In late April, Rudy Bellani, founder and CEO of Oystir, came to Rutgers and gave career advice and information about his company. For more about Rudy, see Myka Ababon’s interview here.
Rather than a “how-to” for becoming a science writer, this event was more of an informal all-around career advice session with a slight focus on science communications. Rudy was personable and had wisdom to offer from his own career transition. Rudy broke down the three archetypes in science careers:
1) Non-science dependent. This includes science communications, consultants, and science outreach.
2) Science-dependent, such as professors, industry scientists, and post-docs.
3) Mixed-dependent, which includes patent law.
The first step is to determine if you want to stay in science at all, and to what extent. So where are many of the available jobs in the market? Evidently, science communications, medical liaisons, biostatisticians, and scientists are in high demand, with entry-level jobs available in communications and R&D. To help PhDs apply for these jobs, Rudy created Oystir, a personalized job matching service that helps PhDs effectively apply to jobs, even jobs that were under the radar before utilizing Oystir. As Rudy explains, “we do a terrible job telling companies why we’re qualified for a job,” and companies don’t know how to understand how good PhDs are as applicants. To circumvent this issue, Oystir acts as a hiring manager to help place PhDs in a job by job-matching and helping with resumes. Oystir has been able to place people in jobs within days. Beyond describing the awesome power of Oystir, Rudy had general career advice to give, the frankest being “just get a job.” After you land your first job, it becomes much easier to get other jobs. When it comes to getting this first job, Rudy says to apply to small companies: their applicant pool is much smaller, and you’ll get a larger breadth of experience. As far as experience goes:
individual experience > hacked experience >>> classroom experience > nothing
Which is to say, no one hires based on promise. If you don’t have personal experience with a skillset, you can hack it (maybe you did something similar), but merely taking more classes is only slightly better than having no experience at all with a skillset. Lastly, changes happen all the time. Getting a job is more about reinventing yourself than using transferrable skills, and you have to ask how far you’re willing to be reinvented. To get started, visit www.oystir.com, and don’t forget to check out Myka Ababon’s post Informational Interview: Rudy Bellani, CEO of Oystir.