Career Options for Biomedical Scientists—A Book Review

Figure 1. The large discrepancy between the number of PhDs awarded in STEM fields and the number of faculty positions available necessitates thinking about other career opportunities. Graphic designed by Youngeun (Kaitlyn) Choi.

As I wrap up my fifth year in graduate school, the topic of my “future plans” has begun to rear its ugly head with friends and family. Although I’ve wanted to go into science communication since I started my PhD, the need to start thinking realistically about job prospects has led me to do some digging on the relevance of my PhD skills outside the world of academia. My colleague, Jessica Polka of the Future of Research symposium, directed me to a new book, Career Options for Biomedical Scientists, edited by Kaaren Janssen and Richard Sever. Here’s what you can expect from the book as well as what could make it better. There are a few additional resources at the bottom of the article, but sound off in the comments section if you can recommend some more!

Career Options for Biomedical Scientists does many things right. It begins with a swift introduction to why PhDs should think about jobs outside of academia and doesn’t call them alternatives, but career options. First and foremost, this book opened my eyes to the ridiculous odds of getting a job in academia, which I summarized in a separate article. The introduction points out what I see as the most significant reason why all biomedical PhDs should think about nonacademic careers; there are simply far more biomedical PhDs minted in the U.S. than there are tenured positions available (Figure 1). The editors don’t wallow in these numbers and quickly point out that jobs outside of academia should be thought of as opportunities and not alternatives. They additionally assure the reader that the skills developed during a PhD, namely the abilities to think independently and make sense of complex data, are useful in many different careers. These are all things that I think should be jammed into the brains of graduate students in their first years of graduate school. Graduate students should be thinking about career options from the get go, and knowing that there really are many opportunities should keep senior graduate students and postdocs from obsessively worrying about jobs. A similar book spends more time informing the reader that it’s okay to leave academia and coaches readers through making resumes and learning how to network, but I personally appreciated that Career Options for Biomedical Scientists focused much more on the careers themselves.

Later, the book delves straight into career possibilities. Each chapter explores a career field and is written by an individual in that field. The first few chapters cover careers highly related to academia and included positions in academic administration, core facilities, and liberal arts colleges. For me, these chapters were not particularly useful because many of the careers discussed still required time as a professor or, at the very least, a postdoc, and were too entwined with academia. In addition, these chapters brought up what I see as an issue throughout book; it is unclear who the intended audience is. In many chapters, the authors seem to assume that the reader has prior postdoctoral training, while in others, the science writing chapter for instance, the authors inform readers that one doesn’t need a PhD degree to get into the field. In each chapter I would have preferred the authors to explicitly state what you can expect with/without a PhD, and with/without postdoctoral training in each field.

I found later chapters more useful and more pertinent to those leaving academia. These covered fields from grants administration to management consulting. There was a similar general structure to each chapter: a quick intro to the field, a description of the jobs available, a description of the qualifications required, advice on getting into, progressing, and getting out of the field, and additional resources. This generally worked quite well, and was certainly better than other publications that give testimonial after testimonial from individuals in the field, but there was still wide variability in what went under each section. Things that I would have liked to see in each chapter but were often missing were: a description of a typical day in each career, an estimated salary for each career, and a more quantitative description of the job market. (This site does a good job at a few of these).

It’s my hunch that the discrepancies between chapters were due to the fact that a separate individual wrote each. The reader really only gets the opinion of a single person in the field and the fields are broad enough that an individual couldn’t possibly have first-hand experience in every job in that field. My ideal resource on scientific career opportunities would have each chapter written by the same individuals to maintain consistency. Each chapter would then have 2-3 testimonials from people who work in the field.

That said, Career Options for Biomedical Scientists does a great job of a presenting a variety of opportunities available for PhD students and graduates. Where other resources can get bogged down in convincing the reader that it’s okay to leave academia, or abandon structure to jam in personal testimonials and anecdotes, this book succinctly sums up the need to consider “alternative” careers and provides a plethora of information in an easily digestible manner. It’s lacking in its quantitative descriptions of salaries, job prospects, and details about work-life balance, but certainly provides an excellent introduction to many different fields.

RESOURCES

Basalla, S., and Debelius, M. (2007) “So What Are You Going To Do With That?” Finding Careers Outside Academia Revised Edition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago

Kreeger KY. (1998) Guide to Nontraditional Careers in Science, Taylor and Francis, Philadelphia

Career Advice for Life Scientists

Tyler Ford is not affiliated with Career Options for Biomedical Scientists and its authors or editors in any way.