ABSTRACT
It is now a full decade since I helped persuade my department head to start a postdoc program for our new PhDs. In retrospect, it is more than fair to say that neither I nor my department head was precisely thinking ahead. We tried; it's just that neither of us got the future right. If we had it to do over again I would still press to hire our own unemployed PhDs as postdocs, just as I did in the early 1990s. Yet we ended up with a program whose consequences are both greater and different from those we anticipated.
