Category: Career Exploration

NIH BEST Blog Rewind: Pondering the “next step” as a late-stage postdoctoral fellow

7/21/2020

Career Exploration, Personal Perspective

In Fall 2018, I started writing a series of pieces for the NIH Broadening Experiences in Scientific Training (BEST) Student/Postdoc Blog. As these pieces are no longer accessible online, I wanted to re-share them in a continuing series NIH BEST Blog Rewind. Here, I will add some additional thoughts to what was originally authored in 2018, denoted in bold dark red throughout the piece.

The first in the rewind series comes from when I was entering my last academic year of funding as a postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt University. At the time, I was considering a lot of career paths, as many Ph.D.-trained researchers do.

I hope sharing these thoughts and my perspectives nearly 2 years removed from that experience help graduate students and postdocs currently going through the career exploration process.

Original Publication Date: October 2018 NEW Perspectives, Comments, & Insights

As a postdoc entering my 5th year, it is time to make some difficult decisions about my next career step. This is a time when many postdocs begin to question how they want their lives to progress.

Soul Searching
Does one stay in academia or move into a (horrendously named) “alternative career”? My goal over this and the next 5 BEST blog posts is to take you on my personal journey of finding a career that fits my interests, skills, and aspirations for my life, and, importantly, coming to peace with my decision.

I am not going to provide much detail on the mechanics of the job search or the importance of career exploration as those areas have been covered by others, and in other posts by yours truly (see also Start Here on this blog).

See also these excellent resources from UCSF's Office of Career & Professional Development to help you in career exploration as well as planning for academic & nonacademic careers.

Getting Personal
I want to make this series of posts personal, which will be challenging given my personality. I am going outside my comfort zone of sharing my feelings/desires/dreads so that maybe others on this journey realize that it is more than OK to do so. I think discovering and accepting your feelings in addition to taking a logical approach to the “pros” and “cons” of a position is critical to making a holistic choice that will be good for your soul.

The "Default Path" to Faculty Post Ph.D.
The “default path” of obtaining a Ph.D., doing a postdoc, and ultimately getting a faculty job is so ingrained into the culture of academic training that it often seems like considering other career options is going against the logical, natural flow. However, the career landscape for available tenure-track faculty jobs has become extremely different from that of our mentors.

I think mentors and trainees are implicitly aware of this but when you personally go through the faculty search process, it becomes very apparent just how tough it is to obtain these positions.

Personal Experience on the Faculty Job Market + New Advice & Insights
I knew through following academic and higher education news sources that landing a tenure-track faculty position was going to be tough but my experience applying last fall (2017) really opened my eyes. I applied to 26 positions that I thought fit my research interests and expertise (neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience), mostly in psychology departments at R1 research universities. I had a total of 1 on-campus interview and it was for the job description I felt least fit my expertise.

I think this result reflects two things:
1) landing a tenure-track job at an R1 is VERY difficult and
2) trying to predict which departments you think would be interested in you is virtually impossible. As with landing any job, the academic job hunt is all about “fit” and if you aren’t the right fit at the right time, you can’t expect to land the job.

Read more about my personal experience on the faculty job market in Tales From the Academic Job Market.

How can you be more proactive in planning for the faculty job market?
Don't dismiss conducting informational interviews with assistant professors at a variety of institutions to learn what made them successful in their job search. In addition, you can use these info interviews to learn more about what it is like working at a liberal arts college, Masters comprehensive university, etc... You may find being faculty at a certain type of institution best fits your skills and interests.

Also, read our Survey-based Analysis of the Academic Job Market paper now published in eLife to learn more about metrics associated with successfully receiving a faculty job offer.

Predictors of receiving a faculty job offer for individuals on the market in 2018-2019. For more see our publication in eLife (image from Fig 5D): https://elifesciences.org/articles/54097

Next Steps - Searching for Purpose & Happiness in Life
So, where am I going from here? Will I persevere and win the tenure-track lottery? Do I even want the tenure-track life (there are a lot of pros and cons)? If I move into a career outside academic research and teaching, was my postdoc a waste? Of course not (more on this point in my next NIH BEST post).

The concept of the Sunk Cost Fallacy looms large here. A sunk cost is a cost that has already been incurred and cannot be recovered and the fallacy involves allowing past costs to impact current and future decisions.

This manifests psychologically in the mental challenge we encounter when deciding on whether we should abandon a project or direction due to the amount of energy, time, or resources you have already invested into it INSTEAD OF whether the decision makes sense in the moment or with an eye to the future.

