Dave Jensen over at ScienceCareers published a nice article this week in his Tooling Up series. The article is entitled The Slightly Irreverent, Shake 'Em Up Job Search, and it's definitely worth a read. The title turns me off because it sounds like he's trying to be cool, but his larger point is that sometimes you have to bend the rules a bit to get past the inhumanity of online job searching.
Scientists aren't generally the most outgoing, personable lot, so online job applications hold a lot of appeal. I'd so much rather email someone than talk on the phone or (yikes!) just go knock on their door and say hello. But only 3-5% of job seekers actually find employment through online ads. So it's probably not a surprise that the 40 or so resumes I submitted electronically during my job search yielded nothing.
Despite not being very fruitful, I think that online job ads are really useful, particularly if you're looking for a way to leave academia. Even just a few hours of online job hunting gave me a sense of what was out there, what sorts of jobs I should be applying for, and what sorts of things employers value (communication skills and demonstrated experience seem to trump all else, including your doctorate).
The problem is that any old schmuck can apply for a job online, and someone has to sort through all of those resumes. Jensen's point is that you have to worm your way in an any way you can in order to make yourself a real person in the eyes of that HR person sorting through applications. His number one suggestion is to call the company, but *don't* call the HR department. Start talking to people in the company -- anyone in the company. Don't even mention that you're applying for a job, as they'll likely just forward you to the HR department.
I think this advice is solid. It's unfortunately hard to swallow, at least for me. I'd like my resume to stand for itself. And I'd like to believe that my experience and qualifications make my resume glow like a beacon of light in that huge stack of resumes. But perhaps the best way to show off your communications skills isn't with a bullet point on your resume but by, well, communicating.
Showing posts with label advice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label advice. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Informational Interviews
I'm almost through with week one of my new job, and it's been fantastic so far. Almost a full year has gone by since I've really interacted with scientists, and I forgot how strange most of them are. (I mean that in a good way.) I haven't had any time to write in the past week, but I'll start sharing my impressions soon.
In the meantime, someone asked whether I was doing anything beyond sending out resumes and cover letters during my job hunt, which is the perfect follow up to my last post about talking to people.
Most of those 50-ish resumes and cover letters that I sent out were met with a resounding silence. Never heard a peep. There's nothing worse than spending a few hours perfecting a cover letter and then not even being met with a rejection letter. After sending a couple dozen applications out into the black hole, I had some great templates for my cover letter and a few different resumes that were tailored for different types of jobs. For instance, I had a resume that I submitted to academic publishing jobs that highlighted my writing skills and experience. That resume was very different from the one I sent for jobs that were education-oriented.
Despite all of the great application materials I had, I didn't appear any closer to actually having a job. When you look at the numbers, the percentage of people who are hired through online job applications is relatively small*. This is a fairly major difference from the academic world, where lots of jobs get filled by people who simply sent in applications in response to an ad. When I started really reading the ScienceCareers forum, it became clear that I had to change my strategy a bit.
The word "networking" always sounds cheesy to me. Worse than cheesy, actually. Sleazy. But it doesn't have to be. During my job search, I built up a network of people in my area who were doing interesting things, working at interesting places, or seemed well-connected in a given field. Looking back, this kind of happened naturally. It started with one woman I met who was working in science education/outreach at my postdoctoral institution, then she gave me the names of a bunch of other people working in that arena. Slowly, I contacted all of them and set up meetings with them. These are often called informational interviews, and they can be really interesting.
There are a couple of schools of thought about how you should approach informational interviews. Some people feel that you should approach informational interviewers and new contacts without telling them that you're actually looking for a job. Others feel that you should be up front about the fact that you are job-hunting, though you shouldn't expect that the person you're meeting with will actually do anything about it. I opted for the latter approach, because it seems more honest to me. You can tell someone that you're looking for a job and think they're company is interesting without sounding like a bozo. I also suspect that people can see right through your request for a meeting...they know on some level that you're gunning for a job.
During my job hunt, I had about 15 informational interviews with people from state agencies, nonprofits, research institutions, universities, and schools. Almost everyone I contacted was happy to meet with me, and most of them gave me the names of a couple other people to talk to. These interviews also gave me a good sense of what was going on in my community. One of the interviews led to a conference for science educators, which I attended at the expense of the school that invited me. The conference led to more contacts...and so on.
