The Naturejobs team looks at careers in sports science and life as a PhD student in 2017 following publication of Nature’s biennial PhD survey, which sought the views of 5700 students worldwide.
Jenny Kedros, research manager at Shift Learning, the educational research agency that helped analyse the data, talks about the survey’s main findings to chief careers editor David Payne.
You can read about the results in the article Graduate Survey: A love-hurt relationship. The underlying raw data available via this Figshare link.
Sports science
The survey asked about career satisfaction, a big driver behind career choice. Naturejobs editor Jack Leeming talks to Juan Delgado, head sports scientist and applied neurotechnology specialist in the New York Sports Science Lab in Staten Island, New York. Juan’s career didn’t quite turn out the way he had planned, but he found another path that has had a big impact on his work, and life. You can read more about Juan’s work, and about sports science in general, by reading the article Smarter, Not harder.
#AskTheExpert
This month’s #AskTheExpert question comes from a speaker at last month’s 2017 London Naturejobs Career Expo. Esther Melo Herráiz, a postdoc researcher who now works in the partnering division at healthcare company Roche, wants to know more about how to plan for future careers. Nana Lee, assistant professor in the biochemistry department at the University of Toronto, Canada, answers Esther’s question.
Ask your question
If you’ve got a science career question we can help you find the answer. Simply send your question to naturejobseditor@nature.com and we will do our best to find a science career expert to answer it in a future podcast episode.
Julie Gould is a freelance podcast producer and science journlist.
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The number of students each year drawfs the number of jobs, and the trend seems to be growing. New bachelor graduates in recent surveys are 10x the number of positions, so graduate school is the only option. at some level, as the article hints, there is a demand for masters degree. The growth is strongest in the bioinformatics masters with programs at John Hopkins, USC, Stanford among others. The career routes can contain more routes and better compensation with a work/family life that doesn’t involve working at near poverty level often in some of the expensive cities in the world. This article hints on it – but it would great for this blog to explore some of these non-Ph.D. master’s routes. With more students taking these options (particularly when their goals don’t require a Ph.D). we could perhaps give those committed to academic positions better odds of success. Ph.D. is one route, masters in another as the article indicates. I would love to see this blog look at Master’s routes. David Wesley Craig, USC (https://dtg.usc.edu)