Matt: Hey folks, and welcome to the grad school sucks podcast, the show for academics and grad students who want to take their career from academia into industry. I'm your host, Dr. Matt Carlson. And today I want to share my conversation with Kyle Ireton with you. He's a friend of mine in the industry space, and we've been chatting for a while, and I'm glad I finally got to share his story on the show.
Matt: So, Kyle started out in neuroscience, he began a postdoc, and then eventually decided it was time to go industry, and he shifted into the biotech space in data science. He made one more career move, uh, that leads us up to today, and now he's a statistical programmer in the clinical trials industry. Kyle and I talked about A variety of things, some of which were a viral Twitter debate that led to him leaving academia.
Matt: Kyle's experiences with contract vs. W 2 or full time roles. And how to address gaps in your experience when recruiters are basically telling you you don't have any real world experience. It is a great show packed with a lot of information and very valuable for folks who want to take their skills. With data that they learned maybe in the social sciences or life sciences over to the industry space, working with data as well.
Matt: And before I get to that, I want to let you know that I have an upcoming webinar. My webinar for December will be on Tuesday, December 12th at 7 p. m. Eastern. I'll be talking about a variety of career paths available to social science. Grad students and PhDs. And I'll be discussing my own journey from academia to industry, and I'll be answering your questions live.
Matt: So be sure to show up live and bring some great questions because not only will I be doing Q and a for those who are alive, but I'll also be giving the folks who show up live some bonus resources. I'll have a link. For free registration for that webinar available in the description of this episode. And I also have links to Kyle's pages on Twitter or X, LinkedIn and Tik TOK available in the description as well.
Matt: Without further ado, let's get to the episode. Kyle, thanks for chatting with me. If you could just give me like a brief introduction into who you are now and what you do.
Kyle: Absolutely. I think most people have come across me on Twitter, where for the last year and a half, I've been pretty outspoken about my journey transitioning from the academic environment to the industry environment.
Kyle: And with regards to that, I started my PhD in neuroscience at UC Davis in 2015, graduated at the end of 2020. I did a postdoc for a year and a half, and for the last 18 months, essentially, I've been working in biotech. I had a short stint as a senior scientist on contract at a medical device startup. And then a year ago, I moved to my current position, which is as a statistical programmer in the clinical trials industry.
Matt: Very cool. Very cool. Then there's, and we've talked before, so I know a little bit about your background. Yeah. If we could roll it back a little bit, you did a postdoc after you finished your PhD, correct? Mm hmm. An academic postdoc? Yes. Yeah. At what point in that postdoc did you start thinking that you were wanting to take your career to industry?
Kyle: I'm laughing because there's a certain incident on Twitter that was the final straw, I would say. But when I started my postdoc, I think I told people after I finished my PhD, I am exactly split. I am perfectly 50 50 between continuing on the academic track and doing something new. And for the first year, I feel like I was, I found that it was like better than my PhD experience in a number of ways.
Kyle: I still believe that in my individual experience, but after the first year, I felt like there were a number of factors where I felt more constrained. Then I realized I would and I thought more about the long term picture of would I be doing this for how many more years? So it was around March of 2022 specifically that there's a Twitter, I would say, like an incendiary incident where essentially, you know, There was a lot of discourse about how much should we pay postdocs and what's really fair.
Kyle: I just came across a lot of opinions of people, they might have been a minority of academics, but they were very vocal that we should not pay postdocs more because they don't deserve it. And again, I have a lot of friends in academia who wouldn't agree with that now, but at the time I said, okay, you know what?
Kyle: I know the system is very slow to change, and now I know there are certain influential people that are actively hostile to change. I'm going to go out. I'm not saying I'm going to leave yet. I'm just going to get an offer and I'm going to prove that I'm worth more than they say I'm worth. That was really the impetus for me.
Matt: And did you, before you got the postdoc, did you anticipate staying in academia? Like back when you were a PhD student?
