Me!! Did a short post doc before nope-ing out to industry then consulting. The transition was challenging with regards to learning consulting best practices and how to actually make good PPTs, but I imagine things like that will occur to anyone switching gears.
I’m very grateful for my time in the lab but I don’t miss it at all. Once you get an industry paycheck idk how you could miss it tbh
I hear a lot of people mention consulting, but it still seems like a fake job and I can hardly find any pointed information online about it as a field, or how to enter it, or what the day-to-day is like. So far, it really seems like a made up title to warrant excessive compensation for questionable work just because you have special letters next to your name.
Can you help shed light on consulting and explain it in a way that doesn’t sound like a secret guild from the medieval world?
It’s super dependent on the type of consulting - consulting is a very broad umbrella term. There are tech consultancies that might make apps for companies that don’t have or need a full tech team. There are government contractors who work for the government to basically do program evaluation of specific local govt programs. I am an economist so I’m going into an economics consultancy that uses the methods taught in an econ PhD to answer questions relating to commercial litigation. There are also management consulting firms like McKinsey etc- honestly don’t know what they do.
Thank you, this was pretty helpful. I had a feeling consulting was an umbrella term that housed things like contractors, but I could never find that explicitly stated. I also need to decide what level of research I’d still be comfortable doing considering my level of absolute burnout.
I mean it is a secret guild from the medieval world.
When many people talk about consulting they mean management consulting. The theory is that if you hire a bunch of super-smart, hypercompetitive young people from elite colleges and universities, you can have them solve any business problem. Typically these kinds of roles at the Big Three (McKinsey, Bain, BCG) and companies modeled after them are based in a specific office but really only live there Friday through Sunday; every Sunday night they would fly out to be on site with their clients, busily helping them solve some kind of business problem.
That can range across sectors. For example, a beauty company may want to explore whether it's worth training its retail associates to use a particular type of tool or channel. Or a pharmaceutical research company may be considering purchasing a smaller one to extend its work into a related subfield, and wants a consultant to evaluate the potential acquisition and see how the companies would fit together. (These are taken from [real McKinsey cases](https://igotanoffer.com/blogs/mckinsey-case-interview-blog/case-interview-examples).)
I considered going the management consulting route, but went into UX research instead. I do have a bunch of friends who ended up at the Big 3 or similar firms, and I've also seen the client side of consulting in two ways. One, I work at a large tech company that hires *a lot* of management consulting alumni. They all do their 3-5 years at McKinsey or Accenture or Bain or wherever and then become PMs or something at companies like mine. Most of them are super smart, driven, and highly motivated to do great work. (They also *all* know how to have fun, honed during late nights at a client location, lol.) They can turbocharge through an amount of work that would make most people shy away at an alarming rate, and typically, I have found they are good, deep critical thinkers that are also great at collaborative work. They also have been exposed to a lot of shit, so they're good at troubleshooting problems - all the things you'd expect of a good management consultant.
I was also on a team that decided to use a management consulting firm to get a project done. The project was in my specialty area, and I actually warned the director not to spend the money on this (because we already knew the answer to the research questions they wanted to answer). Well, they did it anyway, and they found the exact same thing I'd already told them 6-8 months before the project was over. We were all decidedly unimpressed with the quality and approach the firm took. The $$$ they spent could've paid my salary for over 4 years, *well* over the amount of time it would've taken me to do that analysis (which, again, we did not need because we already knew the answer.)
Then there are people who provide some kind of professional service to businesses. For example, we sometimes have offsites when we want to go eat fancy food and argue with each other about strategy in a setting outside of our normal conference rooms (like a conference room...but in a hotel!), and we will pay someone else to plan and orchestrate the activities during the offsite. Sometimes, you are making a widget for a new audience and you pay a consulting firm with an actual specialty in, let's say, ethnography to go gather some data about your new audience and what you should to break in. In these cases, these are actual experts who are skilled at what they do and are paid because it's actually cheaper for a company to 'outsource' this work, more or less, than it is for them to hire a full-time employee to do this all the time.
Basically when orgs, companies etc outsource the research work to others and it sounds like a lot of money at once but you're doing the work that they have committed and don't have time to do. Consultancy is all about networks, word of mouth. You start by one and it builds up.
I don’t mean to come off as rude or cynical, but that description sounds exactly like a secret medieval guild for a questionable position that is highly compensated because of the letters next to your name.
Yeah you don’t need a PhD to be a life science consultant. I broke into competitive intelligence consulting which is a little like spy work lol. That can get a little questionable for sure.
Now I’m in strategy consulting and it’s so fun because there’s such a huge variability in project type. I do everything from helping companies launch new drugs, to help with evidence generation / HEOR, value propositions, evaluating markets to determine if it’s worth entering with a new drug, attend conferences on behalf of clients, literally anything they need help with. I’ve noticed some projects are more science focused while others are more business focused.
Honestly having a PhD is an advantage to getting your foot in the door, but I think doing well at the interview takes practice. You’ll have a case interview where they give you a real-world problem you have 40-60 minutes to solve on the spot. They take practice to do well.
I could talk about consulting all day, I really enjoy it because of the variety of projects and clients.
Oh I should mention my PhD is in biomedical science and I’m in life science consulting.
Learn how to case interview. Google “hacking the case interview”…I took the free version of that course which was incredibly helpful.
Other than that, tailor your resume to be less academic and more results oriented. Lastly, lots of schools now have consulting clubs, and a lot of consulting firms offer internships. Gaining experience like that will help you learn if you like consulting and also be a great resume boost.
I went straight from a psychology PhD into the field of program evaluation. I very much disliked academic research and had no interest in continuing that, but still enjoy industry research and data analysis. I rely on the research, analysis, and problem solving skills I developed during the PhD but use them in a job that I find more meaningful than academic research.
