Resolutions for the last year of my PhD, or how to start preparing for your life after grad school

Who doesn’t like an occasional initiation ritual? Celebrate, recalibrate, and step right into that brave new year, together with your customized list of dreams and plans (woohoo…). Number one on my 2018 resolutions list is to finish all experiments for my dissertation (yay to unrealistic timelines!). Number two is to invest time and energy into thinking about what I want my life to look like after the PhD defense.

I’m supposed to graduate in 2019, and as much as I don’t want to leave my lab, I have to understand what I want to come next and start working towards that early on. So, here’s how I thought one should reasonably go about laying the grounds for their post-PhD future (= my new year’s resolutions = my final PhD year’s hopes and dreams):

1. Investigate non-academic career options

However we feel about academia, the objective reality is that most of us won’t become professors. When I think about non-academic career paths, my main questions are: What are the specific jobs I could apply for with my set of skills? What actually is my set of skills (aside from ensuring low impedances between EEG electrodes and participants’ scalps and being skeptical about pretty much everything)? And really now, would I enjoy doing any of the non-academic jobs out there? Just taking the time to think about all of this and make use of some of the online resources available would already be great. So far, I’ve gotten a few cool ideas from friends, colleagues, and well, McGill, which I think might be especially useful for early-career academics looking into their job options:

• • You can check out the Career Planning for PhDs eBook. A concise booklet created by a popular UK recruitment site, it lists all typical skills PhD students have and links them to a wide variety of potential career options. One of their tips is for you to give each of your professional skill a strength and an enjoyment score (makes sense to reflect on those).

• • Create an Individual Development Plan (IDP). There are a bunch of IDP resources online, this specific one is more like a career-planning app, a web tool for PhD and postdoctoral students, using which you can not only look into your skills and preferences and see how they relate to 20 different career paths, but also set and keep track of your career development goals throughout the year. The system will send you reminders about what you were planning to work towards at a current time – might be annoying (being bugged by your long-term goals – yuk!) but likely still very useful.

• • Consider doing an internship or establish a collaboration with an industry partner. Those are, I think, really the only ways to know for sure whether you’ll actually enjoy doing the work involved in a specific non-academic career path – by trying it out. There are several ways of organizing a real industry experiences for yourself while still doing your PhD.

In Canada, Mitacs provides funding for students who want to collaborate with an industry partner on their project (meaning you’ll get both PhD funding AND an industry experience during your graduate studies). PhD students would, for example, be eligible for their Accelerate and Accelerate International (f.k.a. Globalink Partnership Awards) programs, where half of the funding will be contributed by the industry partner, and half by Mitacs. The absolutely cool thing about Mitacs programs is that acceptance rate is very high.

Mitacs has designated staff positions to support applications from specific universities or even graduate programs. For neuroscience-related applications from McGill, just a few months ago, Healthy Brains for Healthy Lives (HBHL) established a collaboration with Mitacs, so we now have our very own Mitacs rep, Dr. Noha Gerges, who can answer questions and support us throughout the application process. Because of this collaboration, we will also get a few perks in terms of deadline flexibility (i.e., as a post-doc, you can apply for the Elevate program on a rolling basis) and support in finding the right industry partner (HBHL is now working on a list of companies interested in participating).

Mitacs’ Policy Fellowship is also quite a catch: they will match you with an evidence-based-related policy position that suits you best for one (paid) year of work. You’d have to be a postdoc at the time when you start the internship and take a leave of absence from the university. Very cool.

Another option for getting hands-on experience in industry is to find an internship for the 1-3 months in-between of your initial thesis submission and your PhD defense and get sponsored by McGill ($2000/month) through the Doctoral Internship Program. You can find a database of potential placements online.

 

2. Build up a professional network

In the end, it’s people who hire other people, and whether the ones hiring know you personally (or at least through online networks such as ResearchGate, LinkedIn, or Twitter) might increase your chances of getting a position. I also already wrote about the importance of picking the right working environment for yourself, and this is, I think, best done through having in-person communications and/or working experience with your potential future team. So, how can we expand our professional networks? Here’re a few tips that come to mind:

• • Talk to people at conferences and local events. International conferences are great. Note to self though: make use of local events – it’s not that difficult and being part of a stable local community might give you much more than meeting individual people internationally.

• • Organize lab visits. During longer-term (>2 weeks) visits, you can learn new methods and get a feel of the working environment in a place you’d consider doing your postdoc at (is this lab/research center/city a good fit for you?). You can also do short-term visits to meet people, give a presentation, get feedback from a lot of researchers at the same time, and again, just talk to the PI you’d consider working with in your postdoc. Lab visits are not at all unrealistic: both Mitacs and McGill have travel grants for lab stays (for Mitacs, the stay can’t be shorter than 3-4 months).

• • Update your ResearchGate (RG) profile regularly. For people to know what you’re currently working on, even while your research is still not published, you can add updates (for example, a .pdf of your conference poster) to your RG projects. This may be especially useful for sharing a RG link with conference attendees interested in your poster instead of sending them an e-mail with an attachment (that way you’re giving them an option to follow you on RG and/or check out your other work). You can do other little things to increase visibility of your work, too, like writing a quick update in your RG project the moment your paper got accepted, and then in a few days follow up with a full text/download link.

 

3. Look for funding for post-doc placements

Whether you’re postponing the decision to leave or stay in academia, you can still do a postdoc. If your goal is to get an external fellowship or to apply for a grant together with your future lab, you might want to start preparing the paper work while still finishing up your PhD. That way you’ll avoid having a year gap between your PhD defense and the start of your postdoc and can focus more on actual research in the limited time of your postdoc placement.

That’s it. That’s my 2018 plan of attack. One last addition would be that to have mental resources for all of these seemingly stressful things and the actual lab work, I should continue finding time for happiness-inducing and naturally rewarding things like spending time outdoors, staying in touch with my friends, and teaching, and doing community outreach, and reading, and calling my mom at least once a week, and and and. That. Happy holidays, everyone. New year, new energy, new goals, new research – I’m excited.

If you have any suggestions/tips for last-year PhD students, let us know in the comments to this post!

Special thanks to Dr. Noha Gerges who carefully reviewed all Mitacs-related information on this page!

Bio: Anastasia Glushko

I’m a PhD student in Neuroscience at McGill. Originally from Russia, I started out as a neuropsychologist and worked with kids with special needs. At McGill, I’m using electroencephalography to better understand how people process language and music.

Website: www.mcgill.ca/neurocoglab/members/doctoral
Researchgate:  rgate://anastasia

Dec 21, 2017