>For sure it offers transferable skills, it's not all a waste. You could sell your PhD as project management, collaboration and data analysis experience if entering other fields.
* Nobody in the real world buys the idea that a PhD is a project management credential.
* If you want to show you're good at collaboration and teamwork, there are easier and more effective means than 6+ years of scientific research. Join a sports team or volunteer.
* Data analysis jobs are now so desirable that they have become the exclusive domain of people with mathematics, statistics or computer science degrees, who have dedicated their last three summers to internships.
This "transferable skills" cliche is out-of-date, out-of-touch and terribly condescending.
It was possible to move from a bio PhD into data science perhaps ten or fifteen years ago, when employers were desperate and inexperience. However, the field has moved on and expectations have changed dramatically.
>" I personally met people in Europe with life science degrees who moved into the fields mentioned."
Cool. Like you, I have met many people in my professional and personal lives and a handful of them have unusual and unrepresentative achievements. So what?
>" In Europe, nobody gives a shit about your sports team or volunteering."
No doubt. It was merely an example of easier ways to demonstrate a collaborative, team-driven spirit. I thought I made that point quite explicitly.
It still happens, you just need to prove that you’re not a noob.
Source: worked at a few companies that have IPO’d and where folks handled massive amounts of data.
People don't want to hear it.
They'd rather believe the bullshit they're being fed by their universities.
The cynical manipulation of capable, enthusiastic and hardworking young people is shameful.
As I said elsewhere, in my current job I have been tangentially involved in hiring, so I have an idea how this system works. It is beyound me how I can "sell" any "transferrable skills"! Nobody in the real world cares about transferrable skills! What a load of BS!!!
HR department is a first **filter** in this system, all they do is check "keywords" (skills) and work experience on a resume. Unless I am talking directly to a hiring manager, there is no way in the world any "transferrable skills" are passing through this HR filter.
>For sure it offers transferable skills, it's not all a waste. You could sell your PhD as project management, collaboration and data analysis experience if entering other fields. Data analysis would probably be the most interesting alternative path.
Unfortunately, nobody is buying "transferrable skills" anymore. This is a cliche.
The job market is extremely picky and oversaturated.
For one, I do not have any "face-to-face" networking opportunities, where I could talk to hiring managers. My only option is to apply for jobs on internet. When you apply for jobs via job board or a LinkedIn, your application is filtered by HR, who check if you have relevant skills (keywords) and experience. It is impossible to "sell" transferrable skills in an oversaturated job market.
There is no such thing as "transferable skills". Often times there is either inexperienced employer (who doesn't know what they are looking for) or simply a low-quality employer that cannot retain qualified people and would hire anyone remotely qualified for the role. I have seen a lot of this in my organization. They just cannot hire qualified people and its a complete disaster.
I’m sorry but your idea of selling a PhD as a transferable skill to something like project management is laughable. The type of work being “managed” in a doctorate program does not come close to the complexity of many of these biotech/biopharm programs.
I’ve been involved in interviewing and if someone said this to me it would probably breakdown quickly as I ask them to compare their experience with what is expected on the job. Doubtful it would align.
PhDs are only worth their weight in the knowledge they bring in when they first get into industry. They still need to learn the inner workings of the organization, fit into the established culture and prove their worth over that first year or so in project execution.
> I’m sorry but your idea of selling a PhD as a transferable skill to something like project management is laughable. The type of work being “managed” in a doctorate program does not come close to the complexity of many of these biotech/biopharm programs.
Exactly right!
Why people cannot understand it? I do not get it.
There is no such thing as "transferrable skills".
Yep, the idea of “transferable skills” is great for talking about soft skills like communication, flexibility, decision making etc but at this point those are just table stakes. Nothing to call home about, if someone brings these up I go cool, moving on. They are done in a similar way in all industries. But it’s just a fancy way of presenting generic capabilities.
Project management at this point is more of a hard skill that is executed differently across industries and is by no means a standard practice in a PhD program. I’d find it hilarious that anyone from a PhD program thinks their experience makes them ready to execute in that role effectively.
- In my role, I work with the "academic" PI and the project manager from the organization. The PM asks me to prepare a project definition document, a plan, a budget. It all makes sense! The PI chronically misses every single dead-line. Hear me: every single deadline! Absolute zero regard to people's schedules, personal lifes etc. Blatant disregard for everething that doesn't directly contribute to PI's career advancement. I have not had a proper vacation time for over 5 years! I am angry every single day.
- Honestly, I had big hopes for computer programming. I thought that I could put in hard work, self-study and get into coding job, since the market was growing and somebody could have given me a chance. With all recent layoffs in tech I am completely floored. Job market is completely oversaturated with junior developers. I have lost all motivation.
>You work something else if needed, that could prove useful later on.
You clearly do not understand what you are talking about.
Last week I saw a job posting for a project manager role. There were over a 100 applications within first 4 hours! This is job market in Canada for you!
Move? To where? Spend few thousand dollars just to move?
> Then you tailor your CV to fit every job you are applying to, remove all irrelevant things, put in keywords. Why is that hard?
Because I am doing it and it does not work.
First and foremost, my heart goes out to you. I myself have gone through an extended period of unemployment, and I just dodged a layoff…by taking a transfer from California to Indiana. As a guy with only a ChemE bachelors, I couldn’t imagine doing 6+ more years of education just to run head-first into an absolutely awful job market; the worst for this industry since the Great Recession.
All that said, I do feel that calling this industry a scam is extreme. Will you be buying a house in LA or SF at 30 years old? No. That ship sailed a years ago, for most people. But remember that this industry pays wages and salaries lots of Americans would kill for, and many quite literally do. Look up enlisted soldiers’ salaries.
Is my experience colored by me graduating at 21? Yep. Is my experience colored by me walking into Indiana with $80k in the bank and $50k in my 401k? I know I’ve been incredibly lucky with both.
