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Erik: What has your experience taught you about how science careers are changing?
Stacie: I think my experiences just being involved in the scientific fields, especially
in life science, has shown me that we're awarding more PhD's than ever before, there are a lot
of people who just by virtue of sheer numbers cannot follow that traditional academic path,
cannot end up in that in that ivory tower, and there are a lot of people who are there
for either by choice or simply by virtue of the fact that they just can't compete off
looking for alternative types of careers, and by alternative I just mean anything outside
of the traditional lab, whether it be academic or pharmaceutical company, biotech, what I
see and sort of what I hear is that people trained as scientists aren't really aware
of what the possibilities are for them. What else can you do with a PhD and the truth is
you can do a lot, but having the ability to take your skill set and adjust it for a new
career, people with PhD's aren't being trained to do that, and the academic institutions
may be a little bit hesitant to provide that training because the head of the lab wants
to train the next Nobel prize winner, I don't know if they're as interested in training
the next executive director of the NYU Neuroscience Institute, or the next editor of Nature Medicine,
they want to get the biggest return on their investment in you, and they're investing a
lot in you, so I think that there's a great need to educate people with science backgrounds
on other things that they can do, alternative types of careers and I don't think we're really
providing enough of that just yet.
Erik: What do you think would help get that process started?
Stacie: So that process is starting a little bit. So when you go to a large scientific
meeting, there's usually one session about alternative careers and the room is usually
packed and I've been a speaker at a lot of these. At NYU, we have a bi-annual event called
"What can you be with a PHD" where there are panels of people who are doing really interesting
other things, and that event is attended by almost 2,000 people, I think, the last one.
So there's obviously this great need for it and I think also some of the big scientific
journals like Nature, I know for example has nature jobs network that's not just focused
on, you know, where to get a postdoc, where to get a professorship, so it's starting,
and I think as more of us end up in high-profile alternative careers and can be mentors to
other people, you know, you hope that you're the beginning of a larger group that's going
to encourage this kind of thing.