After finishing their PhD, they knew they wanted to stay in academia, and they were willing to go wherever they needed to make that happen. So when they found a postdoc abroad, they packed everything up and moved.

A couple of years later, the contract ended. They wanted to stay, but there wasn’t a permanent position for them, and they couldn’t find another suitable job nearby. Eventually, they found another postdoc in another country, so they moved again.

Then, a few years later, they did it again. Now they’ve spent years working in academia, lived in several different countries, and built up considerably more research experience than they had when they finished their PhD. But they’re still on temporary contracts, and they still don’t know where, or whether, they will eventually find a permanent academic job.

And of course when you’re moving all the time, it’s really difficult to properly establish yourself anywhere.

This person has met lots of people throughout their career, of course. They have former colleagues, collaborators, supervisors, and friends scattered across several universities and countries. But every time they begin to feel properly integrated into one academic community, their contract starts coming to an end.

Then they’re somewhere else, and have to get to know another department, meet another group of researchers, establish new collaborations, and start building relationships again. Meanwhile, the people they worked with two countries ago are inevitably becoming a little more distant.

So, despite having spent years working in academia, they don’t feel like they have the kind of strong network in any particular place that someone who had spent those same years building a career in one city might have developed.

And obviously, your professional network isn’t the only thing that gets interrupted every time you move, as you have to rebuild the rest of your life too.

You find somewhere to live, learn your way around a new city, work out where to buy groceries, meet people, make friends, and gradually develop all the little routines that make somewhere start to feel like home.

If you’ve moved abroad, you’re also probably trying to understand a different healthcare system, different bureaucracy, different taxes, maybe a different language, and all the other things that come with moving your entire life to another country.

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Then, just when you’ve been there long enough that it all begins to feel relatively normal, you might have to do the whole thing again. And this makes planning the rest of your life almost impossible.

Now I know for some people, this is completely worth it. Some people love academia enough that they genuinely don’t mind moving several times to stay in it. They might enjoy living in different countries, want the experience of working at different universities, and care enough about becoming a professor that they’re willing to go through years of uncertainty to give themselves the best possible chance.

That’s great, and I’m glad there are people willing to make those sacrifices. But I want people to understand how much of a gamble you’re making with the academic path.

When you start your first postdoc, it’s easy to tell yourself that you’re committing another two or three years to academia, and that it’s not that long. You’ll do some good research, hopefully publish a few papers, strengthen your CV, and then you’ll be in a much better position to apply for something permanent.

But then you reach the end of those two years, and find out that you still aren’t quite competitive enough, or that there simply aren’t any suitable permanent jobs available at the time.

So you apply for another postdoc. Then another two years doesn’t seem that bad, especially when you’ve already come this far. Then, at the end of that one, you’re faced with the same decision.

I think that’s how so many people end up spending six, eight, or ten years as a postdoc, and for most, they’ll have nothing to show for it at the end of it. They’ll have spent those long nights, moved a thousand times, and gave it all their all, and still will never get a permanent academic position.

And, to top it all off, you’re then also going to struggle massively to move into industry because you’ll be seen as too academic. After all, you’ve just spent the last 10 years in academia, so why would industry want to hire you?

Of course there are people who spend years doing postdocs and eventually land a permanent position they love. I’m sure many of them would say that the uncertainty and moving were completely worth it in the end.

But there are also exceptionally talented researchers who spend years doing exactly the same things and never get that position. There simply aren’t enough permanent academic jobs for everyone who wants one.

Hard work, publishing in top journals, building strong relationships, and even being willing to move for opportunities can all improve your chances. But none of them can guarantee the outcome.

So if you’re considering doing a postdoc, I think it’s important to ask yourself if you never land a permanent academic position, would you still feel that was time well spent?

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If I were in your shoes…

If I were considering a postdoc because I wanted a long-term academic career, I would do two things.

First, I would set a deadline for myself. If after 3 years I didn’t think I was going to land a permanent academic position, I would decide to walk away. Spending more years in a low earning position that isn’t going to lead anywhere isn’t going to help you.

And second, I would prepare an exit plan. What would you do if an academic career path doesn’t pan out? Would you go to industry, do consulting, work for a non-profit, etc.? Choose a second path and make sure you develop the translational skills and network required for those careers while you give academia a shot.

That way you won’t end up lost 5 years down the road with no prospects.

Weekly Exercise

This week, you will build:

A personal academic career risk map that defines what you’re willing to sacrifice for an academic career, what you’re not willing to sacrifice, and the conditions under which you would eventually choose another path.

By the end of this exercise, you will have:

A clearer idea of how long you’re willing to remain on temporary contracts, how much geographic flexibility you actually have, what outcome would make those sacrifices worthwhile, and the point at which continuing in academia would no longer make sense for your life.

Question 1: What are you actually pursuing?

You need to go beyond just staying in academia. What position are you ultimately hoping to get?

A tenure-track professorship? A permanent research scientist role? A teaching-focused university position? A job at a research institute?

Then ask yourself why you want it.

The permanent academic position I am ultimately trying to reach is:

[Insert here]

I want this position because:

[Insert here]

The parts of this career that matter most to me are:

[Insert here]

If you don’t really care about teaching, running a laboratory, applying for grants, or the independence that comes with leading your own research, it’s worth asking yourself if the destination you’re chasing is something you genuinely want or just the next step you’ve been conditioned to take.

In My Orbit

There’s a song that I can’t get out of my head recently called Unethical by Faouzia. It came out last year, but she’s on tour right now and the song is getting bigger and bigger by the day. I especially love the live performances of the song, her voice is insane. It’s also incredible because she’s an independent artist, so it’s amazing to see how people can succeed now just from the power of things like social media!

I met them because we were collaborating with another research group, and when I first saw them, I was surprised. I had spent enough time in academia by then that I had a pretty fixed picture in my mind of what a PhD student looked like, and they didn’t fit it.

Most of the students around me had gone through their education in a straight line. Undergraduate degree, maybe a master’s, then a PhD somewhere in their twenties. This person was visibly older, and I later found out had already built a career, raised a family, and lived through a completely different stage of adulthood before deciding to return to university.

And admittedly, I made assumptions about them because of it. I wondered if they would be a little removed from the research, if everything they had going on outside of their PhD would make them less available, and, if I’m being completely transparent, if someone who had been away from academia for that long would be as sharp as the younger students I was used to working with.

Thankfully, I was wrong about essentially all of it. They were one of the most organized people I had ever worked with. They communicated clearly, followed through on everything they said they would do, handled problems without turning them into emergencies, and knew when something was worth figuring out independently and when it was time to ask someone else for help.

Working with them was so easy because I never had to wonder if something had been forgotten and a deadline would slip, or if a small problem was actually going to be a much bigger one.

By the time the project was over, I thought they were probably the best PhD student I had ever worked with.

To be honest, the experience made me a lot less worried about getting older. I used to feel that to do well in life, you had to follow a particular sequence. You needed to finish one stage of education by a certain age, move into the next, find your first proper job, start progressing through a career, and keep reaching the next milestones like dominoes falling into place.

For some people, that is how it happens, and that’s great. But for many others, things don’t line up in such a predictable way, and that’s great too.

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For example, many of the things that made this particular student so good were because of the years they spent outside academia. They had worked with other people for years, they knew how to manage their time while juggling multiple responsibilities, and they had dealt with enough difficult situations that a failed experiment or an unexpected problem didn’t derail them.

And perhaps most importantly, they knew exactly why they were there. Which isn’t always the case for someone starting a PhD earlier. I’ll be the first to admit that I did a PhD partially because I just did well at university, liked my subject, and it seemed like the most obvious thing to do next.

But if you’re 35 or 52, deciding to leave an established career and return to university usually requires a little more deliberation. There are more things to give up, more people affected by the decision, and fewer chances to pretend that you haven’t really thought through what you’re signing up for.

Of course there are also benefits to starting right out of college. You likely don’t have kids, a mortgage, and haven’t gotten used to higher pay in industry. But my point is that neither route is inherently better. They each produce people with different advantages.

And this concept extends far beyond just graduate school.

People convince themselves they’re too old to change careers because their friends have already spent ten years climbing a particular ladder. They decide they missed their opportunity to start a company because the founders they read about are so much younger. They don’t apply for another degree because they don’t want to walk into a classroom where most everyone else is twenty years younger.

I get why it can be hard to do something outside of the norm. Changing paths later in life can make you feel like you wasted time or did something wrong. You might also experience a temporary loss of income, status, seniority, stability, or even just the comfort that comes from knowing what you’re doing.

But when you’re older, you also know yourself better. You have more experience, more savings, stronger relationships, a professional network, and a much better idea of the kind of work you enjoy and the environments you hate.

So if there is something you’ve been wanting to do, and your biggest objection is that you’re too old, I would think again. Thinking “I should have done this five years ago” isn’t much of a reason by itself.

You didn’t do it five years ago. You’re here now.

The timing might be different than you once imagined, but that doesn’t make the path any less worth taking.

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If I were in your shoes…

If there were something I wanted to pursue but I kept telling myself I was too late, I would try to determine if my circumstances genuinely prevent me from doing it or if I had just internalized an age by which I thought it was supposed to happen.

Then I would look at what I bring to the table now that I wouldn’t have brought five, ten, or twenty years ago. Starting later might come with costs, but it can come with advantages too.

Weekly Exercise

This week, you will build:

A one-page timeline reset for something you have been postponing because you feel like you should have started sooner.

By the end of this exercise, you will have:

A clear picture of where your imagined deadline came from, which obstacles are worth considering, what advantages you’ve actually gained by starting later, and one concrete step you can take now if you decide the path is still worth pursuing.

Question 1: What do you think you’re late for?

Choose one thing. Maybe you want to change careers, apply for graduate school, start a company, move somewhere new, learn a completely different skill, pursue a creative project, or apply for a role that would require you to move backward in seniority before eventually moving forward again.

Write it down as specifically as possible:

The thing I still want to do is:

[Insert here]

Then answer:

I thought I would have done this by age:

[Insert here]

I am currently:

[Insert here]

Now you can compare where you are now to when you thought you should’ve achieved this goal.

Question 2: Where did that deadline come from?

In My Orbit

I’m still making my way through all of the MCU movies, and I’m currently on Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s my favorite ride at California Adventure, and it’s great to finally be watching the movie and have more appreciation for the theming. I also didn’t know Bradley Cooper voiced Rocket, so that was an interesting surprise. I think he’s my favorite character!

If you decide to do a PhD, you need to know that at some point you will want to quit. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken with someone who did a PhD and didn’t think even for a split second that they didn’t want to continue. More often than not, people have to fight through many periods during which they can’t imagine staying in their program for another minute.

For me, I experienced it about halfway through my program. I had a tough time the first few months of the PhD, but I chalked it up to living in a new country, adapting to the weather, and feeling a bit lonely, but I expected that going in and was able to brush it off pretty well.

But two years into the program, I felt like I couldn’t take it anymore. Trying to balance the constant experiments, papers, conferences, and failures, I eventually hit a wall.

I was exhausted, overwhelmed, and increasingly convinced that I simply couldn’t keep doing it for another year or two. So I approached my supervisor, told him how I felt, and said that I thought I wanted to leave the program.

He listened thoughtfully, and instead of getting angry, trying to convince me that I was making a mistake, or immediately launching into all of the reasons I should stay, he suggested that I take a few days completely away from my research before deciding anything.

So I took his advice. For a couple days, I stopped running experiments, stopped looking at my data, and forced myself not to think about the long list of things I still needed to finish. I went for walks around the park, watched my favorite TV shows, slept, and allowed myself to be completely and utterly lazy.

And when I eventually returned, the things that had seemed almost impossible a few days earlier suddenly felt considerably more manageable. The experiments were still waiting for me, the papers still needed to be written, and none of the problems I had been worried about had disappeared. But I had enough energy again to deal with them.

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There are perfectly legitimate reasons to leave a PhD. You might realize that you no longer want the career the program was supposed to prepare you for, or you might discover that you hate the work itself. Your personal circumstances might change, another opportunity might come along, or you might just decide that another several years of your life are no longer worth exchanging for the degree.

So staying in a PhD that makes you miserable isn’t the best decision, nor do I think finishing something just because you started it is always a particularly good use of persistence.

But I do think sometimes people wouldn’t leave if they had the chance to rest and recharge for a bit.

When you’ve been working relentlessly for weeks or months, every unfinished task feels a lot bigger than it is. Another failed experiment feels like a sign from the universe telling you stop. A bad meeting can make you feel like you chose the wrong career. A pile of work that you could get done in 2 hours if you sat down and focused now looks like something you’ll never finish.

That’s why, whenever someone tells me they’re thinking about leaving their PhD, I don’t think they need to immediately start with a pro/con list to decide. Unless there’s some urgent reason a decision needs to be made immediately, I think the first thing to do is take a step away for a moment.

Ideally, take a few days off if you can. And don’t use those days to catch up on papers you haven’t read, reorganize your data, write a few paragraphs of your thesis, or convince yourself that working from your sofa technically counts as resting.

