I've been dreading writing this post. Today marks 1 year since I defended my Ph.D., 1 year since I started introducing myself as "Dr. Sandlin" (I'm kidding, I never do that). It's been a year since the idea of finishing grad school stopped being abstract. A year ago today, I gathered all my favorite people around and enjoyed a fantastic party to celebrate all the hard work and good friends that got me to the magnificent point of potential that is graduation day. I remember thinking that nothing could ever be as hard as graduate school was.
Confession: I did not love my dissertation project with my whole heart and soul. It was a good project, and it was important work, and it gave me some great training opportunities, but I had not always dreamed of being a polyomavirus researcher. As a result of my work, the world has not responded with a greater need for polyomavirologists. So I always knew that what I was doing would be confined to my graduate school experience and that I needed to find some other way to make something of my career. I wanted to be able to transition away smoothly, and look back confidently and say "I was right, I didn't need a post-doc to do what I wanted to do."
This marks a big day for me. I don't have a real job yet. I don't know what I want to do with my career, and I don't know if it will be possible to do in Seattle, even though I knew I would have this problem. That sucks.
On the one hand, it's been a good year. I've done a lot of things I couldn't have done if I hadn't gone to graduate school (Scientist in Residence at the Carnegie Science Center, STEM panelist, instructional design, and I get to meet people all the time). Sometimes I hate living in the shadow of this degree, but it has helped me open doors for myself. And I get to live in Washington, where my family and friends are (not the ones I went to grad school with-but they'll all be moved in another year or so anyway).
On the other hand, this isn't what I wanted for myself. I freelance because it's a kind of work I can do that helps pay the bills, not because it's what I aspire to do. After a year of looking for my dream job, it's about time to get real, and just get a real job. To me, this doesn't mean finding a post-doc, it means settling into some non-dream career path with full-time work and waiting for the economy to turn around. I guess it's time to admit that my aspirations are getting in the way of having any form of success. I met someone at the UW who is looking for a virologist to help their drug discovery project. It's not a post-doc position, it's a scientist job and I applied.
So what else have I learned? I've tried lots of things- that's what the blog was meant to cover. Not all these experiments have panned out. Blogging has not made me some important voice for my peers, but it has given me a nice outlet for some of these ideas. The same for Twitter. I'm generally too embarrassed to tell people I meet in person about either, so it's hard to connect these to my real life. Volunteering and interning have felt useful, but neither has led to job offers. I didn't want to become the blogger for the struggles of the underemployed PhD. It's time to think a bit more about how some of these activities fit into my ultimate goal of being employed, and how to best use my energy to get there.
Showing posts with label rant. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rant. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Sunday, May 20, 2012
On the STEM Skills gap
I have, in the past, weighed in on the question of over-producing Ph.D., and I will probably never run out of things to say on this topic. But recently I've been thinking about the flip side of this problem, sometimes called the STEM Skills Gap. You see, there are apparently many companies and recruiters who are at a loss to find qualified people to fill positions under that STEM umbrella (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). From my perspective, this is why I get rejected for positions that require some clinical trials experience, or GxP experience. Locally, employers like Boeing and Amazon need employees to push forward the boundaries of modern manufacturing, and run their SQL data bases or use Sharepoint or other things that we don't do in school. The argument is that if 'we' (in this case the US or WA workforce) don't provide adequate workers, these jobs will go elsewhere. I get that, the company needs a workforce that provide the engine of labor to move forward.
What I don't get is why they think these skills are so hard to come by- in contrast to, say, a Ph.D. All of those 'experiences' I mentioned before are simply things a bright person could pick up on the job. In a era of tight budgets, there is no time or money to train an insufficient candidate, and apparently leaving a role empty is less of a burden than hiring someone who might be inefficient at their role for a period. Is there a place where there is an experienced workforce ready to mobilize on these challenges? If these companies don't stay here, where are they going instead, and how are those workers prepared that those of us here are not? I'd really like to know the answer to this, I think we could learn a lot.
