Project summary

I want to work on an edited book project tentatively titled Navigating the postdoctoral journey: A practical guide to finding, applications and career success in South Africa and the Global South. The book is going to be an open access book meant to support doctoral graduates, current postdoctoral fellows, early-career researchers, and emerging academics who are navigating the uncertain transition from their doctoral completion to sustainable research careers.

From my personal experience, many doctoral graduates are either not aware or well enlightened about what postdoctoral fellowship entails and the opportunities such provide. Even some that are already postdoctoral fellows, are finding it hard to navigate the programme in terms of policy, mentorship, research output, funding, grant application, the mental, emotional and other challenges in the programme and how to cope with the demand of the position. The future of the postdoctoral fellowship aftermath seems very blurry to many, while those who are near the end of their postdoctoral programmed are feeling like the end to their sources of income through the progamme is going away. Hence, it is very important to educate them on how to navigate in the programme, succeed in it and transit brilliantly to the next level of their research careers. Also, the book seems to answer the question for the future of postdoctoral fellowship by asking : After the postdoctoral fellowship, What next.

Mentorship is another huge problem. Many mentors do not know what it is expected of them towards their postdocs aside for guidance for research outputs . In addition, there seems to be some inadequacies on the part of policies for the postdoctoral fellowship which is affecting the postdocs negatively .

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

The projects seeks to highlight the problems/challenges, take personal experiences of past postdocs into cognizance and suggest solutions to the identified problems. It is aimed at making the book to be like a manual for both mentors and their postdoctoral fellows under them. This will make their time in the fellowship to be worthwhile and to guide them in how to transition from the phase to the next phase in the academic /research careers.

It will also seem to inform policies for a positive institutional changes that will be more favourable to postdoctoral fellows.

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How will this funding be used?

The funding is aimed at support for the writing time, editorial support, design and formatting, development of templates, career planning tools and funding resources, Web hosting , publication of an open access guidebook and dissemination of outputs.

Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?

I am the only one in my team for now. I hope to involve my mentor, the research office and other postdoctoral fellows when the grant is approved.

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

If the scope is too broad more than the received funding. Hence, the scope will be managed and timeline followed in phases. So phase the main phase will be to achieve open access guide and toolkit for postdoctoral fellows and aspiring postdoctoral fellows. Also, there will be advisory team from Mentors and the research office from the University of South Africa to guide in the actualisation of the project.

How much money have you raised in the last 12 months, and from where?

At this stage, no external cash funding has been raised for the project