Because I was living in a fairly small and economically sleepy town, I started to feel like I'd exhausted my network. Luckily, the interview process for my current job started just as I'd run out of people to talk to. But one way to take the sleaziness out of networking is to actually keep in touch with people. Networking is a two-way street, so keep the lines of communication open.
Tips for Informational Interviews:
1. Keep your initial email to someone you don't know short, but put the text of your resume in the text of the email.
2. Coffee shops make good venues for meetings, but always offer to meet the person at his or her office. Essentially, make the meeting as easy for someone to attend as possible.
3. Dress nicely. For most meetings, there's no need to wear a suit. Nice pants and a button-down shirt (or something along those lines) sends the message that you have your shit together.
4. Do your research. Make sure you know what the person you're meeting with does and how it fits in with the rest of the company, just like you would if you were visiting a university department for an interview.
In the meantime, someone asked whether I was doing anything beyond sending out resumes and cover letters during my job hunt, which is the perfect follow up to my last post about talking to people.
Most of those 50-ish resumes and cover letters that I sent out were met with a resounding silence. Never heard a peep. There's nothing worse than spending a few hours perfecting a cover letter and then not even being met with a rejection letter. After sending a couple dozen applications out into the black hole, I had some great templates for my cover letter and a few different resumes that were tailored for different types of jobs. For instance, I had a resume that I submitted to academic publishing jobs that highlighted my writing skills and experience. That resume was very different from the one I sent for jobs that were education-oriented.
Despite all of the great application materials I had, I didn't appear any closer to actually having a job. When you look at the numbers, the percentage of people who are hired through online job applications is relatively small*. This is a fairly major difference from the academic world, where lots of jobs get filled by people who simply sent in applications in response to an ad. When I started really reading the ScienceCareers forum, it became clear that I had to change my strategy a bit.
The word "networking" always sounds cheesy to me. Worse than cheesy, actually. Sleazy. But it doesn't have to be. During my job search, I built up a network of people in my area who were doing interesting things, working at interesting places, or seemed well-connected in a given field. Looking back, this kind of happened naturally. It started with one woman I met who was working in science education/outreach at my postdoctoral institution, then she gave me the names of a bunch of other people working in that arena. Slowly, I contacted all of them and set up meetings with them. These are often called informational interviews, and they can be really interesting.
There are a couple of schools of thought about how you should approach informational interviews. Some people feel that you should approach informational interviewers and new contacts without telling them that you're actually looking for a job. Others feel that you should be up front about the fact that you are job-hunting, though you shouldn't expect that the person you're meeting with will actually do anything about it. I opted for the latter approach, because it seems more honest to me. You can tell someone that you're looking for a job and think they're company is interesting without sounding like a bozo. I also suspect that people can see right through your request for a meeting...they know on some level that you're gunning for a job.
During my job hunt, I had about 15 informational interviews with people from state agencies, nonprofits, research institutions, universities, and schools. Almost everyone I contacted was happy to meet with me, and most of them gave me the names of a couple other people to talk to. These interviews also gave me a good sense of what was going on in my community. One of the interviews led to a conference for science educators, which I attended at the expense of the school that invited me. The conference led to more contacts...and so on.
Because I was living in a fairly small and economically sleepy town, I started to feel like I'd exhausted my network. Luckily, the interview process for my current job started just as I'd run out of people to talk to. But one way to take the sleaziness out of networking is to actually keep in touch with people. Networking is a two-way street, so keep the lines of communication open.
Tips for Informational Interviews:
1. Keep your initial email to someone you don't know short, but put the text of your resume in the text of the email.
2. Coffee shops make good venues for meetings, but always offer to meet the person at his or her office. Essentially, make the meeting as easy for someone to attend as possible.
3. Dress nicely. For most meetings, there's no need to wear a suit. Nice pants and a button-down shirt (or something along those lines) sends the message that you have your shit together.
4. Do your research. Make sure you know what the person you're meeting with does and how it fits in with the rest of the company, just like you would if you were visiting a university department for an interview.
Friday, May 11, 2007
lesson #1: talk to people
At some point, I'll write more about strategies for finding a job outside of academia and such, but for now let's start with a few statistics about my job search:
- Number of months between leaving postdoc and securing new job: 8 1/2
- Number of resumes with customized cover letters sent out during this time: about 50
- Number of formal interviews: 4 1/2 (I never figured out if my third interview was for real or not, so I'm counting it as half an interview)
- Income during this time period: $0
- Number of part-time (10-30 hours/week) volunteer jobs done during this time: 3
Scientists out there, you could interpret these results in many ways, no? In terms of how these numbers fit in with the experiences of other academic refugees, I'm not sure. The only thing I am really sure of about my refugee status is this: It fucking sucked.
