Mentoring beyond the PhD

Helping academic skills transfer to non-academic careers

Thirty years ago, I started training graduate students. I realize now that I had no idea what I was doing.

That’s not a big surprise: like virtually all new professors I’d been taught how to design an experiment and write a thesis, but not (even a little bit) how to train grad students. But as much as I’d like to blame the system, I can’t: I also didn’t do much thinking about that part of my job, or dig into resources that could help me figure it out. (The mere fact that you’re reading this piece puts you ahead of early-career me!)

In hindsight, of all the ways I didn’t understand training grad students, one really stands out: I didn’t know what I was training them for. I knew my own early-career pathway – from PhD student to postdoc to assistant professor – and I assumed the training I gave my own grad students should equip them to follow the same path. Somehow, I thought that preparation for a career in academia was what PhD studentship was all about. It isn’t, of course.

I did learn. I came to understand that relatively few of the grad students I helped train would end up in academic careers, and that this career diversity was a marker of success (both theirs and mine), not of failure. I learned this by talking with my students, and by seeing the remarkable diversity of ways they put their skills to work in building careers. They acquired (or at least polished) those skills doing research with me on stream ecology, or the evolution of insect host choice, or plant population genetics; but they applied those skills in many ways. One of my PhD students built from a thesis in tree population genetics to an industry career in genetically-personalized medicine and athletic training. Another found a career as a research and policy analyst for an organization that oversees higher education across my region of Canada. Two others are research scientists with our federal government: one in agriculture, another in forestry. My grad students now teach high school, or community college; they work for conservation organizations and parks and museums; one is a medical doctor. And even this list only scratches the surface.

It might seem that training grad students for such a wide range of careers would make the job much harder – that my reorientation must have involved a wholesale reinvention of what I do with my students. It doesn’t, and it hasn’t. That’s because it turns out that the skills grad students need to do original research and communicate it in papers and theses are the same skills they’ll need in other careers (in career lingo, these skills are transferable). Grad students learn how to ask good questions, and how to design the kind of work that can answer them. Grad students learn to build, maintain, and interrogate large datasets. Grad students learn how to communicate the results of their work to multiple audiences. Grad students learn how to be part of teamwork; and very often, when they have assistants or participate in training undergraduates and other more junior students, they learn how to manage a team. Your PhD student may never again sequence the glutamate dehyrogenase gene of red mangrove; but the skills they’ve acquired around that more specialized task will serve them well in almost any career.

While it’s true that most grad student training is transferable, I’m not suggesting that supervisors needn’t think about career diversity at all. There are certainly things you can do – that you should do – to make careers outside academia visible and achievable for your students. Perhaps most obviously, you can make sure the training you provide extends to skills beyond the narrowly academic. You might encourage your students to analyze not just their research data, but related policy data, perhaps in cooperation with a local nonprofit. You might encourage them to write not just papers and a thesis based on their work, but outreach pieces, letters to the editor, and more. You might involve them in securing and administering the grants that fund their work. You might encourage them to seek internships or other short placements in industry or government labs, or with nonprofits; better still, consider inviting colleagues from those kinds of organization to join supervisory committees or even to cosupervise your students. You might encourage your students to attend talks and other events by non-academics, at home or at conferences, and you can make sure such events are available in your department. You might foster explicit discussion of career paths and transferability of skills, perhaps in a series of group meetings to which you invite alumni whose career paths illustrate possibilities. These are just a few examples; but any of them does two salutary things. First, they bring career paths to the attention of students who may not be aware of some of the places their work can take them. Second, they signal that you’re aware of these career paths, that you respect them as appropriate goals for grad students, and that you encourage your students to consider any career they’ll find fulfilling.

I’ve aimed this essay at people like me – those who train grad students. But if you’re a grad student yourself, I hope the lessons are obvious. You participate, of course, in your own training, and you can help shape it. You can look for the kind of opportunities I’ve described, and you can push your own academic supervisors to provide more of them. You can help make your student colleagues aware of skill- and career-building opportunities, and aware more broadly of the many ways they can put the skills they’ve acquired to work. It’s a big world, and we need skilled scholars to contribute in so very many ways.

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