alternative science careers

Exploring Career Options for PhD Students: Planning for Success

Posted on by Lindsey Drake

Earning a PhD opens doors to a wide range of career opportunities across academia, industry, government, and beyond. While many students begin their PhD programs with specific career goals, research shows that career interests often evolve during their training (Brown et al., 2023). Therefore, exploring career options and remaining flexible to opportunities is important. By embracing career exploration and self-assessment, students can identify their best career options and make informed decisions about their next steps after graduation.

The Many Career Options for PhD Graduates

PhD graduates today find themselves in diverse roles, with opportunities extending beyond traditional academia. Career paths include:

  • Academia: Research-intensive faculty positions, teaching-focused roles, or administrative leadership.
  • Industry: Roles in biotechnology, data science, or consulting, often in research or management positions.
  • Government and Nonprofit Organizations: Research or policy roles in agencies such as the NIH (National Institutes of Health) and FDA (Food and Drug Administration), and others.
  • Additional Careers: Science communication, medical writing, marketing, patent law, or entrepreneurship.

During their training, PhD students develop highly transferable skills—critical thinking, project management, data analysis, communication, and problem-solving—that are highly valued across sectors (Sinche et al., 2017). Recognizing the value of these skills can expand career options for graduates.

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Reflections on My Path from Academia to Industry

Posted on by Melanie Preston
My career took a different direction than what I had envisioned in grad school, and that was a good thing.
My career took a different direction than what I had envisioned in grad school, and that was a good thing.

Several years ago, I made the move from academia to the biotech industry. Leaving my research in academia seemed like a huge risk to take, but it was a positive career change that I only recently realized was a long time in the making.

Before joining Promega, I was a post-doc at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I worked on these fascinating enzymes that add nucleotides to the 3ʹ ends of RNAs, developed a Next-Gen Sequencing assay to measure their activities, discovered a bizarre and novel activity of one of the enzymes, and wrote a patent application.

I love science. Being immersed in a tough problem in the lab and then working as hard as I possibly can to solve it is so rewarding and satisfying to me! I really enjoyed my research project, but I found myself interested in a variety of other science topics. The thought of having my own lab where I worked on the same types of enzymes for 30+ years made me anxious. Why did I feel that way? I attributed it to the apprehension of the hard work it would take to establish a lab and get tenure.

Meanwhile, at UW–Madison, we had begun a campus-wide discussion to brainstorm about solutions for sustaining the biomedical research enterprise in the US. I attended almost every meeting and, overall, was left with an ominous feeling. Many scientists clearly loved their work but were frustrated and discouraged by the prospect of losing (or never getting) funding. Is this what I really wanted? I reminded myself of my enthusiasm for science and convinced myself it would be worth it once I had a lab up and running and was mentoring my own students.

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