I admit that I know little about life in STEM, but this seems to me to be a very risky move indeed.  A few years down the road when you'd be on the market again, wouldn't the fact that you had left a TT job just short of tenure to take a mere post-doc red-flag you as someone who had probably failed to make tenure??? 

[niceday]

Can you take a leave of absence and do this for a year to see where it gets you? It is an awfully risky move, as others pointed out.

[totoro]

Is your husband a tenured prof at the same school as you? if so, I can't see why you'd want to do this unless you are looking to get divorced or something. You're about to get tenure at the same place! Then the two of you maybe should try to look for a move to somewhere you both like better. Doing a post-doc style thing during a sabbatical as people have suggested is also a good idea. Yeah, I quit a tenured position and then I was a post-doc (kind of, with my own grant) and now I finally have an offer for a tenured (kind of, this isn't the US now) position again, 4 years on. I did this partly because I disliked my location and partly in order to give my wife the opportunity to take up a job here (which was also a post-doc). With only the first operative I wouldn't have done it.

[scampster]

So that leads to my main question:
What kind of salaries do post-docs in the Ivy (in the life sciences) generally make?  Any personal experiences?

Biology salaries seem to be up to $45 or low 50K. "Up to" being the key word.

Pretty much.  The NIH post-doc sale salary scale tops out at about $51K, and that's for someone with 7+ years of experience post-PhD.  Scale starts at about $38K.

And many people don't pay scale.

Oh my god, that's brutal.

Scampster, glad she isn't a postdoc on an NIH funded project

[snowbound]

I don;t understand the suggestions about sabbaticals.  A sabbatical is not a 12-month vacation, where you can do whatever you want.  At my school, at any rate, sabbaticals are granted to do specific research or writing or whatever--not to take up another job entirely.  WE also have to sign something committing to return to the school at the end of the sabbatical.  It's not the same as an unpaid leave of absence. 

[greyscale]

There's a postdoc in my lab who was an assistant professor for a year elsewhere (at an Ivy, actually) in a theoretical field and then decided she wanted to move into a much more applied life science field. It's a rather unusual situation and I'm not sure it's the decision I'd have made.

Her actual job title is something like research scientist, and she is able to be the PI on grants, though that took some wrangling. She brought a grant with her so it was in the school's interest to let her have PI status.

Postdoc salaries in life science vary but they generally suck. Some schools have publicized salary rules and everyone makes the same based on experience; here's an example: http://postdocs.stanford.edu/handbook/salary.html. Others (eg UC schools) have different salary steps (something like Postdoc 1 through Postdoc 7) and you can get hired at different points in that. But the salaries suck either way. Fancy external biology postdoc fellowships generally pay $45-50k (mine is $45k; people who started the same fellowship the year after me got $50k. Sigh.) When I applied for postdocs three years ago, Berkeley would have paid me $37k, for instance.

In some situations, postdoc status (at least at some universities, and also perhaps according to the NIH?) is limited to your first 5 years post-PhD (with some exceptions). After that you are research staff of some sort which generally means higher salary but a bigger hassle to create the position. I used to know more about how this worked at different schools but I am probably wrong in some particulars now. (The NIH scale does go up to 7 years so now I'm confusing myself. Hmm.)

[aprilmay]

There is a huge range. You'll need to ask about the salary of individual postdocs. They can range from surprisingly low to surprisingly high. You are an unusual candidate for a postdoc position and while anything is possible, I haven't seen this. I have to tell you I would not take someone who has been at a SLAC for years as a postdoc because you've not had research as your primary focus for many years. It also looks like you don't know what you want to do. You'll need to do some heavy convincing. As you wrote that you think you'd be a strong candidate, can you share why? Good luck.