This lingering on sunk costs can also be problematic when considering a career change. Don't let your past investments in a particular career path dissuade you from pursuing what interests you now. Find your Ikigai ("reason for being" in Japanese).

Over the course of this blog series, I hope to share my experiences in finding a landing place after the postdoc. I am going to try to be fairly open about the struggles and doubts I experience and hopefully offer perspective on finding happiness and purpose in life. I think it is ingrained in American culture that your career defines you. New people you meet invariably ask, “What do you do?” to get a sense of who you are and what you value. This is unfortunate. You are so much more than a job or even a career (acknowledging the distinction that often gets drawn there).

Think Beyond Lab/Work/School
Through volunteering in something you deeply believe in, you can also find purpose, even if your job has no direct impact on the world. The key here is to know what you can and can’t sacrifice in a job or career and how you might be able to fill a particular void in your life through activities outside of work.

I volunteered in my local postdoctoral association and it ultimately led to a career path I did not initially consider.

In retrospect, my involvement in the Vanderbilt Postdoctoral Association (VPA) allowed me to build confidence in my leadership experience (as treasurer & junior co-chair/vice president), learn more about the postdoctoral training & support landscape, and exposed me to the national postdoc affairs landscape by attending National Postdoctoral Association annual meetings. Now working as the Postdoc Affairs Program Manager at NC State University, I can see how all those past experiences led me to my current role.

Without getting involved in the VPA, I might not have ended up in my current career.

You never know how the various experiences in your life will ultimately influence you and your path. The key is to experience things beyond your current work/research/training to broaden your perspective, give back, and build new skills - they will benefit you now & in the future.

Come Along On My Journey

In closing, part of the search for a post-postdoc (or post-Ph.D.) career is a search for yourself. This sounds kind of intimidating and it is. Hopefully, though, by going on this journey with me you will see that people do come through to the other side and along the way they often discover what is most important to their well-being and happiness. Seems like a pretty nice outcome after navigating the hard, twisty road to a career. Ready for the ride?

Further Reading
Career Management: The Sunk-Cost Fallacy!

The Journey from Postdoc to Working in Postdoctoral Affairs

More from the Reflections Blog:
Career Exploration Series
Start Here

Career Exploration Series (PassioInventa)

Learn more about BEST
BEST: Implementing Career Development Activities for Biomedical Research Trainees
This book provides an instructional guide for institutions wanting to create, supplement or improve their career and professional development offerings. Each chapter provides an exclusive perspective from an administrator from the 17 Broadening Experiences in Scientific Training (BEST) institutions. The book can aid institutions who train graduate students in a variety of careers by teaching faculty and staff how to create and implement career development programming, how to highlight the effectiveness of offerings, how to demonstrate that creating a program from scratch is doable, and how to inform faculty and staff on getting institutional buy-in.
This is a must-have for graduate school deans and faculty and staff who want to implement and institutionalize career development programming at their institutions. It is also ideal for graduate students and postdocs.

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Giving Thanks: Finding personal fulfillment

11/4/2019

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Life Advice, Career Exploration/Development

We are entering the month of November and that means Thanksgiving is only a few weeks away.

All too often, however, we aren't thankful enough for what we have. Instead, we can easily become consumed by what we don't have as we compare our life situations to others.

In the end, we need to work to define what life circumstances will truly make us happy, pursue those things, and ignore what others say should make us happy.

Envy & the perils of human competition & comparison
The truth is, it is very difficult for human beings to not envy one another...it is as old as the Biblical story of Cain & Abel, among others.

This brings up the philosophical debate: are humans by nature competitive or cooperative? Obviously, we are capable of both types of behavior. Certain societal and institutional settings, though, can amplify one or the other.

For instance, capitalism and neoliberalism are focused heavily on competition and individualism. In addition, American culture is often centered around individuals striving to be "the best".

There is nothing wrong with working to improve and better yourself but gauging one's progress against others in a race to the top is fraught with peril.

Furthermore, social media platforms have enabled us to know even more about the lives of others and can fuel our envy for what others have that we don't. It's important to remember, though, that on social media individuals often display only the best version of themselves and their lives.

This fact has led many young people to be focused on living the "perfect life" and when they inevitably don't reach that lofty goal, their mental health can suffer.

Finding happiness
We all want to have happy, fulfilling lives but struggle to know what that looks like for us.
Everyone has different values and needs when it comes to what they classify as a "good" life.

