Join PEEC for a talk by Dr. Karthik Yarlagadda, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease.
Abstract: Finding employment as a PhD is difficult, regardless of where we seek employment. Survey data, like NSF’s Survey of Earned Doctorates, also tells us that post-graduate employment in academia has trended downwards by ~15% over the last 30 years. While we can look at the numbers and see where PhDs in the life sciences and other sectors end up, data alone doesn’t tell us how to navigate the transition out of academia, or what a career outside of a university looks like. Having recently worked through that transition myself to end up at the National Institutes of Health, I’ll share some reflections and stories of my past few years – navigating the wider job market with a PhD, starting a new job in a field entirely different to my PhD, and most importantly, finding personal fulfillment away from a lab bench.
