In the end, my jobseeker status after leaving academia lasted exactly two weeks.

In early January, I resigned from my position as a group leader at the Department of Cell & Developmental Biology at the University of Würzburg. At the end of April, I left it and academia. A fortnight later, I signed a contract at a medical communications (MedComms) firm based in Mannheim – my first day back in employment, after a “break” in which I’ve been slowly disentangling myself from academic commitments, was September 1st, 2023.

Of course, the actual search process for a new position began as soon as I handed in my resignation, and I plan on blogging about that in the nearish future for all the rest of you out there who are contemplating making the leap out of academia and into something different. What I find heartening though – based at least on this sample size of 1 – is that it illustrates how the skills we acquire as academics by no means institutionalise us to the extent that we become unemployable anywhere else.

I’m also very excited about making this transition from a research/teaching environment (where my writing/reading/organising/communicating skills were very much add-ons) into one where those same skills are being placed front and centre.

I’m fascinated to see how life in the private sector compares to that in academia/public sector, and I’ve already prepared a list of preconceptions and I’ll revisit that in about a year’s time to see how whether those expectations were met, or not.

Ever since I resigned, I’ve felt galvanised in a way that I haven’t since I finished my PhD. I always thought that I would be happy going on forever with the research/teaching routine in academia, but I’m starting to suspect that I’m going to be even happier doing something completely new, completely different, and in a new setting. Change is good, and perhaps in the future it will be not just possible but common for scientists to move back and forth between academia and biotech/pharma.

As I noted when I first went public about leaving academia, what this means for TIR is a bit of an open question. There’s no shortage of ideas for postings and my memories and associations with labwork are fresh enough that I’ll be able to keep writing on those topics for some time, but it will also be fascinating to start mixing in impressions and commentary on my new chapter in the world of biotech/pharma. I very much hope that these thoughts and reflections will be of use to other scientists thinking of or making the jump. 

As I’ve noted in the past, I remain convinced that we need to train as many PhDs as possible, but that we also need to start signposting the routes out of academia much more clearly. The world of science is much, much bigger than just academia, and I’m starting to feel that academia’s role in generating researchers might be of greater societal importance than its role in generating research data…again, something to mull as the architecture of my new environment becomes clearer.

Watch this space! 🙂