Author: Life After My Ph.D.
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6 Things I Did Wrong in My Industry Job Search
I definitely didn’t have a perfect job search. Especially towards the beginning of it, I messed up on many things – many of which are listed below. Fixing them helped me increase my chances of success, so I hope they inspire you to take a look at your own job search strategies. Not to necessarily…
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Reflecting On 6 Months of Blogging
I started this blog, Life After My Ph.D., in mid-December, 2021. It’s now July 1st, 2022. So, I’ve been blogging for a little over 6 months now. Sharing my recent career and life journey has been SO fun and rewarding. I’ve loved my experience so far! How It All Started When I started my blog,…
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7 Things Academics Get Wrong About Industry Jobs
I recently Tweeted asking former academics that now work in industry/non-ac jobs to share the biggest myths about non-ac jobs that they’ve seen academics have, and want to debunk. I got some really fun comments and I thought I’d make a post describing them, adding my own take on each. These are just for fun,…
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3 Things That Surprised Me About My Remote Medical Writer Job
When I was in grad school and my postdoc, I didn’t have a good sense of what medical writing entailed. I honestly thought it sounded kind of stuffy and mundane. I probably imagined a bunch of scientists sitting at computers typing away on manuscripts and documentation. I’ve been pretty open about how medical writing isn’t…
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3 Important Lessons I’ve Learned About Working in Industry After Leaving Academia
I remember when I was a grad student trying to figure out how to transition from my lab to a non-ac/industry job. It felt like a completely different world, a world I had absolutely no practical understanding of. Having been at my job for exactly 3 months as of today, I wanted to write a…
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I Voluntarily Gave Up Authorship On My Ph.D. Research Paper and I’ve Never Felt More Free
In industry, once you leave a workplace, you don’t spend months (or years) “wrapping up” work for them, unpaid. Your old coworkers and managers don’t keep contacting you to do more work. You pass it along to them with proper documentation and make your exit. So why do academics think it’s normal to keep working…
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Did I Need to Get a Ph.D.?
Less than a year ago, I was scrambling to set a defense date. Less than 3 months ago, I started at my new industry job as a medical writer. One thing that I’ve been thinking about recently and really mulling over is the simple question: Did I need to get a Ph.D.? I mean, I’m…
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Everything That Happened With My Toxic Former Advisor
I’ve mentioned my toxic former PI in some past blog posts and rather heavily on my Twitter. I wanted to write a post to get the whole story out there in case anyone was interested in how I ended up dealing with him! I also really wanted to let others who may be going through…
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The Only Skill From My Ph.D. That I Use In My Industry Job
So I was thinking about posting a list of skills I use in my job that I learned specifically during my Ph.D. But as I started writing out a list of those skills, I realized they all converged onto 1 “mega-skill” in particular. It’s “consolidating and communicating published information”. The overall goal is to familiarize…
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Teaching Outside of Academia
One thing I hear a lot of academics say when they tout the things they love about academia is that they enjoy teaching and that’s why they stay and don’t consider industry. Ummm…what? Hearing that makes me think they’re not aware of the plethora of job options that you can have in industry or non-ac…