Get away from it entirely. See your friends, go for a weekend trip, watch terrible television, and sleep until noon. Then come back and see how you feel.

You might return and see that nothing has changed. The work could still feel wrong, the reasons you wanted to leave might still be there, and after removing exhaustion from the equation, you might still know that you’d rather build your life somewhere else.

That’s great, and a perfectly acceptable decision. But you may also realize that the enormous, life-changing decision you were preparing to make was partly your exhaustion getting to you.

So a couple days away didn’t solve my PhD, but it gave me enough space to realize that I wasn’t actually finished with the program.

I was just very, very tired.

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If I were in your shoes…

If I were seriously considering leaving my PhD, before handing in any paperwork, I would give myself a short period completely away from the PhD to rest and relax. Then, once I felt a bit more refreshed, I would put the reasons I wanted to leave on paper. Reading them back would help me figure out if I was trying to just escape a particularly difficult period or if the PhD itself was no longer compatible with my goals.

Weekly Exercise

This week, you will build:

A one-page decision map that helps you separate temporary pressures, structural problems with your PhD, and opportunities or priorities pulling you toward something else.

By the end of this exercise, you will have:

A written record of why you are considering leaving, which problems could realistically be changed, which ones would remain even after a break, and the conditions under which staying or leaving would make sense to you.

In My Orbit

I just started rewatching Schitt’s Creek this week. This is the second time I’m watching it, and I think it’s even better going through it another time. The show is really funny, campy, and has an amazing cast that all bring something really special to their characters. I think my favorite is Stevie!

In some places, PhD students receive less through their stipend than they would earn working full-time at minimum wage. They may be teaching undergraduates, conducting research that contributes to the university’s output, publishing papers, presenting at conferences, helping to supervise other students, and performing the various administrative tasks required to sustain academic work, yet the money they receive can still leave them struggling to afford an ordinary room near the campus where they are required to work.

When this comes up, the usual response is that no one forced them to do a PhD. They knew the stipend before accepting the offer, and if earning more money mattered to them, they should have chosen another career.

I understand the logic up to a point. People should think carefully about the financial consequences of the paths they choose, particularly when that path involves several years of relatively low income and no guarantee of a lucrative position at the end. I would never encourage someone to start a PhD without looking closely at the stipend, the local cost of living, the expected length of the program, and what their financial life is likely to look like while completing it.

But understanding that a system has poor conditions is not the same as agreeing that those conditions should remain that way forever. Every generation inherits arrangements that the previous one was told were simply the price of entry, and while some of those arrangements reflect the unavoidable difficulty of the work, others survive because questioning them is treated as weakness, entitlement, or evidence that people are no longer willing to make sacrifices.

Once that happens, the discussion moves away from whether the arrangement is reasonable. Instead, it becomes a debate about whether the people living under it are sufficiently hardworking, grateful, or committed to deserve anything better.

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That is how we get to the suggestion that PhD students struggling financially should just work more. But many PhD students already work more than 40 hours a week, and experiments can’t exactly be scheduled around a regular 9-5. Even if they could find a way to work another job, some programs restrict the amount of outside work a student can take on, while many prohibit it entirely.

The university expects the PhD to receive the student’s full professional attention, which is understandable when it’s funding someone to do research, but that expectation creates a responsibility that is rarely acknowledged in conversations about stipends.

A student can’t be simultaneously told that the PhD is too demanding for another job, that outside employment would interfere with their academic obligations, and that they must be available for the work their department requires, while also being told that their inability to live on the resulting income is a problem they should solve privately.

The contradiction becomes even clearer when universities describe stipends as financial support rather than compensation. This language makes the money sound like a charitable contribution toward the student’s education, despite the fact that the institution is getting years of teaching, research, publications, grant support, intellectual property, and administrative labor in return.

Academia has always had an uneasy relationship with money, particularly when the person asking about it is relatively junior. Scientists are supposed to be motivated by curiosity, teachers by devotion to their students, and PhD candidates by the privilege of spending several years pursuing knowledge. The work is described as so meaningful that asking what it pays can make you feel embarrassed.

But meaningful work still takes place inside a real human being’s life. So a person can care deeply about their research and still need to pay rent. And they can feel fortunate to study a subject they love while also believing that the university benefiting from their work should pay them fairly.

I also find it odd that many people only admire advocacy after it has succeeded. Once a profession has better pay, safer conditions, more reasonable hours, or greater protections, those changes are treated as obvious signs of progress. While people are asking for them, however, those demands are often described as unrealistic, entitled, or evidence that a younger generation has lost its work ethic.

The people who challenge an arrangement are rarely the ones who created it, and they are often the people with the least power to change it individually. That is precisely why collective advocacy matters. A single student asking for more funding can be dismissed as difficult, but hundreds of students presenting the same evidence begin to reveal that the problem isn’t their budgeting, resilience, or willingness to work.

By the time someone is working full-time, prohibited from earning more elsewhere, and still unable to cover basic expenses, telling them to work harder isn’t practical advice. It’s just a way to make the institution’s decision not to pay them properly sound like a failure of personal responsibility.

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If I were in your shoes…

If I were trying to advocate for better pay, I wouldn’t say that the current amount is unfair to you. Personal hardship is real, but institutions can dismiss it as individual circumstance. A stronger case connects the compensation to the work being required, the restrictions placed on earning elsewhere, the local economic reality, and a specific change that someone has the authority to make.

The Compensation Case

This week, you will build:

A concise, evidence-based case for improving your pay or working conditions, whether you’re a PhD student asking for a higher stipend, an employee preparing for a salary discussion, or part of a group trying to change an institutional policy.

By the end of this exercise, you will have:

A one-page compensation case, a clearly defined request, and a shorter version of the argument that you can use in an email, meeting, survey response, union discussion, or conversation with someone who has the power to support the change.

In My Orbit

With Avenger’s Doomsday coming out later this year, I’ve decided to finally watch the Marvel movies in order. I’m currently in the middle of watching Thor, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the movies so far. I’m not usually a big fan of fantasy, and so Thor hasn’t been my favorite, but I really liked Iron Man and Iron Man 2.

They felt a little more believable and grounded in the real world, and thought they were pretty funny too. I’m excited to make it through the rest of the films, most of which I’ve never seen!

One of the things I care about most when discussing PhDs is whether students are being paid enough to live. Strangely, some of the people most resistant to this idea are those who endured the same financial struggles themselves and now seem to regard them as an unavoidable, or even valuable, part of the experience.

I often share reflections from my own PhD journey, along with stories people tell me about theirs, and the subject that appears again and again is money. Particularly at universities located in expensive cities, students describe receiving a stipend that feels inadequate once it has been divided between rent, utilities, transportation, food, healthcare, and other everyday expenses.

The reason it feels that way is because for many students, it simply isn’t enough to live on. Some work part-time jobs around experiments and teaching responsibilities, while others depend on their parents, partners, savings, credit cards, or food banks to cover what their university funding does not.

They worry about whether they can afford groceries at the end of the month, if they can turn on the heat during winter, and if a medical problem is serious enough to justify the cost of seeing a doctor. After a while, these calculations become so embedded in daily life that they begin to feel like an ordinary feature of doctoral education when I believe they should be evidence that something has gone badly wrong.

None of these struggles should be normal. You can be conducting world-class research at a prestigious university, having already spent years earning the qualifications required to be there, while simultaneously worrying about whether you can afford to meet your most basic needs as a human being?

That has never seemed right to me, which is why I continue sharing these stories. I want more people to understand what life during a PhD can actually look like, rather than only seeing the version presented on university websites, and I hope that talking about these experiences openly makes it more difficult for institutions to keep treating them as isolated complaints.

Unsurprisingly though, whenever I write about this subject, I receive comments that demonstrate exactly why meaningful change has been so slow. In this particular instance, someone told me that I needed to stop expecting handouts. Since I had chosen to do a PhD, they argued, the financial consequences were entirely my responsibility, and asking to be paid more was unreasonable.

This attitude is so pervasive throughout academia that I genuinely believe it has become one of the greatest obstacles to improving it. The instant someone speaks openly about low pay or the unreasonable working conditions, the conversation turns toward what they did or are doing wrong.

They should have known the stipend was low. They should have lived somewhere cheaper, saved more money beforehand, worked another job, or simply accepted that previous generations had suffered through the same thing. The institution that established the stipend somehow disappears from the discussion, while the person struggling to survive on it becomes the only party expected to explain themselves.

If these experiences belonged to a handful of students at one badly managed university, perhaps it would make sense to treat them as individual circumstances. But when PhD students across disciplines, institutions, and countries continue describing the same financial pressures, it becomes increasingly difficult to argue that they have all independently failed to budget correctly.

Just to offer some perspective, someone recently told me that their PhD stipend in the United States was $15,000 in 1998. Using inflation figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, that would be worth approximately $30,700 in June 2026. I continue hearing from current students whose funding remains somewhere in the mid-$20,000s, which means some are effectively being offered less purchasing power than students received almost three decades ago.

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The precise comparison will naturally vary between universities, fields, and cities, but the larger pattern is difficult to ignore. At the same time, housing, food, transportation, and healthcare have become dramatically more expensive.

When universities set funding below what it costs to live, the missing money doesn’t just disappear. It has to come from family support, a partner’s income, existing savings, additional work, growing debt, postponed healthcare, cheaper food, or a colder home.

And that arrangement determines who can afford to become a scientist. Someone with parents who can supplement their stipend may be able to accept an offer in an expensive city, attend conferences, survive an unexpected bill, and remain in academia long enough to build a competitive career. Someone without that support may be equally talented and committed, but eventually decide that continuing is financially impossible.

We often talk about wanting academia to become more accessible to people from different economic backgrounds, yet continue defending a system that is only survivable when someone else can help pay for it.

And describing adequate compensation as a handout makes even less sense when we consider what PhD students actually do. They conduct research, analyze data, write papers, teach undergraduates, supervise projects, maintain laboratories, contribute to grant-funded work, and produce knowledge that universities use to attract funding and strengthen their reputations.

Universities often emphasize that students are receiving training, access to facilities, and the opportunity to earn a doctorate. All of that is true, but it doesn’t erase the value of the work being performed in return. An arrangement can be educational and still involve labor, just as receiving experience from a job doesn’t mean an employee should be grateful for any salary they’re offered.

A PhD is work. Being paid properly for that work is not expecting a handout, and wanting enough money to buy food, heat a home, and visit a doctor is not evidence that an entire generation has become entitled.

I’m not arguing that every PhD student should become wealthy, live alone in the most expensive part of a city, or graduate with a large investment portfolio. There’s an enormous distance between demanding luxury and asking not to live in constant financial anxiety, although discussions about doctoral funding often pretend those are the only two possibilities.

The purpose of a stipend should be to allow someone to focus on their research without having to construct the rest of their life around avoiding financial disaster. That doesn’t mean every discomfort can or should be eliminated, but food insecurity, inadequate healthcare, and an inability to keep a home warm shouldn’t be normalized problems of doing a PhD.

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If I were in your shoes

If I were considering a PhD today, I would closely examine the funding you’ll receive. Learn what the stipend is, compare it with realistic housing and transportation costs, and ask current students what their lives actually look like rather than relying on the university’s assurance that the amount is competitive.

I would want to know if funding covers the summer, how often the stipend increases, what healthcare costs are excluded, whether teaching is included in the funding or paid separately, and how many students depend on outside work or family assistance. These questions may feel awkward during the excitement of receiving an offer, but it’s not worth ignoring until you’re stuck in a bad financial situation.

I would also never feel ashamed for allowing funding to influence where I studied, whether I accepted an offer, or if I remained in a program. Prestige can’t buy groceries, and no university name is worth your health, mental or physical.

In my orbit

I used to be a really avid reader, and I had kind of fallen out of the habit, so I decided to get back into it and started reading a book called PenPal by Dathan Auerbach. It’s supposed to be a horror/thriller novel, which I haven’t read much of before.

I love scary movies, so I thought I would give the genre a try in books. I’m about halfway through, it’s really good actually. I’ve always loved atmospheric/creepy movies rather than jump scares, and since the latter is pretty much impossible to achieve in a book, it does a very good job of being creepy. I’ve had a few points throughout the book where all the hair on the back of my neck stands up. I’m excited to see where it leads, but so far so good!

When I moved from California to London to start my PhD, I expected to spend the first few months adjusting to the research. I knew I would miss home, get lost on the Underground more times than I’d like to admit, and wonder whether I’d made the right decision moving halfway across the world. I didn’t expect one of the biggest adjustments to be learning how to live in the cold.

London felt cold almost all the time. Even during the summer there were days that reminded me of winter back home, and once autumn arrived I realized my apartment seemed to hold onto the outside temperature with remarkable determination.

The heating worked perfectly well, but every time I thought about turning it on, I also had to think about what the next electricity bill was going to look like. Before long, I stopped treating it as something that was simply there to be used and started thinking about it as something that had to be rationed.

Most evenings I wore sweatpants, a sweatshirt and thick socks around the apartment. If I was working at my desk, I’d usually have a blanket over my legs as well. I don’t remember making a conscious decision that this was how I was going to spend the winter.