For 8 1/2 months, I felt like I had severe head wounds from banging my head against the wall that I had to neatly cover up each time I went begging for a job in my new suit. I jumped up and down screaming "I'm here! I'm smart! Hire me!" until I was hoarse. I put on song and dance routines for the many kind strangers who granted me informational interviews (another topic for a future post).
In the end, though, the head-banging, the screaming, the singing, and the dancing, didn't get me a job. What got me a job was all of the genuine hard work I'd done as a graduate student.
When I started applying for non-academic jobs, I sent a quick email to the three people who had furnished letters of reference for all of my academic job applications asking them if they would still provide letters for me for this new breed of applications. They all said yes, but only one of them -- committee member X -- asked what kind of job I was looking for. I emailed him some of my general ideas, and never heard back. In my mind, I thought "It's true. They all think I'm a failure."
About five months after I sent that email, I got a call from X out of the blue. He was calling to find out whether I would be interested in a job at his university. He described the job and I nearly fell over. It was *perfect*. I had described a job like this -- but not quite as cool -- to friends and family. My qualifications were perfect. He hadn't called anyone else. I am starting on Monday.
Having spent over 20 years in school, I really wanted to believe that the old adage "It's not what you know, it's who you know" wasn't true. I wanted my resume to speak for itself, and to some extent it did. On its own a resume can say a lot of things. Mine basically says "I'm a nerd, but I just got my braces off, so I'm cool now." X knew that I was a nerd, and my qualifications were a big part of why I got the job. As important, though, was the fact that we had worked together in the past. X and I wrote two papers together -- I was first author on one, and he was first author on the other. We worked well together and had a great deal of respect for each other. There are plenty of other people out there with resumes like mine, but X hadn't worked with them before.
And so we come to the first, and most important lesson when looking for a job:
Talk to people. Every single person you know is an important contact, and they need to know what kind of gig you're looking for. Even more fundamental than that, they need to know that you're looking for a job. Don't be afraid to tell them, whether they are former advisers or relatives. These people already know you and, hopefully, think well of you. So if they are ever in a position to suggest someone for a job, they'll think of you.
- Number of months between leaving postdoc and securing new job: 8 1/2
- Number of resumes with customized cover letters sent out during this time: about 50
- Number of formal interviews: 4 1/2 (I never figured out if my third interview was for real or not, so I'm counting it as half an interview)
- Income during this time period: $0
- Number of part-time (10-30 hours/week) volunteer jobs done during this time: 3
Scientists out there, you could interpret these results in many ways, no? In terms of how these numbers fit in with the experiences of other academic refugees, I'm not sure. The only thing I am really sure of about my refugee status is this: It fucking sucked.
For 8 1/2 months, I felt like I had severe head wounds from banging my head against the wall that I had to neatly cover up each time I went begging for a job in my new suit. I jumped up and down screaming "I'm here! I'm smart! Hire me!" until I was hoarse. I put on song and dance routines for the many kind strangers who granted me informational interviews (another topic for a future post).
In the end, though, the head-banging, the screaming, the singing, and the dancing, didn't get me a job. What got me a job was all of the genuine hard work I'd done as a graduate student.
When I started applying for non-academic jobs, I sent a quick email to the three people who had furnished letters of reference for all of my academic job applications asking them if they would still provide letters for me for this new breed of applications. They all said yes, but only one of them -- committee member X -- asked what kind of job I was looking for. I emailed him some of my general ideas, and never heard back. In my mind, I thought "It's true. They all think I'm a failure."
About five months after I sent that email, I got a call from X out of the blue. He was calling to find out whether I would be interested in a job at his university. He described the job and I nearly fell over. It was *perfect*. I had described a job like this -- but not quite as cool -- to friends and family. My qualifications were perfect. He hadn't called anyone else. I am starting on Monday.
