A 5th year PhD student asks—I have just about 1 year left in my PhD, and I’m realizing I need to start planning to finish things up, not just continue working kind of endlessly on my projects. Like so many things in grad school, nobody really teaches you how to do things; nobody teaches you how to…
A postdoc asks—I've been searching for a job for almost a year without any luck. I know the job market is really bad, but I’m desperate to get out of my lab and get onto my real career. Do I just have to wait out the bad job market and hope to get lucky, or is there something else I should be doing?
A 5th year PhD student asks—I know about all the things I need to do for my job search but realistically I don’t know when I’m going to do it. I think I can handle each part when I think about it in a vacuum, but in addition to my ongoing research, I have to start writing my dissertation, plus I’m…
A postdoc asks—I'm going to be finished at UCSF this summer (2 months from now), and I’m searching for an industry role. I know I probably should have started sooner, but I was busy with finishing my papers and some personal issues. What should I be doing with the time I have left? And how long…
A fifth-year PhD student writes—I'm getting ready to job search, but I don’t really know where to start. I guess I'm just looking for some structure for the process.
A first-year PhD student asks—I'm finishing my last lab rotation and have decided which lab I want to join. How do I tell the other PIs I rotated with that I won’t be joining their labs? I don’t want to burn any bridges.
A late-stage PhD student asks—In theory, I feel like the quality of my work should get me where I want to go. Networking has always felt gross, but I recognize that it is just valuable for people to know what I am capable of and to know I exist. How did you get over the gross feeling?
A postdoc asks—I'm looking for an industry job and realize that my skills fall in between a lot of the job descriptions. How do I decide when to apply to the higher-level position, when I fit most of the higher-level requirements, but not all of them, but I feel overqualified for the lower-level…
A postdoc asks—I've heard that informational interviews are helpful, but also that it is a bad idea to reach out to people after you applied to a job to ask them to recommend you. Should you still do informational interviews while you are actively job searching and applying? How does that fit in?