So, allowing others to define what you should find meaningful in life is very problematic. It is incredibly common, though. We all have parents we want to please or life plans we think we should follow but that is a recipe to live a life that lacks personal fulfillment. The idea that smart, dedicated people need to aspire toward some high-paying, prestigious job is common among parents who want their children to "succeed". But that job as a doctor, lawyer, or consultant might not be what the child really wants.

You shouldn't allow societal expectations to define your life, either. American society values money a lot. So, if you aren't earning a large salary, you might be socialized to assume your life might not be very "good". Certainly, you need to earn some threshold of salary to live a healthy life without deprivation (one study says the magic threshold number is $75,000, but your mileage may vary).

In terms of how societal expectations apply to Ph.D.-trained researchers, the assumption is that "success" for this type of training is to eventually land a faculty job. Even though there are plenty of roles where a Ph.D. would provide value and the role might better fit the trainee's skills and interests.

There is so much more to life and happiness than money or a prestigious position. But what are those other things? The answer to that is incredibly personal.

The importance of self reflection & awareness
One huge obstacle in allowing individuals to find meaning in their lives is that we often fail to take the time to think deeply about what we want out of our life. While this seems like a basic place to start, our fast-paced, modern world doesn't leave much time for self reflection unless one makes a concerted effort to do it. In fact, psychologist Tasha Eurich's research suggests ~10-15% of people are self-aware.

Self-reflect & begin designing the life you want
Exercises to increase your self-awareness.
Designing Your Career online course from Stanford University (free).
More life design resources from Stanford.

A matter of perspective
The perspective we take to our "success" is the most critical component to our happiness. We can count our blessings or ruminate on our deficiencies. The former, positive thinking is infinitely better for your mental and physical health.

Take me, for example, at age 33 with a Ph.D. I could focus on the fact that I don't make a six figure salary, that I have yet to find a significant other, and that I don't have kids, though I want to someday.
Or, I could focus on the fact that I am in very good health, have loving parents and two sisters who I get to see on a regular basis, have the flexibility in my work to take time for family, friends, and my own well being, and make enough to live pretty comfortably. On top of all that, I am doing work that I think is having a positive impact on the world, helping support others in their career & professional development.

All in all, I am doing alright.

In closing, try to take stock of what you value in your life. Is it money? Prestige? A flexible work/life balance? Autonomy in your work? Plenty of free time to spend with family and friends?

Once you know your values, pursue them and don't let the opinions of others derail you on your path to your own personal fulfillment.

When you set your own metric of success and work hard to obtain it, you can find your own happiness. And that is something to truly be thankful for.

"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances." - Viktor Frankl

For further reading/listening
Articles:
The Comparison Trap
How to stop comparing yourself to others
The age of envy: how to be happy when everyone else's life looks perfect
How you think about money can impact how happy you are in life
How the West become a self-obsessed culture
Perfectionism is increasing over time: A meta-analysis of birth cohort differences (1989-2016)
Change your perspective, change your life

Books:
The Road to Character
The resume virtues are the ones you list on your resume, the skills that you bring to the job market and contribute to external success. The eulogy virtues are deeper. They are the virtues that get talked about at your funeral, the ones that exist at the core of your being-whether you are kind, brave, honest, or faithful: what kind of relationships you formed.

Insight: The surprising truth about how others see us, how we see ourselves, and why the answers matter more than we think
Research shows that self-awareness—knowing who we are and how others see us—is the foundation for high performance, smart choices, and lasting relationships. There’s just one problem: most people don’t see themselves quite as clearly as they could. This book offers tips on improving one's self-awareness.

Podcasts:
The Happiness Lab
WorkLife with Adam Grant
The Science of Success

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Career Exploration 101

9/3/2019

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Career Exploration/Development

What do you want to be when you grow up?

This is a question we rarely escape in our youth and, if we are being honest with ourselves, something most adults grapple with from time to time.

The 21st Century world of work is evolving quickly and the concept of a "linear" career is quickly coming to an end.

What this means is that deciding what one wants to do with one's life has become an increasingly complex choice. There is rarely a single, straightforward path to most careers and the options for employment continue to grow. Freelance work abounds and employment sectors such as data science and software engineering didn't even exist as recently as a few decades ago.

Where is someone supposed to start on this journey?

As I serve graduate students and postdocs in my role at NC State University, I will highlight resources and tools of particular interest to this group.

Career Exploration Resources for Ph.D.s

One great resource is ImaginePhD, developed by the Graduate Career Consortium.

ImaginePhD and other online resources are used to create what we in the career development field call "individual development plans" - IDPs. Specifically, these resources focus around the concept of aligning your skills, interests, and values with potential careers.

