Leaving academia can be intimidating. You've spent years training as a researcher, but what jobs can you actually do outside academia? And how do you even get started? 🎓

Welcome to the first episode of After Academia: Coffee With…, our new interview series where we explore different careers beyond academia, together with the people who've made the transition. ☕

In this episode, we're joined by Maria, a Senior Lab Operations Scientist in the pharmaceutical industry, who shares how she transitioned from academia to industry after her PhD.

We talk about what her job actually involves, how she found her first opportunity in industry, which skills from her PhD turned out to be valuable, and what surprised her most about working outside academia.

Maria also shares practical advice for PhD students and postdocs considering a similar career change, including how to approach networking, what to put on your LinkedIn profile, and why understanding the pharmaceutical industry can make finding the right job a lot easier.

Whether you're actively planning to leave academia or simply curious about what else is out there, we hope this conversation helps you explore your options! 🙂

⏰ Chapters

00:00 🎓 Why transitioning from academia to industry is difficult

00:25 ☕ Meet Maria: What does a Senior Lab Operations Scientist do?

03:08 💼 A typical working day in the pharmaceutical industry

05:26 🔄 Why Maria decided to leave academia

07:00 🔎 Finding an industry opportunity through a fellowship

09:07 🧠 Transferable PhD skills that are valuable in industry

11:37 📚 Industry fellowships, training and leadership skills

15:33 🤔 What Maria had to unlearn after her PhD

18:02 🏢 The biggest surprises of working in industry

20:24 💡 What she wishes she'd known before applying

23:54 🚀 Practical advice for PhDs looking for industry jobs

25:59 🧪 What is GMP, and why is it useful to know?

29:08 ☕ Final thoughts and a small coffee confession

🔬 About After Academia: Coffee With…

There are many career paths beyond academia, but it isn't always easy to understand what these jobs actually involve or how to get into them.

In this series, we sit down with former academics working in different fields to talk about their career transitions, their day-to-day work, the skills they use, and the advice they would give to researchers considering a similar path.

Our goal is to make exploring careers beyond academia just a little bit less of a struggle.

💬 Which career should we explore next?

Are you considering leaving academia? Or have you come across a job outside academia that sounds interesting, but you have absolutely no idea what someone in that position actually does?

Let us know in the comments! We'd love to hear your suggestions for future guests and careers to explore.

🔔 Subscribe to The Struggling Scientists for more career conversations, research tools, and practical advice for PhD students and researchers.

🌐 Find more from The Struggling Scientists:

https://thestrugglingscientists.com

#LeavingAcademia #PhDCareers #IndustryCareers

ResearchRabbit gives researchers a different way to explore scientific literature by visualising the connections between papers, citations and authors. 🐇🔎

In this walkthrough, we show you how we use ResearchRabbit to explore a research field. We start with just one paper and gradually build a collection, before showing how you can start with an existing Zotero library or BibTeX file and explore a much larger body of literature. 📚

We also look at how ResearchRabbit can help you discover connected papers, identify influential research, explore author networks and find connections that can be difficult to spot in a traditional list of search results. 🕸️

🐇 Try ResearchRabbit

https://thestrugglingscientists.com/ResearchRabbit

Chapters

00:00 👋 Introduction

00:56 🐇 How ResearchRabbit changes literature discovery

01:51 📄 Starting with one paper

03:58 📚 Starting with Zotero or an existing collection

04:31 🕸️ Understanding the literature map

05:41 🔎 Refining your literature search

06:20 ⚠️ Research alerts and retracted references

06:49 👩‍🔬 Exploring authors and collaborations

07:23 💭 Final thoughts and takeaways

📚 More research tools and tutorials:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLz6aXl5V5V77ziE8Leh9IuMB4yY4m0Yjq&si=OaQLB5nKrTQdyNwJ

SciSpace has become much more than a tool for chatting with PDFs. In this episode of the PhD Toolkit, we put it through a real research workflow to find out whether it actually deserves a place in your research toolkit.

We test how well it helps with literature discovery, understanding papers, note-taking, writing and overall workflow before scoring it on our PhD Toolkit leaderboard.

⭐ Try SciSpace

This video isn't sponsored, but we do use affiliate links. If you decide SciSpace is right for you, using our link helps support the channel at no extra cost.

🔗 Affiliate link:

https://thestrugglingscientists.com/Scispace

🎁 Discount codes:

JNSS20 = 20% off monthly plans

JNSS40 = 40% off annual plans, best for heavy users or systematic reviews

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Chapters

00:00 Introduction

01:10 Setting up the test

01:51 Finding papers

04:56 Understanding papers

05:38 Saving ideas

10:23 Writing

14:32 Research Impact

15:37 Ease of Use

16:31 Value for Money

17:30 Workflow Integration

18:35 Would we recommend it?

19:09 Leaderboard update

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📚 Watch the rest of the PhD Toolkit here:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLz6aXl5V5V77ziE8Leh9IuMB4yY4m0Yjq&si=OaQLB5nKrTQdyNwJ