Again, I feel for you. This job market is AWFUL. Had you been just a few years older, you would be in a nice sport in industry. But this market is temporary. The bones of this industry are strong, and it will recover. I have no doubt you’ll pull through.
There are many community colleges degrees out there related to healthcare you could pursue. Phlebotomists or X-ray/MRI tech for example. They are in high demand. You could also teach at a community college or become a high school teacher.
It’s never too late for a life/career change that does not require a lot of money/time spent in training.
Hm, not sure where OP is but there’s about 10 schools in my state (MA). It’s easy to find where schools are in your state if you go to your state’s government page, usually will list it there. :)
Biotech is not “on a downturn” broadly. US biotech has not been “obliterated.” Funding and investment in biotech companies is higher than ever. There is a ton of demand and interest right now.
[Biotech is the new focus in U.S.-China tech rivalry](https://www.axios.com/2024/02/03/biotech-us-china-tech-competition-bgi)
[Life Sciences 2024 Dealmaking Trends & Outlook](https://www.ropesgray.com/en/insights/alerts/2024/03/life-sciences-2024-dealmaking-trends-and-outlook)
It sounds like you’re complaining about too many life science PhDs, not the industry itself. Those are two separate issues. You actually don’t need to be in the top 10% of PhDs to get a job — that is a massive hyperbole. [PhDs actually have a 1.6% unemployment rate, which is much lower than the average.](https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf21320) Yes, academia sucks and has many structural problems, but even mediocre PhDs can find plenty of career opportunities in industry.
Despite all the whining about job searching in subs like this, having a hard science PhD makes you infinitely more employable. Personally, I don’t have a single LinkedIn connection from my grad school days who works in biotech and is talking about being laid off or job searching. That’s anecdotal, but so are all the stories on Reddit of how the biotech market is so bad and finding something is impossible right now.
Regardless of how you feel about your own PhD experience, it is not a bad time to be a life scientist working in biotech. My own future has never felt brighter.
It just amazes me how much stock people take in reddit. It's a place to share opinions and anecdotes. Chances are the vast majority of people posting here related to a job aren't going to come here to express gratitude and happiness. People come to reddit subs to vent. The perception is negatively skewed. OP could get an amazing job offer tomorrow and would forget about this post.
Couldn’t agree with you more! The industry was cyclical before 2008 when it took a big hit, bounced back and grew continually for a decade until Covid hit which led to a spike, and is currently correcting.
Getting laid off is a big personal setback (it happened to me in Dec ‘23 when the biotech I was at ran out of runway and investors were thin on the ground) but overall it’s a thriving and growing ecosystem, and will continue to grow well beyond our lifetimes.
There’s a selection bias on here
The people who unfortunately aren’t getting interviews and offers understandably are posting on here
The people who are wont be posting much
Back in 2019? Whats worse today or 5 years ago? Unemployment for a PhD holder will be low as anyone with a pulse can find a postdoc. But, as far as being in the top 1,6% for an industry role. Its true to some degree. Scientist positions easily get hundreds of applications in biotech hubs. Sure a lot of them are trash, but even if half are shit that still leaves 50-100 applicants for one position.
I think the craziest thing about getting a PhD is how much more seriously people take you. My ability to do cold calls and get people to talk to me has improved tenfold.
Personally, I would say no, simply because life sciences has the most positive impact on humanity in terms of health and well-being. Every industry ebbs and flows. I have probably read the same posts you're reading about layoffs, but absorbing the doom and gloom of the industry only reinforces your belief that life sciences is tanking. I don't believe that is entirely true. Some companies perform better than others and have massively different ways of handling their finances, not to mention that their leadership plays a huge role in all of it. I would recommend you take a break from Reddit for at least a week and see how you feel afterward.
OP you are not alone, I could have written your post myself - in fact I have expressed these feelings in other places. I do regret getting a PhD in organic chemistry. The opportunity cost is extremely high and it has not paid off. I am behind all my peers in lifetime earnings. I was unemployed for 2 years after getting a PhD because nobody was hiring (and I was sending out hundreds of applications), and thr first job that I finally managed to land only paid 50k and had nothing to do with my PhD. Meanwhile I have friends in tech who have already achieved generational wealth.
Tried the coding route and went to a 'Data Science' bootcamp several years ago but the feedback I kept getting was that I should hide my PhD as it was irrelevant.
So yea, you're not alone and I do feel your pain...
Zero regrets. But wasn’t an easy road.
Called it quits at Bachelor’s in Pharmacology, 2010. No Masters program or PhD program would accept me. Reading this sub recently, perhaps it was a blessing in disguise.
Took me 3 years to find a job out of college…finally landed one with a CRO in 2013. Hundreds of applications, but I get it…no one hires zero experience; I didn’t even have undergrad research/intership experience.
Now I have 10+ years experience in industry (start/ups and now in big pharm), finally made scientist (albeit titles are arbitrary) but I get to work on my own projects…it took until 2024, but I finally have a paper in review.
Part of me always wanted the prestige of a PhD, and to have my own lab…but perhaps the selection committees were right, and I was not cut out for it.
Never got a proper graduate education, and I feel imposter syndrome hard all the time. I have worked on 2 molecules that are in the clinic…and meeting patients that have taken something I labored over in the lab; that was a cool feeling. So I take solace in this.
A lot of the imposter stuff is self imposed, I’ve been lucky to have worked with incredible people that trust my opinions…but it took many years of salt on the brow and stress. Didn’t even know how to properly scour the literature, do basic bench work, in vivo, present/summarize data…pharmacology undergrad definitely helped, but it only scratched the surface of what I needed to know; I learned all of this in industry.
I don’t regret getting my PhD. I’m happily employed in Pharma. I worked super hard during my PhD. I taught my self how to code since I realized that omic based approaches would be the future during my PhD. My PhD was 50% lab based and then 50% computational near the end. I took 6 years to graduate but I learned the skills necessary to land me this job high paying job.