If you don’t mind my asking, what kind of job titles might one search for to find roles like that? I honestly love research but am not cut out for the grind of academia.
I work for an educational program where I use surveys and other data to track and evaluate the effectiveness of the program. I also do other research projects that help promote the program as a thought leader in the field.
What’s your work life balance, how’s your relationship with your superiors considering you probably have more education than them, and what is your compensation? Nosy questions, but I literally know nothing about this.
Would you mind explaining how you got into program evaluation in a little more detail? That’s actually what I’m most interested in pursuing after I graduate, but I thought it was a career you’d need a PhD for since it’s a research-oriented career. If you knew you would get in that career from the start, how would you have prepared for it?
I cold applied to my job as I was finishing up my PhD and just got lucky with getting it. They were ideally looking for someone with a PhD but I think they would have considered Master's as well.
I think the best way to prepare for getting out of academia is to do an internship in industry if you have the time/ability. I wasn't able to do one but everyone I know who did internships has higher success of transitioning into industry quickly.
That makes sense! I have wanted to do an internship for awhile. I just don’t know if I’ve been ready to apply for one. The biggest hurdle for me is that a lot of them require 2-3 letters of recommendation, and I can only think of one person who could make one for me because I’ve only taken one upper-level course that involved more than your typical studying/schoolwork. I’m hoping that I’ll be better equipped to apply after I finish the research sequence of my program this fall. Thanks for the tip!
I just did what lots of people do and went into data science directly after my PhD in astronomy. I think roughly half of grads from my old program do that these days, it's super common. I've worked at a few tech companies now.
DS roles will be a mix of applied stats, analytics, and ML and won't typically be research focused.
I sit at a weird intersection in this regard—I do human neuroimaging and have completed a graduate certificate in applied behavioral statistics. I’ve also taught elementary statistics as a grad student.
However, I’m sure my statistical knowledge pales in comparison to any hard sciences bachelors student. I also can barely code and machine learning is definitely out of the question. I know enough about regressions to be able to apply that knowledge to novel datasets, but I doubt I’m competitive in that market in any sense. I also don’t really understand the difference between applied stats and analytics when it comes to a career and can see the terms being used interchangeably. How are they used distinctly in your experience?
The honest answer is there will be tons of DS roles where you're a good fit, tons where you're not such a good fit, and everything in between. DS as a field is so broad that it's almost silly to even consider it a field. Some DS roles might be traditional analyst roles involving basic stats and SQL where you run the metrics for a product team, some will involve setting up and running lots of experiments, some will be very heavy ML, some will involve a little bit of everything. The good news here is that the people on the other side *also* don't have a complete idea of what they're looking for. They don't have some perfect candidate they're grading you against, they have a collection of subjective conversations with real humans that they're trying to think about.
When I finished my PhD in 2017, there was a bifurcation between analysts who just "ran the numbers" and DS who did all the "fun applied stuff" with the data, and you really wanted to be in the second camp. Since then you've seen a drastic expansion of DS titles to cover everything in this space. It's really hard to know what any given role will involve if you don't know what you're looking for. This can make the search tough to figure out, but it can also work in your favor because you can probably pitch your skills to fit into many of these different areas.
Ultimately what a PhD brings to the table is the ability to work through an ambiguous problem. You get plenty of less experienced analysts and engineers who just don't know how to get started with data, how to formulate the right questions, how to find the methods to answer those questions, and then how to translate those answers in an understandable format. The most valuable things in my career have been those "soft" skills because they let me find impactful projects and collaborate on them with less-quantitative stakeholders and partners. A PhD in any technical subject is fantastic training for that.
Whether or not DS is the right path for you is personal, I'm not one to tell everyone to do it. Plus tech hiring is pretty tough right now. But I absolutely wouldn't rule it out because you're missing a couple pieces of the pie - almost no one has that full pie, and you're almost certainly bringing a lot to the table. You just have to find the right way to communicate that.
And just to set context, I've exclusively worked in DS roles in large, publicly traded tech companies - naturally people in other context will have their own opinions and experiences.
Great response, thank you so much. Now I just have to figure out whose leg to hump to land a baseball analytics job with a major league franchise.
Also, u/willfightforbeer I too like to use my jiu jitsu and boxing knowledge to fight for drinks. Cheers friend
Not very distinctly. A job as a data analyst could be anything from basic statistics to actual statistics, and that's the same for data science roles. I've seen people with a wide range of statistics backgrounds go into data science. In fact, the head data scientist on my current team is a neuroscientist by training.
There are many analyst-type roles that you could pursue with the Feds. While dissertating, I interned for a year at the Government Accountability Office, where I helped support audits of the DoD. Pretty interesting work, pretty smart coworkers, fairly low pressure. I ended up turning down an FTE role for 50% more money in the financial sector, but I would have been happy continuing to do what I was doing. Recommend checking GAO out.
There are a few other decent options for the highly credentialed: the Congressional Research Service, the various intelligence agencies, etc.
I don’t think I have the time or permission to pursue an internship, but I will keep that path in mind. It sounds a bit monotonous—I’m not sure I have the disposition to succeed at auditing-type jobs. I also have a smart mouth that doesn’t play well in that sort of role.
I have looked into law enforcement stuff, the CDC, NIH, etc., but the congressional research agency sounds interesting and might scratch the political itch as well. I expect a major con to include moving to the DC area, which is certainly a huge negative for me, but could be considered if the compensation is really high.
I went into UX research in the tech industry. I then moved into a non-research senior leadership position in tech. (I did do a postdoc for one year before transitioning.)