I like the phrase the Skills Gap, because it implies there is a disconnect on both sides. Schools train us to do something no one will hire us to do directly, jobs are looking for people with training that doesn't exist. If schools would help their graduates recognize that while your training may provide you expertise in some specific arena, this type of training prepares you, generally, to be successful in a wide array of fields. And then those companies might be willing to look at these trainees with an eye towards their future, rather than just their ability today. I think companies are too myopic in their hiring practices. If the industry is as dynamic and changing as they insist it is, why aren't they looking for a workforce that is as well? People who are brave enough to take on a technical challenge and have a history of success with other technical challenges are probably going to be just what Microsoft or Philips need to compete.
I have one other gripe about this process- I don't believe that the people in charge of hiring really understand what they want and need in a candidate. I was hired at the bank because (among other things) I am "good at math." I took math up to 3 dimensional calculus; this does not make me a better teller. Not once have I been asked to calculate an interest rate and returns for a client on the fly. I sometimes total checks and subtract withdrawals, but that is arithmetic- a skill set that I all but lost touch with by high school. Yes, a teller needs to be comfortable with numbers and fairly detail oriented in that way, but no quantity of calculus will be required on that job. I often worry that I am overlooked as a candidate because my experience doesn't match verbatum the ambitions of a hiring manager who is asking for the stars and willing to settle in between.
I will recognize that if I had been involved in an actual clinical trial as a graduate student, my job prospects would be better. But our work was funded to be basic research by the NIH. I did some drug discovery, which means I learned how to pull the very interesting parts out of huge datasets, and how to refine my assumptions by performing iterative analysis. Unfortunately, potential employers seem to believe that the ability to submit a 510K for FDA approval is WAY more important to my potential for success than my capacity to solve problems. Sure, the first is easier to quantify. But there are much fewer funding opportunities for academic researchers who have interest in commercializing their science. This is why so few of us come out of our training with that perspective.
When I hear educators complain about the leaky STEM pipeline, my heart breaks. They are looking at students who can't perform in basic skills categories that make it nearly impossible for them to perform, let alone compete for good jobs and opportunities. When I hear employers talk about the leaky pipeline, I want to scream. To them, the biggest leak is those who stay in the pipeline and fail to train into the fields that we didn't know existed. But I don't want to leave this as just an angry tirade. The gap is real, and it is part of the compartmentalized cultures of "academia" and "industry." All parties need to do better about seeking out input from the other side about what funding can be earned, what training should be provided and what skills will be necessary to present a workforce that keeps up with the changing demands of the global economy.
What I don't get is why they think these skills are so hard to come by- in contrast to, say, a Ph.D. All of those 'experiences' I mentioned before are simply things a bright person could pick up on the job. In a era of tight budgets, there is no time or money to train an insufficient candidate, and apparently leaving a role empty is less of a burden than hiring someone who might be inefficient at their role for a period. Is there a place where there is an experienced workforce ready to mobilize on these challenges? If these companies don't stay here, where are they going instead, and how are those workers prepared that those of us here are not? I'd really like to know the answer to this, I think we could learn a lot.
I like the phrase the Skills Gap, because it implies there is a disconnect on both sides. Schools train us to do something no one will hire us to do directly, jobs are looking for people with training that doesn't exist. If schools would help their graduates recognize that while your training may provide you expertise in some specific arena, this type of training prepares you, generally, to be successful in a wide array of fields. And then those companies might be willing to look at these trainees with an eye towards their future, rather than just their ability today. I think companies are too myopic in their hiring practices. If the industry is as dynamic and changing as they insist it is, why aren't they looking for a workforce that is as well? People who are brave enough to take on a technical challenge and have a history of success with other technical challenges are probably going to be just what Microsoft or Philips need to compete.
I have one other gripe about this process- I don't believe that the people in charge of hiring really understand what they want and need in a candidate. I was hired at the bank because (among other things) I am "good at math." I took math up to 3 dimensional calculus; this does not make me a better teller. Not once have I been asked to calculate an interest rate and returns for a client on the fly. I sometimes total checks and subtract withdrawals, but that is arithmetic- a skill set that I all but lost touch with by high school. Yes, a teller needs to be comfortable with numbers and fairly detail oriented in that way, but no quantity of calculus will be required on that job. I often worry that I am overlooked as a candidate because my experience doesn't match verbatum the ambitions of a hiring manager who is asking for the stars and willing to settle in between.
