“Do you think your PhD fucking impresses me?” I was sitting at a table in Ottawa’s prestigious Chateau Laurier for one of my worst job interviews ever. This angry little man in front of me had a PhD himself. And while ultimately I decided that
One morning last October, I put on my dress pants and dress shirt and climbed onto the bus into the city. The sun hadn’t yet risen over the last of the fall leaves, and there was a light haze hanging in the early-morning glow over
I was having lunch with a fellow PhD working outside of academia the other day, and I articulated something I’ve been thinking but didn’t quite know how to say. I don’t regret my PhD. I really don’t, even though I’m cynical about academia. It’s a
As I’ve transitioned to a post-PhD career, I’ve realized something. Success is all about mindset. Now before you imagine those cheesy posters from the 90s that had motivational quotes on them (hands up if you’re old enough to remember those), let me explain. It’s super
I was raised religious, and as a kid there were two career paths that appealed to me more than any others: missionary and minister. I felt that I’d been put on this earth for some higher purpose, and what higher purpose could there be than
As I finished an academic fellowship in Greece in May of 2018, I asked myself a question I should have asked years earlier: What comes after a PhD when there’s no academic job? The academic job market had been disappointing the year before. I poured
This post is one of the first I ever wrote. It laid the groundwork for a lot of my thinking about post-PhD careers that ended up in my book, Doctoring: Building a Life After a PhD—read a sample for free on Amazon. Leaving academia isn’t
If you’re somewhere at the beginning, middle, or end of a PhD, there’s something I want you to grasp before we can get down to the brass tacks of actually starting a career outside of academia. You have a lot to offer the marketplace. There’s
