From PhD to Panelist — Part 3
With the 45-min whirlwind on deep work concluded (Part 2), it was time to have questions lobbed at me. *eek* Now for the main event — Career and Networking Panel: Tips and Advice for Getting Your Dream Job! O_o
Lesson 4: Failure is easiest when shared among friends.
From doe-eyed undergrad to jaded grad student to hopeful postdoc, my journey in chemistry is almost 15 years old at this point. I learned a lot, changed my mind a lot, and ended up in a place that I could not have foreseen when publishing my first paper.
Despite the cliche that the phrase has become, my career path is actually “non-traditional.” I started out in academia with my eye on industry and somehow landed in the Silicon Prairie as a project manager.
I’ve worked as a government contractor, built internal products for an ag tech startup turned million-dollar sale, and now do project management full-time at Pixo. And as a result of that trajectory, I can add panelist to that list. Now I was the one staring down at those faces instead of looking up at them.
After the standard gambit of questions (what’s your background, what do you do now, etc.), it was time for double jeopardy.
What do you know now that you wish someone had told you when you were sitting here?
Answer: How hard it is to get into the work force. People go to graduate school for one reason — getting the best job that they can in a field that they really enjoy. Professors and advisors wearing rose-colored glasses will bat their eyes at you, cooing about how grades don’t matter in grad school and companies will jump at the chance to hire PhDs… Nope! Try again.
Going to graduate schools trains you in one thing — how to be a professor at a strong research (so-called R1) institution. Little attention is given to teaching or management, only how to do research. Add to that my graduation in 2010, one of the largest years for unemployed PhDs.
Back in the day, PhDs had three options: academia, national labs, and industry. For those not interested in (even a little) teaching, that leaves two. With the decade or more long slash to fundamental research and science funding in general, national labs are no longer bastions for PhDs, particularly those in stEm (and yes, the capitalization is on purpose). That leaves one. And if people like ExxonMobil or even the national government don’t know what to do with a PhD chemist, who will?
Rather than the 6mos. out to start looking for a job, it’s more like 18mos. And that postdoc? Better have a second one lined up. 2–3 postdoctoral fellowships is becoming the norm, even if hiring managers still old the stigma that it’s the person and not the standard that’s trouble.
So yeah, not super positive, but true. Finding a job is hard. Really hard. Demoralizingly hard. But it will happen. It may not be the best job of your life, but it’s something, and it will get better.
How do you cope with an unfair advisor or colleague?
Answer: Find an advocate, preferably one with prestige. I recalled a girl who I knew in grad school at another institution. Her grad advisor and mine were collaborators on a few projects. He was treating her unfairly and inappropriately. My grad advisor intervened and advocated for her. Things got better.
When life hands you lemons, you’ll want someone to hand you a tissue and then a baseball bat, so you can take turns smashing those f*ckin’ lemons into oblivion.
I gave another example of a woman who wasn’t being paid the same as her male colleagues. She went to HR and sued for inequality and won. And rather than switch institutions after the suit, she walks tall and proud through those misogynistic corridors.
Find your crew, the people who will stand up for you, the people who will fight with you and for you. When life hands you lemons, you’ll want someone to hand you a tissue and then a baseball bat, so you can take turns smashing those f*ckin’ lemons into oblivion.
What the heck does a project manager do?
Answering that is an entire blog in-and-of itself, so I’ll wax poetic another time. Most people don’t really know, and that’s ok. Part of being a PM is educating. *wink*
Some question about culture that ended with “and I got fired.”
One of the things that I wanted to add to the panel was frankness. I’ve been on the audience side of a lot of panels, and many of them say the same thing. “Networking is important,” which it is, but I don’t need to hear that a floppity jillion times. Or, how life just magically fell back into place for the mom who stepped away for years to have children. Um, reality check, table for 1, please.
Life is not all wine and roses. It’s messy, and it’s challenging, and it sucks. Sometimes it’s unfair, and sometimes you get blamed, but the world still spins.
How I came to be unemployed is not something that I look back on with unbridled happiness.
Somehow the audience came to ask about company culture. What happens when you don’t fit? Well, you leave... just not maybe the way that you intended. In other words, I shared with the audience that I got fired. I did; I was laid off. It was not fun. I felt like a failure.
Grad students don’t leave by accident. Going to grad school might be a whim, but leaving grad school is purposeful. Every job that came before, I left on my own terms: college, graduation, new job, unhappiness, etc. Then… unemployment. I was a PhD getting advertisements for custodial jobs fairs.
Don’t misunderstand me; I have nothing against a solid day’s work with good pay and benefits, but I think that it’s safe to say that I’m a bit overqualified for some things.
To be honest I was pretty scared at sharing that story. How I came to be unemployed is not something that I look back on with unbridled happiness. It was definitely a low point, but I got through it, especially with the help of my crew.
I found a job that I like at a place filled with good people. What I didn’t expect were the personal reactions. Not one, or two, but three different people came up to me and said how much they appreciated that I shared my story. Mostly because we, as a culture, don’t speak openly about failure. One woman commented to me that her entire lunch table was talking about it! *wow*
And the lesson? Sharing your failures is more valuable (and more rewarding) than sharing your successes. As Brené Brown says, vulnerability fosters connection. *all the feels*