I will recognize that if I had been involved in an actual clinical trial as a graduate student, my job prospects would be better. But our work was funded to be basic research by the NIH. I did some drug discovery, which means I learned how to pull the very interesting parts out of huge datasets, and how to refine my assumptions by performing iterative analysis. Unfortunately, potential employers seem to believe that the ability to submit a 510K for FDA approval is WAY more important to my potential for success than my capacity to solve problems. Sure, the first is easier to quantify. But there are much fewer funding opportunities for academic researchers who have interest in commercializing their science. This is why so few of us come out of our training with that perspective.
When I hear educators complain about the leaky STEM pipeline, my heart breaks. They are looking at students who can't perform in basic skills categories that make it nearly impossible for them to perform, let alone compete for good jobs and opportunities. When I hear employers talk about the leaky pipeline, I want to scream. To them, the biggest leak is those who stay in the pipeline and fail to train into the fields that we didn't know existed. But I don't want to leave this as just an angry tirade. The gap is real, and it is part of the compartmentalized cultures of "academia" and "industry." All parties need to do better about seeking out input from the other side about what funding can be earned, what training should be provided and what skills will be necessary to present a workforce that keeps up with the changing demands of the global economy.
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Post-quiz analysis and reflection
That quiz I posted last week prompted a MAJOR spike in blog traffic. Thanks to everyone who participated. It was gratifying to know that I can drive traffic to the blog, if I want/need. It's also pretty obvious that my usual low number of visitors is not the reason I am still searching for a job.
Although I am leaving the quiz open for anyone else who wants to take it, I wanted to throw down a little analysis. (So go ahead and add new answers, make my analysis irrelevant). My big fear in putting together the quiz was that an overwhelming majority of respondents would say they had a brief job hunt with no struggle. Unfortunately for everyone who had to sweat it out, this wasn't the case. It's not rare to have a job with minimal job effort (you know, compared to the MAJOR effort that was earning the Ph.D. in the first place) (19% of participants report their job hunt was 0 months, 8/36 reported having no major barriers in their job hunt). But it's pretty far from the norm.
On the other hand, people often tell me that being on the market as long as I have been is no big deal. Again, more than half of respondents DID get their position in less than a year. So it's ok to feel like this is taking longer than I thought it should. I find it terrifying that a FIFTH of respondents said it took more than 2 years to find a job (22%), which is terribly long time to be seeking the stability of a job. In a future post, I will have more to say about the STEM Skills Gap Crisis (15/36 reported having difficulty finding jobs that meet their qualifications), but for now it should be clear to us all that there is no "usual" way Ph.D.s get that first job- and it's probably because there are so many directions to go from here.
Today I got to chat with one of the other interns about her job hunt, she post-doced in comp bio, then took a staff position for a year and a half before deciding to leave academic science and has been looking for a position while doing some consulting for about a year. She is hoping to spin-off with a company that she's been working with for a couple months. She reminded me that lots of people post-doc while they are looking for a position, eventually everyone goes somewhere. It helps keep your skills from getting stale, even if it doesn't add anything else. Because how long can you be out of your field and still claim to be an expert in it? As she was saying this, I was reaching for a paperbag to breathe into with one hand and starting to surf "post-doc uw" with the other.
But I stopped myself.
She has a really good point, you don't want your skills to get stale. That's actually why I've been working so hard to get more communication experience as an intern and a contractor. If I took a post-doc, I couldn't do that. And then I would be letting go of the skills I've been working so hard on and I enjoy so much. I asked my editor at Words and Numbers to be a professional reference for me, and she agreed. I'm clearly not wasting my time, this is just MUCH slower than I wanted.
I have a looming anniversary. I defended my Ph.D. at the end of last June. In just a couple months, I won't really be a 'recent' graduate anymore. So I look back at what I've done with a year all to myself. It hasn't been lucrative, but I've learned a lot, taken on and conquered some new challenges and developed new contacts and skills. I don't know how long that will feel sufficient, but I'm not going to give up on this dream yet.
