Getting out of the drift
Paul Smaglik
Wednesday, 29 July 2009 20:02 UTC
Sometimes the path of least resistance makes good sense.
Example? A new PhD from Portugal wants to do a postdoc in Europe. There are more positions in other EU countries, and the EU’s Marie Curie mobility grants reward young scientists to train elsewhere.
But sometimes, the easy road can become a trap—like not knowing what to do with your life, so you go to graduate school (guilty as charged!). And, even though maybe you’re not happy with that step, you follow it through, from PhD to postdoc and beyond. Next thing you know, you’re suffering an existential crisis—after putting in 10+ years of training.
A columnist for Slate calls this phenomenon ‘drift’.
Sometimes it works out OK (I used my time in graduate school to become a science writer rather than an academic; the author of the slate piece used her law school skills to eventually launch another career).
But sometimes drift can trap a person in its tantalizing current of familiarity. Here’s a quiz
to see if you suffer from “drift”.
If you do, please let us know, and we will discuss strategies for breaking out of this insiduous career riptide.
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Replies
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I have done the questionary with5/10 positives and “feel right”. May be this is because a change in my career
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Good test! I personally don’t feel adrift and I am happy with my choices so far. However I soon have to decide where to go with my career after finishing my PhD I share one question with the “drifters”: How do I know if there is something out there that I will like better than what I do now? It would be interesting to learn a bit about how others made these big decisions of where to direct their careers.
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One good place to start—within the Naturejobs world, at least—is in the ‘Movers’ archives. When I launched this feature in 2001, my goal was to look at varied career paths of senior scientists from around the world, in all sectors and disciplines. I found that scientists were able to move between—or at least work at the boundary of —disciplines and go from academia to industry and back again.
There are hundreds of examples here. When I speak to students and postdocs, I often ask them what their favorite part of their day, or job is? Is it writing grants? Doing experiments? Giving talks? Reviewing literature? Then I ask them what kind of environment do they prefer to work in? Primarily alone? Within a heterogenous team? Within a homogenous team? Answering those questions honestly can give you clues to what kind of job will make you happy 5-10 years on.
As for the “movers”, now that this feature has ended, I am thinking of doing a semi-scientific meta-analysis (How many “Movers” went from academia? How many changed disciplines? How many emphasize “soft” skills?). So stay tuned for that project’s culmination—and let me know if you think it’s worth undergoing, before I procrastinate any further!
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Paul, thanks for the “movers” link and the set of questions! The questions helped me start sorting out various hunches I’ve had, very helpful. I found reading about the different exiting careers in the “movers section” very inspiring – although for someone like me just starting out it can be a bit difficult to envision myself in their positions! I think the meta-analysis of the “movers” that you mentioned would be interesting – to know in which direction the moving trend goes. Maybe it could also be useful to have some kind of index where you could find professionals who are currently working in academia, industry, non-profit etc, if you are interested in learning how people in a certain line of profession came to end up there.
A very selfish observation from a current PhD student would be that it also could be interesting to read about movers earlier on in the moving, so to speak – people in the middle of making their careers. But I realize that this may not be a general interest for Nature’s readers, but rather for PhD students and perhaps would fit better elsewhere.
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