It started when I’d leave the heating off one evening because it didn’t seem quite cold enough to justify it, then another because I was trying to keep my bill down, and eventually it stopped feeling like a decision altogether. It just became the way I lived.

I had convinced myself that this was just part of doing a PhD. The stipend covered my rent and my groceries (barely), and whatever was left over had to stretch across everything else. Heating became one more thing to think about, no different from deciding whether I could justify going out for dinner that week or booking a flight home to see my family.

I accepted those trade-offs because everyone around me seemed to be making similar ones. But the further away I’ve gotten from my PhD, the more I realize how absurd it was.

Universities recruit students from all over the world, ask them to spend years producing original research, celebrate the papers they publish and the grants they help secure, while some of those same students are sitting in their apartments wearing three layers because turning on the heating is too expensive.

Over the past few years, housing has become more expensive, energy prices have risen, groceries cost more than they used to, and yet stipends haven’t kept pace with any of it.

And the result isn’t that PhD students have to deal with a minor inconvenience. They have to constantly worry about their bills that month, if they can afford to have a real meal tonight or need another night of instant noodles, or if they can see the dentist without worrying about how much it will cost.

Yet whenever these issues are discussed, they often get flipped back on the students. That they are being greedy, expecting too much, or demanding more than the previous generations. Universities and academia don’t ever want to admit there’s an actual problem because that would mean they have a responsibility to fix it.

When they can blame every individual instead, it becomes a personal problem. You’re just not willing to sacrifice enough for this, or someone else would kill to be in your shoes so you better not complain.

But no one is asking to be rich while they do a PhD. Most people understand there are financial trade-offs involved in spending several years in research rather than working full-time elsewhere.

But there’s an enormous difference between postponing financial progress and struggling to afford things that everyone needs to live a normal life.

If I were in your shoes

If you’re currently doing a PhD and constantly finding yourself making these kinds of calculations, I’d encourage you to speak with other students and try to incur change. I know it sounds like it’s just another thing to add to your list of tasks, and you don’t want to stir up any trouble.

But nothing will change if no one stands up and demands better. Organize with other students and try to form a union. You have more power than you think, and if you work together you might be surprised what you can achieve for yourself and the students who will come after you.

Another option I would encourage is trying to find summer internships or part-time work during your PhD. Make sure to check your university’s policies, but in my case I was allowed to work up to 20 hours a week outside of my PhD.

Of course that many hours isn’t realistic for most people, but if you can do 5-10 hours a week of work on the side, that could be enough to give you a little extra buffer so you don’t have to stress quite as much about those basics. You can do freelance work, tutor students, find startups who could use your expertise, etc.

And finally, try to remind yourself that you won’t be in this situation forever. It be hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I promise it’s there, so keep going and stay as positive as you can.

In my orbit

This week, I’ve been listening to the new Gracie Abrams album Daughter from Hell. I like her as an artist, and think there are a few really good songs on there. I think she does a good job of weaving in clever and unique writing while still keeping a catchy melody. But I do think the album is a bit too long, and I’m not a fan of the last couple of songs, so she should’ve just removed those!

I had already started to imagine that I would probably leave academia, but I still applied for a few postdocs because it felt irresponsible not to. After spending so many years on the academic path, completely closing that door before I had even defended felt too final. A postdoc was the obvious next step, and even though I didn’t think I wanted it, there was a part of me that still felt like I should at least see what was available.

So I applied. I prepared for the interviews, spoke to people about the projects, tried to picture myself in those labs. Then I heard the salaries.

I wasn’t expecting to be impressed. I knew academia didn’t pay like industry, and by that point I had spent enough time around universities to know that low pay is to be expected. People complain about it, joke about it, rearrange their lives around it, and then somehow continue on because the work matters, the next opportunity might be better, or leaving feels too much like giving up.

But I remember being genuinely surprised because every postdoc position I interviewed for paid less than what I had made during my industry internship. I knew postdocs would pay less than a full-time industry job. But I was shocked to see that I would be paid less than what I had made while I was still a PhD student, working temporarily in industry for a few months.

And it really bothered me. Part of it was practical, obviously. It’s hard to hear a salary and not immediately think about rent, savings, bills, travel, and moving costs. But it also just made me feel sad.

A postdoc isn’t a simple extension of being a student. In many fields, it’s a demanding research job that comes after years of specialization, failed experiments, papers, presentations, teaching, mentoring, technical work, and a level of persistence that most people outside academia will never fully see.

Postdocs do a huge amount of the work that keeps research moving. They manage projects, train students, write papers, analyze data, keep collaborations alive, apply for funding, give talks, and often become the person in the lab who knows how everything actually works.

And yet the pay still leaves a lot to be desired. For a while though, I felt almost embarrassed that the salary bothered me so much.

I wanted to be the kind of person who could look at the work alone and decide that was enough. I wanted to believe I was above caring too much about money, because there is something in academic culture that makes financial concern feel slightly vulgar. Curiosity is noble, sacrifice is respectable, and ambition is acceptable as long as it’s directed toward publications, fellowships, grants, and prestige, but the moment ambition becomes attached to salary, people start to look at it differently.

This was something I had absorbed over years of being in academia. The best people were supposed to care about the question so much that everything else became secondary. The people who left for industry were often spoken about with a complicated mixture of respect, disappointment, and suspicion, as if they had made a perfectly understandable choice that still revealed something slightly unfortunate about them.

And I really don’t understand that mindset. Most PhD students aren’t choosing science because they think it will make them rich. They spend years earning very little, often while watching friends in other fields build savings, get promoted, move into better apartments, buy homes, take real vacations, and become adults while their life is still organized around experiments, funding, deadlines, and temporary contracts.

So when someone finishes a PhD and decides they want a job that pays them better, I don’t think that means they suddenly stopped caring about science. They just also care about other parts of life, and they should.

Because it matters if you can pay rent without panic, help your family, afford to move for an opportunity, deal with an emergency, travel home, have children, buy a home, or leave a bad situation. So money isn’t everything, but it’s also not nothing.

And at some point, you have to ask yourself what you want to prioritize in your life and you can’t keep waiting on “temporary” situations to end. The PhD is temporary, and a postdoc is temporary. The next postdoc might be temporary too, but maybe it leads to something.

Academia promises that the instability, low pay, and uncertainty are all temporary, and if you just persevere long enough you’ll eventually get where you want to be. But not everyone gets that ending.

A lot of people give years to the academic path and still end up having to leave. Some leave because they want to, some leave because the jobs are not there, and some leave because they are tired of living in a state of permanent stress, constantly hoping that the next stage will finally allow them to feel secure.

And when they do leave, I don’t think they should be judged for it. I have never understood why choosing better pay is a negative.

If someone can continue working in science, using their training, contributing to research, medicine, technology, policy, communication, product, data, or any other part of the broader scientific ecosystem, but do it in an environment that pays them enough to build the kind of life they want, why should that be looked down upon?

Why is the lower-paid version more pure? Why do we act as if the only way to prove you care about science is to accept a version of it that makes the rest of your life harder?

I understand why people stay in academia. There are parts of academia that are beautiful when the environment is good. The freedom to ask strange questions, the depth of thinking, the mentorship, the long conversations about ideas, the feeling that you are contributing to knowledge in a way that may not have an immediate commercial purpose but still matters.

I know people who look at the tradeoffs honestly and decide that staying is worth it. They know the salary, the uncertainty, the odds, the pressure, and they still choose it because the work gives them something they don’t think they can find anywhere else.

I respect that enormously. But I also respect the people who look at the same tradeoffs and choose differently.

I respect the person who realizes they don’t want to keep moving every few years, who wants to earn enough to support their family, and the person who loves science but also wants savings, health, rest, and choices.

That isn’t selling out. You’re allowed to care about science and still care about your salary, and to love research and still want a stable life. You can choose the path that gives you more freedom, security, room to breathe, or simply a better chance at building the kind of life you actually want.

You don’t owe anyone a financial sacrifice to prove that you’re a real scientist.

If I were in your shoes...

If you’re trying to decide whether to stay in academia or leave for a better-paying role, I would try to separate the decision from the guilt around it.

The guilt we learn in academia can make you feel like leaving means you wasted your training, disappointed your supervisor, gave up on your younger self, or admitted that you weren’t strong enough for the path. But none of that is true. What matters is what you want now and for your future.

So I would look at each option and think about it practically. How much will you earn? Where will you have to live? How long is the contract? What does the next step realistically look like? Will you be able to save? Will you be able to rest? Will you build skills that give you more options, or will you become more dependent on a path that’s already making you uneasy?

And if you do choose to leave, don’t worry about what anyone else thinks. The people who understand will understand, and the people who judge you for your choice won’t ever be convinced otherwise.

Make the choice that gives you the life you can want to live with, not the one that impresses or satisfies anyone else.

In My Orbit

This week, I finally watched The Drama with Zendaya and Robert Pattinson. I thought it had potential, but I wasn’t particularly thrilled with the movie. It was produced by A24, which has a bit of a cult following, but I’ve never really liked their movies.

I think they are bit too artsy for my taste, and they always strike me as a little odd and offbeat. I think that’s kind of the point, but it’s not my cup of tea!

There was no formal approval process, elaborate justification, and or awkward conversation where you had to convince him that your reason was worthy. If you had a doctor’s appointment, needed to be home for a repair, had a long stretch of writing to get through, or just knew you would work better somewhere quieter that day, you could send a quick message and work from home.

At the time, I knew this was a good thing, but I don’t think I fully understood how rare it was until I started hearing more stories from other PhD students. Within a few months of starting my PhD, I had heard from so many other students that they were constantly monitored, questioned, second-guessed, and overworked in their labs.

I was very lucky that this wasn’t my experience because my supervisor was supportive, caring, and treated the people in his lab with immense respect. He didn’t act like a PhD student’s commitment had to be measured by how often they were physically in the building. He didn’t assume that someone working from home was secretly doing nothing.

And I think part of the reason he understood this so well was because he applied the same logic to himself. He would work from home when he had a lot of writing to do and needed a quiet place without interruptions. He would work from home if he had a doctor’s appointment, or if someone was coming to fix something in his house, or if it was just too cold that day and he didn’t want to make the journey to the lab.

So many academic environments still treat that kind of flexibility as something dangerous. There’s this underlying fear that if students are given too much freedom, they will immediately take advantage of it, stop working, disappear, or fall behind on their research.

But I think that fear actually says more about the culture of the lab than it does about the students. Because in our lab, the flexibility didn’t make people careless. If anything, it made us all feel even more responsibility to step up to our obligations. We knew we were lucky to have that level of trust from our supervisor, and we didn’t want to abuse it.

So everyone in the lab published, collaborated, helped each other, prepared talks, wrote papers, ran analyses, planned experiments, and actually had the energy to do all those things without burning out. There were high standards, but those standards were attached to the quality of the science, not to whether someone could be seen sitting in the same building every single day.

When you’re reading papers, analyzing data, writing thesis chapters, preparing figures, debugging code, revising a manuscript, or thinking through a result, that doesn’t need to happen under fluorescent lights in a university building. I know for me personally, I wrote almost all of my thesis either at home or at a coffee shop.

Of course, there’s work that needs to happen in person. Labs need people there for experiments, meetings, training, equipment, collaboration, etc. But there’s a difference between needing people present because they genuinely need to be there and expecting them to be there even when it isn’t necessary or is actively detrimental to their productivity or energy.

I know the supervisors who don’t give this level of trust to their students genuinely believe they’re maintaining standards, building resilience, or teaching students what science requires. But in many cases, I think it actually has the opposite effect.

When you’re treated like a capable adult, you usually become more careful with the trust you are given. You don’t want to waste it or take advantage of it. You understand that the freedom exists because the expectations are real, and because someone believes you can manage yourself without being constantly monitored.

This environment asks you to develop judgement that you take with you the rest of your career. It helps you determine what kind of work requires collaboration and what kind requires solitude. It encourages you to think deeply about your time, energy, responsibilities, and the standards of your field to balance it all. It teaches you to truly become independent instead of just learning how to survive under someone else’s control.

And isn’t that supposed to be the point of a PhD? A doctoral program is meant to train someone into an independent researcher. You can’t tell students to become self-directed thinkers while also policing every hour of their day as if they’re children trying to skip school.

If you want students to become independent, you have to give them opportunities to practice independence. If you want them to make good decisions, you have to let them make decisions. If you want them to take ownership of their work, you have to stop treating accountability as something that can only happen under surveillance.

I don’t want to pretend like my PhD experience was a walk in the park, because no PhD is. There were hard periods, stressful deadlines, failed analyses, confusing results, and a lot of times when I wanted to give up.

But when I compare my experience to what many others went through, I know the culture of my lab made an enormous difference. The hard parts of my PhD were because of the work itself, not because I needed to constantly navigate someone else’s insecurity or need for control.

My supervisor taught me that high standards and humane leadership are not opposing forces. It showed me that people can be ambitious without being watched, productive without being controlled, and committed to their work without organizing their entire life around being seen.

A good PhD environment does not have to be built on surveillance, suspicion, or constant proof of commitment. Sometimes it really is as simple as trusting people to do their work, and letting them have a life while they do it.

