Intentionally Directing a Career Path
by Aurora Ginzburg
Hey there,
This is the first guest post from a reader of the newsletter about her own career journey. I first met Aurora virtually back in 2021 when she was working at the American Chemical Society (ACS) and she pitched that I write something for the ACS Green Chemistry Institute newsletter. I wrote it and you can check it out here. Aurora has a background in the same sort of chemistry and materials science area that I do, but I got a sense in talking to her that she wasn’t going to go down the same path I took. In thinking about my own career path I’ve thought of myself as a surfer trying to catch a wave and ride it into another.
Aurora spent a significant amount of time figuring things out and this is her story, advice to others, and hopefully inspiration to make the change you’ve been thinking about.
In reading and editing this story from Aurora I think she’s making her own waves.
Tony
Intentionally Directing a Career Path
by Aurora Ginzburg
In January of 2022 I did a scary thing and left my first post-PhD job without another position lined up.* I knew I needed to take a hard pivot from the jobs I was most obviously qualified for and spend time exploring what else I could do with my professional skills, expanding them if necessary. I am now three weeks into an absolute dream position that I never would have known to look for back in January. I have learned a ton about career development during these past seven months, in large part thanks to others sharing their stories and offering to extend a helping hand to me, and I hope to pay a bit of that forward with this post. If I get the time I would love to turn this into a series of posts, but we’ll see, for now I am going to give a succinct list of actionable career development advice based on things that have worked for me. I am going to generalize this to be applicable to as broad of an audience as possible, but it is probably most relevant for people who have a STEM PhD.
There are many resources out there to help you prepare your resume and interview skills, tailoring them for each job. While those are important, I will not harp on them here. I want to take this space to share the more non-traditional things that worked for me.
Research what you want! This does not have to be a specific position, though it may be, but be bold and greedy and think about what your perfect job has. Consider what you like/used to like about your field, as well as what you don’t. Talk to your friends from graduate school about their jobs, ask specific questions, make a list of what parts of their job you would want. Read job postings, read Medium.com articles, talk to anyone doing anything remotely interesting to you and learn about their work. STEM degrees are incredibly versatile and you can supplement your degree quickly with new skills if you are deficient in an area. Through many conversations I came to realize that my ideal situation would be a remote job, focusing on immediate, large-scale, sustainable change wherein I am performing data analysis and crafting scientific stories. You need to have an idea of what you want (this may change over time), so that you can express it in a 30-60 second answer to “tell me about yourself”.
Practice your introduction. Expect that every person you talk to will ask some variant of “tell me about yourself”. I used to use this as an opportunity to go through my career chronologically. That is fine but isn’t going to best serve you. Do the politician thing where you answer the question you wish they had asked which is “what are you looking for and how can I help you get that?”. They *could* ask this later, but why take a chance? Get to the heart of what you want early and expand on your story.
I took the approach of actually writing out my introduction as a paragraph and memorizing it. It evolved as I learned more about what I was looking for, figured out how to market certain aspects of my background, and had more relevant skills to highlight. You want to be imaginative and open to changing your ideas about your background and your goals. I think something along the lines of this format works well:
1-2 sentences about what specifically you are looking for in your career/next job.
2-3 sentences about how your past experiences prepared you for what you are looking for and how you ended up here.
1 sentence about what you are hoping to get out of this call.
Having some anecdotes humanizes the whole interaction too and it’s easier to remember a person with a good story.
Supplement your skills. Once I realized what I was looking for in a job, it became apparent that most of the opportunities that excited me were going to require more computer science skills than I had. There is some really innovative work being done in data science, a field that wasn’t really a thing back when I started my undergraduate degree in chemistry. Data science is an umbrella term that encompasses a lot of different kinds of work, usually involving the application of statistics and computer science to a domain-specific data set. It is propelling a range of meaningful scientific innovation due to the new wealth of available data. I didn’t know much about coding but wanted to be as employable as possible and had been pretty dazzled by some machine learning applications for batteries and enzymes.
In about four months I learned Python, SQL, common data science/machine learning libraries, and built some portfolio work on GitHub. I did this by spending about $75 dollars on Udemy courses. I treated these courses as a full-time job. The internet is such an amazing resource and MOOC courses have changed the way people can gain new skills. This ended up being pretty important for my current role because while I am relying most heavily on my background in quantitative analysis and sustainability, there is also a need to understand how to manage large amounts of data and design scalable analysis processes. I predict we are going to need more scientists with computer science skills, so if you have the time, I highly recommend any course by Jose Portilla on Udemy. This also shows initiative and a growth-mindset on your resume.
Find your people. Again, we are so lucky to have the internet. Gone are the days of needing to fly somewhere to make a networking connection or know someone to make an introduction. That said, it is not always easy to find your people online. You can try the LinkedIn cold message, it will work sometimes and is a fine way to meet people. However, there is no bias to this process in finding *helpful* people, or hiring managers. To find the helpers you need to find where they hang out. This will really depend on what your priority is in your next job, is it a specific technology, purpose or location? I was focused on sustainability, chemistry/materials science, data science, and the west coast, so I found many groups to join online in these areas. The most helpful ones were on Slack, though there were some on Meetup and Discord that I liked as well. I had no idea how much hiring is done on Slack now, but it is a lot! If you can find a Slack community dedicated to what you are interested in, there will likely be channels in there where hiring managers post about specific needs they have. Add your picture to your profile and engage in these groups, the more you can come across as a real human behind a screen, the better. You can also use the search feature to find other users in the group you may want to connect with (e.g., I reached out to people who had a similar background as me by using certain keywords to find older posts by them).