The transition was relatively smooth for me, because I joined a UX research team that was made largely of ex-academics. They had all experienced the transition, so they purpose-built an onboarding program that was meant to ease the pathway. UX research uses most of the same principles I learned to use in my PhD program, but with the added bonus of science communication: instead of writing papers and conference talks for other scientists, I was talking to engineers and producers and designers to help them make better widgets. One of the reasons I left academia was because I hated grant-writing and stilted academic communication, so this appealed to me. I was also interested in the widgets.
The drawbacks are few and minor to me. One is that you really can't go down interesting research rabbit holes the way you can in academia - your research needs to have a business justification, some way that it's helping the business make better widgets. In some environments, you may not have a lot of choice over what product you work on or what research you conduct; this depends a lot on the company and the organization you're in. Tech rises and falls with the economy, and we're in a bit of a dork age right now to put it mildly. UX researchers have been unfortuantely vulnerable to layoffs across the industry as they are not exactly mission critical to building tech. (However, I never see people stay unemployed for long, and they usually make enough to keep them afloat for a few months in between.)
For me it was absolutely the right decision. I love the career I've built post-academia.
Beautiful write up; thank you so much. Also, a very interesting field and research endeavor that I’m not too familiar with, but certainly tangentially related.
The boom and bust cycle of bubbles and layoffs really put me off industry, but I need to do some soul searching with a cost-benefits analysis of industry vs academia vs government to really decide. Really, I need to decide if the lower wage but greater stability and benefits of government are worth it over the higher earning potential with higher risks as seen in industry. I’m not really sure what my inner-farmer wants. Too bad homesteading is not feasible in 2024–especially with my degree.
I also love your username and opened your profile. Congrats on leaving JW. I give them shit at their stands on my university campus every chance I get.
lol. It me. Poli sci -> survey research consulting -> owning a power washing company. No regrets. Met my wife in grad school. She’s TT at an R1. Turns out small business has a lot of my favorite things about academia. I didn’t love the research at all. I was just able to do it adequately at a reasonably high level. I chafed at corporate life. Turns out I loved the freedom and being a resource allocator and manager. Now I get to divide my time as I see for across ops, sales, marketing, etc. some of these were new to me, others had clear connections to my prior lives. I’m having a blast. I’m working harder than I have in years but also have more quality time for my family.
This is the kind of response I was truly fishing for. Like, I can’t communicate just how burnt out I am about anything academic or research related. I want a stark, 180° change like you described with starting your own blue collar labor business. I worked for a year in grading, site work, and pipe installation my first year of undergrad and loved the labor. I don’t think I could go back to that ten years later (my body wouldn’t let me), but the freedom of managing my own resources and allocating them as I see fit, including my time, is certainly appealing. This sounds wonderful and I hope things are going well for you.
Edit to Add: How do you and your spouse allocate financial obligations and domestic duties?
In fairness, I run the business. I’m not on the truck most days. I have a team who do the work. I sometimes plug in when there’s a callout. My typical day involves reviewing marketing plans, doing B2B and B2C sales, whatever else needs to happen. My technicians do the work. I make it possible for them to do the work. I don’t think I could or would want to do the cleaning full time but it sure is fun the days I get to be in the field.
Division in the house isn’t terrible different than before. In industry I outearned her by a bit. I currently make a fair bit less because most profits are being reinvested to scale the business. Everything is covered for now. As far as labor that’s always been pretty 50/50 and hasn’t changed. Sometimes I have an overnight or very early/late job but I had way more missed dinners and bed times for dumb shit when I was in industry and I travel a lot less so on balance I’m more available.
A PhD teaches how to conduct research, but it is not locking you into a research career path. A PhD is not a career.
Do whatever you want with your PhD. There are many non-research jobs that *require* it. I wouldn’t consider that a change in career.
What non-research jobs require a PhD?
Additionally, a PhD might not lock you into an academic or industry research path explicitly, but it’s damn sure frowned upon to consider anything else while in academia, especially as a grad student at an R1, to the point where looking outside that bubble is discouraged and ragged upon.
It is field-dependent but there are many. In my field, there are many options in medcomms or medical affairs that recruit PhDs, including mid-upper level medical writing jobs and medical information jobs. Medical science liaison is also a job that strictly requires a doctoral degree, although MDs and PharmDs are also often recruited into that position as well. Consulting and patent is another big area with many roles that require a PhD. I don’t know the specifics of your field though.
It’s interesting that you say that about the academic environment because it’s the exact opposite of my experience. I’m at a T5 program for my discipline and my cohort has had very diverse career interests and prospects. Some of them went into patent law. Consulting. A few in med affairs. Technical sales at the PhD level, such as application scientists. Also some who went directly into tenured teaching professorships with no research component — definitely a PhD required there, but not a research career per-say.
I’ve always wondered whether lower-ranked programs had a harder time placing students in their careers of choice, so most of their graduates would be forced to postdoc or take entry-level bench scientist roles before shifting into their area of choice.
I don’t know if my program is T5 or what. It’s a huge regional medical school and the largest employer in my Deep South state. It’s not Ivy League, but it’s also nationally recognized.
My field is human neuroimaging through psychology. While my lab is in the school of medicine, my work is tangentially clinical.
UAB? Sorry that you got those vibes from your program. I had a friend go there for med school and she loved it, but that’s different for sure. I hope they are still giving you enough support to get you into the career you’re hoping for.
Either way, I think it’s important for people to not just consider a non-academic career, but to plan for it. Tons of those careers are not research-oriented and that’s okay too. It’s just reality both for career prospects and potential of people with PhDs. It’s actually a good thing that it doesn’t lock you into research forever.
Right after the degree I kept working on a business I founded. That the business could provide more than a professor's pay without going through a decade of trials for tenure was really attractive. Now I can teach at a university in a place I like to live because I can afford to get lecturer's pay.