Taking online skills and interests assessments through ImaginePhD, myIDP, or myPath, among others, is the first step in the career exploration process.

Your interests and skills then map on to potential job families which you need to further explore to determine which careers in those families may fit your values and other parameters important to you - work/life balance, salary, autonomy, work travel requirements, etc...

For example, from ImaginePhD my top interests include helping others, connecting ideas from different fields, and meeting and connecting people. My top skills include working with limited supervision, working as part of a team, and contributing to an institution.

These map on to the job families of Higher Education Administration (which I am in now), Communications, Public Relations, & Marketing, and Training.

ImaginePhD also has a nice career exploration worksheet you can print out and hang somewhere prominent to remind you of potential careers that align with your skills, interests, and values. It also, importantly, emphasizes the next steps required in your career exploration process.

ImaginePhD_Career_Exploration_Worksheet.pdf
File Size:	1732 kb
File Type:	pdf

Download File

Digging Deeper Into Potential Careers

After you have identified some job families you are interested in learning more about, ImaginePhD allows you to explore potential career fields further through a variety of resources including lists of common job titles in the field, sample job descriptions, job simulation information from InterSECT Job Simulations, profiles/interviews from people working in the field, and more.

ImaginePhD also offers for each job family a list of resources to allow you to connect with professionals in that field. These include links to online groups (from LinkedIn) as well as national organizations that may have local chapters in your area. The connection step is critical as it allows you to begin the important process of meeting people who work in the field, learning about the typical tasks they focus on in their work, company culture, etc...this is informational interviewing (& see).

As you get to know these individuals working in a career field of interest to you they can be powerful advocates for you when/if you begin to look into employment at their organization. This is how you build a network - meet like-minded people and get to know them and through your interaction with them show your value.

There are also a ton of tips sheets available through ImaginePhD. Some examples:
Informational Interviewing Tips
Networking Tips
LinkedIn Tips
See them all on the General Resources section of the ImaginePhD site

There are also sections for each job family from ImaginePhD focused on skill building - how to get the experiences and expertise needed to be competitive for jobs in that family. These resources include links to webinars and online courses, publications, and more.

When it comes time to apply for jobs, ImaginePhD has example application documents for each job family, links to job boards, and articles with valuable tips on making a great impression with your application materials.

Ikigai - Reason for Being

To summarize, the concept of career exploration is thinking about how your skills and interests intersect with something the world needs and will pay you to do. This process helps you find your reason for being or ikigai in Japanese.

The Importance of Self-Reflection

Tools such as ImaginePhD can help you begin to map out your reason for being but the process of finding a career fit that is right for you also takes some deep self-reflection.

You often need to listen to your gut and not overly rationalize a career choice. If you have some internal feeling of doubt/concern about a potential career path, it could be nerves, but it could also be your body telling you it might not be the best fit. Really, you need to integrate the rationale side of you with your emotions and "instincts" to make smart career decisions.

For Ph.D.s, it is hard to dismiss the "typical" path of pursuing a faculty career. However, you really need to decide if you want the lifestyle that comes with a faculty career. There are obviously many forms of faculty careers from primarily doing research and writing grants to primarily teaching. Irregardless, if you find it difficult to envision yourself as being happy in the role, you shouldn't pursue this path just because you have been "trained" to do it.

Personally, this happened with me. I was applying for faculty jobs at large, research-intensive universities but had this lingering doubt that I didn't really want to spend my time conceptualizing projects, working on grant proposals, and writing papers all day.

Only late in my postdoc did I start shifting my focus to other career options. You can read a bit about that career journey here, here, and here. I am happy in my current choice and feel like it nicely fits my personality while giving me a good work-life balance.

Final Thoughts

There are plenty of career options for Ph.D.-trained researchers. Tools like ImaginePhD and other IDP-planning resources can help you begin to discover what those other career options are.

I believe everyone has a unique set of skills that contribute value to the world. The key is discovering how they map onto your interests and values and can lead to meaningful and fulfilling work.

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Start here

5/6/2019

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Career Exploration/Development

Naming my first Reflections blog post "Start Here" may seem a bit on the nose. But, the key to taking on any big life decision is to start tackling the problem.

I am currently reading the book Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans (see an excellent New York Times review here).
It is a really great read for anyone trying to improve some aspect of their lives: finding the right job, prioritizing your love/family life, doing something that makes a difference in the world, etc...