Although I am leaving the quiz open for anyone else who wants to take it, I wanted to throw down a little analysis. (So go ahead and add new answers, make my analysis irrelevant). My big fear in putting together the quiz was that an overwhelming majority of respondents would say they had a brief job hunt with no struggle. Unfortunately for everyone who had to sweat it out, this wasn't the case. It's not rare to have a job with minimal job effort (you know, compared to the MAJOR effort that was earning the Ph.D. in the first place) (19% of participants report their job hunt was 0 months, 8/36 reported having no major barriers in their job hunt). But it's pretty far from the norm.
On the other hand, people often tell me that being on the market as long as I have been is no big deal. Again, more than half of respondents DID get their position in less than a year. So it's ok to feel like this is taking longer than I thought it should. I find it terrifying that a FIFTH of respondents said it took more than 2 years to find a job (22%), which is terribly long time to be seeking the stability of a job. In a future post, I will have more to say about the STEM Skills Gap Crisis (15/36 reported having difficulty finding jobs that meet their qualifications), but for now it should be clear to us all that there is no "usual" way Ph.D.s get that first job- and it's probably because there are so many directions to go from here.
Today I got to chat with one of the other interns about her job hunt, she post-doced in comp bio, then took a staff position for a year and a half before deciding to leave academic science and has been looking for a position while doing some consulting for about a year. She is hoping to spin-off with a company that she's been working with for a couple months. She reminded me that lots of people post-doc while they are looking for a position, eventually everyone goes somewhere. It helps keep your skills from getting stale, even if it doesn't add anything else. Because how long can you be out of your field and still claim to be an expert in it? As she was saying this, I was reaching for a paperbag to breathe into with one hand and starting to surf "post-doc uw" with the other.
But I stopped myself.
She has a really good point, you don't want your skills to get stale. That's actually why I've been working so hard to get more communication experience as an intern and a contractor. If I took a post-doc, I couldn't do that. And then I would be letting go of the skills I've been working so hard on and I enjoy so much. I asked my editor at Words and Numbers to be a professional reference for me, and she agreed. I'm clearly not wasting my time, this is just MUCH slower than I wanted.
I have a looming anniversary. I defended my Ph.D. at the end of last June. In just a couple months, I won't really be a 'recent' graduate anymore. So I look back at what I've done with a year all to myself. It hasn't been lucrative, but I've learned a lot, taken on and conquered some new challenges and developed new contacts and skills. I don't know how long that will feel sufficient, but I'm not going to give up on this dream yet.
Friday, April 27, 2012
Job opportunties for PhDs?
If you read any academic/career blogs for the PhD audience, you are probably aware of the debate about the over-production of PhDs. Are there too many? What jobs are they supposed to get? For some fields (chemistry especially), there is an painful mismatch between training and industry needs. Chemjobber started some nice dialogue about the opportunity costs of grad school in response to a Chronicle Article by Jon Bardin, a chemistry grad student and science writer who talked with excitement about the many directions a person can take graduate training. I agree, there are many places you can take a PhD, teaching high school for example, but many of those positions don't require the PhD which can make a burnt out graduate feel like the years of toil were for naught. DocFreeride responded very candidly about the risks of going to graduate school (it's not a guarantee for a job). These are all great articles, and I would encourage you to look at the comments section of each.
Some may point to the low unemployment rate for those with PhDs as evidence that there is not a mismatch. First, remind yourself that this number only accounts for those who have had a job that pays into unemployment- grad students and post-docs in between positions don't count. I would like to respond to this, as a technically 'employed' PhD. Someone asked me recently on a particularly optimistic day if getting my PhD was worth it. And I responded that I'll always be able to find work (editing papers for China or taking contracts, for example), but as someone who has invested so much time in my professional development, I have ambitions to find a fulfilling career. And that has proven to be much harder than I might have thought.
I was meeting recently with a couple of other out of work scientists (casualties of the boom-bust Seattle Biotech market). One of them walked me through his current career plan:
Plan A- Dream job as a scientist.
Plan B- Full time work using transferable and technical skills.
Plan C- Contract work using any transferable skills.