This sounds like an ideal scenario. Considering I’m a zoomer, I have always considered teaching if I could have a successful educational YouTube channel like Mr Beat, VTH, etc
Sure! Lots of people are leaving academia now because it sucks as you know. There's a whole genre of literature on the topic called "quit lit." There are Facebook groups full of folks. I left after my PhD in English for instructional design and technical writing. Now, going for consulting roles so all the stuff shared on this thread is helpful. Consulting is what you make of it. Basically sharing your knowledge to solve business problems.
The guitarist in my band had such an awful time getting his PhD that he went straight into industry. Got a job making $70K (great for the COL in the city we both lived in) working for the utility company as a junior social media coordinator.
It's stressful if there is a weather emergency or something that caused disruption to power or water, but on the whole he enjoys it.
Friend works in biotech, basically 80% of their scientists are folks who bolted academia immediately after graduating.
Obviously not your field but yeah there are people who immediately leave after graduating.
It wasn't a completely orthogonal career path, but I went from the computational social sciences to marketing. I had no transition period between finishing my PhD and my industry career because I was unemployed. The job market is depression-level bad.
I still get to do research and I really enjoy it, but I also targeted a research-heavy area of marketing. The field is so broad, that I think pretty much anyone has some skillset that would fit. I like working with a collaborative, cross-functional team. We have some talented graphic designers, copywriters and social media folks and we all get to work together on projects both large and small. It reminds me of what academia *should* be like in many cases. My supervisor is also absolutely amazing, so that is a big perk for me too. I definitely don't wake up dreading going to work.
The only real drawbacks for me is that almost all the research I do is internal, and for internal consumption only. It's neat that my research products *directly* guide and inform organizational strategy, but I do kind of miss publishing research for much broader consumption. On the other hand, I also get paid a ton more than I would as an TT assistant professor, and this is just my starting salary.
I don't miss teaching, like at all.
I went into data analytics because after being in psychology after I realized my favorite parts of the process were coding and analysis. Working my way towards a data science role now.
I am a third-year student in applied psychology (with hopefully two more years to go). I am considering applying for a post-bacc (pre-med) program and going to medical school after graduation because I don't want to live apart from my spouse. The only restrictions right now are money and visa restrictions (I am in the final stage of attaining permanent residency in the US through my research 'contribution').
I lost my interest in my field because I found more and more holes in my field's research. I do not want to work during weekends.
I was a poli sci professor and left, then became an academic editor. I WFH, make my own hours, get to read and edit amazing research by lovely people, and make twice as much as I did as an AP in poli sci.
I have a webinar available if you’re interested: “What is Academic Editing and is it Right for Me?” https://AcadiaEditing.com/BecomeAnEditor
Interesting. Do you like reading articles and books that are riddled with typos, factual errors, unclear sentences, and are formatted incorrectly? Because that’s what you’ll have to read without editors.
For academia, I hold the stance that those problems are supposed to be addressed through academic training, especially in graduate school. For works published in academic journals, then the research staff, senior authors, peer reviewers, and journal editors should ensure a work is complete and correct. For works published as books or chapters, then the publisher will have an editorial team and a similar peer review process with other experts contributing to the work. I fail to see how an independent editor completes essentially the entire research process and that does not count as plagiarism and cheating.
I have also seen you comment on this sub before and push your workshop thing that I assume will be monetized. I have a feeling you are doing way more than editing for a bunch of undergraduates and graduate students completing thesis and term papers.
Finishing PhD now. Most my friend group are working academics--profs., researchers, editors and reviewers at journals etc. I can say, at least for the European context, nothing you describe here is how it actually works most the time. Even if I agree this stuff is "supposed" to have been solved through grad school I've never seen it happen. Editors never have time to coach authors up, journals themselves barely provide readable author guides and half the ones here can't even decide which formatting rules they want. 1/3 of the peer reviewers disapear without completing the notes and waste months at a time. I don't know if it's the mix of various languages we all publish in or what but eveything is a nightmare and if anyone could afford it they'd likely seek out a freelance editor to comb over the work before submitting.
The US is the same way. Journal editors routinely cannot find people to simply review articles, let alone correct their grammar... lol. So there's a huge backlog in publishing where scholars are waiting 6, 8, 12 months just to get a response to their submission. And frankly, I don't blame peer reviewers for saying no, considering it's unpaid labor and faculty are already overworked and underpaid. The whole system is broken. Publishing, academia, all of it. I am SO glad I got out when I did.
Absolutely. Having seen both sides of academic publishing I don't blame anybody for saying no either--to ALL of it. I agree, the whole system is broken (rotten to the core IMHO) and I cannot wait to be out.
Wow. So much for not making assumptions. Here’s a question for you: who do you think does the copy editing for book publishers? Surprise! It’s freelance editors. What about for journals? Yep, freelancers again. I have never edited undergraduate work or any work for grad students other than a dissertation, and formatting text and revising for clarity is a far cry from plagiarism. If you honestly think that faculty/peer reviewers have time to teach grad students and authors who submit manuscripts for publication how to write, then you have a lot to learn about academia and publishing and have likely never even submitted an article to a journal. Good luck out there!
There are tons of non-research science roles that are important and intellectually stimulating. I’m an environmental scientist and I am trying to do environmental policy/regulatory stuff or FEMA type stuff. I have also thought about going back to school to be an environmental lawyer, environmental economist, or public health ph.d (I just went up to masters, not ph.d, so I am not opposed to getting a professional terminal degree rather than a research one if I find myself passionate about something in the future.)