You will also find resources within these communities. I came across some awesome newsletters (including ones with job listings that aren’t cross-posted to job aggregator websites!) and more niche job posting websites. There are so many different groups and the ones that worked for me might not work for you. True online communities are powerful and finding one where you fit in can change your life, it certainly changed mine. That said, if you are passionate about working on sustainable technologies, leave a comment below or reach out to me via LinkedIn and I can point you in the right direction. Finally, a good career coach, someone with a network and a wealth of experience from their own career, can also be immensely helpful. If you do reach out I might know someone that could help you.
Become a professional socializer. In the era of Zoom you should aim to be able to “hop on a quick call” at the drop of a hat and have a conversation with anyone that leaves the impression that you are intelligent and enjoyable to talk to. Sound intimidating? Ya it is, but practice helps. I forced myself to have 1-4 “chats” a day with professional strangers for over a month. This served a lot of important functions: network building, career exploration, and social skill tuning. It also served to keep my eye on the prize. Every day that I talked to people who had interesting careers reminded me how badly I wanted that for myself, and how capable I was of achieving it.
When people told me to do this in the past I used to worry myself with “but what will we talk about” and come in with a long list of questions. My refined approach is to make sure to get in my introduction, whether they ask or not, but then let them steer the conversation. Unless I needed something quite specific from them, I was there to appreciate their time and whatever it was they wanted to share. I came prepared with a basic understanding of their background from LinkedIn, but only brought up parts of it if there were lulls in the conversation or it naturally made sense. If they wanted to interview me, I was happy to play ball, if they wanted to tell me about their entire life history, that was fine too. In general, the more you can parrot someone’s behavior and engage in active listening, the better of an impression you will leave. For more on the emotional intelligence necessary to get what you want from people out of a conversation, I highly recommend the book Never Split the Difference by former FBI hostage negotiator, Chris Voss.
After talking to 50+ people, you start to realize how individualized every person’s perspective and advice is. To be honest, >75% of the advice I received wasn’t relevant or helpful to me. But I learned to sift through it and take the gems, always being polite and curious about that person’s experience. Just remember that one person’s experience doesn't have to be yours. Maybe they went back to school, maybe they paid $20k for a bootcamp, maybe they suffered through a job they hated for 5 years to end up where they are now, etc. I always reflected on my calls by recounting their path and then asking myself “at what cost”, deciding on what I wasn’t willing to accept for my own life. Or at the very least what would be a backup plan. All this to say, I am incredibly appreciative of the time that every person gifted me, and the vulnerability they expressed when sharing their career stories with me, but not every person was someone I would need to talk to again. When you strike gold with a new connection, you will know it. Follow-up with those people and be intentional in keeping those connections going.
Qualifications matter, but not as much as you may think. This is super job-specific, but in general, if the job interests you, go for it. Figure out how to market your relevant experience and what translational skills you have. If the company likes you, they may be able to change the job to be more appropriate for you. You do need to have the ability to solve whatever problem they are addressing with this position, so finding out what they actually need, rather than the wish list provided in a job posting, is key. If you can solve their problem, explain that in a cover letter/interview. Studies have shown that men are likely to overestimate their qualifications, while women underestimate theirs. So in particular, if you aren’t a man, apply for the long shot job anyway or reach out to your contact** at the company and ask if they would be open to someone with X skills and background.
If you have made it this far then you are likely toying with the idea of a job change. I would be remiss not to acknowledge the intense emotional impact of being in this place. I personally don’t like writing about my emotional experiences publicly, but I am happy to chat about it individually. It is easy to read articles like this and think “it all worked out for that person, why can’t I ever have any luck” and sink into despair. I’ve been there. It is okay to feel all of that, but also use that feeling as motivation to keep pushing forward because luck is a combination of timing and preparation. If you dedicated many years to your schooling then you deserve to be professionally fulfilled and it is within your power.
Cheers,
Aurora Ginzburg
Feel free to reach out to me via LinkedIn, but it may take me a bit of time to respond because of how much I have on my plate at the moment.
* While it was stressful for me, I don’t take for granted that I was able to do this, and not everyone has that freedom and privilege. I would encourage everyone to play their cards as well as they can, but recognize that we all have different hands in life.
** I wasted a lot of time blind applying for jobs on LinkedIn and big company career pages where I didn’t know anyone at the company. It rarely got me anywhere, and I tailored my resume and cover letters. If you weren’t invited to apply and don’t know anyone there, I would advise against this process unless the job hasn’t been widely posted or it is so specialized that you are one of a few people truly qualified for it. The numbers just aren’t in your favor. To give you an idea of the numbers, I had a hiring manager in the semiconductor industry tell me that he gets 60 applications, *after* HR has filtered them for only qualified candidates, and he has to decide who to contact from that stack with the very little time he has.
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