Kyle: Yeah, I think I was maybe a little more academically inclined in grad school before I started my postdoc, but honestly, it was because I was unaware of what the alternatives would realistically be.
Kyle: And I didn't find that like, I had a personal way to relate to alternative careers. I thought industry sounded weird. Basically, I didn't know anybody that was really doing industry. So I just felt like I just don't see how that could be for me. So I just wrote it off in that sense, but I thought I wouldn't rule it out.
Matt: Sure. No, that makes sense. And what was it like being, so you were a postdoc and you started looking for jobs in the industry. What was that process like?
Kyle: Yeah, so it started out with a series of conversations with people that I knew either via Twitter or via my university setting. I met someone on Twitter that introduced me to a Slack channel, basically, for people interested in tech or biotech.
Kyle: And, uh, people like introduce themselves on there and you could be connected with people that were interested in hiring. So, I had a number of conversations with people working for companies about how I could fit with them. Nothing came of that in terms of a job offer, but it was really helpful to start getting a picture of what industry folks want to hire for, from people that have a PhD.
Kyle: In addition to that, I, I had a friend in my graduate program, like one person who had gone to a company who I was like relatively close friends with, and we just bumped into each other. We were like literally in the park, Central Park in Davis, and they were like, what are you up to now? What are you looking at?
Kyle: And I said, I'm doing this postdoc thing, but I'm open to other stuff. And I think that just planted a seed because they wound up calling me, not necessarily because I was like going out and searching for jobs, but just because they hit a spot where they needed somebody for their company. And they asked, would you be ready to apply to this?
Kyle: And I happened to be of the mindset that I was taking real steps. I was taking concrete action that wound up being my first job offer. And there were a couple of small other interactions like that, but it was a combination of people I knew from in person in my grad program, and then a couple of close contacts from social media.
Matt: Yeah, yeah. Knowing people is so important. If you don't mind sharing, and you can ballpark this if you want to, what was the difference between the pay you were getting as a postdoc and then the pay that you were offered at this first industry gig? Uh, 100, 000. It was a difference of 100, 000? Yes. Wow. Yeah.
Matt: I think that'll surprise a lot of people. Yeah. To hear that it's like, can be of that magnitude.
Kyle: It shocked me, and I will qualify that a little bit. The difference came from the fact that I was in the Bay Area, and my first position was a contract position. So, all of the compensation that they paid me was just cash.
Kyle: So, it wasn't health benefits, it wasn't like a 401k match, it was just money. And there are advantages to having a base salary, which would be lower than what I was making as a contractor. And then having long term benefits, but that was just more money than I thought that I could get. I was hoping for like half, half of that.
Kyle: I wanted to get to 80, 80, 000 maybe for my postdoc salary, which was like 55, but they flat out said, Hey, this is the rate for contractors. This is what we're offering you. They pretty much said you can take it or leave it. I didn't really negotiate. I was just like, okay, that's more money than I ever thought would be in my capacity to get.
Kyle: So I obviously said, okay, yes, I'll accept gladly and thank you.
Matt: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. When I was, honestly, when I was a research scientist that number would have blown me away. And, so what were your experiences like when you, actually before you got there? What was it like cutting ties with your postdoc?
Matt: If you don't mind sharing. Yeah,
Kyle: it did go a little bit rough. It was tough because I think it came down to communicating expectations, and I was clear and upfront with my advisor that I was looking at industry positions, and my advisor had a previous postdoc go to industry. So I thought we both would know what that entails, but it turns out it all happened relatively fast.
Kyle: So I got an offer within three months of starting to look. And part of that is because I was a unique fit for this position. I was referred by a friend from within the company. And the labor market was super hot. It just happened faster than my advisor would have expected. And the weird thing about the job search is like, you hear about people taking a year to look for a job.
Kyle: And what that really means is it took them a year to find like an offer for the job. But once you get the offer, the timeline is very fast compared to academic timelines. And I know you know this, I'm explaining for the audience. Sure. They wanted me to start within four to six weeks. Yeah. At the latest.
