Happy Friday from Southern California.
If you spent 5-7 years as a PhD student/candidate, finish, and then realize that you want to work outside academia, have you wasted your time?
I got an email recently that brought this question up indirectly.
The short answer: no.
The longer answer:
I work in science communications and marketing.
For my PhD project, I studied the role of a bacterial protein called curli in modulating gut health. This means my work involved working with bacteria, mice, harvesting tissue, extracting RNA, running PCRs, and performing protein assays.
For my postdoc, I used a mouse model to study lung disease in pre-term infants.
That was almost a decade of my life. I’m proud of that work.
But I never want to do that work again. And I didn’t waste my time.
Instead, here’s what that experience does for me as a science communicator:
- When I write a marketing asset, I know to avoid jargon scientific end users don’t care about.
- When I write a protocol, I make it as simple as possible to follow because if you have worked in experimental science (or bought furniture from IKEA), you know the agony of following an unfollowable protocol.
- I can speak meaningfully with the lab scientists when I collaborate with them on projects – something I do regularly.
- I can push back and ask questions if something doesn’t make sense.
- I can read complex papers, synthesize that knowledge, and incorporate it into my work where relevant.
I am a scientist AND a writer/marketer in the biotech industry. In my case, my scientific training is an asset to my role as a writer/marketer.
The knowledge, tangible lab skills, emotional intelligence, and problem-solving skills I learned from being a bench scientist will always be invaluable tools in my arsenal to deploy in various aspects of my job.
I meet former lab scientists all the time who are crushing it as product managers, project managers, medical affairs professionals and more, because of their advanced scientific background.
So, if you find yourself using your PhD outside the traditional path you thought you would follow, no, you didn’t waste your time.
It’s not just about the work; the thinking you bring to the work is highly valuable.
That’s all for this week.
Gertrude Nonterah, Ph.D.
Author of Navigating the P.I.V.O.T.