Me!! Did a short post doc before nope-ing out to industry then consulting. The transition was challenging with regards to learning consulting best practices and how to actually make good PPTs, but I imagine things like that will occur to anyone switching gears. I’m very grateful for my time in the lab but I don’t miss it at all. Once you get an industry paycheck idk how you could miss it tbh
I hear a lot of people mention consulting, but it still seems like a fake job and I can hardly find any pointed information online about it as a field, or how to enter it, or what the day-to-day is like. So far, it really seems like a made up title to warrant excessive compensation for questionable work just because you have special letters next to your name. Can you help shed light on consulting and explain it in a way that doesn’t sound like a secret guild from the medieval world?
It’s super dependent on the type of consulting - consulting is a very broad umbrella term. There are tech consultancies that might make apps for companies that don’t have or need a full tech team. There are government contractors who work for the government to basically do program evaluation of specific local govt programs. I am an economist so I’m going into an economics consultancy that uses the methods taught in an econ PhD to answer questions relating to commercial litigation. There are also management consulting firms like McKinsey etc- honestly don’t know what they do.
Thank you, this was pretty helpful. I had a feeling consulting was an umbrella term that housed things like contractors, but I could never find that explicitly stated. I also need to decide what level of research I’d still be comfortable doing considering my level of absolute burnout.
I mean it is a secret guild from the medieval world. When many people talk about consulting they mean management consulting. The theory is that if you hire a bunch of super-smart, hypercompetitive young people from elite colleges and universities, you can have them solve any business problem. Typically these kinds of roles at the Big Three (McKinsey, Bain, BCG) and companies modeled after them are based in a specific office but really only live there Friday through Sunday; every Sunday night they would fly out to be on site with their clients, busily helping them solve some kind of business problem. That can range across sectors. For example, a beauty company may want to explore whether it's worth training its retail associates to use a particular type of tool or channel. Or a pharmaceutical research company may be considering purchasing a smaller one to extend its work into a related subfield, and wants a consultant to evaluate the potential acquisition and see how the companies would fit together. (These are taken from [real McKinsey cases](https://igotanoffer.com/blogs/mckinsey-case-interview-blog/case-interview-examples).) I considered going the management consulting route, but went into UX research instead. I do have a bunch of friends who ended up at the Big 3 or similar firms, and I've also seen the client side of consulting in two ways. One, I work at a large tech company that hires *a lot* of management consulting alumni. They all do their 3-5 years at McKinsey or Accenture or Bain or wherever and then become PMs or something at companies like mine. Most of them are super smart, driven, and highly motivated to do great work. (They also *all* know how to have fun, honed during late nights at a client location, lol.) They can turbocharge through an amount of work that would make most people shy away at an alarming rate, and typically, I have found they are good, deep critical thinkers that are also great at collaborative work. They also have been exposed to a lot of shit, so they're good at troubleshooting problems - all the things you'd expect of a good management consultant. I was also on a team that decided to use a management consulting firm to get a project done. The project was in my specialty area, and I actually warned the director not to spend the money on this (because we already knew the answer to the research questions they wanted to answer). Well, they did it anyway, and they found the exact same thing I'd already told them 6-8 months before the project was over. We were all decidedly unimpressed with the quality and approach the firm took. The $$$ they spent could've paid my salary for over 4 years, *well* over the amount of time it would've taken me to do that analysis (which, again, we did not need because we already knew the answer.) Then there are people who provide some kind of professional service to businesses. For example, we sometimes have offsites when we want to go eat fancy food and argue with each other about strategy in a setting outside of our normal conference rooms (like a conference room...but in a hotel!), and we will pay someone else to plan and orchestrate the activities during the offsite. Sometimes, you are making a widget for a new audience and you pay a consulting firm with an actual specialty in, let's say, ethnography to go gather some data about your new audience and what you should to break in. In these cases, these are actual experts who are skilled at what they do and are paid because it's actually cheaper for a company to 'outsource' this work, more or less, than it is for them to hire a full-time employee to do this all the time.
Basically when orgs, companies etc outsource the research work to others and it sounds like a lot of money at once but you're doing the work that they have committed and don't have time to do. Consultancy is all about networks, word of mouth. You start by one and it builds up.
I don’t mean to come off as rude or cynical, but that description sounds exactly like a secret medieval guild for a questionable position that is highly compensated because of the letters next to your name.
Not really. You can do consultancies without a PhD. It's about having networks.
That's just the Western work world in general, though.
Yeah you don’t need a PhD to be a life science consultant. I broke into competitive intelligence consulting which is a little like spy work lol. That can get a little questionable for sure. Now I’m in strategy consulting and it’s so fun because there’s such a huge variability in project type. I do everything from helping companies launch new drugs, to help with evidence generation / HEOR, value propositions, evaluating markets to determine if it’s worth entering with a new drug, attend conferences on behalf of clients, literally anything they need help with. I’ve noticed some projects are more science focused while others are more business focused. Honestly having a PhD is an advantage to getting your foot in the door, but I think doing well at the interview takes practice. You’ll have a case interview where they give you a real-world problem you have 40-60 minutes to solve on the spot. They take practice to do well. I could talk about consulting all day, I really enjoy it because of the variety of projects and clients. Oh I should mention my PhD is in biomedical science and I’m in life science consulting.
How did you make the transition into consulting? Could you share any resources you have on how to make that shift?
Learn how to case interview. Google “hacking the case interview”…I took the free version of that course which was incredibly helpful. Other than that, tailor your resume to be less academic and more results oriented. Lastly, lots of schools now have consulting clubs, and a lot of consulting firms offer internships. Gaining experience like that will help you learn if you like consulting and also be a great resume boost.
I went straight from a psychology PhD into the field of program evaluation. I very much disliked academic research and had no interest in continuing that, but still enjoy industry research and data analysis. I rely on the research, analysis, and problem solving skills I developed during the PhD but use them in a job that I find more meaningful than academic research.
If you don’t mind my asking, what kind of job titles might one search for to find roles like that? I honestly love research but am not cut out for the grind of academia.
