Do all first year graduate students dream of becoming a principal investigator of their own lab after getting their PhD? Or do some enter graduate school knowing that they will not be working in academia? Or (most likely) some people graduate from college NOT knowing what they want to do, but knowing that they like science and working in the lab, and so they end up in a PhD program? I’m not saying that there is a right and wrong reason to get PhD training, and all the scenarios I’ve outlined above are equally valid. All I am saying is that if there are as many different reasons to be in grad school as there are grad students, why has the science PhD program long inculcated academia as the goal after getting a PhD?
According to a NatureJobs article published last month, this may be a consequence of graduate students being trained solely by professors, who can only offer their own career paths as an example. This article is a guest post submitted by Dr. Virginia Schutte, and highlights some of the emotional struggles she faced when transitioning out of academia. It also offers some advice on how to not let these negative thoughts affect your career decisions. Although NIH is doing a great job with the BEST grants, and graduate students are getting more exposure to AND training for other careers where their PhD degree is useful and highly sought-after, the decision to abandon academia is still fraught with not only mental but also emotional difficulties. Aside from providing a wider range of skills training to equip graduate students for a greater scope of professions, work should also be focused on slowly removing the stigma and emotional burden from leaving academia. Hopefully, in the future, this transition will be treated as normally as any other career choice.