The book starts out emphasizing the need to Start Where You Are. This centers on the need for a person to figure out where they currently are in their lives and what problem(s) they are trying to solve. A key point here is that you need to focus on the right, actionable problems in your life.
You should avoid tackling what the book terms "gravity problems" or problems that we effectively have no chance of changing because they are systemic (like gravity). This doesn't mean you should tackle a difficult problem but you should address it in an actionable way where your actions have the ability to affect change.
Another key step to moving forward with your problem is addressing "anchor problems". Anchor problems often keep us stuck because we have become anchored to only one ideal solution. This is problematic because that solution may not be obtainable (think, achieving a particular job at a particular company - what are the odds of you achieving this?). Ultimately, to address these problems, you need to reframe them or approach them from a new perspective. Maybe you don't need to land that particular job but you want to do a particular type of work and there are other avenues you could pursue to find a career that is a good fit for you. Be flexible and don't get stuck on only one solution.

Life isn't about waiting for the winds to change. It's learning to adjust your sails.

The book defines "life" broadly as health, work, play, and love. You should start out assessing how your life is going in each of these areas (how full is your life in each area, what could be improved) and whether you want to tackle a particular problem in one or more of them.

You may find work fulfilling but have no time for play, love, and health. So, that might mean you need to address how much time you spend on work and whether you might want to do something different that provides you the free time to spend on the other important aspects of your life. What is a good life and how "full" these four areas of work, health, play, and love need to be to achieve the life you want will vary considerably from person to person.
Once again we come back to starting where you are. What one person might deem a life problem worth solving another might be perfectly OK with. One's "good life" is immensely personal. But you need to understand what that good life looks like for you.
As this blog and my interests focus on career exploration, let's turn to what a "good career" looks like for you. Where do you start?

At the intersection of your skills, interests, values, and personality lies your ideal career.
If you are in the Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields, myIDP is a great resource to identify your skills and interests and some potential careers that might be a good fit with them. ImaginePhD is another great resource to assess your interests/skills and do some career exploration. Though it is marketed for humanities and social sciences, I find it a useful general tool.

Other great resources include InterSECT Job Simulations and content from UCSF's Office of Career & Professional Development (see also the MIND resources from UCSF).

A key concept from Designing Your Life is to "prototype" your next move...ie, try out a new career before you make the leap. A useful way to begin to learn more about a career and start to measure its fit for you is via informational interviews. Another great way to prototype is to freelance or volunteer, performing the task "on the side" to see how you like it and begin building a portfolio of experience that will help to land a job in that space, should you want to pursue it. Some work is easier to freelance or volunteer for than others. Writing is in high demand from many organizations (think, your professional association and their newsletter). You can also get experience with working with and presenting data (and market yourself as a Data Scientist) via Kaggle and keep your work available on GitHub.

A final point to keep in mind as you explore your career options, prototype your next move, and think about your ideal life: there is not one "optimal" life for you. The following quote from Designing your Life sums up this point: "A common mistake that people make, is to assume that there’s only one right solution or optimal version of your life, and that if you choose wrong, you’ve blown it.That’s completely absurd," Mr. Evans said, “There are lots of you. There are lots of right answers.”
I think this point is especially powerful as people grapple with the fear of making the "wrong" choices in life. It is freeing to know that one choice (or series of choices) doesn't have to define your whole life. The book pushes the idea of creating multiple "Odyssey Plans" for your life. Map out the next five years of your life in radically different ways: 1) pursue certificate in X, 2) intern at company Y, 3) transition to position at company Y OR 1) continue working in area Z while also working on improving writing skills by volunteering with association W, 2) do freelance writing for company D while still working in area Z, 3) move to a full-time writing career OR 1) continue working at company T, 2) take night classes in area U, 3) get promoted to new role at company T, etc.
This activity reinforces the idea that there are multiple viable options available to you in your career and life. I could do A, B, or C and be happy and fulfilled. Having this mindset means that if things don't work out with option A (you realize that career/life choice wasn't the right fit for you), you know you can pivot to option B or C and be equally (or maybe more) happy.

Remember that life is a journey, and there is no one way to undertake it nor one path to follow. With some deep reflection on your skills, values, and interests, you can start researching and planning the multiple paths you could take to achieve fulfillment in your life.

Find more resources on the Designing Your Life website.

And view Bill Burnett's talk on designing your life on YouTube.

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Reflections Blog

NIH BEST Blog Rewind: Pondering the “next step” as a late-stage postdoctoral fellow

Giving Thanks: Finding personal fulfillment

Career Exploration 101

Start here

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