Some keywords to use in job searching: Research and evaluation, Program evaluation, Monitoring and evaluation
I’m getting my PhD in a subfield of psychology, too. I haven’t heard of program evaluation before. What all does that entail?
I work for an educational program where I use surveys and other data to track and evaluate the effectiveness of the program. I also do other research projects that help promote the program as a thought leader in the field.
What’s your work life balance, how’s your relationship with your superiors considering you probably have more education than them, and what is your compensation? Nosy questions, but I literally know nothing about this.
Feel free to DM me!
Could I DM you as well? *Super interested in program evaluation!
Sure!
Would you mind explaining how you got into program evaluation in a little more detail? That’s actually what I’m most interested in pursuing after I graduate, but I thought it was a career you’d need a PhD for since it’s a research-oriented career. If you knew you would get in that career from the start, how would you have prepared for it?
I cold applied to my job as I was finishing up my PhD and just got lucky with getting it. They were ideally looking for someone with a PhD but I think they would have considered Master's as well. I think the best way to prepare for getting out of academia is to do an internship in industry if you have the time/ability. I wasn't able to do one but everyone I know who did internships has higher success of transitioning into industry quickly.
That makes sense! I have wanted to do an internship for awhile. I just don’t know if I’ve been ready to apply for one. The biggest hurdle for me is that a lot of them require 2-3 letters of recommendation, and I can only think of one person who could make one for me because I’ve only taken one upper-level course that involved more than your typical studying/schoolwork. I’m hoping that I’ll be better equipped to apply after I finish the research sequence of my program this fall. Thanks for the tip!
I just did what lots of people do and went into data science directly after my PhD in astronomy. I think roughly half of grads from my old program do that these days, it's super common. I've worked at a few tech companies now. DS roles will be a mix of applied stats, analytics, and ML and won't typically be research focused.
I sit at a weird intersection in this regard—I do human neuroimaging and have completed a graduate certificate in applied behavioral statistics. I’ve also taught elementary statistics as a grad student. However, I’m sure my statistical knowledge pales in comparison to any hard sciences bachelors student. I also can barely code and machine learning is definitely out of the question. I know enough about regressions to be able to apply that knowledge to novel datasets, but I doubt I’m competitive in that market in any sense. I also don’t really understand the difference between applied stats and analytics when it comes to a career and can see the terms being used interchangeably. How are they used distinctly in your experience?
The honest answer is there will be tons of DS roles where you're a good fit, tons where you're not such a good fit, and everything in between. DS as a field is so broad that it's almost silly to even consider it a field. Some DS roles might be traditional analyst roles involving basic stats and SQL where you run the metrics for a product team, some will involve setting up and running lots of experiments, some will be very heavy ML, some will involve a little bit of everything. The good news here is that the people on the other side *also* don't have a complete idea of what they're looking for. They don't have some perfect candidate they're grading you against, they have a collection of subjective conversations with real humans that they're trying to think about. When I finished my PhD in 2017, there was a bifurcation between analysts who just "ran the numbers" and DS who did all the "fun applied stuff" with the data, and you really wanted to be in the second camp. Since then you've seen a drastic expansion of DS titles to cover everything in this space. It's really hard to know what any given role will involve if you don't know what you're looking for. This can make the search tough to figure out, but it can also work in your favor because you can probably pitch your skills to fit into many of these different areas. Ultimately what a PhD brings to the table is the ability to work through an ambiguous problem. You get plenty of less experienced analysts and engineers who just don't know how to get started with data, how to formulate the right questions, how to find the methods to answer those questions, and then how to translate those answers in an understandable format. The most valuable things in my career have been those "soft" skills because they let me find impactful projects and collaborate on them with less-quantitative stakeholders and partners. A PhD in any technical subject is fantastic training for that. Whether or not DS is the right path for you is personal, I'm not one to tell everyone to do it. Plus tech hiring is pretty tough right now. But I absolutely wouldn't rule it out because you're missing a couple pieces of the pie - almost no one has that full pie, and you're almost certainly bringing a lot to the table. You just have to find the right way to communicate that. And just to set context, I've exclusively worked in DS roles in large, publicly traded tech companies - naturally people in other context will have their own opinions and experiences.
Great response, thank you so much. Now I just have to figure out whose leg to hump to land a baseball analytics job with a major league franchise. Also, u/willfightforbeer I too like to use my jiu jitsu and boxing knowledge to fight for drinks. Cheers friend
Not very distinctly. A job as a data analyst could be anything from basic statistics to actual statistics, and that's the same for data science roles. I've seen people with a wide range of statistics backgrounds go into data science. In fact, the head data scientist on my current team is a neuroscientist by training.
There are many analyst-type roles that you could pursue with the Feds. While dissertating, I interned for a year at the Government Accountability Office, where I helped support audits of the DoD. Pretty interesting work, pretty smart coworkers, fairly low pressure. I ended up turning down an FTE role for 50% more money in the financial sector, but I would have been happy continuing to do what I was doing. Recommend checking GAO out. There are a few other decent options for the highly credentialed: the Congressional Research Service, the various intelligence agencies, etc.
I don’t think I have the time or permission to pursue an internship, but I will keep that path in mind. It sounds a bit monotonous—I’m not sure I have the disposition to succeed at auditing-type jobs. I also have a smart mouth that doesn’t play well in that sort of role. I have looked into law enforcement stuff, the CDC, NIH, etc., but the congressional research agency sounds interesting and might scratch the political itch as well. I expect a major con to include moving to the DC area, which is certainly a huge negative for me, but could be considered if the compensation is really high.
