Articles Written By Elizabeth Deyett

When I started applying for jobs after getting my PhD, I didn’t even know what transferable skills were.  I heavily emphasized my technical skills. After all, I had spent the last 5 years perfecting them. But application after application I never heard anything back.  When I really began to analyze the job descriptions I realized the technical skills were not all they emphasized. Words like “communication”, “collaboration”, and “independent worker” continuously popped up again and again. It hadn’t dawned on me before that these are skills known as transferable skills.  I realized that people cared more about whether I could…

The first time I had an interview it was a disaster. I answered all the questions wrong. I had never interviewed before, but for some reason I thought I was going to do great.  Right from the beginning it was bad. The first question they asked me: “How are you?” For which I gave my generic automatic answer Fine how are you. My interviewer also said fine and asked if I could tell him a little bit about myself. So, I proceeded to tell him that I was a PhD student.  I kept my answer rather succinct because I’d read how…

I didn’t start my LinkedIn profile until after the pandemic hit. Suddenly, I had some time on my hands and desperately needed a job. I quickly threw one together and connected with everyone I could think of. I had 100 connections and a Social Selling Index (SSI) score of 12. Luckily I had learned about SSI in a recent Cheeky Scientist webinar. So, even though I joined LinkedIn pretty late in my PhD career, I knew enough to get me started.  I decided to improve my SSI score before I even started looking for a job. It made me very…

It took about a month for that fact to finally sink in. I was a PhD, no longer a PhD student. I was part of the 2% of society that now possessed that degree of education. But I had no idea how to write a resume.  After you get your PhD, all you hear about is getting a job, making a decent salary, and finally enjoying life.  This was not true for me. I was in some post-PhD fog, a depression unlike what I faced during my PhD. There were of course dark times in the lab, at the computer, redoing…

I grew up with 5 younger siblings; I thought I knew a thing or two about negotiating.  Growing up, we had to negotiate about who got control of the remote. As we got older we had to negotiate who would drive, or host holiday parties.  When I started my PhD, I had to negotiate with my PI all the time about what should or shouldn’t go in the manuscript.  So by the time I got a seat at the negotiating table I wasn’t too worried. I had so much negotiating power, I was valuable, well educated, and well trained.  But…

Networking was one of those things I was always doing “tomorrow.”  It was so much easier to sit down and work on my resume, or change some word choices on my LinkedIn. They were easy and they made me feel like I accomplished something. But really it was like treading water.  I tread this water for months, thinking I was moving somewhere but I was only moving with a gentle current. My actions weren’t actually propelling me in any direction. I wasn’t getting any hits on my LinkedIn, I wasn’t getting any call backs on my resume.  Was I not…

I knew that networking and virtual networking were important to my career but it seemed impossible. I got my PhD at a small university, hours away from the closest city. My industry network was smaller than my academic one; which I felt I could count on one hand.  I was invisible to industry and had no job prospects.   I knew I wanted to leave academia after my PhD instead of doing a postdoc, but I was so uncertain around what I wanted to do. I felt I had no opportunities.  On top of this, my significant other was looking for…

When I told my labmates I was working on my LinkedIn profile, they said what for? In their eyes LinkedIn was not for academics. Obviously, since I was getting a PhD in academia, there was no place for me in industry, I had to stay in academia. And so, I stopped asking them to connect. I stopped asking other academics within my university to connect too, and soon I stopped asking everyone to connect. My LinkedIn profile laid dormant for several years while I went through grad school. As I neared the end of my PhD, I realized I wasn’t…