A 4th-year PhD student asks—

I'm wrapping up my PhD in cancer biology next year, and I want to move into a non-bench role, but I don’t feel qualified for anything besides gene editing, cell engineering and working with mice. What would I even offer outside the lab?

It can be easy to feel like being a scientist is just about experiments and data, but it’s important to remember that a PhD education translates to much more than experimental expertise. Maybe you’ve heard of “transferable skills” before? These are core skills that can be developed in a niche area (like cancer biology) but applied to a broad range of careers (like non-bench roles). While you might be able to describe pretty clearly how you got good at gene editing, with transferable skills we often don’t even realize those skills are being developed in the moment. Here’s an example from my PhD: During my first year of grad school, I was terrified of presenting at lab meeting and hated public speaking. But I had to present on a regular basis, and it forced me to overcome some of those fears, and eventually I realized I’d gotten so much better at it. It really clicked for me when someone came up to me at a conference and commended me on a great talk. I realized that people understood my science better when I spent the time to make it a compelling story. And once I realized I had gotten good at it, it became a lot more fun!

Have you published or presented anything? That could speak directly to your ability to communicate complex topics and connect with other people. Other common examples of transferable skills that scientists often develop include problem-solving (troubleshooting/optimizing experiments), teamwork (scientific collaborations) and project management (your scientific project). If you have a specific role in mind, consider reaching out to people with that role and asking for an informational interview—they will have great insights into what specific transferable skills are most useful in that field, and how you can strengthen them, and ideally, they might even offer feedback that helps you recognize how your skills have developed.

If you don’t have a specific role in mind, just keep paying attention to what you like to do. For me, communication and storytelling have become a core part of my professional identity and I’ve applied these skills in several arenas outside of lab meeting. Much to the surprise of my first-year self, I discovered that I love doing these things! These skills have opened doors to opportunities I wouldn’t have considered otherwise, like teaching undergraduate biology at USF and creating educational content on social media. And you never know where it will lead—I got invited to present a paid distinguished lecture at USF and partner with the American Association of Immunologists to make a science video about tattoos and your immune system!

-Matt Arvedson, Career and Professional Development Leadership Senior Intern