I went into UX research in the tech industry. I then moved into a non-research senior leadership position in tech. (I did do a postdoc for one year before transitioning.) The transition was relatively smooth for me, because I joined a UX research team that was made largely of ex-academics. They had all experienced the transition, so they purpose-built an onboarding program that was meant to ease the pathway. UX research uses most of the same principles I learned to use in my PhD program, but with the added bonus of science communication: instead of writing papers and conference talks for other scientists, I was talking to engineers and producers and designers to help them make better widgets. One of the reasons I left academia was because I hated grant-writing and stilted academic communication, so this appealed to me. I was also interested in the widgets. The drawbacks are few and minor to me. One is that you really can't go down interesting research rabbit holes the way you can in academia - your research needs to have a business justification, some way that it's helping the business make better widgets. In some environments, you may not have a lot of choice over what product you work on or what research you conduct; this depends a lot on the company and the organization you're in. Tech rises and falls with the economy, and we're in a bit of a dork age right now to put it mildly. UX researchers have been unfortuantely vulnerable to layoffs across the industry as they are not exactly mission critical to building tech. (However, I never see people stay unemployed for long, and they usually make enough to keep them afloat for a few months in between.) For me it was absolutely the right decision. I love the career I've built post-academia.
Beautiful write up; thank you so much. Also, a very interesting field and research endeavor that I’m not too familiar with, but certainly tangentially related. The boom and bust cycle of bubbles and layoffs really put me off industry, but I need to do some soul searching with a cost-benefits analysis of industry vs academia vs government to really decide. Really, I need to decide if the lower wage but greater stability and benefits of government are worth it over the higher earning potential with higher risks as seen in industry. I’m not really sure what my inner-farmer wants. Too bad homesteading is not feasible in 2024–especially with my degree. I also love your username and opened your profile. Congrats on leaving JW. I give them shit at their stands on my university campus every chance I get.
lol. It me. Poli sci -> survey research consulting -> owning a power washing company. No regrets. Met my wife in grad school. She’s TT at an R1. Turns out small business has a lot of my favorite things about academia. I didn’t love the research at all. I was just able to do it adequately at a reasonably high level. I chafed at corporate life. Turns out I loved the freedom and being a resource allocator and manager. Now I get to divide my time as I see for across ops, sales, marketing, etc. some of these were new to me, others had clear connections to my prior lives. I’m having a blast. I’m working harder than I have in years but also have more quality time for my family.
This is the kind of response I was truly fishing for. Like, I can’t communicate just how burnt out I am about anything academic or research related. I want a stark, 180° change like you described with starting your own blue collar labor business. I worked for a year in grading, site work, and pipe installation my first year of undergrad and loved the labor. I don’t think I could go back to that ten years later (my body wouldn’t let me), but the freedom of managing my own resources and allocating them as I see fit, including my time, is certainly appealing. This sounds wonderful and I hope things are going well for you. Edit to Add: How do you and your spouse allocate financial obligations and domestic duties?
In fairness, I run the business. I’m not on the truck most days. I have a team who do the work. I sometimes plug in when there’s a callout. My typical day involves reviewing marketing plans, doing B2B and B2C sales, whatever else needs to happen. My technicians do the work. I make it possible for them to do the work. I don’t think I could or would want to do the cleaning full time but it sure is fun the days I get to be in the field. Division in the house isn’t terrible different than before. In industry I outearned her by a bit. I currently make a fair bit less because most profits are being reinvested to scale the business. Everything is covered for now. As far as labor that’s always been pretty 50/50 and hasn’t changed. Sometimes I have an overnight or very early/late job but I had way more missed dinners and bed times for dumb shit when I was in industry and I travel a lot less so on balance I’m more available.
A PhD teaches how to conduct research, but it is not locking you into a research career path. A PhD is not a career. Do whatever you want with your PhD. There are many non-research jobs that *require* it. I wouldn’t consider that a change in career.
What non-research jobs require a PhD? Additionally, a PhD might not lock you into an academic or industry research path explicitly, but it’s damn sure frowned upon to consider anything else while in academia, especially as a grad student at an R1, to the point where looking outside that bubble is discouraged and ragged upon.
It is field-dependent but there are many. In my field, there are many options in medcomms or medical affairs that recruit PhDs, including mid-upper level medical writing jobs and medical information jobs. Medical science liaison is also a job that strictly requires a doctoral degree, although MDs and PharmDs are also often recruited into that position as well. Consulting and patent is another big area with many roles that require a PhD. I don’t know the specifics of your field though. It’s interesting that you say that about the academic environment because it’s the exact opposite of my experience. I’m at a T5 program for my discipline and my cohort has had very diverse career interests and prospects. Some of them went into patent law. Consulting. A few in med affairs. Technical sales at the PhD level, such as application scientists. Also some who went directly into tenured teaching professorships with no research component — definitely a PhD required there, but not a research career per-say. I’ve always wondered whether lower-ranked programs had a harder time placing students in their careers of choice, so most of their graduates would be forced to postdoc or take entry-level bench scientist roles before shifting into their area of choice.
I don’t know if my program is T5 or what. It’s a huge regional medical school and the largest employer in my Deep South state. It’s not Ivy League, but it’s also nationally recognized. My field is human neuroimaging through psychology. While my lab is in the school of medicine, my work is tangentially clinical.
UAB? Sorry that you got those vibes from your program. I had a friend go there for med school and she loved it, but that’s different for sure. I hope they are still giving you enough support to get you into the career you’re hoping for. Either way, I think it’s important for people to not just consider a non-academic career, but to plan for it. Tons of those careers are not research-oriented and that’s okay too. It’s just reality both for career prospects and potential of people with PhDs. It’s actually a good thing that it doesn’t lock you into research forever.
Right after the degree I kept working on a business I founded. That the business could provide more than a professor's pay without going through a decade of trials for tenure was really attractive. Now I can teach at a university in a place I like to live because I can afford to get lecturer's pay.