Having spent over 20 years in school, I really wanted to believe that the old adage "It's not what you know, it's who you know" wasn't true. I wanted my resume to speak for itself, and to some extent it did. On its own a resume can say a lot of things. Mine basically says "I'm a nerd, but I just got my braces off, so I'm cool now." X knew that I was a nerd, and my qualifications were a big part of why I got the job. As important, though, was the fact that we had worked together in the past. X and I wrote two papers together -- I was first author on one, and he was first author on the other. We worked well together and had a great deal of respect for each other. There are plenty of other people out there with resumes like mine, but X hadn't worked with them before.
And so we come to the first, and most important lesson when looking for a job:
Talk to people. Every single person you know is an important contact, and they need to know what kind of gig you're looking for. Even more fundamental than that, they need to know that you're looking for a job. Don't be afraid to tell them, whether they are former advisers or relatives. These people already know you and, hopefully, think well of you. So if they are ever in a position to suggest someone for a job, they'll think of you.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
you can take the academia out of the academic...
I recently mentioned that less than 20% of science and engineering doctoral recipients are in tenure-track positions 4-6 years after they graduate. According to survey of 2003 graduates, though, 80% of those who don't go on to do a postdoc after graduation are still employed in their specific field of science*. In trying to find people who'd left the ivory tower from my super-specialized niche, I only found a few. So where are all these people going? Do they go into hiding after leaving the tower?
Data from 1996 to 2003 from this same report shed light on where these mystery folks go. It turns out that a majority (40-68%) of those fleeing academia find jobs in...drum roll please...academia. Yep, you read right. The survey doesn't go into any depth about what these non-academic roles in academia are, so they could be anything from technical research positions to janitorial jobs. Who knows.
The fact that there are people doing jobs aside from research and teaching at a university often goes unnoticed by the faculty members, postdocs, and students. As a graduate student I -- admittedly -- assumed that pretty much everyone who wasn't a researcher or professor at my school was a secretary of some kind. But when you start to really look around your university, you'll find people working on the periphery of science in all sorts of roles. There are grant writers, journalists, science communicators, K-12 outreach specialists, academic administrators, lobbyists, event planners, caterers...the list truly goes on and on. They are truly working on the interface between the research world and the real world.
In my experience, these people are an incredible font of information about leaving academic research. Many of them have their doctorates, but either lost interest in their research or simply wanted to explore different positions. I met with many such people at both my graduate institution and my postdoctoral institution, and I found that they were always happy to share their stories, experiences, and, most importantly, their Rolodexes (Rolodices? Rolindices?). Best of all, these are people who are actually at your current institution. You can just stroll into their offices in your lab coat and start asking questions.
This is a good time to announce that I, too, will be joining the ranks of the non-academics in academia. I start at my new job (!) at a large R1 university on Monday. I started this blog at the prompting of friends who are curious about what it's like to work on the periphery of science, so I'll finally start writing about that on Monday. For those of you who have read about all of the emotions that lead up to my decision to leave academia, I hope you don't feel betrayed by the fact that I'm headed back into the halls of the Ivory Tower.
* If I site this survey, it will be revealing too much about who I am, and we can't have that. But if you'd like me to send you the published data, leave a comment.
Data from 1996 to 2003 from this same report shed light on where these mystery folks go. It turns out that a majority (40-68%) of those fleeing academia find jobs in...drum roll please...academia. Yep, you read right. The survey doesn't go into any depth about what these non-academic roles in academia are, so they could be anything from technical research positions to janitorial jobs. Who knows.
The fact that there are people doing jobs aside from research and teaching at a university often goes unnoticed by the faculty members, postdocs, and students. As a graduate student I -- admittedly -- assumed that pretty much everyone who wasn't a researcher or professor at my school was a secretary of some kind. But when you start to really look around your university, you'll find people working on the periphery of science in all sorts of roles. There are grant writers, journalists, science communicators, K-12 outreach specialists, academic administrators, lobbyists, event planners, caterers...the list truly goes on and on. They are truly working on the interface between the research world and the real world.
In my experience, these people are an incredible font of information about leaving academic research. Many of them have their doctorates, but either lost interest in their research or simply wanted to explore different positions. I met with many such people at both my graduate institution and my postdoctoral institution, and I found that they were always happy to share their stories, experiences, and, most importantly, their Rolodexes (Rolodices? Rolindices?). Best of all, these are people who are actually at your current institution. You can just stroll into their offices in your lab coat and start asking questions.