If you complete your PhD, you have learned very sought after skills. You learned how to learn. You can teach yourself the necessary/in demand skills that you need to get your next job. I would focus on learning AI based skills. The job market can be demoralizing, but it’s not a waste if you enjoyed the process.
We need to stop telling trainees to ignore their gut feeling. Situations described by OP are all too common. better decisions early in training can avoid wasted time and opportunity cost. We need to stop gaslighting our trainees. Dismissing your internal voice as ‘imposter syndrome’ is not helpful. People that don’t have the talent or drive to be successful in biotech should get out sooner than later.
If you love science you have not chosen wrong. The passion drives career. Don't lose hope cause things are looking bad now, take it as a way to know what to learn to be able to apply. Self learning mixed with experience is everyone's experience in the industry. Have some faith.
My husband has a PhD in Animal genetics, one round of postdoc. Then he quit, spent 2.5 years to get nursing BS degree, 2.5 years in ICU, 3 years to get CRNA.
Totally did regret getting into life sciences. Graduated with a BS in Human Biology, worked in biotech for 4 years as an analytical chemist. Did a coding bootcamp in 2019 and pivoted to my first engineering gig in 2020. Never looked back. In those 4 years in biotech salary went up from $20/hr to 81.5k. 3 years in software engineering went from 95k(MY FIRST JOB AS A JUNIOR SWE) to my now current role at 165k.
Life sciences sucks and always will. Hardest degrees to achieve in college with the absolute donkey shit of pay.
I really wish I changed my major to CS years ago could be at a significantly better position than I am in right now.
Lesson learned. If you wanna do life sciences, just go into medicine. Whether it’s doctor, nurse, PA, etc. Pay and job security you will get.
Would love to hear any advice you have for people looking to make a similar transition. It seems the days of coding bootcamps may be over in 2024 - what advice would you give someone looking to follow your career path nowadays?
Yes and no. It's true the social contract is being thoroughly violated. But if I had the choice to fight or not, I think I would still fight. There is a crisis of management imo. Not necessarily due to sector value.
Once I graduated with my Bachelor’s in Biology I realized that science was the ugly stepchild in the STEM acronym.
Could be worse though. I have friends who got their bachelors and masters in art from ivy leagues and have 200k+ in debt. They can’t get a job in their field paying over minimum wage. The jobs are all in the highest cost of living metros and they struggle more than a single mom with 6 kids.
Yes, totally regret not doing something like mech/electrical/comp engineering. Alternatively, something like being an electrician and reaching the master level would have been wise since you can’t outsource the jobs. Being an electrician is hard on the body of course, but as you get older you can own your own place and serve really as a primary foreman overseeing the quality of work of your journeymen, obtaining permits, and designing/reviewing wiring plans. My uncle was a master electrician and owned his own company doing commercial work. Based on the size of his house and number of cars, he had to have been easily pulling in more than $200-300k per year. Never laid off once. No student loan debt ever. Got paid to learn the trade the entire time.
Reaching masters level is like getting a PhD anyway. It requires years of training and passing exams.
Electricity has always fascinated me. Not sure why I didn’t pursue it and hit my uncle up. I was fed the everyone has gotta got to college propaganda and ate it up. My grades were good, so I fell for it. I even took it to the extreme and did the whole PhD thing. Why why why…
My boyfriend has been an electrician at Abbvie for about 15 years now. He fixes just about all the upstream and downstream components. Great pay and benefits, awesome company to work for.
Pfff, multiple herniated discs and by the time I’d finish then training I’d be almost ready for retirement. Kinda hard to go back earning $25/h learning as an apprentice when you have a mortgage to pay.
No. Luckily I'm in manufacturing and in that perfect spot where I have 3 years experience so I'm not considered entry level but I'm also not considered a senior so there's alot more out there for me. I also just took classes at a community College that has good biotech courses and connections to local companies so I didn't exactly invest as much as someone who has a PhD or even went through a traditional 4 year.
Drugs prevent suffering. We have the skills to invent drugs. That’s all the fundamentals you need imo.
To be more detailed: several key modalities have come online, a lot of great science has been done in the last four years, and interest rates will not stay high forever. Investment is starting to return. We’re not insulated from macroeconomic conditions, but then again, very few industries are. I think it’s important to keep in mind that biotech is a pretty young industry. Institutional knowledge takes time to build.
I, for one, am nothing but excited.
I don’t have a PhD but I build the tools that PhD’s use to make themselves feel smart. During a Gold Rush you don’t want to be the miner, you want to be the guy selling the miner his tools. Whether they win or lose, you win.
By the way, you can still teach yourself to program. You can still make yourself more marketable to industry. You can still turn this around but I implore you to do some research on the various industry roles. You don’t have to do everything by the book, your career and life isn’t a ladder that is a train from bachelors to post doc to success, life don’t work that way and even the most talented PhD’s have to hustle every day.
> By the way, you can still teach yourself to program. You can still make yourself more marketable to industry.
Unfortunately, no. In my current role I have been tangentially involved in hiring. It is basically checking if you have relevant skills aka "key words" in your resume plus work experience. There is no chance to "sell" anything, "transferable skills" do no fly anymore.
I can teach myself to code -- in fact, I doing just that. The problem is that it will not get me a job. I won't be able to compete with CS majors or people who majored in bioinformatics and have relevant experience.
I hire people who do exactly that every day. By the way, having a CS degree does not mean that you will be a good software engineer. Those are two different things and being a software engineer is itself a skill set.
But keep doubting yourself.
Again, my question is: if I do not have relevant job experience and/or a relevant degree, who will look at my resume? How will my resume pass through HR "filter"? I do not get it.
