So you drive a car? Then please tell me how the differential works. And if that’s too hard, can you tell me how the windshield wipers do their job? Explaining the former may be difficult, but surely it’s quite straightforward to explain how wipers wipe water off your windshield. What is an explanation? How to […]
Digital Event
If you’re still in graduate school, there’s a lot you can do to help prepare for the possibility of a non-academic career down the line. The most frequent piece of advice given by our respondents was to do an internship at some point in your graduate school career. This could be a summer-long experience or […]
Our respondents engaged in a perspective-taking exercise that we hope will be valuable to you as you’re thinking about your next career stage. We asked them to imagine when they were still in academia, and to give advice to someone in the same position. First, respondents offered some thoughts on morale, which may be low […]
Once you’ve decided to make a transition out of academia, and you’ve considered what kind of new career field you’d like to enter, how do you find a job in that field? Our respondents shared four routes by which they found their first jobs after academia: through programs to transition academics to industry positions, through […]
In the first half of our digital event on experimental psychologists working in non-academic careers, we covered the experience of pursuing a new career outside of academia. Our respondents explained what their motivations were for pursuing a new career, what skills acquired in academia they use in their new careers and what new skills they […]
During the first part of our #beyondAcademia digital event on careers outside academia, we introduced our respondents in their professional contexts. Today, we reconvene our digital event to address the following questions in the posts during the remainder of the week: What should you consider when choosing a non-academic career path? How do you […]
Today’s post, the last in this week’s digital event on “What is it like to be an experimental psychologist working in academia?” is a combination of gratitude journal, book of secrets, and five-year plan. We asked our respondents, introduced here, what they most appreciate about their new career, what surprised them most about having a […]
After experimental psychologists leave academia, how satisfied are they with their new careers? And how do the positives and negatives compare to their experience in academia? Our respondents, introduced here, shared the upsides, and the downsides, of pursuing a non-academic career. Intellectual Satisfaction If there’s one thing academia is known for, it’s for the pursuit […]
The experience that experimental psychologists acquire during their academic careers proves to be extremely useful outside of academia. When we asked our respondents, whom we introduced at the beginning of the week, what knowledge and skills from academia they use most often in their new careers, Katie Rotella summed up the group’s views: “pretty much […]
We introduced our respondents yesterday. Their motivations for leaving academia fell into four broad themes: lifestyle factors, scarcity, curiosity, and impact. Lifestyle factors Most respondents cited the need for increased control over their careers and where they lived as important reasons for their career switch. Being a young scientist in academia involves stress and uncertainty. […]