This is a good time to announce that I, too, will be joining the ranks of the non-academics in academia. I start at my new job (!) at a large R1 university on Monday. I started this blog at the prompting of friends who are curious about what it's like to work on the periphery of science, so I'll finally start writing about that on Monday. For those of you who have read about all of the emotions that lead up to my decision to leave academia, I hope you don't feel betrayed by the fact that I'm headed back into the halls of the Ivory Tower.
* If I site this survey, it will be revealing too much about who I am, and we can't have that. But if you'd like me to send you the published data, leave a comment.
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
can they do that?
I had a pretty good idea of what my perfect job would entail. The question then became "Is that possible? Is there anyone out there actually doing this?"
When you've spent your life in school -- and always assumed that you'd spend the rest of your life teaching and working at a school -- it's not surprising that you don't know about careers that exist outside of school. As part of this process of figuring out what went on out there in the real world, someone suggested that I find some role models, essentially people who had studied what I'd studied and didn't end up in academia. Reasonable, yes, but easier than it sounded. On my first pass, I found a science writer and a TV personality, and that was about it. No joke. There was no obvious industry drawing people away from universities.
Lacking role models, I spent every waking hour looking at job postings and reading job descriptions. There's the Chronicle of Higher Education job board (which has separate sections for non-academic careers). Science and Nature have job listings, some of which aren't at universities. But more interesting were sites like Indeed, which searches listings from tons of job sites and aggregates them for you. Here, I found job titles I'd never heard of: Program Coordinator, Assistant Editor (different from Editorial Assistant), and Awake Overnight Life Skills Coach (also known as your boyfriend/girlfriend).
I also made lists of companies I admired for whatever reason, whether they had anything to do with my specialty or not: The Gates Foundation, United Nations, Wikipedia, and countless others. I made lists of places I liked to spend time: Museums, national parks, libraries, cafes. For each of these companies and venues, I checked out their online job listings to find out what people there actually do. What are their job titles? What sorts of backgrounds do they have? What value would they see in a niche-geek like me?
When I started looking outside of the academic bubble, I got really excited. There are thousands of interesting companies out there and millions of people doing really interesting things. But I also got worried because I didn't see many job ads geared toward people like me.
In reading my posts about this whole process, you might get the impression that I approached it all rationally and intelligently like a good scientist should. And to some extent, that's true. I knew that I needed to figure out for myself what I wanted in a job, and I needed to figure out how those desires fit in with the already existing working world. But at the time it felt like utter chaos, and there were many times when I was hard on myself for not knowing what I wanted to do next. It didn't feel rational or intelligent to give up things like money, health insurance, and direction in hopes that I'd find something better. It was kind of a mess, and I can't claim that I navigated the process with grace, but I did eventually find a job that met all of my criteria.
When you've spent your life in school -- and always assumed that you'd spend the rest of your life teaching and working at a school -- it's not surprising that you don't know about careers that exist outside of school. As part of this process of figuring out what went on out there in the real world, someone suggested that I find some role models, essentially people who had studied what I'd studied and didn't end up in academia. Reasonable, yes, but easier than it sounded. On my first pass, I found a science writer and a TV personality, and that was about it. No joke. There was no obvious industry drawing people away from universities.
Lacking role models, I spent every waking hour looking at job postings and reading job descriptions. There's the Chronicle of Higher Education job board (which has separate sections for non-academic careers). Science and Nature have job listings, some of which aren't at universities. But more interesting were sites like Indeed, which searches listings from tons of job sites and aggregates them for you. Here, I found job titles I'd never heard of: Program Coordinator, Assistant Editor (different from Editorial Assistant), and Awake Overnight Life Skills Coach (also known as your boyfriend/girlfriend).
I also made lists of companies I admired for whatever reason, whether they had anything to do with my specialty or not: The Gates Foundation, United Nations, Wikipedia, and countless others. I made lists of places I liked to spend time: Museums, national parks, libraries, cafes. For each of these companies and venues, I checked out their online job listings to find out what people there actually do. What are their job titles? What sorts of backgrounds do they have? What value would they see in a niche-geek like me?
When I started looking outside of the academic bubble, I got really excited. There are thousands of interesting companies out there and millions of people doing really interesting things. But I also got worried because I didn't see many job ads geared toward people like me.