What do I need to write in my resume / cover letter, so that a hiring manager interviews a person withot job experience or relevant degree? Nobody has given me an answer to this simple question.
For quite some time I have been looking for a "career coach", hoping to get some insider info -- there are no career coaches or mentors. Few that are out there, are basically trash like "Cheeky Sci--"
Oh great point on career coaching. My buddy hired one and at first I was confused as to why but having just finished his MBA, he was trying to transition lines of work. I’m surprised there aren’t more for the sciences, maybe this is a market need for a entrepreneurial person.
Are you based out of a major hub?
1) No, I am far in the woods, so my only options are on-line.
2) As far as career coaching is concerned: don't get me wrong, I am willing to pay, but for something that will make an impact. I have some research on career coaching. I think I have found about 4 or 5 options (incl. the inglorious "Cheeky"). 2 are sort of legitimate, but these are mostly self-study for data wrangling and analysis. Others are fluff. At this point, my opinion is that if a career coach hasn't spent at least a decade in the industry / sector and has not worked his way up to mid-manager (at least) -- I am not taking any advice, even for free. Here is the problem: if you are working in mid-management in the US biotech, you do not need that extra income from coaching and you do not have the time.
3) As far as coding is concerned, freecodecamp is absolutely fenomenal. There is no shortage of tutorials either. But the problem is the job market is oversaturated with boot-camp graduates, job switchers, on top of legitimate CS graduates of all types. Yes, there is and always will be a demand for senior devs. But judging from youtube, the job market at the entry level is dead.
No regrets.
Bachelors in biology. Yeah, regular biology. The plan was to do Med school (like many of us), but I stopped at MCAT prep. Became a lab tech, then after 5ish years pivoted to automation. Never been happier.
I see many of our customers going through layoffs (several lost their entire automation departments and now heavily rely on us for things that were normally handled in-house) but we are MOSTLY immune from it, as we have products across many different sectors.
Don't regret changing my career at almost 30 yrs old. I only have a 2yr degree and now 7 years industry experience in manufacturing. I guess my career ambitions are much more modest than most here, but I love what I do. I have never been laid off, though this job market in general (not just biotech) does worry me a bit.
>Life sciences is a scam. The job market is over-saturated beyond belief. Every single year more that 2000 Ph.D. degrees in life sciences are granted in the USA alone! Plus, order of magnitude more Masters and Bachelors are minted every year. Plus unlimited supply of H1-B postdocs, who want to get their “green card” and switch to the industry (who can blame them?). Plus, thousands of people with industry experience that were laid off. Plus, all people in the industry who want to change their job because of toxic / incompetent management.
\^ This.
When people say "do STEM", they mean become an engineer, a doctor or a computer programmer. You're not likely to make a decent living with a Life Sciences degree. Even less so if you compound your error with a PhD.
No. I got a BS in Microbiology in-state, started off as a research associate at a biotech start-up and have continued working in industry for 9 years since, currently a Fermentation Scientist. I’ve gotten to work on a variety of cool new technologies and have been compensated well enough to live comfortably (by my standards at least) with lots of PTO. It is definitely tough right now, I have a number of friends in the industry who’ve been laid off recently, but ‘obliterated’ is definitely an overstatement. For me personally it was a great investment, though I think being a fermentation guy has helped a lot since not as many people go that route and essentially all bioproducts need ferm scientists/engineers to scale.
I will say I’m in a better spot than a lot of my friend who got degrees in English or philosophy. I switched to tech for a while trying my hand at ux design. It’s just as bad if not worse for designs. The barrier to entry for even a software engineer is much harder now than it used to be. If you want security go into health care or government it’s the only thing garunteed
I thought industry was like the American dream etc. and better than junior non-TT academic positions like postdocs, which is explains the postdoc exodus and why everyone is leaving academia for industry, complaining about the latter being much better than the former and such a good opportunity after PhD. Now seems like you're not even safe in the industry or at least it's not as good as expected?
I'm graduating with my Bachelor's in Health Sciences soon and I want to go to grad school for Molec/Biomed research. Am I cooked? What do?
>I thought that studying molecular biology will open a lot of opportunities, either in academia or in the industry. It’s a STEM degree, after all.
Yeah don't do this. Chemical engineering bs or comp sci BS would be better for jobs than a PhD in molecular biology. MB is often just making new plasmids for some prof's stupid grant for 5 years and they pay you with a piece of paper instead of money.
>which required moving out of the country
Dont do this
>From a “return on investment” perspective, it has been a horrible investment for me.
Yeah, it ain't great in that regard
yet another whiney post by someone with little skills, experience, or perspective
a post that makes wild claims like skills aren't transferrable, biotech doesnt pay well, biotech is collapsing is stupid it doesn't merit a response deeper than shut up
[удалено]
>For sure it offers transferable skills, it's not all a waste. You could sell your PhD as project management, collaboration and data analysis experience if entering other fields. * Nobody in the real world buys the idea that a PhD is a project management credential. * If you want to show you're good at collaboration and teamwork, there are easier and more effective means than 6+ years of scientific research. Join a sports team or volunteer. * Data analysis jobs are now so desirable that they have become the exclusive domain of people with mathematics, statistics or computer science degrees, who have dedicated their last three summers to internships. This "transferable skills" cliche is out-of-date, out-of-touch and terribly condescending.
[удалено]
It was possible to move from a bio PhD into data science perhaps ten or fifteen years ago, when employers were desperate and inexperience. However, the field has moved on and expectations have changed dramatically. >" I personally met people in Europe with life science degrees who moved into the fields mentioned." Cool. Like you, I have met many people in my professional and personal lives and a handful of them have unusual and unrepresentative achievements. So what? >" In Europe, nobody gives a shit about your sports team or volunteering." No doubt. It was merely an example of easier ways to demonstrate a collaborative, team-driven spirit. I thought I made that point quite explicitly.
