Articles Written By Sarah Smith, PhD

I truly believed I had a stellar resume brimming with all my accomplishments from every walk of life. I kept shooting the same resume at all the different job postings, all throughout the year.  Surprisingly, I never got a call back.  After facing several rejections, I reached out to a friend who is a hiring manager at a firm and asked them to have a look at my resume. The first reaction I received was “what position are you targeting? The feedback that I received from a person who knew what I was trying to convey made me realize that…

Contributing Author: Marios Tsatsos, PhD After my interview, I got a call from the HR department. This was the big phone call – the one about money. I had interviewed well, and the person from HR was calling to let me know he was about to meet with the hiring manager. Hopefully, he said, there would be an offer for me after they met. It was time for the negotiation.  Then he asked about salary…  I didn’t want to give the first number, so I deflected his question with a joke. It worked, and the representative mentioned the first salary…

When I started writing my dissertation in September, I kept my head down. I was focused and determined. I ignored all social gatherings, all other responsibilities, this was my prime directive. 200 pages later, it was done, approved by my committee and my defense date was set, March 7th, 2020.  The defense went great, standing room only. For the first time in months, I could breathe.  Little did I know this would be the last in-person defense at my campus for the foreseeable future. Not even 10 days later, the world would shut down, the pandemic closed everything. I was…

I couldn’t believe it.  After nearly 25 years of being a “student,” I had done it.  I had earned the right to put 3 letters at the end of my name: P-h-D.  After those 25 years, I felt it was time to leave academia behind, I no longer wanted to be on a college campus anymore, with undergrads, and lifetime academics.  I wanted something more. This was not for me.  So I brushed off my CV which I had used for so many grant proposals, changed a few things here and there, and started posting my ‘resume’ on every job…

By the time I received my PhD, I had never held an industry job. I had never been trained in how to create a resume or cover letter.  After college, I watched those going into industry struggle to get jobs, but I was at ease with my PhD lab already picked out, my future was set. I followed these friends on social media as they got jobs…found spouses…started to have children. Meanwhile, I was still glued to my bench trying to squeeze my stipend into a survivable income. I was no longer at ease. I was stuck and uncertain about…

Onboarding expert and contributing author Sarah Smith, PhD, shares her company onboarding experience. The day I had been waiting for was finally here. My first day in industry. I had been looking for a job for nearly a year, and this one seemed like a great fit for me. I couldn’t wait to get started…But when I showed up, no one was prepared for me to be there. I had no desk. One of my coworkers seemed very annoyed that they had to find a random table for me to sit at. I didn’t have a computer either. I was…

My very first video resume was embarrassing. At the time, I thought it was pretty good. I had some music going in the background because it seemed like a way to add personality. Bad idea. After reviewing my recording, I noticed there was also a dog barking somewhere in the background. On top of that, the lighting wasn’t very good in the room where I filmed myself. I had shadows on my face, and it made my eyes look a little sunken… However, this seemed fine to me – after all, I was applying for a PhD-level position not a…

Finding the right position with the right job search strategy was one of my biggest challenges once I decided to move into industry.  I had plenty of academic experience, but I didn’t know if that was valuable in industry. A lot of people told me that it would be difficult to apply for industry roles without relevant experience. At first, I made some major mistakes. My advisor told me to list my technical skills at the top of my resume. He told me to emphasize my education section – surely, this would impress employers, right? It didn’t, and now I…

The current crisis reminds me of something that happened to me years ago, before I had leadership skills. I had an interview with a big company, and it was scheduled to take place on an upper floor of a tall building. I took the elevator, which turned out to be the wrong choice. Normally, I’d have chosen the stairs, but I was feeling nervous and didn’t want to make my heart rate increase – it was already beating fast. The elevator got about halfway up to my floor and abruptly stopped. The doors didn’t open. There were several other people…

Your salary should always remain a secret from interviewers and potential employers. Contributing author Sarah Smith, PhD, explains why… And how PhDs can deflect questions about their current salary. After 2 postdocs at 2 different universities, I realized something… I didn’t enjoy what I was doing anymore. The academic career wasn’t what I had envisioned. All I did was sit at a desk and work on my research in isolation. I had lost my passion – my future in academia was painfully limited. So at a networking event, I took a deep breath and awkwardly introduced myself to a prominent…

As with most long-term projects, consistent accountability requires motivation. Research done at the University of Rochester identified two types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation is the kind of curiosity that drives you to pursue knowledge all the way to mastery. PhDs almost always have a lot of this motivation. Loving your field of study and wanting to advance it is what made you push your way through a doctoral program. Intrinsic motivation derives from natural satisfaction – when the task is its own reward. The problem is that intrinsic motivation rarely drives a job search. What PhDs need…

LinkedIn is an excellent resource for networking, and it makes the whole process easier than ever before. But LinkedIn should not be the only place you are meeting industry professionals. You need to attend in-person networking events too. Meeting in person allows someone to get to know you at a far more significant level than the internet alone will allow. The amount of rapport and relationship-building that can occur during a 10-minute, in-person interaction could take months if attempted over the internet. There is no substitute for face-to-face networking – it’s what we as a species have evolved to do.…