In reading my posts about this whole process, you might get the impression that I approached it all rationally and intelligently like a good scientist should. And to some extent, that's true. I knew that I needed to figure out for myself what I wanted in a job, and I needed to figure out how those desires fit in with the already existing working world. But at the time it felt like utter chaos, and there were many times when I was hard on myself for not knowing what I wanted to do next. It didn't feel rational or intelligent to give up things like money, health insurance, and direction in hopes that I'd find something better. It was kind of a mess, and I can't claim that I navigated the process with grace, but I did eventually find a job that met all of my criteria.
fantasy vs. reality
In thinking about what I wanted to do next, there were a few things that I had to figure out for myself:
1. Did I want to leave science all together and pursue one of my butcher/baker/candlestick-maker fantasy careers? Or did I simply want what's usually called an "alternative career" in science?
2. What was it that I liked about my job in academia? What didn't I like? These likes and gripes would serve a purpose in evaluating future job possibilities, should any actually arise.
3. What do people actually do outside of academia? Aside from the professions in which the tasks are fairly well-known -- doctor (the real kind), teacher, lawyer, etc. -- I really didn't know what was out there or how I might fit in.
In the next few posts, I'll look at each of these in more depth. For now, we'll just look at the fantasy career question.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'd come up with a lot of careers that I thought would be more fun than being a scientist. This was not a difficult thing to do since everything looked more fun than what I had been doing. I'd wander through Williams-Sonoma silently choosing the Wusthof knives for the kitchen of my haute-vegetarian restaurant. Or I'd read a Kristof piece in the New York Times and spend hours researching careers in public health. Most of these fantasy careers involved working more directly with people -- feeding them, serving them good coffee, helping them. But another thing these jobs had in common was that I'd never done them before.
If you've never done something before, it's very easy to fantasize about it. In these daydreams, it somehow never sinks in that bakers actually have to get up at 2 a.m. to prepare those lovely warm croissants they serve you in the morning. Or that many chefs work until 2 a.m., sleep for a few hours, then get up early to get the freshest fish at the market. If you've ever fantasized about owning a restaurant, I highly recommend reading Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential. Bourdain bills himself as a renegade chef, which gets pretty annoying, but he describes his life as a chef, and it's horrifying. All the things you never thought about in your glowing vision of chefdom are brought out into the light.
The greater message here is this: Really think about these fantasy careers. Are these jobs things you'd like to do for an afternoon or for a month? Or are they really something that you want to do day-in, day-out for years to come. One of the best ways to figure this out is to actually talk to someone who does that job for a living. Talk to your barista, and you'll realize that she's making minimum wage and has coffee burns on her hands. What are these jobs really like? Stop fantasizing.
The other thing I realized about my fantasy jobs was that I wasn't qualified for most of them. Sure, I'd waited tables for a summer in college, cooked dinner for friends, and made truffles for my valentines, but did that mean that I could effortlessly slip into a glamorous career as a personal chef? No. Did my Ph.D. qualify me in any way for a career in public health? No. In the course of getting a Ph.D., you realize that you can pretty much learn anything. You learn how to learn, and you learn how to learn quickly. You figure out how to learn on your own, with a book and a stack of journal articles. So it is easy to think that you can do anything you want. And you certainly can. But when I looked at many of my fantasy jobs and what it would take to actually do them, I realized that many of them would require more school. I love learning and all, but going back to the classroom to learn held no appeal for me. At some point you have to stop loading and start firing.
Crazy (okay, nerdy) as it may sound, in college I fantasized about becoming a science professor. I now knew that that fantasy career was unsatisfying, but there were aspects of science that I was still drawn to. I kicked and screamed my way through labwork, but still loved to spend hours puzzling over the big-picture questions that had been challenging scientists in my field for decades. I still had a sense of wonder about the overall concepts in science. And over the years those questions and concepts had come to shape who I was and how I viewed the world. I didn't want to leave them behind completely, but I did want to change how I approached them.
There are a few well-trod paths into the world of alternative careers in science. Science education and outreach. Science writing. Science policy. What these all have in common is, well, science. They offer the opportunity to stay in touch with those seductive big-picture concepts, while trading the nitty-gritty details of academia in for other nitty-gritty details that might be a better fit.
I loathe the phrase "alternative careers in science," so you won't see it here again. With less than 20% of science and engineering doctoral degree holders in tenure-track positions 4-6 years after graduation, it's clear that academia is just one of many choices that are out there*. To describe non-academic careers as "alternatives" is silly and only furthers the perception that those who don't pursue the tenure-track are failures.
