A sixth-year PhD student asks—

I've seen a lot of advice about how you should avoid badmouthing your former employer when you’re applying for a job, to avoid sounding bitter or like you’re going to be super critical of your new organization, etc., but I’m finding it hard to figure out how to talk about my PhD experience. I don’t have any publications, and I really want to explain the environment in my lab and how difficult my PI was, as context. They ended up pulling me off of the main project I was expecting to publish without any discussion, and kept throwing so many side projects at me that I couldn’t make enough other progress. If I get asked about why I don’t have any publications, how do I avoid badmouthing my PI when they were problematic and sabotaged my chances to produce more?

Oof! It sounds like you’re coming out of a seriously difficult situation (so I’ll start by offering my condolences on the difficult lab experience, and congrats on getting out!). Generally, it is important to avoid being too negative about your former work experiences when talking about them in an interview, but you also don’t want to be misleading and give the impression that your experience was super positive and functional. I think that the best approach is to prepare yourself with as many objective details about the situation as you can, so that you can clearly describe what happened, and let the interviewers come to their own conclusions about your PI.

For example, if asked whether your work has been published anywhere, you can respond with a detailed accounting of the work you completed, and say that your PIs priorities changed, leading to another person being the official author on the paper, despite your work completing X, Y, and Z. You could even add that because of that experience, you’ve realized that you work best when your supervisor makes decisions more collaboratively with you, and that you want to work in an environment that is significantly different from how your lab was run.

The key is to avoid focusing your answers on an evaluation of how bad your experience and former boss were, but instead on what the prospective new employer should know about how you do your best work (even if this was informed by a counter-example). I’m sorry you had such a rough experience!

-David Blancha, Assistant Director, Career Development Team for Researchers