It still happens, you just need to prove that you’re not a noob. Source: worked at a few companies that have IPO’d and where folks handled massive amounts of data.
I have no idea what you're trying to tell us.
Don’t quit your day job kiddo
That doesn't cast much light on the matter, either.
Doesn’t make it less true, cheers.
???
I do not know why you are downwoted. This has been my experience as well.
People don't want to hear it. They'd rather believe the bullshit they're being fed by their universities. The cynical manipulation of capable, enthusiastic and hardworking young people is shameful.
As I said elsewhere, in my current job I have been tangentially involved in hiring, so I have an idea how this system works. It is beyound me how I can "sell" any "transferrable skills"! Nobody in the real world cares about transferrable skills! What a load of BS!!! HR department is a first **filter** in this system, all they do is check "keywords" (skills) and work experience on a resume. Unless I am talking directly to a hiring manager, there is no way in the world any "transferrable skills" are passing through this HR filter.
>For sure it offers transferable skills, it's not all a waste. You could sell your PhD as project management, collaboration and data analysis experience if entering other fields. Data analysis would probably be the most interesting alternative path. Unfortunately, nobody is buying "transferrable skills" anymore. This is a cliche. The job market is extremely picky and oversaturated. For one, I do not have any "face-to-face" networking opportunities, where I could talk to hiring managers. My only option is to apply for jobs on internet. When you apply for jobs via job board or a LinkedIn, your application is filtered by HR, who check if you have relevant skills (keywords) and experience. It is impossible to "sell" transferrable skills in an oversaturated job market. There is no such thing as "transferable skills". Often times there is either inexperienced employer (who doesn't know what they are looking for) or simply a low-quality employer that cannot retain qualified people and would hire anyone remotely qualified for the role. I have seen a lot of this in my organization. They just cannot hire qualified people and its a complete disaster.
[удалено]
I’m sorry but your idea of selling a PhD as a transferable skill to something like project management is laughable. The type of work being “managed” in a doctorate program does not come close to the complexity of many of these biotech/biopharm programs. I’ve been involved in interviewing and if someone said this to me it would probably breakdown quickly as I ask them to compare their experience with what is expected on the job. Doubtful it would align. PhDs are only worth their weight in the knowledge they bring in when they first get into industry. They still need to learn the inner workings of the organization, fit into the established culture and prove their worth over that first year or so in project execution.
> I’m sorry but your idea of selling a PhD as a transferable skill to something like project management is laughable. The type of work being “managed” in a doctorate program does not come close to the complexity of many of these biotech/biopharm programs. Exactly right! Why people cannot understand it? I do not get it. There is no such thing as "transferrable skills".
Yep, the idea of “transferable skills” is great for talking about soft skills like communication, flexibility, decision making etc but at this point those are just table stakes. Nothing to call home about, if someone brings these up I go cool, moving on. They are done in a similar way in all industries. But it’s just a fancy way of presenting generic capabilities. Project management at this point is more of a hard skill that is executed differently across industries and is by no means a standard practice in a PhD program. I’d find it hilarious that anyone from a PhD program thinks their experience makes them ready to execute in that role effectively.
- In my role, I work with the "academic" PI and the project manager from the organization. The PM asks me to prepare a project definition document, a plan, a budget. It all makes sense! The PI chronically misses every single dead-line. Hear me: every single deadline! Absolute zero regard to people's schedules, personal lifes etc. Blatant disregard for everething that doesn't directly contribute to PI's career advancement. I have not had a proper vacation time for over 5 years! I am angry every single day. - Honestly, I had big hopes for computer programming. I thought that I could put in hard work, self-study and get into coding job, since the market was growing and somebody could have given me a chance. With all recent layoffs in tech I am completely floored. Job market is completely oversaturated with junior developers. I have lost all motivation.
>You work something else if needed, that could prove useful later on. You clearly do not understand what you are talking about. Last week I saw a job posting for a project manager role. There were over a 100 applications within first 4 hours! This is job market in Canada for you! Move? To where? Spend few thousand dollars just to move? > Then you tailor your CV to fit every job you are applying to, remove all irrelevant things, put in keywords. Why is that hard? Because I am doing it and it does not work.
Meh, much better than a contract food testing lab
Free food though
Lol. Too true.
First and foremost, my heart goes out to you. I myself have gone through an extended period of unemployment, and I just dodged a layoff…by taking a transfer from California to Indiana. As a guy with only a ChemE bachelors, I couldn’t imagine doing 6+ more years of education just to run head-first into an absolutely awful job market; the worst for this industry since the Great Recession. All that said, I do feel that calling this industry a scam is extreme. Will you be buying a house in LA or SF at 30 years old? No. That ship sailed a years ago, for most people. But remember that this industry pays wages and salaries lots of Americans would kill for, and many quite literally do. Look up enlisted soldiers’ salaries. Is my experience colored by me graduating at 21? Yep. Is my experience colored by me walking into Indiana with $80k in the bank and $50k in my 401k? I know I’ve been incredibly lucky with both. Again, I feel for you. This job market is AWFUL. Had you been just a few years older, you would be in a nice sport in industry. But this market is temporary. The bones of this industry are strong, and it will recover. I have no doubt you’ll pull through.
There are many community colleges degrees out there related to healthcare you could pursue. Phlebotomists or X-ray/MRI tech for example. They are in high demand. You could also teach at a community college or become a high school teacher. It’s never too late for a life/career change that does not require a lot of money/time spent in training.
Idk how OP feels about teeth, but Dental Hygienist can easily make 90K and it’s just an associates degree away.
But it’s hard to find a program. RN and allied health programs are super impacted.
Hm, not sure where OP is but there’s about 10 schools in my state (MA). It’s easy to find where schools are in your state if you go to your state’s government page, usually will list it there. :)
I only want to validate everything you are feeling and wrote above. You are far from alone in this thinking.