If I were in your shoes...

If I were a PhD student trying to decide which lab to join, I would pay attention to how the supervisor talks about time.

The project, publications, funding, or where previous students ended up all obviously matter, but it’s important to learn what daily life in the lab actually feels like. Are students allowed to work from home when their work can be done remotely? Do people take holidays without guilt? Are appointments treated like normal parts of life?

So before joining a lab, I would try to speak to current students without the supervisor present and ask very direct questions. What time do people usually leave? What happens if someone needs a day at home to write? Does the supervisor care more about progress or physical presence? Do students feel comfortable being honest when they are overwhelmed or stuck?

I would also try to determine if people answer carefully or freely. If every student sounds like they are choosing their words very carefully, that probably tells you something.

If I were already in a PhD, I would try to be realistic about what kind of flexibility is actually possible given the nature of the work I was doing and the style of my supervisor.

Then I would make requests in a way that makes it easy to say yes. Instead of vaguely asking, “Can I work from home tomorrow?” I would say something like, “I’m going to work from home tomorrow so I can finish the analysis section and revise the figures without interruption. I’ll send you an update by the end of the day.”

And if your supervisor is very controlling, I would try to find ways to make it more bearable. Maybe you bring noise-cancelling headphones to the office while you write, and put on some background noise of a coffee shop to imagine you’re elsewhere. Or take a 5 minute walk once every hour to get some fresh air and a change of scenery. And keep reminding yourself you won’t be there forever.

In My Orbit

I just finished watching an action-thriller this week starring Bruce Willis and Sarah Jessica Parker called Striking Distance. I thought the movie was really well done, and had a great twist ending. I thought I guessed it a few minutes into the movie, but I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong.

The movie was also full of real live action scenes, and of course no CGI. It’s honestly amazing to look back at older movies and see what they used to do, and in my opinion it looks a thousand times better. Definitely one I would recommend to add to your list!

The older I get, the harder it has become not to compare where I am in my life to where my parents were at the same age. I know people say you shouldn’t do that because every generation has its own challenges, and I understand the point. My parents had difficulties I will never fully understand, and I don’t want to pretend that the world was just so much easier before I came along.

They worked hard, they were intelligent, they made sacrifices, and they deserved what they were able to build. But they also didn’t do anything particularly remarkable to get to the stage of affording a home.

They went to college, got good white collar jobs, worked hard for a few years, and eventually reached a point where they could afford their day to day life, save money, buy a house, and begin building the rest of their adulthood from a relatively stable foundation.

Of course, my own timeline is a bit different because I did a PhD. I didn’t start working properly until years after many of my friends, and I spent most of my twenties accepting low pay, delayed savings, and a slower entry into normal adult life because I believed the degree would eventually be worth the delay.

But even a lot of my friends who started working straight after university are nowhere near the position my parents were in at this age. Many of them have been employed for years, have done everything right, and still most of them have accepted that they may never own a house.

And I don’t think buying a house needs to be everyone’s goal. I don’t think there it’s some non-negotiable milestone, or that adulthood only counts if you have a driveway, a spare room, and a garden you complain about maintaining.

But I do think the inability for many people in my generation to buy a house represents a much bigger problem.

It’s not that I want my parent’s exact lives, or that I think the past was some perfect economic paradise. But a life that once seemed to follow from hard work, education, and a decent job now seems to require an almost absurd combination of timing, family help, dual income, high salary, luck, and avoiding one bad financial setback.

And on top of everything, I regularly see conversations about how younger people don’t want to work hard anymore.

That they don’t want to grind, sacrifice, or put in the work. The fact that they want some flexibility, decent pay, meaningful work, and a life outside their job gets misinterpreted as evidence that an entire generation has become soft.

But it’s becoming more and more difficult to take that argument seriously.

Most people I know are not refusing to work. They are working full-time, applying for better jobs, taking on side projects, freelancing, trying to build skills, moving for opportunities, dealing with unstable contracts, trying to save money, and still finding that the basic costs of life have become difficult to keep up with.

The issue is not that people don’t want to work, but that work no longer seems to buy what it used to. For example, The Economic Policy Institute shows that productivity has increased 92.4% since 1979, while hourly pay has only grown by 33.6%.

So when people say younger generations are lazy, I don’t really understand what they mean. Workers have helped create far more value over the last several decades, but wages have not grown anywhere near the same pace. People in my generation aren’t just imagining that their effort is bringing them less in return.

And I know this is more complicated than one statistic. Housing has its own problems. Healthcare, childcare, interest rates, stagnant wages, asset prices, and the disappearance of many stable middle-class pathways all have their own explanations. But when you put everything together, the result is still the same. A normal life has become much more expensive to achieve through normal work.

There was a time when a minimum wage job could meaningfully contribute toward paying for college. Now someone can graduate from college, work full-time, and still struggle to afford rent, groceries, transportation, and one unexpected bill in the same month.

That is a complete breakdown in the relationship between effort and reward.

And now, we’re being told that AI is going to make us even more productive. It will help people write faster, code more, automate repetitive work, reduce costs, accelerate output, and allow companies to do more with fewer people.

I understand why people are excited about that, it really can make certain tasks easier, make knowledge more accessible, and help people move much faster than they otherwise could.

But I also think we are skipping over the most important question. If AI creates all this new productivity, where is the value actually going to go?

Because if the last several decades have taught us anything, it’s that productivity gains do not automatically translate to better lives for workers. More productivity doesn’t mean higher wages, shorter hours, cheaper housing, more affordable education, or less financial anxiety.

They can just as easily become higher expectations. Now you need to produce more output with the same salary, so there will be smaller teams carrying larger workloads. There are fewer entry-level jobs because the basic tasks that used to train people into a career have been automated away. There’s even more pressure to be constantly adaptable in a market that already punishes people for not having the exact skills an employer wants at the exact moment they happen to want them.

So I don’t think that younger people are upset or concerned because they expected life to be easy. Many studied, worked hard, delayed gratification, and tried to be realistic. But now even the most basic version of stability their parents had feels increasingly out of reach despite all the effort they’ve put in.

So if productivity keeps rising, technology keeps improving, and companies keep becoming more efficient, but ordinary people are less able to afford housing, food, family life, transportation, and security, then the issue is not that people are asking for too much.

It’s that too much of what they produce isn’t coming back to them.

If I were in your shoes...

If I were starting my career right now, I would try to move away from the idea that some hard work and education will be enough.

I know that sounds bleak, but I actually just think it’s important to have a clearer direction now. Hard work still matters, but it has to be attached to the right opportunities, the right market, and the right form of leverage.

So the first thing I would do is get very specific about what I want out of my future.

Do I want to buy a house? Do I want to live in an expensive city? Do I want children? Do I want flexibility? Do I want to support family? Do I want to travel? Do I want a career that gives me status, money, autonomy, or some combination of the three?

This gives you a starting place to work backwards from and determine the most viable paths that will get you to your goals. It can also help if you answer these questions: What income would I actually need to afford the life I keep saying I want? What does rent cost where I want to live? What would a mortgage require? What would childcare cost? How much would I need to save every month for the next five years to have any real security?

I think a lot of people avoid doing this because it can be depressing, but I also think it can help you prioritize properly and build the life you want. If the job you’re in, the field you’re entering, or the career path you’re pursuing can’t realistically get you the life you want, it’s better to know that early.

I would also try to build a life with more than one route forward. One employer can easily decide you’re no longer needed, or an academic path can close unexpectedly. It’s not to say you should live in constant fear, but that you should try to avoid becoming too dependent on any single institution to make your life work.

So I would build skills that travel across industries, maintain relationships outside my immediate field, save more money than I think I’ll need for emergencies, etc.

When you know you have some power and control over your life, it feels a lot better.

In My Orbit

In order to escape the stress of the world, I often like to disappear into a movie, and this week that was Voicemails for Isabelle. It has Zoey Deutch from Set It Up and Nick Robinson from Live Simon, and I was actually very pleasantly surprised by this movie.

I was expecting it to be a pretty cheesy, so bad it’s good kind of Netflix rom-com. But I actually thought they did a great job of creating a unique story that struck the right balance between genuinely funny and heartfelt/touching. I thought it was good enough that I would actually watch it again, which is how I know I really liked a movie.

For the last year and a half, science has felt like a minefield. Academic funding feels more fragile, permanent academic roles remain almost impossibly scarce, and the postdoc path, which was already unstable, now seems even more like a holding room rather than a proper stepping stone.

And for a long time, even if people knew academia was a bit of a gamble, there was some comfort in the idea that industry existed somewhere outside the university walls. Maybe you wouldn’t become a professor, but you could go into biotech, pharma, data science, clinical research, consulting, medical affairs, product, policy, or one of many other careers.

But right now, that doesn’t look like a viable option either. Every day there seems to be another layoff announcement, restructuring, hiring freeze, or another scientist posting that they’ve applied to hundreds of jobs and still can’t get a single interview.

So when I spoke with this person that told me that nearly half their cohort was unemployed, I wasn’t necessarily surprised, but I was still devastated to hear it. It seems the traditional pillars of academic routes are crumbling at the exact moment the industry sector is undergoing a parallel contraction.

And some of the people who are struggling the most with those circumstances are recent PhD graduates. For generations, the pursuit of a doctorate was built on a foundational idea of deferred payoff, where where you willingly trade your twenties, accept meager stipends, and delay the standard milestones of adulthood for the promise that your hard-won expertise will eventually guarantee you a secure place in the world.

Watching that concept be unilaterally torn up by a horrible market is not just financially devastating, but demoralizing. People who spent around 10 years in higher education now have nothing to show for it. They are unemployed PhDs, which honestly seems like an oxymoron but sadly isn’t.

And once you have the PhD, you’re kind of stuck. On the one side, you have a PhD job market obsessed with hiring the perfect fit rather than looking for foundational capability. This has transformed hiring into an automated checklist where adaptability and raw intelligence are secondary considerations.

So If you don’t possess the precise therapeutic modality experience, projects with the exact proprietary software, or the specific number of years in a commercial lab on your resume, your application simply vanishes into the digital ether. It’s no longer enough to be an exceptional problem-solver who can master a new discipline in a matter of weeks. The modern hiring system demands a plug-and-play candidate who matches a hyper-specific set of keywords.

This is especially troubling because there’s nothing PhD students can do to circumvent this issue. How are you supposed to guess what skills/techniques will be in demand 5-7 years in the future when you’re starting your PhD and selecting a project? It’s impossible, and just a matter of luck if your project happens to align with industry’s demands when you graduate.

Then on the other side, if you try applying to roles that don’t require a PhD just to start working, support yourself, and start gaining that desired experience, now you’re overqualified, too expensive, or just simply ineligible for the role.

I love the advice I see online giving students tips for how to transition into industry. Things like networking, tailoring your resume, and emailing hiring managers can all be great tips.

But sometimes, I think we need to acknowledge there are some structural problems that are out of any one person’s control. If a graduate is unemployed, it’s not necessarily because they haven’t applied enough, networked properly, or edited their resume enough. Sometimes it’s just a bad market or they graduated at an inopportune time.

So I don’t want to tell people that everything happens for a reason, or that the right opportunity is just around the corner, or that persistence automatically turns into reward if you wait long enough.

But I do think it’s important to not be hopeless and instead just be realistic.

If you’re looking for a role right now, keep going. I hope you keep refining your materials, asking for help, expanding your search, and finding people who can make the process feel a little less isolating. I hope you stay open to careers that you may not have known about when you started your PhD.

But if you continue to struggle, it’s vital to give yourself the grace that the system is withholding from you, remembering that a broken market is a reflection of economic volatility, not your worth as a scientist.

If I were in your shoes...

If I were sitting in the wreckage of this current market, here’s how I would approach the situation.

First, I would try to separate my career success from my self-worth. I personally struggle with this, where sometimes I see my failures in work as personal failures and that I’m somehow worth less as a person if I’m not succeeding. I really don’t think that’s productive, and that’s why I’d want to remind myself to be realistic.

If you keep reminding yourself that you’re doing everything you can, and that the market is just in a tough place, then you can let those rejections roll off your shoulders and maintain the will to keep going.

Next, I would shift away from the volume game on massive job boards. Because large enterprises rely so heavily on rigid Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) that filter out anyone without the exact criteria, your chances of breaking through the automated wall are dismal.

I would redirect my energy entirely toward smaller, mid-sized biotech firms or agile startups where human gatekeepers still outnumber automated algorithms and where a hiring manager actually has the autonomy to value raw adaptability over a perfect keyword match.

Something else I would do is build micro-proofs of industry alignment. If you’re repeatedly told you lack a specific industry skill or software proficiency, spend a few weeks creating a small, public-facing project, a technical write-up, or a case study that explicitly demonstrates your mastery of that tool.

Having a tangible link to a portfolio item attached to your resume or LinkedIn profile can often override a lack of formal experience in that specific niche.

In My Orbit

I just finished watching one of the latest Harlan Coben' book adaptations on Netflix called I Will Find You. I’ve always been a big fan of mysteries/thrillers, and I’ve seen several of his other books adapted into these limited series, but I wasn’t a huge fan of this one.

