Beyond the PhD: my current and future plans

I’ve finished my PhD! Despite the virus, in March I had the viva and submitted my corrections. Which means that as of this month (specifically April 1st!) it’s all finished and the certificate should be in the post. In case you missed it, here is my recap detailing the rather strange end to my PhD.

I’ve hinted in the past that I planned to take a 1-2 year break to travel after finishing the PhD. Unsurprisingly, this is now on hold for the moment.

In this post I’ll cover what I’m doing instead and set this in the context of my longer term aspirations which I’ve never discussed here before.

My long term career plans

At the heart of it, I want to be able to do a job that I enjoy, working for causes that I feel passionate about. This doesn’t sound very unusual, I’d hope most people set out to do fulfilling work that they enjoy. Sadly in my experience many people get sidetracked by money or feel unable to make bold career moves.

Absolutely central to having so much freedom is to have a savings safety net. Over the past few years I’ve gradually built up my savings and lowered my expenses (2019 report here).

In the short term having savings means I can afford to support myself without immediately seeking out another job. In the long term this affords me the option to move around, take lower-paid jobs I care about, take risks and try different things or even take voluntary (unpaid) positions to build up experience.

Read more about financial freedom here or the Mr. Money Mustache blog which takes it even further.

One of the things which appeals to me most about financial freedom is being able to afford to work part time at your main job if you choose. This could provide you with a good amount of time each week to concentrate on other projects you feel strongly about, even potentially building up a “portfolio career”.

It would be great to be able to continue spending time helping students on this website, whilst at the same time picking up a few other projects which can help in other fields.

What I care about

I care about two main things: people and the planet. I don’t know exactly what I’ll be doing in 10 years time, but I know that I’m passionate about these two main causes and want to play my part in making the world a better place. That sounds very non-committal, but this means that I have some scope to try out a huge range of different fields.

Potential fields of work

Fields on my radar which I’ve been considering going into include:

• Coral reef restoration (full post here)
• Economic sustainability / Green banking
• Urban food growing
• Fighting human exploitation
• Reforestation
• Lab grown meat production
• Fighting exploitation of natural resources
• All things “levelling the playing field” such as fighting racial or sexual discrimination
• Personal finance empowerment
• Or simply carrying on in the field of my PhD: regenerative medicine

A pretty diverse list! They’re all tied together by the central idea of trying to help make the world a better place.

How could I help?

You may have noticed that the list above doesn’t actually state jobs, they’re fields or aims.

Of course it’d be no good me saying I want to fight exploitation in court: I’m not a lawyer!

There are other ways to get involved though, in the case of fighting exploitation that could be:

• Using novel methods to track and/or stop it close to the source
• Uncovering and analysing data to assess prevalence and focus resources
• Raising awareness and public support by reporting as a journalist (shoutout to Ronan Farrow) or filmmaker
• Even introducing policy: though please stop me from pursuing politics!

I don’t believe that people should have to “stay in their lane” and stick to the profession they trained in: sometimes tackling a problem from a new angle can help. You probably have some complimentary skills from another discipline which could be applied.

I believe that having a passion for something is likely reason enough to spend your time on it. If you care about a cause there is a way to apply your enthusiasm to help.

Where could I work?

Academia – there are no shortage of research groups working on things I care about. In the short term doing a postdoc somewhere could be a handy way to see another part of the world and build my skills while contributing to the field.

Business – I feel like I could have very fulfilling careers working in a huge range of companies, ranging from eco-web search company Ecosia, ethical banking company Triodos through to fighting sexual exploitation with Thorn.

Social enterprise / Charity – Corals for Conservation (group I helped in Fiji), Migrateful, 38 Degrees or a whole host of other charities and social enterprises could make for interesting work.

How about starting my own company?

I’m not at all opposed to starting my own company or social enterprise if there is a niche not currently being well served. At the moment though the idea of raising funding and being responsible for salaries (especially with an impending financial downturn!) doesn’t sound at all fun to me.

Potentially starting with lifestyle business (which are much more modest) currently sounds more appealing to dip my toes in and is something I’m considering.

So as you can see, I’m not 100% set on staying on academia, but that is not to say the PhD wasn’t worth doing.

Will my PhD be useful?

Unlike other PhD students, who may have a very focussed aim of becoming an academic afterwards (see the piece with one such PhD student here), I’m not sure whether academia is right for me long term.

I don’t dislike the idea, but I’m certainly much less sold on it than I was at the start. I’ve seen how competitive funding applications are even once you’ve “made it” and I am all too aware of how slow the pace of progress is.

I may end up going in to careers where having a PhD isn’t necessary but I know that it will have been useful. All the points in this post about why I decided to do a PhD still hold true, I enjoyed the research which is enough. For my own personal growth it has been fantastic, I learned new skills, gained confidence and frankly now won’t be stuck wondering if I should have done one.

Additionally, many of the fields I’m considering are both science-orientated and technical. Having a PhD will be a fantastic asset in practically every role for the fields I’m interested in.

There is no doubt that for better or worse simply having a PhD is useful and points towards technical competence, even if you’re switching fields.