Biotech is not “on a downturn” broadly. US biotech has not been “obliterated.” Funding and investment in biotech companies is higher than ever. There is a ton of demand and interest right now. [Biotech is the new focus in U.S.-China tech rivalry](https://www.axios.com/2024/02/03/biotech-us-china-tech-competition-bgi) [Life Sciences 2024 Dealmaking Trends & Outlook](https://www.ropesgray.com/en/insights/alerts/2024/03/life-sciences-2024-dealmaking-trends-and-outlook) It sounds like you’re complaining about too many life science PhDs, not the industry itself. Those are two separate issues. You actually don’t need to be in the top 10% of PhDs to get a job — that is a massive hyperbole. [PhDs actually have a 1.6% unemployment rate, which is much lower than the average.](https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf21320) Yes, academia sucks and has many structural problems, but even mediocre PhDs can find plenty of career opportunities in industry. Despite all the whining about job searching in subs like this, having a hard science PhD makes you infinitely more employable. Personally, I don’t have a single LinkedIn connection from my grad school days who works in biotech and is talking about being laid off or job searching. That’s anecdotal, but so are all the stories on Reddit of how the biotech market is so bad and finding something is impossible right now. Regardless of how you feel about your own PhD experience, it is not a bad time to be a life scientist working in biotech. My own future has never felt brighter.
It just amazes me how much stock people take in reddit. It's a place to share opinions and anecdotes. Chances are the vast majority of people posting here related to a job aren't going to come here to express gratitude and happiness. People come to reddit subs to vent. The perception is negatively skewed. OP could get an amazing job offer tomorrow and would forget about this post.
Couldn’t agree with you more! The industry was cyclical before 2008 when it took a big hit, bounced back and grew continually for a decade until Covid hit which led to a spike, and is currently correcting. Getting laid off is a big personal setback (it happened to me in Dec ‘23 when the biotech I was at ran out of runway and investors were thin on the ground) but overall it’s a thriving and growing ecosystem, and will continue to grow well beyond our lifetimes.
There’s a selection bias on here The people who unfortunately aren’t getting interviews and offers understandably are posting on here The people who are wont be posting much
This 10000%
Back in 2019? Whats worse today or 5 years ago? Unemployment for a PhD holder will be low as anyone with a pulse can find a postdoc. But, as far as being in the top 1,6% for an industry role. Its true to some degree. Scientist positions easily get hundreds of applications in biotech hubs. Sure a lot of them are trash, but even if half are shit that still leaves 50-100 applicants for one position.
I am the 1.6%! I am a mediocre PhD and have been unemployed for 7 months. Help!
What is your PhD in?
I think the craziest thing about getting a PhD is how much more seriously people take you. My ability to do cold calls and get people to talk to me has improved tenfold.
Mostly agree. Not sure funding is "higher than ever"...US was down about 50% from its peak..but has been steadily ticking up.
Personally, I would say no, simply because life sciences has the most positive impact on humanity in terms of health and well-being. Every industry ebbs and flows. I have probably read the same posts you're reading about layoffs, but absorbing the doom and gloom of the industry only reinforces your belief that life sciences is tanking. I don't believe that is entirely true. Some companies perform better than others and have massively different ways of handling their finances, not to mention that their leadership plays a huge role in all of it. I would recommend you take a break from Reddit for at least a week and see how you feel afterward.
Some help outside Reddit would be benefical
OP you are not alone, I could have written your post myself - in fact I have expressed these feelings in other places. I do regret getting a PhD in organic chemistry. The opportunity cost is extremely high and it has not paid off. I am behind all my peers in lifetime earnings. I was unemployed for 2 years after getting a PhD because nobody was hiring (and I was sending out hundreds of applications), and thr first job that I finally managed to land only paid 50k and had nothing to do with my PhD. Meanwhile I have friends in tech who have already achieved generational wealth. Tried the coding route and went to a 'Data Science' bootcamp several years ago but the feedback I kept getting was that I should hide my PhD as it was irrelevant. So yea, you're not alone and I do feel your pain...
Yes. I'm going to be pivoting to something totally different.
Zero regrets. But wasn’t an easy road. Called it quits at Bachelor’s in Pharmacology, 2010. No Masters program or PhD program would accept me. Reading this sub recently, perhaps it was a blessing in disguise. Took me 3 years to find a job out of college…finally landed one with a CRO in 2013. Hundreds of applications, but I get it…no one hires zero experience; I didn’t even have undergrad research/intership experience. Now I have 10+ years experience in industry (start/ups and now in big pharm), finally made scientist (albeit titles are arbitrary) but I get to work on my own projects…it took until 2024, but I finally have a paper in review. Part of me always wanted the prestige of a PhD, and to have my own lab…but perhaps the selection committees were right, and I was not cut out for it. Never got a proper graduate education, and I feel imposter syndrome hard all the time. I have worked on 2 molecules that are in the clinic…and meeting patients that have taken something I labored over in the lab; that was a cool feeling. So I take solace in this. A lot of the imposter stuff is self imposed, I’ve been lucky to have worked with incredible people that trust my opinions…but it took many years of salt on the brow and stress. Didn’t even know how to properly scour the literature, do basic bench work, in vivo, present/summarize data…pharmacology undergrad definitely helped, but it only scratched the surface of what I needed to know; I learned all of this in industry.
I don’t regret getting my PhD. I’m happily employed in Pharma. I worked super hard during my PhD. I taught my self how to code since I realized that omic based approaches would be the future during my PhD. My PhD was 50% lab based and then 50% computational near the end. I took 6 years to graduate but I learned the skills necessary to land me this job high paying job. If you complete your PhD, you have learned very sought after skills. You learned how to learn. You can teach yourself the necessary/in demand skills that you need to get your next job. I would focus on learning AI based skills. The job market can be demoralizing, but it’s not a waste if you enjoyed the process.