Kyle: The thing is like, some companies, some businesses, they're not like, they're basically moving as fast as they can. And when they're hiring someone, it's like, they had an urgent need already. So, they need someone that's ready to step in. And on the academic timeline, I feel like having a month to wrap up like a postdoc project and hand things off, that sounds like crazy.
Kyle: Even though in the business world, you would say, Hey, I'm turning in my two weeks. It's been amazing working with you guys. I really appreciate you. I just, I'm moving on to something different. So in that sense, it was a little bumpy with the advisor because they didn't expect that. But we worked hard to bridge that gap and do responsible handoff.
Kyle: And we have a good relationship now. That's awesome.
Matt: That's great. What was, so you started this job, this first job in the industry. What was the experience of actually being in there and doing the work and how did that differ from your experiences as a postdoc?
Kyle: Yeah, it was pretty cool. What struck me is that the science was really good and that was like really reassuring.
Kyle: They were really doing cutting edge research and I didn't know that happened anywhere outside of the university. I felt like their, even their basic research was on par with what we were doing in the university in terms of neuroscience research, but if anything they were further ahead of us because like They had the money and the intention to just invest in things and get the ball rolling and collect data.
Kyle: So that was really impressive. That doesn't mean they can like, this is a comment on industry in general. They're not necessarily further along in their big picture understanding of the brain. I don't know that anybody is because that's a massive problem. And like everyone on the university side. And on the industry side is moving along at the same general rate because you have to have many people studying many different problems, putting the picture together, but in terms of their individual project, they were just very far ahead.
Kyle: My experience was way more supervisory than I thought it would be. So as a postdoc, I was, I was doing animal behavior. It was like getting the mice out of their vibarium, loading them into behavior equipment. Running them for hours, putting them back, and then after that, going to my computer, like, doing analysis, writing up stuff, sending it to the advisor, having meetings.
Kyle: At my company, I was not really doing hands on experiments very often. I was helping people coordinate experiments that we were doing at contract research organizations. And this is, like, an area of science and industry that I didn't know existed before I joined. But basically, this is an important concept for biotech and industry.
Kyle: You have sponsor companies who are the people that like own the intellectual property and names that would be familiar are like the vaccine companies like Pfizer, Moderna, etc. So they're the ones that like own the intellectual property of the product, the drug, what have you. But they partner with contract research organizations or CRO companies, which they offload a lot of experimental labor to them.
Kyle: So as a senior scientist with my sponsor company, I was partnering with three or four CRO companies and they were running the experiments on the ground at their different research sites. In different states across the U. S. And I was basically a communicator. I was the liaison. The touchstone between them and between my own company.
Kyle: And you need to have a person that understands the science who can be a reliable relay between all these different parties and then the interests of the company and the other people in my department. So is that too vague or does that help provide a little more
Matt: clarity? No, that's great. I think for people who just have no frame of reference for life outside of academia.
Matt: What would you say, and I know you've had some experiences past that point, so maybe I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself, but what would you say are like maybe three key differences that you think separate working from academia compared to working in industry? Yeah,
Kyle: the big one, especially from this job, was like less of an emphasis on manual data collection.
Kyle: for people in a senior role. In addition to that, compartmentalizing the jobs themselves, so people have a more defined scope of what they do. That doesn't mean that you can't look at the whole picture and find things interesting. I don't feel like it's as limiting as that might make it sound. And then, thirdly, I think, again in my personal experience, it was the respect for working 40 hours a week, not on weekends and not on holidays.
Kyle: Which people take for granted in an industry that you won't do. And it's not that it never happens. There are definitely crunch times, but I think it's acknowledged that crunch times are the exception instead of the norm. And however, if you join a company that doesn't respect, that's a red flag for me.
Kyle: There are many companies in many cultures where. They have respect
Matt: for that. Yeah, very cool. Very cool. So how long did you end up staying in this this contract role that you had? It
Kyle: was, it wound up being six months, maybe a little bit more.
Matt: Yeah. Is that pretty average for a contract role?