I thought it was an interesting premise and really drew me in during the first episode, but the writing progressively got worse. In particular, I noticed this trend I’ve seen people point out about modern media where shows and movies are now being written assuming you’re on your phone and not paying attention.

So instead of something happening and them letting you draw the logical conclusion, everything is said out loud and spelled out. As an example, in an old movie or show they might have just said “The DNA at the crime scene didn’t match X,” and it would be left at that. In this show, they would then say “So that means that X didn’t commit the crime.”

This sort of thing kept happening over and over throughout the show and it was honestly frustrating! It’s disappointing because I think the story and characters were good, but the dialogue was a major let down.

I wasn’t arguing that PhD programs should be easy. Research is full of challenges and students will always need to work hard and have perseverance to make it through their degree. And some of that challenge actually helps you grow and become a stronger scientist.

But I don’t think overworking students by making them stay in the lab until the supervisor leaves produces better scientists. I don’t think PhD students should have to worry about whether they can afford their groceries this month because their stipend is so low.

I also firmly believe that if most PhD students eventually leave academia, then it’s not unreasonable to expect programs to offer more meaningful career support instead of pretending every student will land a faculty job.

Somehow, these opinions were interpreted as a generational embarrassment.

The person who messaged me seemed to think that by talking about these issues publicly, I was making people in my age group look weak, entitled, and unwilling to do difficult things. The underlying argument was essentially that other people had suffered through the system before us, and by asking whether parts of it could be improved, I was indicating that my generation didn’t have the same strength, seriousness, or discipline of those who came before.

I’ve noticed this aspect of academic culture where almost any criticism of the system is quickly reinterpreted as a personal defect in the person making the criticism.

If you say the stipend is too low, someone will tell you that they lived on less. If you say the workload is unhealthy, someone will tell you that science has always required sacrifice. If you say the career support is inadequate, someone will tell you that no one helped them and they turned out fine. If you say you struggled, someone will imply you were simply not suited for the path.

The conversation always shifts blame away from the system and onto the person speaking up about their experience. And it’s odd because everyone seems to know, at least privately, that a PhD can be extremely difficult in ways that have very little to do with actual complexity of research itself.

People know the pay can be low, students can be isolated, some supervisors treat their students more like machines than humans, etc., but if you talk about it and encourage some change, the tables turn on you.

Suddenly, you’re not just describing a set of conditions, but complaining. You’re being entitled, weak, or difficult.

And this is really convenient because if the issue is just that younger people are weak, then no one has to seriously ask whether the system is poorly designed. If the issue is that this generation wants everything to be easy, then no one has to distinguish between difficulty that is essential to scientific training and difficulty that is simply the result of bad incentives, bad management, or institutional neglect.

A PhD should be hard. It’s not a comfortable process, and it’s long and grueling. Research will always be uncertain, experiments will fail, papers are dense, and you could spend weeks or months working on something that leads you to a dead end. That is all part of being a scientist and isn’t something a PhD student should be shielded from.

A PhD should teach you how to sit with difficult problems, deal with ambiguity, become more independent, and how to follow a question when there is no obvious answer waiting for you at the end.

None of that is a problem, it’s actually very much necessary to develop great scientists. But we don’t need to pretend every other difficulty attached to the PhD is also some sacred part of becoming a scientist.

Not being paid enough doesn’t makes someone intellectually rigorous. Being afraid to take time off doesn’t produce better results. Constantly dealing with exhaustion, isolation, and financial stress does not make you a better scientist.

I’m grateful for what I learned during my PhD, and I can appreciate it for what it was while simultaneously acknowledging there were certain parts of the experience that were unnecessary. And I don’t feel the need to see the next generation suffer through the same problems just because that’s the way it’s always been done.

If a company paid people poorly, gave them unclear expectations, offered little career development, and framed burnout as passion, most people would point out that’s a management problem, not an issue with the individual employees. So I’m not sure why it gets flipped when it happens in academia.

And it’s sad to see the people who were harmed by parts of the system be converted into defenders of the same conditions that made their own lives harder. I get why it happens. When you suffer through something, it can be hard to admit that some of it may have been in vain. It can feel like admitting that part of your pain was wasted, and I think people would often rather believe their struggle was essential than accept that some of it was just unnecessary.

But I don’t think we owe broken systems that kind of loyalty. The next generation shouldn’t have to repeat the same problems just so the previous generation can feel that their own suffering was properly vindicated.

There are better ways to respect what people went through. You can acknowledge that previous generations worked incredibly hard, that people built meaningful careers under difficult conditions, and even that academia has produced brilliant scientists, important discoveries, and people who genuinely love the work.

And you can still say that the system should be better than it is. Those ideas aren’t mutually exclusive.

The goal isn’t to make PhD programs easy, but to investigate which parts are actually serving the purpose they claim to serve. Are they making people better scientists? Are they helping people think more clearly? Are they helping people do better work? Are they preparing people for meaningful careers?

And if asking those kinds of questions makes my generation look bad to some people, then maybe looking bad isn’t the worst thing.

If I were in your shoes

If you are currently in a PhD program, I would try hard to just focus on yourself and not worry about what other people say. There will always be someone who tells you they had it worse, that they worked longer hours, had less money, a harsher supervisor, or some other reason to say you’re overreacting.

But none of that should invalidate your experience. And trying to suppress how you feel because you think other people had it worse will do nothing except make you feel bad.

If you are having a rough time, I would try to be creative with handling it because you have other options than just dropping out of your program. Maybe you find a hobby outside of work that you love so much it replenishes your battery at the end of every tough day. Or maybe you vent with your friends every weekend and get every horrible feeling off your chest. Or you start a club and start advocating for better conditions for students at your university.

A PhD is a wonderful time to learn as much as possible and to develop discipline and independence. It’s a shame that some people don’t recognize that there’s a difference between being challenged and being depleted, but just know there’s nothing wrong with you for struggling in a system that has a lot of room for improvement.

In my orbit

I grew up playing pretty much every Pokémon game and watching every show/movie, and I recently downloaded Pokémon Leaf Green on my Nintendo Switch. I honestly prefer the pixelated, old-style games partially because of nostalgia, and partially because I genuinely think they’re better than the modern games.

There’s a certain charm that comes with the old games, and in my opinion a much higher difficulty level, and I’m so happy to be able to play this game I loved so much on a modern console.

This student had not been home since the Christmas holidays. They wanted to take a Friday and a Monday off so they could fly back and spend a long weekend with their family, and they did the responsible thing by asking their supervisor several weeks ahead of time.

And the response wasn’t exactly a refusal, but it also wasn’t an approval. Their supervisor told them the lab was too busy, and that if they took those two days away, they would need to come in the following weekend to make up the missed time.

Taking a couple days off should be a very ordinary request, and yet somehow it becomes heavy with meaning. It stops being a logistical question and becomes an assessment of character. Are you committed enough? Are you willing to sacrifice enough? Do you really understand what this path requires?

And I think it’s so interesting that taking time away is something you need to make up. As if seeing your family after months away creates a deficit and that time off, even when requested properly, is not part of working life but an exception that has to be neutralized through repayment.

There are always practical realities in research. Experiments don’t politely arrange themselves around holidays, family visits, or emotional bandwidth. Cells need passaging, mice need care, samples degrade, deadlines arrive inconveniently, and I understand that there are moments when timing matters.

But the larger issue is not whether every request can be accommodated under every circumstance, but that rest is often looked down upon in the academic research community.

A few months ago, I heard a similar story from someone else. They had asked for time off, and instead of simply discussing the practicalities, their supervisor questioned whether they were really serious about becoming a scientist.

This behavior and mindset takes an ordinary human need and converts it into a professional indictment. It suggests that wanting rest, family, distance, or a life outside the lab is not merely inconvenient, but revealing. The request becomes evidence that the student is not just someone who misses home and their family, but a person whose devotion to the path needs to be questioned.

And once that logic enters the room, the conversation is no longer about the days away, but whether you even belong.

This is exactly how academia gets away with punishing people. It doesn’t explicitly forbid things, but it makes people feel ashamed of normal, human needs so they eventually stop asking for them.

You can technically take vacation, but you should think very carefully before using it. You can technically have boundaries, but you shouldn’t make them too visible. You can technically have a life outside science, but it should remain sufficiently under the radar and flexible so that it never inconveniences the institution.

This is how a culture can claim to support wellbeing while still rewarding the performance of total availability. The policy can say one thing, while the atmosphere says something entirely different.

And PhD students learn the atmosphere very quickly. They learn which requests are safe and which ones will be remembered, whether their supervisor sees time off as normal, irritating, or vaguely insulting, if mentioning burnout invites support or suspicion, and whether family obligations are treated as real, or as excuses that people should just overcome.

I think part of the problem is that academia often confuses devotion with excellence. The student who is always present looks serious, the student who never asks for much looks disciplined, and the student who absorbs unreasonable expectations without complaint looks mature, committed, and resilient.

But presence is not the same as thoughtfulness. Exhaustion is not the same as discipline. And the ability to tolerate poor conditions without protest is not the same as scientific potential.

In some ways, it may even select for the wrong things. A good scientist needs curiosity, precision, skepticism, patience, creativity, and the ability to keep returning to difficult problems without losing their mind. None of those qualities are strengthened by making someone feel guilty for taking two days to see their family.

If anything, the opposite is usually true. People do better work when they are not permanently depleted. They think more clearly when they have some portion of their life that is just theirs and hasn’t been overtaken by work. They become more durable when rest is treated as part of the system rather than an emergency measure only allowed after they have visibly deteriorated.

And yet the mythology persists that the serious scientist is the one who stays late, sacrifices, and wants it badly enough to put everything else second.

All of this tells young researchers to demonstrate their seriousness not through the quality of their ideas, but through their willingness to disappear into the work.

Then, when people eventually become bitter, exhausted, isolated, or desperate to leave academia altogether, everyone is surprised. But it shouldn’t be surprising that people eventually get tired of a system that doesn’t let them have a life and also doesn’t pay well.

These types of issues are especially complicated in PhD programs because of the power dynamics. In many jobs, if your manager is unreasonable, that’s still unpleasant and sometimes career-limiting, but there are often clearer structures around leave, HR, transfers, documentation, and accountability.

A PhD is a different story. Your supervisor shapes your project, funding, authorship, timeline, reputation, conference opportunities, reference letters, and future career prospects. They may be the person who determines whether you are seen as promising, difficult, independent, lazy, brilliant, unfocused, or worth recommending.

So when people say, “Well, students have vacation days,” I always think the more important question is whether they can actually use them without consequence. And this is where the official version of academia often diverges from the lived one. The university may have policies about annual leave, wellbeing, and student support, and the handbook may describe a clear process. But the student still has to walk back into the lab on Monday and deal with the one person who controls their daily life for years on end.

That’s why telling someone to just report it is often more complicated than it seems. Of course sometimes reporting is necessary and the right thing to do because an informal resolution will never work.

But students are not irrational for worrying about retaliation, coldness, reputational damage, or subtle punishment.

I don’t think the answer is pretending research should always be easy or perfectly balanced. There are times where work becomes intense, experiments go wrong, deadlines compress, and everyone has to be more flexible than they would like.

But temporary intensity is very different from a culture that defaults to treating rest as an issue.

A healthy lab could say that it’s a difficult week to take time off, so let’s figure out how to make sure everything is covered. An unhealthy lab just says that if you were serious or committed, you wouldn’t have even asked.

One treats the student as an adult inside a shared system of responsibilities, and the other treats their need for rest as evidence of insufficient devotion.

If I were in your shoes

If I were a PhD student trying to take time off, I would try to keep the request clear, written, and professional.

You don’t need to justify the time off or why you deserve it. I would just state the dates, explain what will be covered before I leave, and identify anything that may need attention while I’m gone. In a healthy environment, that should be enough.

If the supervisor pushes back, I would ask what specific work needs coverage rather than accepting the vague idea that the lab is too busy as a permanent reason no one can leave. There might be a real logistical issue, and you might need to adjust your plans for a different week.

But if not, hopefully this would be enough to calm any fears your supervisor may have about you being away from the lab for a few days.

In my orbit

Hulu recently added a bunch of Jeopardy! episodes and I’ve been burning through them. I love trivia and game shows, it’s such an easy thing to just put on while you’re folding laundry or doing something else.

I sometimes think I wouldn’t do half bad on the show, but then other times I think the pressure would get to me and I’d end up being one of the people that ends up negative and doesn’t even get to go to final jeopardy. I don’t ever want to find out!

I remember being very confused by that feedback, not because I thought I necessarily deserved the job, but because I had just spent years earning the exact credential they listed in the job description. Then, once I showed up with that credential, it somehow became part of the reason I wasn’t the right fit.

At the time, I assumed this was mostly my fault. Maybe I had explained my research badly, I hadn’t translated my experience well enough, or maybe I sounded too much like someone who had just come from a university instead of someone who already knew how to operate inside a company.

And to some extent, that may have been true. I do think PhD students need to learn how to explain their work a little differently when they apply to industry roles. Most companies don’t actually care about your thesis, and they’re not going to automatically understand why the skills you built during your doctorate matter outside your specific field.