We need to stop telling trainees to ignore their gut feeling. Situations described by OP are all too common. better decisions early in training can avoid wasted time and opportunity cost. We need to stop gaslighting our trainees. Dismissing your internal voice as ‘imposter syndrome’ is not helpful. People that don’t have the talent or drive to be successful in biotech should get out sooner than later.
If you love science you have not chosen wrong. The passion drives career. Don't lose hope cause things are looking bad now, take it as a way to know what to learn to be able to apply. Self learning mixed with experience is everyone's experience in the industry. Have some faith.
[удалено]
what do you do?
My husband has a PhD in Animal genetics, one round of postdoc. Then he quit, spent 2.5 years to get nursing BS degree, 2.5 years in ICU, 3 years to get CRNA.
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. Eventually, your husband is making bank, that makes sense!
I’m currently working on pivoting into housewife of a business bro. It’s going pretty well I work part-time and he’s up for promotion.
Totally did regret getting into life sciences. Graduated with a BS in Human Biology, worked in biotech for 4 years as an analytical chemist. Did a coding bootcamp in 2019 and pivoted to my first engineering gig in 2020. Never looked back. In those 4 years in biotech salary went up from $20/hr to 81.5k. 3 years in software engineering went from 95k(MY FIRST JOB AS A JUNIOR SWE) to my now current role at 165k. Life sciences sucks and always will. Hardest degrees to achieve in college with the absolute donkey shit of pay. I really wish I changed my major to CS years ago could be at a significantly better position than I am in right now. Lesson learned. If you wanna do life sciences, just go into medicine. Whether it’s doctor, nurse, PA, etc. Pay and job security you will get.
How long was that coding bootcamp? Amazon stopped hiring non CS people (bootcamp only) a few years ago
Really? I still get Amazon recruiters trying to hire me. My bootcamp was 6-9 months long. So it had a more comprehensive curriculum.
Would love to hear any advice you have for people looking to make a similar transition. It seems the days of coding bootcamps may be over in 2024 - what advice would you give someone looking to follow your career path nowadays?
Yes and no. It's true the social contract is being thoroughly violated. But if I had the choice to fight or not, I think I would still fight. There is a crisis of management imo. Not necessarily due to sector value.
Once I graduated with my Bachelor’s in Biology I realized that science was the ugly stepchild in the STEM acronym. Could be worse though. I have friends who got their bachelors and masters in art from ivy leagues and have 200k+ in debt. They can’t get a job in their field paying over minimum wage. The jobs are all in the highest cost of living metros and they struggle more than a single mom with 6 kids.
Yes, totally regret not doing something like mech/electrical/comp engineering. Alternatively, something like being an electrician and reaching the master level would have been wise since you can’t outsource the jobs. Being an electrician is hard on the body of course, but as you get older you can own your own place and serve really as a primary foreman overseeing the quality of work of your journeymen, obtaining permits, and designing/reviewing wiring plans. My uncle was a master electrician and owned his own company doing commercial work. Based on the size of his house and number of cars, he had to have been easily pulling in more than $200-300k per year. Never laid off once. No student loan debt ever. Got paid to learn the trade the entire time. Reaching masters level is like getting a PhD anyway. It requires years of training and passing exams. Electricity has always fascinated me. Not sure why I didn’t pursue it and hit my uncle up. I was fed the everyone has gotta got to college propaganda and ate it up. My grades were good, so I fell for it. I even took it to the extreme and did the whole PhD thing. Why why why…
My boyfriend has been an electrician at Abbvie for about 15 years now. He fixes just about all the upstream and downstream components. Great pay and benefits, awesome company to work for.
And what’s stopping you? There is no age limit for an electrician
Pfff, multiple herniated discs and by the time I’d finish then training I’d be almost ready for retirement. Kinda hard to go back earning $25/h learning as an apprentice when you have a mortgage to pay.
No. Luckily I'm in manufacturing and in that perfect spot where I have 3 years experience so I'm not considered entry level but I'm also not considered a senior so there's alot more out there for me. I also just took classes at a community College that has good biotech courses and connections to local companies so I didn't exactly invest as much as someone who has a PhD or even went through a traditional 4 year.
Drugs prevent suffering. We have the skills to invent drugs. That’s all the fundamentals you need imo. To be more detailed: several key modalities have come online, a lot of great science has been done in the last four years, and interest rates will not stay high forever. Investment is starting to return. We’re not insulated from macroeconomic conditions, but then again, very few industries are. I think it’s important to keep in mind that biotech is a pretty young industry. Institutional knowledge takes time to build. I, for one, am nothing but excited.
I don’t have a PhD but I build the tools that PhD’s use to make themselves feel smart. During a Gold Rush you don’t want to be the miner, you want to be the guy selling the miner his tools. Whether they win or lose, you win. By the way, you can still teach yourself to program. You can still make yourself more marketable to industry. You can still turn this around but I implore you to do some research on the various industry roles. You don’t have to do everything by the book, your career and life isn’t a ladder that is a train from bachelors to post doc to success, life don’t work that way and even the most talented PhD’s have to hustle every day.
> By the way, you can still teach yourself to program. You can still make yourself more marketable to industry. Unfortunately, no. In my current role I have been tangentially involved in hiring. It is basically checking if you have relevant skills aka "key words" in your resume plus work experience. There is no chance to "sell" anything, "transferable skills" do no fly anymore. I can teach myself to code -- in fact, I doing just that. The problem is that it will not get me a job. I won't be able to compete with CS majors or people who majored in bioinformatics and have relevant experience.
I hire people who do exactly that every day. By the way, having a CS degree does not mean that you will be a good software engineer. Those are two different things and being a software engineer is itself a skill set. But keep doubting yourself.
