A PhD Examined: Beyond Grad School

Finishing My Degree and Starting My Job

9 min readSep 8, 2024

Like all things good and bad, grad school comes to an end eventually. Near the end of my program, I was discovering that the next step was even more challenging. Even though I had to forge my own path through the PhD program, it was a program. What lay beyond was a completely blank canvas and I held a brush and stood asking myself “What now?”

In this final “big topic” article, I will talk about my experience around the end of my program and touch on life beyond grad school.

When to Graduate?

This one should be easy: when your advisor says so, right? Well, yes, your advisor needs to approve your graduation. But most advisors aren’t eager to do so, especially if you’ve been productive. To your advisor, you’re someone who produces original research work for, let’s face it, little pay. They want to keep you around as long as possible, but not so long that they develop a reputation for holding students back.

This is where having regular conversations with my advisor and setting expectations with him paid off. I knew from conversations with him and with senior students in our group what his criteria were for judging someone ready to graduate, I just had to measure up.

Of course, this was easier said that done. My advisor’s criteria included that I publish 2 first-author articles in peer-reviewed journals. It took me quite a long time and effort to achieve this goal. One particular challenge in my case was that I was trying to work on too many things at once. It took the advice of a friend and colleague to point me in the right direction: focus on one thing, see it through, and move on to the next. As obvious as this is in retrospect, it was a lesson I needed to learn at the time.

From that moment on, I felt on the right track and started working toward publication. It’s hard for me to pinpoint an exact moment when I felt ready to graduate (there were many moments where I thought “I’m done, I need to graduate”, but that was just my frustration talking). I think the right moment, from an academic perspective, is when you feel you’ve reached enough maturity of knowledge to create new work and blaze new trails in your subject. Focusing on my work and starting to produce published research is how I knew.

I should stop here and note that the field I worked in (analog integrated circuits) has a high barrier to entry for publication as it requires waiting for integrated circuits to be fabricated and then measuring them in the lab and matching results to theory and simulation. It’s not an easy process. There are other fields where publications come more easily and frequently, so please take my personal story with a grain of salt depending on your field of research.

Of course academic/career readiness is not the only factor to consider for graduation. I had friends who needed to graduate quickly and move on for personal life reasons. For other people, it was financial reasons (they needed a job that paid better). For many people I know and know of, it wasn’t even possible to make it to graduation. I know people who found it necessary to quit their grad program for reasons ranging from finding a better job to quitting an abusive advisor.

Another layer of complexity in the decision to graduate or leave your program is the visa situation for international students. An international student has about 60 days to find a job after they finish their program before they fall out of legal standing and are required to leave the US. For this reason, international students are usually advised to not graduate before securing a job offer. This was, of course, my case and I had to hunt for a job while I was writing my dissertation.

Academia or Industry?

The main question concerning what lies after grad school is, should one continue in the academic track or transition to the industry? This question is probably more relevant to PhD students but can also be meaningful to master’s students considering whether to continue in grad school and pursue a PhD (yes, these people exist, I know at least one of them!).

In my case, I started my PhD program with the full intention of pursuing the academic track and targeting an assistant professor job. Over the years, my attachment to that notion grew weaker as I faced more of the practical realities of academic research. The constant pressure to publish even if you think your work is not ready, the need to sell and embellish your work to make it publication-worthy, the competition among big egos; these were all ugly aspects that I saw more clearly as time went by. A big part of my decision to transition to the industry was also the high barrier to entry for publishing in my field as I mentioned before. What finally tipped the needle once and for all is a talk I attended by one of the professors in my department. He said something along the lines of “if you go for an assistant professor position, you should be prepared to do an amount of work equal to your entire PhD in the first year”. That’s when I knew this wasn’t for me.

These days, I know that I made the right choice by transitioning to the industry but I can’t help missing the academic environment at times. One big plus in academia is more freedom. Academic research by its very nature gives you more intellectual freedom to explore new ideas and test out alternative approaches. Industry, of course, is driven by profit rather and this makes it risk-averse. It’s safer to stick with the old ways that have been time-tested and proven than to try for something new that may not work as well.

