PhD and Beyond

Worldwide, only <2% of the population have PhD degrees. As PhD students, we endure 5 years of disciplined research and experiments to make scientific innovations. Then, when you are about to graduate, you may realize remaining in academia is not the direction you want to pursue. Academia has few tenure-track positions left and extremely limited national funds. Now you’re stuck, you haven’t yet taken any extracurricular activities or internship opportunities to be a competitive candidate and your thesis may not appeal to the industry job market. In this article, I want to emphasize what makes a PhD degree valuable in a diverse job market to broaden the career development plans of fellow PhD students.

Through your courses, students are taught to be great innovators. But, the process is not easy. I will give you an example. Getting a PhD degree is like a marathon that requires training like runners train how to control running phases and endure pain until reaching the finish line. In the end, the world grows with scientific innovations that you have discovered. This is the first valuable skill from getting a PhD, becoming an expert innovator. Due to our profound curiosity, we have learned the accumulated knowledge of centuries and trained in skills to provide new and novel solutions. For example in my research, conventional fluorescence microscopy imaging of live cells on multi-well plates has provided limited temporal information because of the inherent scanning mechanism with a single objective lens. I proposed a new system that provides synchronized image acquisition on a multi-well plate, which expands the interpretation of complex cellular activities with improved temporal throughput ratio. The idea of synchronized imaging allowed me to develop this new system and enabled me to provide unique solutions to unmet needs that biologists hope to have but current systems don’t provide. Eventually, my new proposed approach enriches temporal information of cellular reactions (for example, how tumor cells react to chemotherapy drugs in the second scale). Through the system development process, it has taught me to be an expert innovator.

In order to innovate you must learn to solve problems during research. Just as runners in a marathon face obstacles such as steep hills, rocky roads, piercing hot weather, and tough competitors, PhD students also face unexpected conflicts from diverse roots. For an example, a common obstacle comes from experiments when you set the hypothesis, but the outcome turns out the opposite of expected. You need to narrow down what led to the errors and revise the hypothesis. In this scenario, you go from failure to failure but removing all possible problems yields success. This enthusiasm for tackling new problems with the iterative process makes you into an adept problem solver.

Conflict management comes into play at presenting your work. As a PhD student you have to be ready to defend your research and emphasize what is superior or novel over competitors. You must be able to defend your work at a variety of levels such as the public, other doctoral students, or even your principal investigators. This trains you to be a master of conflict management.

Beyond technical skills and fundamental knowledge of research, you grow to possess superb talent of being an innovator, problem solver, and conflict manager. These transferable skills are essential for any industry jobs working as a leader position in a team. Therefore, PhD students have higher value in industrial fields where complex teamwork and project management are required. While a PhD gives you these skills, expanding job opportunities outside of academia will require further preparation in career development early on. As they say, “The early bird gets the worm”.