But the more I went through the industry transition, the more I realized that this problem was not just about how PhDs communicate. A lot of the difficulty comes from the fact that companies often ask for PhDs while being very unsure of what they actually want from people who have them.

PhD students are told over and over that they need to reframe their experience. They need to rewrite their CV, learn the right language, talk about projects instead of research, explain outcomes instead of methods, and prove they can operate outside an academic environment. So many of us take that seriously because we know the transition is real, and we know a company is a different environment than an academic lab.

But then you apply to a role that explicitly requires a PhD, and the interview process makes you feel like you have to convince them that the degree isn’t a liability.

If a role requires a PhD, then the person applying is by default going to have academic experience. And if you don’t want someone with an academic mindset and training, then why require the PhD?

Of course, there are habits that need to be different if you’re working in industry versus academia. A company can’t operate like a dissertation committee, and not every decision can wait until every possible variable has been accounted for. Industry usually requires faster judgment, clearer communication, more comfort with incomplete information, and a stronger understanding of what matters commercially.

But companies train people into new environments all the time. A new employee usually has to learn the company’s systems, tools, workflows, priorities, internal politics, and expectations. Even someone with the right degree and the right background still has to learn how the organization actually works once they get there.

For some reason, with PhDs, that learning curve is not seen as normal onboarding, but as evidence that the person is too academic, inexperienced, or difficult to translate into the role.

And this leaves new PhD graduates in a difficult position. You spent years getting the degree that these jobs require, and then they tell you that your lack of industry makes you risky. It’s like you are expected to have the maturity and expertise of someone who completed a doctorate, but also the practical experience of someone who spent those same years inside a company.

If a company wants someone who already has industry experience, understands corporate workflows, knows how product or business priorities are set, and can immediately operate without much training, that’s completely reasonable. Some roles genuinely need people with several years of direct industry experience. But if that’s the case, the job description should say so clearly instead of hiding a mid-level expectation inside an entry-level posting.

And if a company does actually want to hire new PhDs, then it should be prepared for the fact that they will have academic backgrounds. They may need help learning what to emphasize, what to let go of, how to communicate differently, and how to make decisions in a faster and more commercially constrained environment.

That’s the whole point of hiring someone at the beginning of a transition. What doesn’t make sense is requiring a PhD and then acting surprised that the person in front of you sounds like someone who just finished one.

If I were in your shoes...

If you are a PhD student or recent graduate trying to move into industry, I would still take the translation process seriously even though I think companies need to do much better.

Most people outside your field will not automatically understand what your research required, how hard it was, or why it should matter to them. You need to make that clear without sounding defensive or expecting them to fill in the gaps for you.

I would practice explaining your work in terms of decisions, problems, constraints, tools, outcomes, and tradeoffs. What did you actually have to figure out? What changed because of your work? What did you build, analyze, manage, improve, or communicate? What kinds of uncertainty did you deal with, and how did you make progress anyway?

I would also try to get some kind of applied experience as early as possible. That could be an internship, consulting project, freelance work, startup experience, industry collaboration, public writing, portfolio project, or even informational conversations that help you understand how people in companies talk about work.

It doesn’t always solve for this issue (I did an industry internship and still was told this!), but it’s at least evidence you can point to for your ability to think in an industry environment.

I would also try not to internalize every rejection as evidence that you’re the problem. Sometimes your interview could have been better, your CV could have been clearer, or your examples could have been more relevant. But sometimes the role is simply asking for a person who doesn’t really exist, or the company is hoping to find someone with more experience willing to take an entry-level salary.

In My Orbit

I’ve always been a pretty big tennis fan, and I was extremely ill this week so while I was doing nothing trying to recover on the couch I watched the nearly 6 hour match between Frances Tiafoe and Matteo Arnaldi at Roland-Garros. It was amazing to see them go back and forth the entire match, and continue playing at the highest level for so many hours. I can’t imagine the energy in the stadium that night, and I hope to one day attend in-person to experience it myself!

I spend a lot of time looking at job postings for PhDs, partly because I write about the academic and industry job market, but also because I’m still trying to make sense of what this training actually prepares people for. The titles and companies change, the language shifts slightly from posting to posting, but the same pattern keeps appearing where scientists are being underpaid even in industry.

This particular role was not at a tiny startup trying to preserve its runway or an academic lab trying to stretch a grant across too many people. It was at a Fortune 500 company, an institution with global revenue, entire departments devoted to compensation strategy, and leadership teams that understand exactly how valuable science becomes once it turns into patents, platforms, approvals, and products.

They wanted a PhD, multiple years of experience, and the ability to perform specialized scientific work, yet the salary range looked closer to what I would expect for a fresh undergraduate, not someone who spent 10 years training.

I wasn’t bothered by the number itself, but how much time and sacrifice was required to even be eligible for a role paying so little. By the time someone is a PhD-level researcher with several years of experience, they are often in their 30s or older, having spent years moving through stipends, postdocs, temporary contracts, immigration uncertainty, publication pressure, grant deadlines, and the constant postponement of ordinary financial adulthood.

To then arrive at the industry job market and discover that even a major company can treat that expertise as minimally valuable is frustrating and saddening.

The usual explanation is supply and demand, and I think that explanation is part of it. Academia produces more PhDs than the academic or industry market can comfortably absorb because universities need people to teach, generate data, maintain labs, write papers, support grants, and keep the research machine moving.

The PhD is presented as training, which it is, but it’s also cheap labor that the system depends on and benefits from. So even if there isn’t a need in the market for that many trained scientists, universities have no incentive to offer fewer PhD positions.

And the reality of being undervalued and underpaid for years on end follows scientists long after they leave the university. If a person spends five or six years on a low stipend, then several more years in a postdoc, their understanding of what counts as a good salary can become warped by comparison. An underpaid industry role may still feel like a rescue if the alternative was another year in academia or another temporary contract. And I think that’s part of why pay stays low because many scientists have already been trained to expect less.

I also understand that some scientific roles might be paid less because scientists have fewer outside options. A project manager can often move between biotech, software, finance, healthcare, consumer goods, consulting, or almost any other sector, and the broad portability of that function forces employers to compete with a wider labor market. The same is often true for marketing, HR, analytics, strategy, operations, and commercial roles, where the domain may change but the basic function remains legible across industries.

A molecular biologist, medicinal chemist, protein engineer, immunologist, pharmacologist, or structural biologist may have many transferable skills, but the exact work they trained to do exists in a much smaller universe of employers.

But again, that’s why I find this frustrating. If scientists are paid less because they have fewer direct exits, then the salary is not actually reflecting the importance or even revenue or profits tied to their work, but just how much leverage they have.

And I think that’s why the comparison with other functions inside biotech is important to me. I don’t think that the business-side workers are overpaid, or that every scientist is automatically worth more because they have a PhD.

But I’m tired of the argument that biotech is incapable of paying more because of the nature of the industry. If the risks, costs, and long timelines associated with biotech prevented them from matching salaries in other industries, then that should apply to all job functions. The same industry that can find money for strategy, product, marketing, business development, commercial operations, and executive leadership somehow suddenly has their hands tied when it’s time to pay the people doing the underlying science.

Of course research creates value on a different timeline than sales or marketing. And it’s harder to tie one experiment, assay, figure, or mechanistic insight to revenue in the same direct way a company might attribute value to a commercial campaign or product launch.

And the kind of value a scientist brings is easy to underprice because it often becomes visible only when things go wrong. A good scientist may save a company months by recognizing that an assay is misleading, that a target is weaker than it looks, or that a result is not reproducible. The financial value of those decisions may be enormous, but it will rarely appear in a clean metric the way a sales number does.

But all of this should just make the valuation of scientific labor more complicated, not something to be ignored. Without research, there is no asset to protect, no product to launch, no approval to celebrate, no market to enter, and no strategy deck sophisticated enough to compensate for the absence of something real at the center of the company.

Scientists are passionate people. No one would be able to stay committed to a specific research question for years on end if they didn’t care. And I don’t think science can ever be a purely transactional career stripped of curiosity or purpose.

But that passion shouldn’t be exploited, and wanting proper compensation isn’t something to be ashamed of. Unfortunately, I think academia is very good at cultivating that shame. It teaches people that low pay is part of training, exhaustion is part of commitment, delayed stability is part of becoming a scientist, and wanting more means you don’t love the work enough.

Then industry inherits a labor force already accustomed to scarcity and doesn’t have to invent the psychology from scratch. A company only has to offer something better than a stipend, postdoc, or another unstable academic contract, and suddenly a salary can feel generous even when it’s still far below what the level of training should command.

This is why industry being better than academia is a poor standard. It lets companies look generous by comparison to a system that already set the floor too low. It also keeps scientists locked in a comparison that benefits employers more than workers, because the reference point is not the value of the expertise, the cost of the training, or the contribution to the business, but the struggle of the previous stage.

A company can say it is simply responding to the market, and in a some sense that may be true. But the market didn’t fall from the sky. It was produced by university funding models, publication incentives, prestige hierarchies, weak labor protections, poor career transparency, and the long-standing habit of treating scientists as people who should be grateful for proximity to meaningful work.

If I were in your shoes…

If I were a PhD student, postdoc, or early-career scientist looking at this market, I would try to separate the market’s assessment of my leverage from the actual value of my ability. A low offer may tell you something about the role, the company, the geography, the labor supply, or the employer’s bargaining power, but it doesn’t have to become a referendum on the worth of your training.

I would also start studying salaries and searching for a job before you graduate so you don’t take something in desperation. I would compare roles across company size, function, location, seniority, and skill set, paying particular attention to adjacent paths where scientific training still matters but the labor market may offer more leverage. Regulatory affairs, medical writing, clinical operations, technical sales, product, data science, bioinformatics, business development, scientific communications, and medical affairs are all valuable paths as well.

The other thing I would do is make my academic labor easily understood by people outside academia. I would learn how to describe the project I managed, the collaboration I built, the ambiguous data I interpreted, the workflow I improved, the experiment I designed, the technical decision I made, or the moment my judgment changed the direction of a project. Academic work often contains more strategy, project management, communication, and decision-making than the job market can immediately see, which means the burden is often on the scientist to translate it so a company can appreciate the value you will bring.

If an offer comes, I would also negotiate if possible. Ask how the level was determined, whether there is flexibility in the range, what distinguishes the next title, how promotion timelines work, and whether salary, bonus, relocation, title, remote flexibility, or professional development support can move. You may not get everything, but asking some questions doesn’t hurt either.

In my orbit

This week I was in the mood to watch an older movie, so I watched The First Wives Club. I think it’s a really funny movie, and has the perfect 90s vibes to it. It’s about a group of women working together to get some justice against their ex-husbands, and it’s quite clever. If you want something that’s feel-good, heartfelt, and feels like a little escape from the world, I would recommend it!

I know that 23 is not an unusual age to start a PhD. In many academic environments, it’s actually perfectly normal. You finish your undergraduate degree, maybe do a master’s, find a supervisor, apply for funding, and keep moving through the system before you have too much time to second-guess yourself.

And that’s basically what I did. At the end of my undergraduate degree, I decided I wanted to continue with a master’s. Then, almost as soon as I started the master’s, I decided I should do a PhD. I was worried about wasting time, so I rushed through the master’s in a year and started my PhD two weeks after I finished.

At the time, I wanted to keep my momentum, but looking back I think it was also partly motivated by fear. I had spent most of my life being rewarded for moving quickly through education. Do well in one stage, get accepted into the next, keep your grades high, impress the right people, and try not to fall behind whatever timeline you’ve built in your head.

The problem is that a PhD is not just the next academic step. It’s a big decision that can shape your finances, professional identity, relationships, confidence, and the kind of work you pursue for years afterward.

And I’m not sure I understood that at 23. I knew how to be a good student. I knew how to study, apply for programs, write personal statements, and follow the next obvious academic milestone. But I had very little sense of what I wanted my actual working life to look like. I had never worked a full-time job. I had never earned a real salary. I had never spent enough time in a company to understand how different the incentives, pressures, expectations, and opportunities could be outside academia.

I thought I knew what I wanted because I liked research, science, and the idea of becoming an expert in something. And I did genuinely like those things. But liking science is not the same as knowing you want to spend your 20s in a PhD program or understanding what research careers actually look like. Wanting to become an expert is not the same as knowing whether the kind of expertise you are building will lead to the life and work you want afterward.

That distinction seems obvious now, but it really wasn’t then. At the time, I had an academic understanding of the world. I knew what professors valued and what looked impressive on paper. I knew that doing a PhD sounded like a serious, respectable, ambitious choice. I also knew that leaving academia, even temporarily, felt like a risk, because I had internalized this idea that stepping away meant losing momentum.

But if I had worked for a couple of years before starting my PhD, I think I would have understood the decision differently. Work wouldn’t have magically revealed my entire future to me, but it would have at least given me a comparison point.

I would have learned what it felt like to work in a company. I would have seen what kinds of roles existed beyond the narrow set of academic outcomes I knew. I would have had a better sense of what skills actually mattered in industry, what kinds of work I enjoyed, what environment I wanted to be in, and whether the jobs I was eventually interested in even required a PhD in the first place.

