There seems to be no shortage of outlets and people offering advice on how to find jobs outside academia right now, but for what it’s worth, this was the way I went about it.
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In the run-up to my decision to leave academia, I had one huge asset: my wife’s career.
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I’m less than a year into my new scientific career in the private sector, and the biggest difference with academia is already clear: it’s the money.
But not, as you might think, in terms of salary…
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It’s taken the private sector only six months to give me something that 20+ years in academia didn’t provide: a permanent position.
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I do miss academia, but only in the abstract.
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I don’t usually blog about my actual research, but this week one of my last papers was published, a characterisation of the protein TbSmee1 in the unicellular eukaryotic parasite Trypanosoma brucei (here). “Mr Smee” has had a long and painful genesis, and in many ways the story of this paper is the story of my own research group, and one I definitely plan on telling at a later date.
For now though, the paper is worth highlighting because I think it illustrates a number of features of contemporary publishing dynamics, peer review, and the importance of frontline research to undergraduates.
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Ko-Fan Chen is a lecturer in Neurogenetics at the Department of Genetics and Genome Biology, University of Leicester (UK). He also runs a research lab to understand sleep. Here, he describes the moment ( his #MySciMoment) that set him on the path to a research career in academia.
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