This question is ultimately very personal and depends on each person’s preferences and life circumstances. It should perhaps be another criterion to decide on graduation readiness: do you know what you’re doing next?

The Job Hunt

Searching for a job was particularly stressful for me, not only because of the visa restrictions I mentioned above, but also because I had to do it in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic when the job market was facing a lot of uncertainty. While my job search experience was slightly atypical, I think the approach itself is good and should be helpful to others.

To maximize my chances at finding a job, I not only contacted my friends who already had jobs in the industry and sent them my resume, I also set up a recurring task on my calendar to apply to a few jobs via LinkedIn (or directly through company websites) every day. Most job hunting advice articles I have read counsel the opposite: instead of sending the same resume to many places, I was supposed to select a few places and send each one of them a custom resume tailored to the position. Since I was really anxious to find a job, I opted for a middle ground. I applied to many different places and slightly tweaked my resume to highlight the relevant skills to each role.

It took me more than 2 months of actively applying to jobs this way to get 2 interviews. This was causing me a lot of anxiety and stress at the time (I reached out and booked sessions with one of the university’s counselors; remember how mental health is important?). Interestingly enough, one of the interviews was due to a connection who worked at the company and the other (with the company where I currently work) was because a manager found my resume through LinkedIn. I was fortunate to find a great job that I really enjoy with a wonderful team after a long and stressful 2 months. I signed the offer 2 weeks before defending my dissertation. I can only hope the job search process isn’t as stressful these days.

I took 2 things away from this experience:

I shouldn’t have underestimated any resources for the job hunt. I
was originally skeptical about applying via LinkedIn because I thought my resume would be lost in a sea of others, but I ended up finding my job because of it.
Flexibility and resilience are important. When I was running out of options and thought I might not get a job in time, I was already starting to talk to my advisor about staying on his research group as a post doctoral student. Staying in academia wasn’t my first choice as I mentioned above but I was trying to adapt to the reality of the situation.

There was one more thing that was helpful throughout this experience. Because I applied to many places, I kept careful details about each application:

Job description
How I applied (online, through someone I knew, etc…)
Interview experience (if I spoke to someone, I would write their
name and my impressions of them and the things we discussed)
A copy of the resume I sent to them so I could look at the same one they’re looking at during the interview.

This was very important and helped me keep track of all the many
details about the process. It’s likely even more important in a
typical job market where one is likely to get several interviews and
(hopefully) offers and have to choose among them.

Taking My PhD to Work

The most obvious thing I took from my PhD and applied to my job is all the technical knowledge. But I took many other things as well.

I still have the habit of keeping a log of my work and it really helps me “keep work at the office” and not have to hold work details in my mind when I’m on vacation for example.
I still keep careful record of my tasks and my time and this has already helped me create a list of my achievements to successfully apply for a promotion.
I strive to maintain the willingness to learn new things every day so I can grow in my position.
I took the importance of mental health to heart and still practice good mental health habits.
I learned the benefits of intentional thinking and approaching tasks with a clear purpose in mind.
I plan ahead for my deadlines and career goals

Concluding Thoughts

Just like most big things in life, it’s important to finish your grad school program well. Paying attention to dissertation defense (if you have one) and the quality of your work, making sure when you’re ready to graduate and applying to the right type of job are all things to keep in mind as you near the end of your program. It’s also important to remember that grad school teaches you a lot of life skills in addition to technical knowledge. I speak from experience when I say it’s important to take all these lessons with you beyond grad school and apply them to “real life” as well.

Thank you for reading this far. This was the last of my broad articles, and I have thus finished covering the big 4 aspects of my experience that I wanted to cover. After this, I plan on writing shorter articles exploring some of the previous topics in more depth. Please let me know if you have any feedback or think there’s a topic I missed