📄 Publications Are Not a Substitute for Depth

A CV with 10–20 publications looks impressive at first glance. But during interviews, a troubling pattern often emerges: many candidates struggle to explain the fundamental concepts behind their own work—the detailed mechanistic picture, or the logic of the experimental tools they used daily.

📄 Strong publication count, weak conceptual clarity•

🧠 Tools used confidently, principles understood superficially•

🔍 Methods followed, but not truly owned

📌 Publications cannot compensate for weak fundamentals.

A postdoc is not hired to repeat established workflows or inflate numbers. A postdoc is hired to solve problems that are not yet defined—and that requires depth, intuition, and the ability to reason from first principles.

Waiting for a supervisor to point out conceptual gaps is a mistake. By the time this happens, the gap is usually already visible—to reviewers, interviewers, and collaborators alike.

We live in a digital era where high-quality learning resources are everywhere. Developing technical depth is no longer a matter of access, but of ownership.

Chase mastery, not metrics.The paper is the receipt; the skill is the currency.