I think a lot of students pursue graduate school because they’re trying to keep doors open. But if you spend years earning a credential for doors that did not require it, you miss the chance to build the experience, savings, network, and confidence that might have helped you walk through them earlier.

I also think about the financial side more now than I did then. If I had worked for a few years before starting, I could have saved money, invested earlier, and built some financial cushion before entering a phase where money was going to be tight.

People often talk about graduate training as if time is the main sacrifice. But the financial opportunity cost is also real. You’re not only spending years in training. You’re often delaying savings, retirement contributions, full-time work experience, and stability that many people outside academia start building much earlier.

To be clear, I still don’t regret doing my PhD. It changed the way I think, write, solve problems, and understand the world. It gave me a level of resilience and intellectual independence that I probably wouldn’t have developed in the same way elsewhere. I also know many people who started the process young and made exactly the right decision for themselves.

So this isn’t an argument that everyone should wait. But I do want more students to feel allowed to wait without interpreting that pause as failure, uncertainty, or lack of ambition.

The pressure to keep moving can become its own trap. You finish one thing and immediately start looking for the next credential, acceptance letter, title, or proof that you’re still progressing. Before long, you’re making decisions that affect your entire life because they look like the next logical achievement, not because you’ve had enough time to think through if you actually want them.

A year or two of working outside academia isn’t a waste of time or a detour. It can help you make a more informed decision, and it could also help you enter a PhD with more financial stability, more professional context, and a clearer understanding of why you’re there. Or it might show you that you don’t need or want the PhD at all. Either outcome is useful.

There’s so much pressure on young people to decide quickly, especially if they’ve been successful in school. The assumption is that high-achieving students should keep climbing. But you shouldn’t treat your life like a sequence of boxes you need to check off as quickly as possible.

You don’t need to make every decision early for it to count, you don’t need to rush into the next impressive thing just because it’s available to you, and you don’t need to prove your ambition by committing to a path before you have enough information to understand if it’s the right path for you.

You have your whole life ahead of you. Taking a couple years to make a decision isn’t the end of the world, and will likely save you time in the long run.

If I were in your shoes

If you’re unsure about doing a PhD, I would encourage you to take the time to explore other options before you commit to it.

Look up job descriptions. Pay attention to whether a PhD is required, preferred, or simply one of several possible backgrounds. There’s a big difference between a role that truly needs doctoral-level training and a role where a master’s degree plus two years of strong experience would be just as competitive.

I would also talk to people who chose different paths. Not only professors and current PhD students because their advice will naturally be shaped by the academic system. Talk to people who left after undergrad, people who stopped after a master’s, people who did a PhD and stayed in academia, people who did a PhD and left, and people who work in roles you think you might want one day.

Ask them what their days actually look like, what skills they use, what they wish they had done earlier, and if the PhD helped them, delayed them, or did a bit of both.

And if you can work for a year or two before deciding, I would seriously consider it. Experience gives you information that school and talking to other people simply can’t. It gives you a better sense of what you enjoy, what you dislike, how organizations work, how money changes your choices, and what kind of life you are actually trying to build.

Then, if you decide a PhD is the right path for you, you can do it with all of that information in mind so your PhD actually supports you and your goals. That time you “lost” by working will be very quickly made up by how much more efficient your degree will be.

In my orbit

I just went and watched the best rated horror movie of the year, Obsession. If you like horror movies that combine some comedy as well, like Bodies Bodies Bodies, Megan, Barbarian, etc., then I would definitely recommend watching it! The movie is directed by Curry Barker, a young new director who got his break posting short films on YouTube. The movie definitely has a Gen Z feel to it, but in the best way possible.

They took all of the right steps in their career to go from their PhD to industry. They finished their doctorate, joined a company as an industry postdoc, built experience outside academia, learned how research functioned in a corporate environment, and hoped the position would turn into a permanent role once the postdoc ended.

Instead, by the time their postdoc was finished, the company had entered a downturn and wasn’t hiring. So they had to leave and find another role.

At the next company, they had about two years to settle in. It gave them just enough time to learn the team, understand the programs, build trust, become useful, and start imagining what growth might look like there. Then layoffs came through and their role was affected.

So they found another job, rebuilt again, and a similar version of the same story repeated. And each time it happened, the transition took months. They had to endure months of applications, recruiter calls, interviews, silence, follow-ups, and networking messages, all while trying to stay calm and optimistic while their savings disappeared.

By the time someone finishes a PhD, they aren’t 22 with years to casually explore. Many are in their late twenties or early thirties. They have already spent a long time living on stipends, postponing savings, moving for training, building expertise in a narrow area, and accepting the idea that the financial tradeoff will eventually make sense once they exit the training stage of their career.

But in many cases, the training period even continues after a PhD. An industry postdoc can be useful because it can help someone transition out of academia, learn how companies work, and develop experience that hiring managers actually understand. But at the end of the day, it’s another position with low pay and an expiration date attached to it. After nearly a decade of training, it’s not ideal to need another stepping stone.

And then, once they do move into a permanent industry role, they enter a sector where permanence is rare. Biotech companies don’t cut programs only when the science is bad. They cut programs when funding changes, when investor sentiment shifts, when leadership decides to focus elsewhere, when a therapeutic area becomes less attractive, when a clinical result disappoints, when a platform becomes too expensive to defend, or when the company has to conserve cash.

So a scientist can do excellent work and still lose their job. A team can deliver everything expected and still be eliminated. Many times, scientists are laid off after a successful project because the company no longer “needs” them. The scientists did the critical research and development, but once the product is commercialized, the value shifts to sales and marketing.

The logic of the industry may be understandable, but the consequences still land on the individuals who sacrificed a lot to become a scientist. A layoff is not only a lost paycheck. It also interrupts the internal reputation someone was building, delays promotions they may have been close to earning, and forces them to learn another organization before they have finished benefiting from the last one.

None of this means biotech can or should become risk-free. Drug development is uncertain, capital markets are unstable, scientific ideas fail, companies sometimes have to make difficult decisions to survive, and ultimately choices will be made only with the balance sheet in mind.

But acknowledging the business reality should not require pretending the human cost is minor. When an industry depends on people who train for years, relocate repeatedly, absorb low pay early on, specialize deeply, and commit themselves to difficult scientific problems, then it needs to determine if it can afford to keep treating career instability as an acceptable cost of doing business..

If I were in your shoes...

If I were trying to build a biotech career right now, I wouldn’t treat getting into industry as the finish line. It has a lot of benefits over academia, but it has its own set of challenges as well.

Before joining a company, I would want to understand the risk around the role as clearly as possible. Not just whether the science is exciting, if the title sounds impressive, or whether the company has raised a large amount of money in the past. I would want to know what the role depends on.

Is it attached to one program? Is that program central to the company or peripheral? How much runway does the company have? Has leadership recently changed? Has the company already had layoffs? Is the hiring connected to real growth, or does it feel like a short-term push around one asset, one milestone, or one financing story?

You will rarely get complete answers, but partial answers are still useful. They help you separate scientific excitement from employment risk.

I would also be conscious about building a career that makes sense in multiple contexts. Technical depth matters, but in an unstable market, depth without mobility can become dangerous. If your entire professional identity depends on one technique, platform, disease area, or type of company, every layoff becomes much more threatening. The scientists who seem to navigate volatility better usually have a wider surface area.

Part of this can also be achieved by nurturing your network regularly, not just after a layoff. By staying in touch with former colleagues, managers, recruiters, collaborators, classmates, and people who have moved into adjacent roles, you will be well prepared to deal with a challenge when it happens. The worst time to check-in with your network is when you’re unemployed and just looking for something out of them.

In addition, I would do side projects, consulting work, etc. outside of my regular job. This is just another way to prevent one company from being the entire container for your professional life.

And finally, I would try to remind myself that the instability is not a personal failure. It’s easy to be embarrassed about gaps, or feel like the people who avoided being laid off just did something better than you.

But in biotech, layoffs are extremely common and almost impossible to avoid across an entire career. Many people are talented, serious, hardworking, and well-trained, and still end up with a CV shaped by funding decisions, program cuts, and reorganizations they had no power over.

So take the market seriously, but don’t let it rewrite your entire sense of self. A layoff can change your circumstances, but it doesn’t define you or your value.

In My Orbit

I’ve always been a big fan of gaming, and my latest obsession has been Marvel Rivals. The first time I played it I was very overwhelmed by the number of characters and buttons, but I’ve actually come to appreciate the complexity! It keeps it exciting, and it’s fun to try out new characters when they come out.

I also really like playing in the competitive mode, where you get to rank up and see how you compare against other players. My best characters are Cloak and Dagger, Scarlet Witch, Namor, and Luna Snow. If you like fast-paced, team strategy games, then I’d recommend it!

During my PhD, I was barely staying afloat financially. I was working part-time on top of my studies, living in an expensive city, and felt like every month I was barely keeping up. Saving money was not something that ever seriously crossed my mind because I was too busy just trying to cover the necessities.

Rent, groceries, bills, transport, and the occasional flight home already felt like enough to think about. I was not sitting there wondering how much I could put into an investment account every month, or whether I was on track to buy a home one day, or if I was building enough financial security for the future. I was mostly just trying to get through the month without creating a new problem for myself.

And then, when I finally finished, I started looking around and realized how much time had passed in everyone else’s life too.

My friends who had gone straight into full-time jobs after college had been earning proper salaries for years. They had raises, bonuses, retirement contributions, and savings accounts that actually grew. Some of them had been investing consistently since their early twenties, which meant their money was not just sitting there, but compounding while I was still being paid just enough to get by.

And I don’t think I understood that clearly enough before I started. I knew PhDs were not well paid. You hear jokes about PhDs being broke and low stipends, and you sort of accept that if you are choosing academia, you aren’t choosing it for the money.

But there is a difference between knowing you will not make very much and actually understanding what that means over five or six years.

It’s not just the lower salary you earn during the degree. It’s the years you miss out on earning a normal salary where you can’t save or invest properly. You don’t have the ability to build the same financial confidence or stability as people who started working right after university.

And I think this is especially hard because during a PhD, you are still working constantly. It’s not like you’re taking five years off to relax and have an adventure. You’re reading, researching, teaching, writing, presenting, troubleshooting, applying for grants, managing your own project, and honestly just being overworked.

And it’s hard to deal with that disconnect because you feel like you are growing intellectually while falling behind materially. You are becoming more skilled, more disciplined, independent, and capable, but you don’t reap any monetary rewards from that work.

Students aren’t really being taught to think about this before they start. The conversation is usually about whether you love the research, whether the supervisor is a good fit, if the lab is strong, or if the project is exciting. All of that matters, of course. But I think the financial consideration matters too, and it’s often treated as if bringing it up makes you less serious or less passionate.

Wanting to understand the money shouldn’t mean you don’t care enough about the science. Money affects where you live, how often you can see your family, whether you can leave a bad environment, if you can take care of yourself properly, whether you can build savings, and what your life will realistically look like with different paths.

And again, I’m not saying this because I want to discourage the PhD path. I learned a lot from mine. I became a better thinker, and it changed the way I understand science, work, and myself. There are parts of that training I still value deeply, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise.

But I do think people deserve to understand the full cost before they choose it. Being aware of the sacrifices you are making is much better than going into something blindly.

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If I were in your shoes...

If I were thinking about doing a PhD now, I would still ask the obvious questions about the research, the supervisor, the department, and the kind of work I wanted to do after.

But I would also sit down and run the numbers properly.

I would look at the stipend after tax, the cost of rent in the city, the realistic cost of groceries and transport, whether I would need to work part-time, and whether I would be able to save anything at all. I would also compare that to what I could reasonably earn if I started working full-time instead, not because money should be the only factor, but because it is a factor that is too often neglected.

I would also think about what the PhD is actually helping me access. If the job you want genuinely requires the degree, that’s one thing. If the PhD gives you technical training, credibility, networks, or research experience that you cannot realistically build another way, that matters. But if you are doing it because you are unsure what else to do, or because it feels like a reasonable next step, I would be much more cautious.

I would also speak to people who finished, not only people who are currently in the middle of it. Current PhD students can tell you what the daily experience feels like, but people who are a few years out can usually tell you what the degree actually did for their career and their life. They can tell you whether it opened doors or delayed them, if they felt prepared afterward, and what they wish they had understood before starting.

And I would ask very direct questions. Did the PhD help you get the kind of role you wanted? Do you feel financially behind because of it? How long did it take you to feel stable afterward? Would you make the same decision again? What do you wish you had known before you started?

Someone else’s answers or opinion shouldn’t decide your life for you, but being informed will help you make the best decision.

In My Orbit

I was in the mood to watch a thriller this week, so I just watched Apex on Netflix with Charlize Theron and Taron Egerton. I think Taron did a great job, and it was really interesting to see him play such a dark character. But overall, it wasn’t my favorite movie. I’m not usually a big fan of movies that have 1-2 main actors just interacting by themselves the whole time, so I think I started to feel the limits of that pretty quickly.

