Life Science PhD Career Path

I'm planning on graduating next year and I've had a number of people ask me about my career plans  when I do. Over the course of my time in graduate school I have learned a lot about the many professional opportunities for PhD scientists. Admittedly, I didn't know that much about academic career paths and the routes to other types of jobs when I started and much of it is not strait forward. Hopefully, this information will help clarify some of the possibilities and challenges newly graduating scientists face. I will draw heavily on some excellent information provided by the American Society of Cell Biology (ASCB), the NSF, and my own perceptions (which are purely anecdotal but occasionally relevant). This post is quite long and I apologize. If you are short on time look at the nice pictures. That is pretty much the gist.

So, what on average is happening with advanced life science training? Based on action movies, it seems one graduates early from college, magically completes a doctorate and then gets to play with lasers, microscopes, and probably aliens. Sadly, this is one of the rare examples of action movies not accurately representing reality, I have not once worked with aliens. Lasers and microscopes yes. Both separately and in combination. Students start a graduate degree in life science for many different reasons usually including a love of science. Graduate training is very different that any other stage of education: it is less structured, less delimited, and much more individual. It is hard and it takes a long time (7 years on average). And even with the dramatic increase in Biology PhDs awarded since 2003 (Cryanoski et al. 2011) close to 40% of graduate students do not complete their doctorate. This is a national statistic and varies across institutions and programs. In my program average time is about 6.5 years and about 1 person per class does not complete the program (class size varying from 5-12 students). This information is all available on graduate school websites alongside the information on course loads and rotation opportunities. Where the great unknown lies in in what comes after graduation. This is in part because it seems so far away when applying to a graduate program and in part because no one is actually tracking what happens to people when they graduate in any organized way. 

Polka 2014

The assumed default course after graduation is to move on to a postdoctoral fellowship with an estimated 70% of graduates becoming postdocs. If graduate school is like an apprenticeship, being a postdoc is like being a journeyman (or jedi knight). You are trained and mostly independent but still not a master of the craft. The goal of a postdoc is to become a master of what you want to finally do. Ideally, one would have fine tuned the skill set necessary for the future job while still a graduate student because putting off preparation until the postdoc stage can be quite costly (Powell 2017). However, many students don't know to or don't have the opportunity to gain necessary experience for a job strait out of the PhD and credential creep often favors researchers who have completed a postdoc. If you want to become a government researcher, you try to get a position in a government lab, learn the system, make connections, and prove that you are interested and an asset to system. If you want to work in consulting, you join consulting clubs, do volunteer consulting and job shadowing, learn the system make connections, and prove that you are interested and an asset to the system. If you want to be an academic researcher you get grants, start training graduate students and undergrads, present at meetings, learn the system, make connections and prove that you are interested and an asset to the system. You want to make yourself the best candidate for the job you want to apply to and ideally you have already started doing these things in graduate school. The ideal version is you work hard, shine bright, and get rocketed immediately to fame and fortune (kind of like a lab coated movie star). 

The problem is that is what everyone is hoping for. The great danger that everyone fears is the postdoc trap, where you get stuck in a "postdoc" position forever and never get to move on to your fame and fortune (Note: the NIH caps being called a postdoc at 5 years, there are other positions that are essentially the same thing with a different title and a raise). With the very incomplete data on postdocs the average time in a postdoc is 4-6 years (see above) but everyone in a lab knows people who have been "postdocs" for much much longer. And an estimated 30% of postdocs do more than one postdoc. Ideally this would be to fine tune skill sets they need for their career, cynically it can be more of a wheels spinning kind of situation (Schlossberg 2016 NYT). 

So, what are the opportunities that post docs are working toward? While attractiveness of academia jobs diminishes with time spent in academia, at least half of young scientists still hope to end up back in a university (Sauermann and Roach 2012). This is tricky: only 12-15% of PhDs actually get the tenure track position. To make it while still young, this seems to require papers in big journals and a good grant track record. Long term there are opportunities to slowly rise ranks from postdoc, to researcher, to instructor (or other non-tenure faculty title), and then make the jump to independence. about the same percent of PhDs hold non-tenure track jobs in academia. These can be the more stable researcher positions or the dreaded adjunct position. Much like the fear of being trapped as a postdoc, there is a perceived risk of being trapped forever in an adjunct loop, contributing to instruction at various institutions but all on short term contracts with far less confidence in renewal than teaching track faculty who usually work on 5-10 year contracts. Together, academic type jobs make up about 30% of the jobs PhD biologists get. So, what else are they doing?

Obviously, there is industrial and government research. Both very desirable prospects with their own difficulties. To get a job as a government researcher most candidates spend several years working through contracting companies. Getting an entry position in industry is also challenging. Though it hasn't been the "back up plan" career in decades, industry is still pushing back against the snubs older than department chairs. They want people who have proven that they are interested in industry and can be successful in the fast paced environment. There is also a sense of instability associated with industry, though at least for larger companies it doesn't seem to be that much more pronounced than other career options. 

This puts us at a little more than 60% of careers accounted for which is a nice pause to talk about geography. Currently, the US is still a destination for training and research so there are many more people coming in to do science than scientists leaving. (Note: this is one of the potential casualties of reduced appreciation and funding of scientific research) When people have asked where I'm going, while I still don't know I tend to rattle off a number of states located on either coast. While I don't want to live in North Dakota, Dave Barry and I agree on this, the states I list aren't just a preference. That's where the money is. For both industry and academia, big research takes big money so places that are willing to invest in research are major hot spots for all kinds of opportunity. 

Shackleford andWolfe

Ok so what are the last 30% of jobs? About 10% of people leave science all together. Everyone has their backup plan ranging from cider orchard with adjoining goat farm, to astronaut, to video game tester, to professional body builder (less ridiculous than you might think. remember that olympic diver). I'm sure the actual careers might be more practical than these examples but they are probably just as varied. This leaves us with the 20% of people who are doing things related to science but not in academia or research. These are the things I didn't immediately think of. Things like textbook illustration, medical writing, consulting, science reporting, science advocacy, science advising, promoting STEM outreach, working in a patent office.There are many different types of career. Just like research and academia they want people who are dedicated to what they do and good at what they do. Just like the other career paths, successful applicants need to demonstrate that they will be successful in that line of work.

So, no matter what career one seeks after completing a PhD, to be successful one has to have obtained the training and skill set to be prepared. There is a lot of discussion now about trying to shift more of that preparation to the graduate training and for the proactive there are already opportunities to build a portfolio and track record of success in a given field. the graduate students who go strait into non-training positions after graduation have taken advantage of these opportunities. But for the majority under the current training system much of that preparation happens as a postdoc. This is why it is important to choose a postdoc carefully.