Plan D- any type of work. His unemployment is running out, so Plan D is a major focus.
I was starting to complain that I had just achieved Plan D- I can pay my bills, but now I spend all my time running around like a crazy person between 3 jobs and networking events and try to spend a few minutes sending out applications. This is not the dream- I never aspired to be a full-time job hunter.... but both of these scientists (politely) told me to stuff it. They knew too many scientists who had lost their homes, spouses and lives as a result of not being able to find a job of any sort. Am I really career savvy for taking a part-time job? Is the most important skill that I learned as a graduate student the ability to work diligently on seemingly pointless tasks?
Well, it is one the skills I learned, but I prefer to think that my analytical ability and aptitude for critical thinking were more important. Another skill I learned is the importance of jumping through hoops when necessary (as expressed by the great @GeneWrangler). When I told these guys I was thinking about getting my CAPM, they were skeptical that I would learn anything I didn't already know. And that's not the point- you don't always get certified to learn things, sometimes you get certified to prove you are a joiner, that you can put up with the necessary Bureaucratic Stuff (BS) to get the job done. A tolerance for BS is important in some jobs, like it or not. Yes, it would be awesome if we could all be fairly evaluated based on our potential for success stemming from a thoughtfully objective assessment of our strengths. But in reality, we just have to find a way to be the right person, in the right place at the right time. I'm not willing to leave that to chance, so I am committed to polishing my candidacy in as many ways as I can in an effort to be ready for when opportunities present themselves. To me, having my PhD means I have the skills to overcome the issues that my field and job market have. I'm not sure what the solution looks like at the moment, but I have spent years looking for something with a much lower probability of success, so I know I got this.
Some may point to the low unemployment rate for those with PhDs as evidence that there is not a mismatch. First, remind yourself that this number only accounts for those who have had a job that pays into unemployment- grad students and post-docs in between positions don't count. I would like to respond to this, as a technically 'employed' PhD. Someone asked me recently on a particularly optimistic day if getting my PhD was worth it. And I responded that I'll always be able to find work (editing papers for China or taking contracts, for example), but as someone who has invested so much time in my professional development, I have ambitions to find a fulfilling career. And that has proven to be much harder than I might have thought.
I was meeting recently with a couple of other out of work scientists (casualties of the boom-bust Seattle Biotech market). One of them walked me through his current career plan:
Plan A- Dream job as a scientist.
Plan B- Full time work using transferable and technical skills.
Plan C- Contract work using any transferable skills.
Plan D- any type of work. His unemployment is running out, so Plan D is a major focus.
I was starting to complain that I had just achieved Plan D- I can pay my bills, but now I spend all my time running around like a crazy person between 3 jobs and networking events and try to spend a few minutes sending out applications. This is not the dream- I never aspired to be a full-time job hunter.... but both of these scientists (politely) told me to stuff it. They knew too many scientists who had lost their homes, spouses and lives as a result of not being able to find a job of any sort. Am I really career savvy for taking a part-time job? Is the most important skill that I learned as a graduate student the ability to work diligently on seemingly pointless tasks?
Well, it is one the skills I learned, but I prefer to think that my analytical ability and aptitude for critical thinking were more important. Another skill I learned is the importance of jumping through hoops when necessary (as expressed by the great @GeneWrangler). When I told these guys I was thinking about getting my CAPM, they were skeptical that I would learn anything I didn't already know. And that's not the point- you don't always get certified to learn things, sometimes you get certified to prove you are a joiner, that you can put up with the necessary Bureaucratic Stuff (BS) to get the job done. A tolerance for BS is important in some jobs, like it or not. Yes, it would be awesome if we could all be fairly evaluated based on our potential for success stemming from a thoughtfully objective assessment of our strengths. But in reality, we just have to find a way to be the right person, in the right place at the right time. I'm not willing to leave that to chance, so I am committed to polishing my candidacy in as many ways as I can in an effort to be ready for when opportunities present themselves. To me, having my PhD means I have the skills to overcome the issues that my field and job market have. I'm not sure what the solution looks like at the moment, but I have spent years looking for something with a much lower probability of success, so I know I got this.
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