About - The Bold PhD

Hello! I’m Dr. Gertrude Nonterah.

Before we get to more of who I am, tell me if you have experienced this:

You did what society told you and stayed in school until you got a Ph.D.

You entered the job market with your shiny new doctoral degree and assumed universities and companies would be pounding at your door to hire you.

…but that has not been your experience at all.

Can you relate?

If your graduate school experience was anything like mine, then you know that although we received good foundations in our given disciplines, many of us were not given the tools we need to thrive in the current career market.

Especially, if you want to work outside of academia.

And let me tell you, it is no fun to enter the career market with a Ph.D. only to you thrash around for months without a job, while you wonder, “Wait, I thought getting a PhD was my golden ticket!”

This is exactly what happened to me.

I earned my Ph.D. in 2015 from the Lewis Katz Temple University School of Medicine and started a postdoc at UC San Diego shortly after that. I had almost hit my third year in that position when my advisor broke the news to our team that grant money had dried up which meant everyone in the lab, except two graduate students, would lose our jobs.

This happened in mid-2018.

I didn’t get another job until the beginning of 2020.

And it was not for a lack of trying.

I made so many mistakes! I laugh at myself in hindsight.

Interestingly, it was also during this time that I gave myself permission to think about what I truly wanted when it came to my career.

Did I want to remain in academia, where I felt joyless and empty although I had been productive?

Or did I want to turn my skills into a career I was happy to wake up to every day?

This realization led me pivot away from an academic profession into an exciting career in medical writing and communications.

Once I successfully navigated into a career outside academia, I made it my mission to share my lessons to help Ph.D.s design, land, and thrive in careers they love.

I started The Bold PhD Consulting to do just that.

These days, when I am not writing scientific content for my day job at a Fortune 500 company, I speak to and train academic audiences on how to use career tools like personal branding and networking to move their careers forward – whether that career is within academia or outside of it.