Ask a Career Consultant
Hi there! Every week, the Career Development Team for Researchers at the Office of Career and Professional Development answers an anonymized career development question from the UCSF community. You can also visit the archive of all of our past columns. To submit your own question, email it to [email protected] with the subject line 'ASKOCPD.'
A first-year PhD student asks—
I am completely committed to finding a faculty position after finishing my Ph.D., and some of the faculty I’ve met so far have advised that the most important thing is for me to carve out a very specific scientific niche. How do I do that? Are there specific skills or other things I should make sure to develop to make sure I can find an academic job? I know it is extremely competitive.
It's great to be considering what you’re interested in doing later as your start your PhD, especially since having those goals can feel motivating. It’s also great to keep in mind, though, that there’s a long way between the beginning of your PhD and a faculty job (or even just the next step in 5 years or so, when you’re graduating). Knowing what you’re interested in doing after your PhD can help you identify people who might be good support for that journey while you’re on the way and can also inform choices you make about how you spend your time and what network you build.
However, there’s a difference between just taking it into account as one of many factors versus letting it steer all your decisions. One reason we caution against focusing too much on a singular direction is because 5-10 years is a long time. The world and the job market will continue to change in surprising ways, and you probably will too. So instead of only focusing on where you might want to be in the long term, consider also what would be most enjoyable and interesting to you right now. As much as it helps to have a clear direction to pursue, it is far more important that the work you do is sustainable and energizing while you are doing it. Burning out or becoming disengaged from your PhD work is pretty likely to push you in a different career direction anyway.
Having said all that, PhD work is—by definition—novel, so finding a niche that carries forward to a faculty career is most likely to come from following your interests as they are now (ideally informed by reading and experience) rather than from trying to predict what specialization will be the most valuable in a future, and unknowable, job market.
-Ray Care, Program Director, Career Development Team for Researchers