There were parts that were tense, and I liked the psychological element of not knowing exactly where the story was going, but I kept wanting the world of the film to open up a little more. I think I prefer thrillers where the tension builds through the environment, the side characters, the reveals, etc.

So it was entertaining enough, but not something I would ever need to watch again. It was more of an interesting performance than a movie I fully connected with.

For a long time, I thought having a PhD would be one of the most impressive things about me. I imagined that once I had finally earned it, I would feel settled. I would finally be able to prove something to myself and to everyone else, and that all the years of school, stress, low pay, uncertainty, and sacrifice would eventually feel worth it.

But that’s not exactly how I feel everyday.

I decided I wanted to study science when I was in high school. I loved the idea of understanding something deeply, becoming the kind of person who could ask better questions about the world, and building a life around curiosity. I liked the idea that if I kept working hard enough, each step would lead naturally to the next one, so that’s what I did.

I went from undergrad directly into a master’s, and then from my master’s into a PhD. At the time, it all felt like progress. It was difficult, obviously, but it also felt like I was moving toward something. Every year had a purpose because there was always another application, project, paper, milestone, or degree to focus my energy on.

And then eventually I finished, I had the PhD, and everything I had worked toward for years was finally real. But occasionally, I question if I made the right decisions going down that path.

I don’t have a research role in academia or industry. I use my degree, but not in the way I expected, and maybe it’s not even technically required for the work that I do now. So when people hear that I have a PhD, I sometimes feel like they expect the next part of the sentence to be that I’m going to be a professor, that I run a lab, or that I work as a scientist at a biotech company.

Just something that makes the PhD sound like it was necessary for the life I have now, so the sacrifice was worth it. But that’s not technically the case.

So sometimes, when I tell people I have a PhD, I feel like I’m admitting that my life didn’t turn out the way I expected. I feel like I’m exposing a mistake, and basically confessing that I spent many years doing something that I didn’t really have to.

I look back and think about how much time I spent in school. I think about the years I could have been earning more money. I think about the friends who entered the workforce earlier, got promoted, built savings, bought homes, and moved forward while I was still writing papers, applying for funding, or trying to make sense of experiments that weren’t working.

Then the endless onslaught of questions begins. If I had done this instead, where would I be now? If I had gone into industry earlier, how much money would I have made? If I had chosen something more practical, would I feel more secure? If I had understood the world better at 22, would I have avoided all of this?

But I don’t want to punish myself for not being able to predict my entire life when I was younger. I didn’t choose a PhD randomly. I chose it because, at the time, it made sense. I was curious, I cared about science, I wanted to challenge myself and contribute something, and I did just that.

So I can’t regret decisions I made because I know I would not be where I am today without that path. I would not write the way I write, or think the way I think. I would not understand academia, industry, scientists, institutions, ambition, burnout, identity, or failure in the same way. I would not have met the people I met, built the confidence I built, developed the skills I developed, or learned how to keep going through things that felt humiliating, confusing, or impossible at the time.

Judging old decisions with new information isn’t fair or productive. We make a choice, live through it, learn things we couldn’t have learned from the outside, and then a lot of the time realize that we want something different. That doesn’t mean the original choice was a waste.

So be proud of every misguided decision, mistake, strange detour, and every version of yourself that was trying to make the best choice with the information they had at the time. The journey matters just as much as the destination.

If I were in your shoes

If I were feeling embarrassed about a decision that maybe doesn’t make perfect sense looking back, I would try to stop worrying about the time I lost, money I missed out on, or other paths I could have taken.

I would try to think about these types of questions: What did this experience give me that I still carry? What did I learn that I could not have learned from the outside? Who did I meet because I chose this path? What parts of me became stronger, better, or more honest because of it? And what do I want now that I may not have been able to want before?

It’s not worth sticking to something you no longer want just to justify a previous decision.

You can take the skills, the experience, the relationships, the confidence, the pain, and the lessons with you, and move on. The old path already did its job, it got you here.

Now you get to decide what happens next.

In my orbit

I’ve been having a bit of a stressful week, and I really needed something to help me unwind, so I’ve been rewatching Emily in Paris. I know it’s probably a horrible, Americanized version of what life in Paris is like, but that’s part of what I love about it. It’s a funny and kind of brainless show that helps me get my mind off of everything.

I’ve seen many scientists fall victim to the same trap. You commit to being a researcher in academia, despite all the instability, the low pay, and the vague future, because you stick to the belief that if you just push a little further and for a little longer, you’ll eventually land that secure permanent academic position.

But for most people, that never happens.

And it’s not that they didn’t make an effort. They are actually the ones who cared enough to keep tolerating conditions that would have pushed most other people out much earlier.

I think a lot of the conversation around academia focuses on the people who want to leave, like the ones who become disillusioned, get frustrated, and decide they want a different life. I understand that story very well, and I have written about it a lot.

But the reality is that many scientists who leave academia didn’t actually want to. They wanted to build a life around research. They weren’t trying to turn their PhD into a stepping stone for consulting or biotech or venture capital. They genuinely want the academic life where you get to ask difficult questions, mentor students, build a research program, and spend your entire life and career close to discovery.

And unfortunately, those end up being the people that can suffer the most at the hands of academia. Because if you are willing to keep believing, academia will usually give you just enough to stay.

One more postdoc, short-term contract, round of uncertainty that is sold as an opportunity, and one more reason to think that if you can just survive this stage, you’ll make it where you want to go.

But for many scientists, they never reach their goal because a lot of these careers begin to depend on a handful of outcomes that are only partially within someone’s control. Did the project work, did the lab have funding, did the paper land in the right journals, did the timing line up, did your PI advocate for you, did the department happen to be hiring in your area, and did the committee decide that your work counted in the right way?

People talk about all careers, but especially academic ones, as if they are linear meritocracies with a few obvious milestones. In reality, they are often narrow funnels built on contingency, scarcity, luck, and prestige.

And unfortunately, by the time many scientists realize that academia may never give them the opportunities they worked for, they have been there for so long that leaving becomes much harder.

So they end up in this terrible middle ground where they’re too far in to pivot easily, too experienced to get entry level roles, and too academically branded to be understood quickly by industry.

I’m not writing this to tell people not to pursue academia. I still think academic research matters a lot, and a lot of industry innovations depend on the work academic scientists do. And I think there are wonderful mentors, meaningful careers, and people who are genuinely built for that path.

But I do think more scientists need to be aware of the structure of academia clearly before they spend years going down a dead end. No matter how much you love research or feel passionate about your field, it’s not going to pay your bills or guarantee you a career.

If I were in your shoes...

If you are a scientist who wants to stay in academia, I wouldn’t tell you to give up on that, but pursue it with your eyes open.

I would get very honest, very early, about what your field actually rewards. What actually seems to move people into stable roles? Are the people getting hired all coming from a tiny cluster of labs? Are they all landing the same kinds of journals? Are they all carrying prestigious funding? Are they all in one narrow subfield? If so, are you meeting those expectations? It’s hard, but really try to honestly audit yourself and your progress so you don’t end up lost with no direction 5 years later.

I would also stop waiting until I was burned out or unemployed to build relationships outside academia.

Don’t abandon your scientific goals, but don’t let academia be the only context in which your work makes sense. I would talk to scientists in biotech, publishing, consulting, medical communications, policy, data roles, startups, and anywhere else my background could create value. It’s not that you’re planning to leave immediately, but you don’t want your first non-academic conversation to happen in the middle of a crisis.

I would still work towards the future I hope for, but prepare for alternate endings in case the future doesn’t work out exactly as you planned.

In My Orbit

I just finished watching a new show on Netflix called Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen. It’s a horror mini-series, and I really liked how it started. I think the first episode was actually the best one. It had the perfect atmosphere and combination of being dark and creepy without being over the top or unbelievable, and had just enough jump scares to keep you on the edge of your seat.

Unfortunately, I think the ending of the show was a let down. There were quite a few things that didn’t end up getting explained, and it felt less like a horror show and more like a modern horror/comedy mix. I like that genre as well, but the show slowly transitioned from the beginning of the series to the end, and it kind of ruined the overall vibe in my opinion. If you have any recommendations for a horror series or movie, I’d love to hear!

They were not lazy, disengaged, or unrealistic about the jobs they could land. They worked hard, got into an elite institution, completed a demanding degree, networked, applied, kept pushing, and still ended up stuck in a job market that seemed almost indifferent to everything they had achieved.

For a long time, there was an implied promise underneath higher education. If you were talented enough to get into the right program, disciplined enough to finish, and serious enough about your work, the degree would carry weight. Maybe not automatically or instantly, but enough to move you into the next phase of your life.

I don’t think that guarantee exists anymore, and yet a shocking number of institutions still behave as if nothing has changed.

Students are still often encouraged to organize their lives around the old model. Focus on the research, publish, build expertise, stay committed, and trust that the degree, the name, and the quality of your work will speak for themselves. But when they graduate, they now walk into a labor market that is asking a completely different set of questions.

Can you show applied experience? Have you worked cross-functionally? Have you built anything outside your formal program? Did you do an internship, a co-op, freelance work, consulting, startup work, independent projects, or something else that proves you can operate outside the academic system? Can you translate what you know into something legible to employers?

A lot of students aren’t taught to think this way until it’s too late, and they have to struggle much more to find a job than they would have if they got the right guidance earlier in their academic career.

And this has consequences beyond just job search strategy, as it changes how people understand and believe in their own value.

I wrote this week about the first time I got paid after leaving academia for industry, and how I almost cried when I saw the number. On the surface, that sounds like a story just about money. It partially is, but it was also about the shock of realizing how much academia had trained me to undervalue myself and my knowledge.

When you spend years in an environment where highly specialized work is compensated poorly, overwork is normalized, and sacrifice is treated as evidence of your commitment, it weighs on you. Even if you know, intellectually, that your skills matter, part of you starts to believe that immense struggle is normal and that wanting more is somehow naïve or selfish.

Then you step outside of that system and sometimes see none of that is true. There are many people and companies that value your knowledge and perspective, and you just have to show up for yourself to find those opportunities.

This week, one of my LinkedIn stories ended up being featured on the front page of The Scientist magazine. It was surreal, especially because I didn’t start writing online with some polished master plan. I started because I felt pulled toward it, and had some things I wanted to say. It was scary, and for a long time no one was listening, but I took a small step before I felt qualified or certain about where it would go.

Leaving academia and taking these leaps of faith in myself has made me realize that so many good things in life begin this way. You will never be fully prepared, have every credential in place, or have someone above you tell you it’s finally time for you to begin. You have to start before you have proof that it will work.

I think many smart people develop this belief that they must first earn permission, and part of that stems from chasing academic validation for so much of your life. You get used to following instructions and performing well in a certain structure, but the opportunities that change your life only appear after you step outside the idea of a rigid framework.

This doesn’t mean everyone should leave academia. There are meaningful, intellectually rich, and deeply valuable parts of academic life. There are also people who genuinely love it and should stay. But I do think we need to be much more honest about what academic training does and does not prepare people for, especially now.

Students aren’t failing to work hard enough. In many cases, they are doing exactly what they were taught to do, but the institutions guiding them have been far too slow to adapt.

The longer we keep telling students that prestige, publications, and persistence will be enough on their own, the more people will keep graduating into confusion, self-doubt, and avoidable disappointment.

If universities really want to prepare students for life after graduation, they need to stop treating career exploration as a distraction from serious work. Learning how your skills translate beyond your department is valuable, internships are key, building a portfolio is useful, and trying something entrepreneurial is also important. Writing publicly, consulting, collaborating, freelancing, and experimenting with applied projects are all serious work too.

Students should not have to discover that on their own after they are already behind.

If I were in your shoes...

If you are still in your degree right now, I would stop assuming that good work alone will make the market understand you.

Do your academic research well, of course, and finish your degree strongly. But alongside that, start building evidence that your abilities exist outside the university. That could mean an internship, a side project, volunteer consulting, freelance writing, technical portfolio work, startup involvement, or even simply a body of public thinking that shows how you approach problems. The exact format matters less than the fact that it is visible and transferable.

I would also start translating your experience before you need to. Most students wait until graduation to figure out how to explain what they did in terms that employers care about, and that’s not ideal. Start practicing now how you would describe your work in plain language. What problems did you solve? What tools did you use? What decisions did you make? What changed because of your effort? If someone outside your field cannot understand why your work was valuable, then it’s no longer valuable.

And if you have already graduated and feel like you missed the right opportunities, I would try not to turn that into a moral judgment about yourself. You are not behind because you were foolish. Instead, I would focus on networking, doing independent projects to show your knowledge, and thinking creatively about how to show someone you deserve a chance.

In My Orbit

If you haven’t figured it out yet, I really love music. I recently came across a video on Instagram from a singer named Isabel van Gelder, singing her song Waiting for the Rain. It’s the perfect mix of Landslide by Fleetwood Mac and Jealous by Labrinth, with a bit more of a singer-songwriter kind of vibe. Again, the lyrics really stand out to me here, and I think it’s the perfect song to listen to with headphones in and your head resting on car window like you’re in a music video.