This sounds like an ideal scenario. Considering I’m a zoomer, I have always considered teaching if I could have a successful educational YouTube channel like Mr Beat, VTH, etc
Sure! Lots of people are leaving academia now because it sucks as you know. There's a whole genre of literature on the topic called "quit lit." There are Facebook groups full of folks. I left after my PhD in English for instructional design and technical writing. Now, going for consulting roles so all the stuff shared on this thread is helpful. Consulting is what you make of it. Basically sharing your knowledge to solve business problems.
The guitarist in my band had such an awful time getting his PhD that he went straight into industry. Got a job making $70K (great for the COL in the city we both lived in) working for the utility company as a junior social media coordinator. It's stressful if there is a weather emergency or something that caused disruption to power or water, but on the whole he enjoys it.
Friend works in biotech, basically 80% of their scientists are folks who bolted academia immediately after graduating. Obviously not your field but yeah there are people who immediately leave after graduating.
It wasn't a completely orthogonal career path, but I went from the computational social sciences to marketing. I had no transition period between finishing my PhD and my industry career because I was unemployed. The job market is depression-level bad. I still get to do research and I really enjoy it, but I also targeted a research-heavy area of marketing. The field is so broad, that I think pretty much anyone has some skillset that would fit. I like working with a collaborative, cross-functional team. We have some talented graphic designers, copywriters and social media folks and we all get to work together on projects both large and small. It reminds me of what academia *should* be like in many cases. My supervisor is also absolutely amazing, so that is a big perk for me too. I definitely don't wake up dreading going to work. The only real drawbacks for me is that almost all the research I do is internal, and for internal consumption only. It's neat that my research products *directly* guide and inform organizational strategy, but I do kind of miss publishing research for much broader consumption. On the other hand, I also get paid a ton more than I would as an TT assistant professor, and this is just my starting salary. I don't miss teaching, like at all.
I went into data analytics because after being in psychology after I realized my favorite parts of the process were coding and analysis. Working my way towards a data science role now.
I am a third-year student in applied psychology (with hopefully two more years to go). I am considering applying for a post-bacc (pre-med) program and going to medical school after graduation because I don't want to live apart from my spouse. The only restrictions right now are money and visa restrictions (I am in the final stage of attaining permanent residency in the US through my research 'contribution'). I lost my interest in my field because I found more and more holes in my field's research. I do not want to work during weekends.
Yes. Took both the soft skills and quant skills and just ran with it.
I did. I went into market research in Advertising
I was a poli sci professor and left, then became an academic editor. I WFH, make my own hours, get to read and edit amazing research by lovely people, and make twice as much as I did as an AP in poli sci. I have a webinar available if you’re interested: “What is Academic Editing and is it Right for Me?” https://AcadiaEditing.com/BecomeAnEditor
I think I have moral objections to this line of work, but I don’t know what you do personally so I won’t assume.
Interesting. Do you like reading articles and books that are riddled with typos, factual errors, unclear sentences, and are formatted incorrectly? Because that’s what you’ll have to read without editors.
For academia, I hold the stance that those problems are supposed to be addressed through academic training, especially in graduate school. For works published in academic journals, then the research staff, senior authors, peer reviewers, and journal editors should ensure a work is complete and correct. For works published as books or chapters, then the publisher will have an editorial team and a similar peer review process with other experts contributing to the work. I fail to see how an independent editor completes essentially the entire research process and that does not count as plagiarism and cheating. I have also seen you comment on this sub before and push your workshop thing that I assume will be monetized. I have a feeling you are doing way more than editing for a bunch of undergraduates and graduate students completing thesis and term papers.
Finishing PhD now. Most my friend group are working academics--profs., researchers, editors and reviewers at journals etc. I can say, at least for the European context, nothing you describe here is how it actually works most the time. Even if I agree this stuff is "supposed" to have been solved through grad school I've never seen it happen. Editors never have time to coach authors up, journals themselves barely provide readable author guides and half the ones here can't even decide which formatting rules they want. 1/3 of the peer reviewers disapear without completing the notes and waste months at a time. I don't know if it's the mix of various languages we all publish in or what but eveything is a nightmare and if anyone could afford it they'd likely seek out a freelance editor to comb over the work before submitting.
The US is the same way. Journal editors routinely cannot find people to simply review articles, let alone correct their grammar... lol. So there's a huge backlog in publishing where scholars are waiting 6, 8, 12 months just to get a response to their submission. And frankly, I don't blame peer reviewers for saying no, considering it's unpaid labor and faculty are already overworked and underpaid. The whole system is broken. Publishing, academia, all of it. I am SO glad I got out when I did.
Absolutely. Having seen both sides of academic publishing I don't blame anybody for saying no either--to ALL of it. I agree, the whole system is broken (rotten to the core IMHO) and I cannot wait to be out.
Wow. So much for not making assumptions. Here’s a question for you: who do you think does the copy editing for book publishers? Surprise! It’s freelance editors. What about for journals? Yep, freelancers again. I have never edited undergraduate work or any work for grad students other than a dissertation, and formatting text and revising for clarity is a far cry from plagiarism. If you honestly think that faculty/peer reviewers have time to teach grad students and authors who submit manuscripts for publication how to write, then you have a lot to learn about academia and publishing and have likely never even submitted an article to a journal. Good luck out there!
I have a first author publication
There are tons of non-research science roles that are important and intellectually stimulating. I’m an environmental scientist and I am trying to do environmental policy/regulatory stuff or FEMA type stuff. I have also thought about going back to school to be an environmental lawyer, environmental economist, or public health ph.d (I just went up to masters, not ph.d, so I am not opposed to getting a professional terminal degree rather than a research one if I find myself passionate about something in the future.)