Postdoctoral Poverty and the Perils of Data Ownership
I graduated into unemployment last year. I’ll say it again for the people in the back: I was crowned Dr. Mariama in May 2021 and was jobless until August of 2021—when I landed my first postdoc position. Devastating to say the least, but God graced me through it.
Despite the devastation of unemployment, I also had no financial safety net. I spent the greater part of my 4-year doctoral journey hustling to make ends meet, living paycheck to paycheck off of a 9-month salary of less than $15,000. This meant upon graduating, I had no savings and accumulated six figures of educational loan debt with looming dread of going back into repayment. But that’s not the worst part.
The worst parts of being an unemployed PhD for a few months and still playing catch up after securing a job were two-fold: 1) losing university affiliation after graduation meant I lost access to all of my raw dissertation data stored on their cloud-based storage system and their library databases/resources; 2) my analyzed dissertation data being locked behind an $800 paywall for 1.5 years.
For the first point, my institution was strict about data security. Through the IRB (institutional review board) process, I was so hyper-focused on compliance with their data security standards that I relied upon university-owned platforms to house my research questionnaire/participant responses along with their cloud-based storage to file my data. In other words, I yielded my data ownership to the university without thinking through the necessity of transferring that data ownership back into digital spaces I controlled. You lose access to all of this once you graduate, which I vaguely remember being told at the beginning of my doctoral program. For the second point, I leveraged student rates for the data analysis software I needed for my own research, but those are short-term licenses. So after my student license expired, I had no clue how I would afford buying another that costs upwards of 8x the student rate.
I am a first generation PhD in my family, but even among my circle of doctoral peers and faculty mentors, I never had robust conversations about data ownership during and beyond my time at the university. Additionally, by the time I got to the final stage of writing my dissertation, while simultaneously navigating the academic job market, I was burned out. I had no energy or mental capacity to focus on anything else besides finishing my dissertation, graduating, and finding a job. This meant I had no strength to think about the consequences of not transferring data ownership to free/affordable platforms before my analysis software license and university affiliation expired. In my new university spaces of employment, I still had not figured out how to get my data back.
Although I was diligently applying for academic jobs, not being able to pay my bills was already difficult in and of itself. Even after landing two postdoctoral jobs since graduation, my income is still very much limited. All things considered, the most destabilizing reality of postdoctoral poverty was being estranged from my own intellectual property (i.e. dissertation data) and not knowing when I could afford to reclaim my ownership of it.
That is until two days ago, December 26, 2022. I’m back and I’m Black, ya’ll!
Transcending poverty throughout my childhood and adulthood thus far taught me how to hustle. With divine intervention reminding me of my creativity and agency, I found some loopholes to access and reclaim ownership over my dissertation data again. It’s temporary, but all I needed was a short window of time transfer all of those files into platforms I can afford until my academic career really takes off.
Postdoctoral poverty can’t stop me, and I’m wiser now more than ever about data ownership. Use my testimony as a cautionary tale to be proactive and entrepreneurial about your data ownership.
Watch my Blackademic BLAST OFF all 2023+ through research, writing, and collaborations. And that’s on period.
