Get Out: leaving the academic bubble

Photo by mk. s on Unsplash

During a PhD one of the most common questions is “Are you going into academia or industry when you graduate?” Careers are talked about in two areas and only two areas. With the latter equated to failure and the former suggesting Tenure-track positions as the holy grail.

Students feel wildly unprepared for the real world, absolutely clueless as to what their options are after the PhD, and think the safety of a postdoc is their only option. It is not.

I broke out of the academic bubble and here’s how you can too.

Make a LinkedIn profile

This sounds like it is an obvious one, but I’m still surprised by how many PhDs don’t have a profile, or they have one but it’s out of date.

LinkedIn is the most valuable resource for professional job search and networking. You need a LinkedIn profile. Add a recent picture where your face is clear and there is no one else in the photo that you have cropped out. Use a color photo. This is the first impression other members of LinkedIn will have of you.

I joined LinkedIn in February 2010 but did not update my profile until I started searching for jobs at the end of my PhD around 2015. That’s almost 5 years lost that I could have been using my LinkedIn for networking, understanding my career options, and becoming familiar with the job landscape. Start using it straightaway.

Use LinkedIn throughout your entire PhD

• Add colleagues to your network
• Announce papers that you publish
• Take courses with LinkedIn Learning
• Comment on interesting articles
• Encourage people when they post

Network

A bad piece of advice that I followed during my PhD was that networking only happens at conferences and you must meet the top professors or industry leaders. These professors were always swarmed after their seminars by eager graduate students and nearly impossible to meet.

Here’s my secret — meet the students from that famous professor’s group that are also at the conference. These people are:

• More accessible than the famous professor
• Well-positioned to have successful careers of their own
• Have access to the professor’s network
• Are around your same age, so you have more in common. Meet them, get their contact info and add them on LinkedIn.

These are long-term investments in your network. As you both advance in your careers, you will be able to call on each other for warm introductions to people from each other’s networks. These relationships will make changing jobs or recruiting hires to the company you work for much easier.

Seek opportunities to build skills that go beyond lab work during your PhD

A PhD is a long time, with multiple years you can use to develop other skills outside of the laboratory. I know that this is frowned upon by most professors (which is a toxic mindset), but you need to look out for what’s best for you. That means making the most of your own training and the amazing resources at your university.

Public speaking competitions are a great way to improve your public speaking skills and gain recognition. Universities typically host speaking competitions, like GradSlam, where students “pitch” their dissertation in 3 minutes. Participation in a competition like this is a great line item on a resume to add credibility that you have good communication skills.

Get an internship. I applied for a role at the technology transfer office at my university my last year of grad school. My professor was not thrilled I would spend 5–10 hours away from the lab each week but the exposure to a “real” job was so valuable I wouldn’t take no for an answer. Nowadays with remote work being commonplace, it is easier than ever to get some real world experience and balance it with PhD work.

Find out possible career options

LinkedIn is an incredible tool to figure out what your options are in a variety of sectors. Here are some examples of sectors that need people with PhDs.

• Academia
• Industry (your specific PhD-related industry)
• Writing (science writing, medical writing, grant writing)
• Consulting
• Venture Capital
• Startups

Go to “Jobs” in LinkedIn and start searching. You can search by title or skill in different locations. If you think you want to be a “Scientist” in “San Francisco,” type that in and see what comes up. You will see literally hundreds of jobs. It will be overwhelming, but don’t panic. Open a job description, read it and see if it sounds interesting to you. If it is, save it for later in LinkedIn. Write down the job title and core skills in a spreadsheet to keep track.

After a few weeks of searching, you will start to see the same job postings over and over. Then it will feel a lot less overwhelming and you’ll know that you have a good idea of who’s hiring for what roles.

Other great resources to see who’s hiring are Angelist and Crunchbase, databases for startup careers and which startups just raised funding. Startups are a great way to rocket launch your career. Typically startups need to hire for skilled roles, can’t afford to pay for someone with 5–10 years experience, and therefore are open to hiring freshly-minted PhDs.

Apply for the jobs that interest you

Some advice I got a lot in grad school was that knowing someone inside the company you want to work for will help you get the job. Yes, this is absolutely true but for several of the PhDs I mentor, they do not have a lot of connections in companies before graduation and feel it will be impossible to break into a company. For your first job after your PhD it’s totally normal not to have a warm intro through the door. That just means you have to apply to jobs cold.

Cold job applications is a numbers game, and you will have to apply to a lot of jobs. I tell my mentees not to get depressed until they’ve sent out over 100 applications. yes…100. This number is big for several reasons.

Applying online means there are going to be A LOT of applicants. LinkedIn makes applying for jobs super easy with LinkedIn Easy Apply. This is a great tool because it gets a lot of resumes in front of employers, but it also can leave your resume lost in a big online pile.

You are going to make mistakes in your application. You might even send your resume with the file name “Your Name_Resume_Company Name” to the WRONG company. It might happen. It’s embarrassing. Forget it, move on and send the next one.

You might apply for roles that have old job postings, or might have internal hires already progressing through the interview process, so you have to keep sending out applications.

You’ll get better at fine-tuning your CV so that it’s a better match for each job description. My big advice is to keep at it. I set a goal to apply to 1 or 2 jobs a day when I was job searching. This allowed me to customize my cover letter and resume for each application without feeling overwhelmed but keeping up a strong pace of applications.

Rock the Interview & Post-Interview

After sending out 100 cold applications, you will absolutely be invited to interview. Now you get to show the interviewer how awesome you are. Be sure you come prepared.

Do your research.

• Use Linkedin to research who is interviewing you and who will be at the meeting
• Follow the company on twitter, see if they publish articles on medium, and find out what you can about the company culture

Educate yourself about the role you are applying for.

• A tip here is after each application you send out, copy and paste the job description into a folder and log the date applied, job title and company into a spreadsheet. Review it before the interview.
• Companies will take the job description down once they have enough applicants progressing through their hiring process. You do not want to get caught forgetting what you applied to since it may be weeks or months since you sent out a cold application to this company.

Come with questions and make sure you ask them.

Remember that your interviewer is a real person and you can ask genuine questions. I like to think of questions I would ask my friends about a new job, such as:

• What about this company drew you to apply and join?
• What are your favorite things about working there?
• I read online that your company has a flexible/fun/etc work culture, what does that look like in practice?

After the interview make sure to follow up with a thank you email.

It is typical that the interview process will have several rounds of interviews, follow the tips above — rinse and repeat.

The number of non-academic careers out there is big. Don’t get trapped thinking that you need more experience before you are ready to get a job outside of academia. You gain experience by getting out and landing your first job. Good luck!