Biophysical Society Bulletin | October 2022

Career Development

ASciencePhDCanLead toManyPaths More than 50% of STEM PhDs leave academia and, depending on the field, the number is much higher. Contrary to the common belief that the main reason for leaving is the difficulty in getting faculty jobs, most PhDs change course because they choose to do

ones and the corporate ones. She also learned a lot about business and management, something that would come in very handy when she decided to go back to academia in various roles related to scholarly communications and the dissemination of information, as well as teaching and learning design. Career stories like this are very common. The reasons for leaving academia are varied and the paths often lead to something unexpected, usually in science but not always. Some choose to go to government jobs or to positions in biotech/pharma. Others teach at community colleges, small undergraduate institutions, and even high schools. Some have primary teaching appointments at large research universities. Still others go into professional society management, patent law, information technology, or investment banking. And I know of one world-renowned researcher who decided to retire, leaving science for Asian art. She will often remark that the skills she learned as a scientific researcher continue to serve her well in her new career. So, pursue your passions even if that means changing course. There are many ways you can stay in science (or leave sci ence), be productive, and make meaningful contributions to your chosen field. The skills you learned and the experiences you accumulated as an academic researcher translate, even more than you can imagine. — Molly Cule

“something else.” Their careers are not “alternative”—they have decided to take a different path to contributing to

science, one that is not on the traditional academic track. A colleague of mine told me about her eclectic career path that led her from the classic tenure track into commercial scientific publishing and back into academia. For her, it all started with a job posting in a scientific journal: a publishing company was looking for people with a PhD in sci ence and no publishing experience. I guess the idea was that it was easier to teach scientists about publishing than the other way around. As it turned out, my friend found her passion: the ideal way to be in science but not at the bench. She also realized that she should have been a lot more excited about lab work given her initial plans to follow the academic track. My friend ended up staying in commercial publishing, in the private sector, for almost 20 years, working on books, journals, and various electronic products. The opportunities to interact with the leaders in the scientific community were amazing, as was the travel to conferences, both the scientific

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