* In 2003, the actual number for the physical sciences was 16.7% [National Science Foundation, Division of Science Resources Statistics, Science and Engineering Indicators 2006 (NSB Publication 06-01, Arlington, VA, 2006)]. For more statistics, check out the National Postdoctoral Association.
1. Did I want to leave science all together and pursue one of my butcher/baker/candlestick-maker fantasy careers? Or did I simply want what's usually called an "alternative career" in science?
2. What was it that I liked about my job in academia? What didn't I like? These likes and gripes would serve a purpose in evaluating future job possibilities, should any actually arise.
3. What do people actually do outside of academia? Aside from the professions in which the tasks are fairly well-known -- doctor (the real kind), teacher, lawyer, etc. -- I really didn't know what was out there or how I might fit in.
In the next few posts, I'll look at each of these in more depth. For now, we'll just look at the fantasy career question.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'd come up with a lot of careers that I thought would be more fun than being a scientist. This was not a difficult thing to do since everything looked more fun than what I had been doing. I'd wander through Williams-Sonoma silently choosing the Wusthof knives for the kitchen of my haute-vegetarian restaurant. Or I'd read a Kristof piece in the New York Times and spend hours researching careers in public health. Most of these fantasy careers involved working more directly with people -- feeding them, serving them good coffee, helping them. But another thing these jobs had in common was that I'd never done them before.
If you've never done something before, it's very easy to fantasize about it. In these daydreams, it somehow never sinks in that bakers actually have to get up at 2 a.m. to prepare those lovely warm croissants they serve you in the morning. Or that many chefs work until 2 a.m., sleep for a few hours, then get up early to get the freshest fish at the market. If you've ever fantasized about owning a restaurant, I highly recommend reading Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential. Bourdain bills himself as a renegade chef, which gets pretty annoying, but he describes his life as a chef, and it's horrifying. All the things you never thought about in your glowing vision of chefdom are brought out into the light.
The greater message here is this: Really think about these fantasy careers. Are these jobs things you'd like to do for an afternoon or for a month? Or are they really something that you want to do day-in, day-out for years to come. One of the best ways to figure this out is to actually talk to someone who does that job for a living. Talk to your barista, and you'll realize that she's making minimum wage and has coffee burns on her hands. What are these jobs really like? Stop fantasizing.
The other thing I realized about my fantasy jobs was that I wasn't qualified for most of them. Sure, I'd waited tables for a summer in college, cooked dinner for friends, and made truffles for my valentines, but did that mean that I could effortlessly slip into a glamorous career as a personal chef? No. Did my Ph.D. qualify me in any way for a career in public health? No. In the course of getting a Ph.D., you realize that you can pretty much learn anything. You learn how to learn, and you learn how to learn quickly. You figure out how to learn on your own, with a book and a stack of journal articles. So it is easy to think that you can do anything you want. And you certainly can. But when I looked at many of my fantasy jobs and what it would take to actually do them, I realized that many of them would require more school. I love learning and all, but going back to the classroom to learn held no appeal for me. At some point you have to stop loading and start firing.
Crazy (okay, nerdy) as it may sound, in college I fantasized about becoming a science professor. I now knew that that fantasy career was unsatisfying, but there were aspects of science that I was still drawn to. I kicked and screamed my way through labwork, but still loved to spend hours puzzling over the big-picture questions that had been challenging scientists in my field for decades. I still had a sense of wonder about the overall concepts in science. And over the years those questions and concepts had come to shape who I was and how I viewed the world. I didn't want to leave them behind completely, but I did want to change how I approached them.
There are a few well-trod paths into the world of alternative careers in science. Science education and outreach. Science writing. Science policy. What these all have in common is, well, science. They offer the opportunity to stay in touch with those seductive big-picture concepts, while trading the nitty-gritty details of academia in for other nitty-gritty details that might be a better fit.
I loathe the phrase "alternative careers in science," so you won't see it here again. With less than 20% of science and engineering doctoral degree holders in tenure-track positions 4-6 years after graduation, it's clear that academia is just one of many choices that are out there*. To describe non-academic careers as "alternatives" is silly and only furthers the perception that those who don't pursue the tenure-track are failures.
* In 2003, the actual number for the physical sciences was 16.7% [National Science Foundation, Division of Science Resources Statistics, Science and Engineering Indicators 2006 (NSB Publication 06-01, Arlington, VA, 2006)]. For more statistics, check out the National Postdoctoral Association.
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