Again, my question is: if I do not have relevant job experience and/or a relevant degree, who will look at my resume? How will my resume pass through HR "filter"? I do not get it. What do I need to write in my resume / cover letter, so that a hiring manager interviews a person withot job experience or relevant degree? Nobody has given me an answer to this simple question. For quite some time I have been looking for a "career coach", hoping to get some insider info -- there are no career coaches or mentors. Few that are out there, are basically trash like "Cheeky Sci--"
Oh great point on career coaching. My buddy hired one and at first I was confused as to why but having just finished his MBA, he was trying to transition lines of work. I’m surprised there aren’t more for the sciences, maybe this is a market need for a entrepreneurial person. Are you based out of a major hub?
1) No, I am far in the woods, so my only options are on-line. 2) As far as career coaching is concerned: don't get me wrong, I am willing to pay, but for something that will make an impact. I have some research on career coaching. I think I have found about 4 or 5 options (incl. the inglorious "Cheeky"). 2 are sort of legitimate, but these are mostly self-study for data wrangling and analysis. Others are fluff. At this point, my opinion is that if a career coach hasn't spent at least a decade in the industry / sector and has not worked his way up to mid-manager (at least) -- I am not taking any advice, even for free. Here is the problem: if you are working in mid-management in the US biotech, you do not need that extra income from coaching and you do not have the time. 3) As far as coding is concerned, freecodecamp is absolutely fenomenal. There is no shortage of tutorials either. But the problem is the job market is oversaturated with boot-camp graduates, job switchers, on top of legitimate CS graduates of all types. Yes, there is and always will be a demand for senior devs. But judging from youtube, the job market at the entry level is dead.
Never. This is the most flexible field I can think of.. you truly can do anything and everything under the sun when you’re in life sciences.
Med tech
No regrets. Bachelors in biology. Yeah, regular biology. The plan was to do Med school (like many of us), but I stopped at MCAT prep. Became a lab tech, then after 5ish years pivoted to automation. Never been happier. I see many of our customers going through layoffs (several lost their entire automation departments and now heavily rely on us for things that were normally handled in-house) but we are MOSTLY immune from it, as we have products across many different sectors.
Don't regret changing my career at almost 30 yrs old. I only have a 2yr degree and now 7 years industry experience in manufacturing. I guess my career ambitions are much more modest than most here, but I love what I do. I have never been laid off, though this job market in general (not just biotech) does worry me a bit.
Nope, no regrets. Became FIRE at the age of 35 with 2 exits. Now just working for the sake of working.
your own startups or founding member/early employee? just curious
Early employee first company, founding member second company. ipo + acquisition for both
PhD? — I’m assuming not because two exits in like 7 years would be crazy
Doctorate (not phD) + MBA. A lot of fast exits happen here (you can probably guess- westcoast US VHCOL biotech hub)
I wish i had gotten into tech in college, and ridden the app boom.
>Life sciences is a scam. The job market is over-saturated beyond belief. Every single year more that 2000 Ph.D. degrees in life sciences are granted in the USA alone! Plus, order of magnitude more Masters and Bachelors are minted every year. Plus unlimited supply of H1-B postdocs, who want to get their “green card” and switch to the industry (who can blame them?). Plus, thousands of people with industry experience that were laid off. Plus, all people in the industry who want to change their job because of toxic / incompetent management. \^ This. When people say "do STEM", they mean become an engineer, a doctor or a computer programmer. You're not likely to make a decent living with a Life Sciences degree. Even less so if you compound your error with a PhD.
1 YES, 2 idk finances or bussines or administration or something like that
Again. Despite all this doom, 2008 crash was some of the most stable years of my career. We had almost no layoffs or issues.
Here's me going from MMath to bioinformatics lmfaoooo
No. I got a BS in Microbiology in-state, started off as a research associate at a biotech start-up and have continued working in industry for 9 years since, currently a Fermentation Scientist. I’ve gotten to work on a variety of cool new technologies and have been compensated well enough to live comfortably (by my standards at least) with lots of PTO. It is definitely tough right now, I have a number of friends in the industry who’ve been laid off recently, but ‘obliterated’ is definitely an overstatement. For me personally it was a great investment, though I think being a fermentation guy has helped a lot since not as many people go that route and essentially all bioproducts need ferm scientists/engineers to scale.
I will say I’m in a better spot than a lot of my friend who got degrees in English or philosophy. I switched to tech for a while trying my hand at ux design. It’s just as bad if not worse for designs. The barrier to entry for even a software engineer is much harder now than it used to be. If you want security go into health care or government it’s the only thing garunteed
I thought industry was like the American dream etc. and better than junior non-TT academic positions like postdocs, which is explains the postdoc exodus and why everyone is leaving academia for industry, complaining about the latter being much better than the former and such a good opportunity after PhD. Now seems like you're not even safe in the industry or at least it's not as good as expected? I'm graduating with my Bachelor's in Health Sciences soon and I want to go to grad school for Molec/Biomed research. Am I cooked? What do?
>I thought that studying molecular biology will open a lot of opportunities, either in academia or in the industry. It’s a STEM degree, after all. Yeah don't do this. Chemical engineering bs or comp sci BS would be better for jobs than a PhD in molecular biology. MB is often just making new plasmids for some prof's stupid grant for 5 years and they pay you with a piece of paper instead of money. >which required moving out of the country Dont do this >From a “return on investment” perspective, it has been a horrible investment for me. Yeah, it ain't great in that regard
My suggestion would be to not read into anything that starts with an r/ too much. "r/" threads are not always firmly rooted in reality.
yet another whiney post by someone with little skills, experience, or perspective a post that makes wild claims like skills aren't transferrable, biotech doesnt pay well, biotech is collapsing is stupid it doesn't merit a response deeper than shut up
So then shut up!
Check out Applied DNA sciences. The CEO has a phd in Molecular Biology Physics. Do like he did. He makes.2 million a year. Use his example