Why I’m not staying on in the research group

Before recent events, I’d said to my supervisor that I wasn’t interested in staying on in the research group. This was for a few reasons:

1. I wanted to take a career break and go travelling.
2. I felt satisfied with where I’d finished my work. It’s not like staying on for another year or two would have drastically progressed my PhD work.
3. I knew I didn’t want to stay in London long term. I’d like to be able settle down and buy a home at some point and don’t really fancy getting locked in to a 25 year mortgage paying £400,000 or more for a small apartment.
4. As shown by the list above, I’m interested in a diverse range of fields. Almost all of them are either more impactful (in my opinion), or help a wider range of people, than my PhD work. I don’t think I’d be satisfied if I don’t at least spend a bit of time trying to help with some of them.

Further to this, I knew that if I stayed in the group as a postdoc it would then be all too tempting to apply for fellowships or lecturer positions and never end up going travelling.

Why would I make myself voluntarily unemployed?

A few main reasons:

• I was expecting to take a break after my PhD and don’t want to go straight in to something
• So that I can take a low-risk chance on new ideas
• I’m not anxious in my ability to find a job
• I don’t need the money
• I want to be able to carry on with my travel plans immediately once things settle down

Of course I don’t know exactly how long the current situation will last for, but I’m in the extremely fortunate position (savings, low rent and no social pressure) to be under no obligation to need a job for the sake of making money.

I’ve shared this article before but it’s worth sharing again. Disregarding the slight irony that some people may see getting a PhD as a big fat badge itself, the main point to take away from that article is that ambitious people should feel able to take risks. That’s one of main reasons I feel so strongly about financial freedom and I am so thankful to be in a position where I don’t have to have a job to make ends meet.

What about gaps on my CV?

I’m not in the least bit worried about not being employed at the moment. In addition to the positive reasons above for why I’m taking a break, I’m not sure if I’ll ever be working in a conventional workplace where taking a break may count against me.

Plus these are really unusual times, I think recruiters will look on this period very differently to usual, a lot of people are being disrupted.

Part of the reason I’m beginning a series from now on to share my monthly plans is to track what I’m up to, ensuring I’m accountable for the new things I want to learn.

I could always point potential employers here if it needed any justification, I’d expect most employers to respect this. If an employer takes issue with me taking some time off, learning new skills and evaluating what I want to do with my life then I probably don’t want to work for them.

Short term plans: how I’m spending to my time now

Now that I’m not able to travel, I’ve temporarily moved in with my girlfriend and her family. Besides a few weeks of casual employment to work on papers I haven’t tried to get reemployed by the university since the lockdown.

Instead what I want to do with my time here in the UK before travelling is:

• Take a break
• Improve my skills
• Develop this website further
• Finish off a few papers (at my own pace)
• Consider new ideas, projects or opportunities

Taking a break most definitely involves baking:

We just made a double-batch of @thehappypear oat cookies and can confirm that they're very tasty! 🍪😁 https://t.co/7ubmbGP9C4 pic.twitter.com/BdPpR0NMpi

— Jeff Clark (@savvy_scientist) April 12, 2020

Improving my skills

There are some skills I fancy dedicating some time to because of one of the following reasons:

• May help in future jobs
• They sound fun
• Could be useful in life
• I’m intrigued and simply fancy learning for the joy of it

Currently this list of skills includes:

• Creating visual content: painting, animation (Blender) and videos
• Meditation
• Coding: Python, making apps and getting an introduction to machine learning
• Baking bread
• Statistics for large datasets

I started learning handstands just before COVID-19 but this is currently on hold because I’m scared of breaking myself and needing to go to hospital! I’d love to learn backflips but yeah no, I’m not risking them at the moment!

We live in an amazing time where new skills in practically every domain can be learned for free online. I want to make good use of this myself, starting now.

Maybe some of these will be useful in the future, maybe not, but I want to spend some time trying them out and now seems like a good time.

Further to this, the barriers to getting involved, sharing your ideas or starting a new business are becoming obsolete.

You can start a YouTube channel with just your phone or self-publish a book with minimal upfront costs. Medium, WordPress and Twitter make sharing your thoughts simpler than ever. I’m looking at ways to expand my reach whilst learning new skills with these tools.

The Savvy Scientist website

I started this website to target the “levelling the playing field” goal: making information about PhDs more widely available, sharing my experiences with people who might not have immediate access to people who’ve gone through the process.

Neither of my parents went to university, so I’ve personally benefitted from reading about other peoples’ experiences online – both at undergraduate level and postgraduate. It would be fantastic if I in turn could pass on my knowledge and help the next generation of scientists.

I didn’t post here as frequently during my PhD as I would have liked, and I’d like to change this going forwards. Traffic is building every month and the feedback I’ve received on the small amount of content I have here has been very useful.

As well as hopefully giving an insight in to PhDs, the website is a good outlet for tracking my own ideas and thoughts whilst hopefully improving my writing.

I’m playing with the idea of making videos to compliment the written content. Video content is becoming more and more popular so could help reach a larger audience plus video production is one of the skills I’d like to learn anyway.

Staying Accountable

Going forwards I plan to share a monthly update on what I’m up to. This will outline my goals for the next month and reflect on my progress from the month before.

Update: The first of my monthly updates is now live here.

This should help to keep me focussed on my long term goals and give a nice diary to be able to look back on to track progress. I fear that if I don’t set a plan, before I know it it’ll be autumn and all I’ll have done is watch every Bon Appetite video!

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You don’t need to have finished your PhD to plan for the future! Where do you want your career to go and what steps can you take to get there?

I hope this post has inspired you to think about what you want to do with your career or inspired you to try learning a few new skills. I’ll keep you updated on my progress. You can subscribe here: