Tag Archives: Graduate Student Survey

Academia to industry and back again

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Eric Betzig, one of three chemistry Nobel laureates from 2014, shares what he learned from working in both academia and industry, and how he applies it to his career now.


Naturejobs-podcast
It’s often said that being a science graduate is a great thing: it opens so many doors and gives you the chance to take on any career. Although this might be true, it also makes deciding what career to focus on, and train for, very difficult.

This month, Nature Careers published a great piece based on the 2015 Nature Graduate Student Survey, where Nature tried to uncover what careers early career researchers were hoping to get, and how they were preparing themselves. In this podcast I was joined by Monya Baker, one of the Nature Careers editors, to give us some further insight into the survey.

The second part of the podcast is an interview I did with Eric Betzig, one of the three chemistry Nobel prize winners in 2014. In our chat we talk about his work in breaking the diffraction limit, what it’s like to see living cells move and his transitions from academia to industry and back again.

The 2015 Nature Careers Graduate Student Survey

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See how current graduate students around the world feel about their future career paths in next week’s issue of Nature as the results from the 2015 Nature Careers Graduate Student Survey are published.

One challenge that many graduate students face when deciding on future career paths is finding information on what the options are, and how other graduates got there. Although some information is collated by universities and by the Survey of Doctoral Recipients, run by National Science Foundation in the United States, for example, it’s not enough for students to make an informed decision.

“Graduate students would make better decisions [about their future careers] if they had better data,” says Paula Stephan, a labour economist at Georgia State University. So, to do their bit and help young graduate students arm themselves, Nature Careers runs a bi-annual, global survey of graduate students.

Many say that mentors should have an active role to play in preparing students for their future careers, but in 2011 the graduate student survey run by Nature Careers demonstrated that as the years went by, graduate students were less and less satisfied with the support they received.

Other surveys have shown that this decrease in support could in part be due to the growing lack of interest in academic careers as the students move through their PhD programmes.

In 2013, the Nature Careers graduate student survey also explored the issue of debt, and how students were increasingly worried about how the financial burden of grad school would affect their future careers.

Whether these trends have continued, the Nature Careers team is trying to find out. This year, the survey looks to answer questions that many graduate students will have on their mind: What do science graduate students around the world expect to pursue for their career? What do they really think about industry – or academia? How do they decide on a career path? Are they getting useful advice from their adviser or from their institution? And how do they feel about their graduate programme?

Find all this out and more in Nature Careers on 21 October 2015, when we publish the results of our 2015 survey. We had almost 3,500 respondents from all corners of the world, including Africa, Asia, Europe and Central, North and South America.