Kyle: It was a little fast.
Kyle: It was a little fast. Yeah. Yeah, and the other thing is they weren't hurrying me out the door or anything. If anything, I had very clear signs that they would encourage me to stay longer and stick around until they had an opening in their budget for a permanent position, which would have taken about a year and a half.
Kyle: So I moved a lot faster than I had to, but I was trying to reorient to a kind of career path that was like more consistent with my personal interest from grad school, which was working with data programming And, um, moving back towards like the arena of data science. So, yeah, I moved faster than I had to.
Matt: And so when did you start looking for the next role? About
Kyle: three months into my first job. So, yeah, because I realized once I got there, like this job is really cool. I get to be more of a senior level supervisor scientist than I had realized. The only thing is that I thought I would be getting more hands on access to data and I thought I would just be able to work that into my job somehow, but that's one of the differences in industry where we have dedicated team members for a reason and it wasn't really in the purview of my job to like do more in that way.
Kyle: And I was full time already for a reason, I realized this is a great gig, but I think it would be better for someone who they want to dedicate everything to this. And, uh, and then for my own sake, I need to find a role where I can be primarily data work driven. And yeah, it took another few months. It was a tough job search, uh, in some ways tougher than my first, but,
Matt: uh, interesting.
Matt: Why do you think that was?
Kyle: Yeah, I think that it was tough because I was still adjusting to the first industry job when I started doing my second industry job search. And I was also traveling a lot, and that was like a good and interesting experience. So I would fly from Sacramento, where I'm based, and just as a starting point, so I was hybrid in the first job.
Kyle: So I would drive down to the office in San Francisco, like in the city, about two times a week. So that was manageable. It was a long drive from Sacramento, but it was doable a couple times a week. But I also flew out to Colorado, Minnesota, and Georgia regularly. At least one week out of the month. When I did my second job search, I wasn't just like a postdoc anymore, sitting in my comfortable office.
Kyle: I didn't have everything lined up because, uh, it was more dynamic in the new jobs. New things would arise. I would have to respond to unforeseen situations. And it just made the process of doing a job search, which really feels like a second job, um, very taxing. And I, I have vivid memories of taking my job interviews from my hotel room.
Kyle: In Minneapolis and Denver, and it was just like a crazy experience to go through. But, but that's what it takes being very responsive, being able to respond in real time and adapt. And that's what I would attribute my second job search success to being open to all that.
Matt: Very cool. And so what was the job title for the second position that you landed?
Kyle: Yeah. So the job title, which I don't feel is very helpful to understand what it is, but it's called a statistical programmer. And every reasonable person would say, Oh, so you do a lot of statistics. And I don't do any statistics. I work with them indirectly, but just to explain the etymology. In clinical trials, you come up with this big plan beforehand, like how you're going to administer the treatment, and then what statistics you're going to use to evaluate how things are proceeding and whether it's safe and effective.
Kyle: And this is like really important. They take it very seriously. You have a full time job, which is called a biostatistician. I'm sure you're familiar with this, Matt, but biostatistician coordinates with the clinical scientist and regulators to come up with the statistical analysis plan, but they're not the ones that are going to go in and dig into the data and do the programming to transform it into a.
Kyle: Standardized data sets, analytical data sets, and figures that actually report the data. So, the people doing the programming to deliver the statistics are people like me. The statistical programmers. Very
Matt: cool. And what were the, so now your new role is the W2 role, correct? And your old role was the contract role.
Matt: What were the differences between the two that you found? The big one
Kyle: is the paycheck, to be honest with you. I just want to be real about that. So as a 1099 worker, as on a contract, you get an enormous paycheck at the end of the month because they pay you the gross amount, they don't withhold taxes. And with the salary they had offered me compared to the paychecks that I'd only ever seen in academia.
Kyle: It was a mind boggling amount. And then going to the W 2 rule, I've done the arithmetic many times since then to make myself believe this is true, but I'm making pretty much exactly the same amount in terms of my total compensation. But my paychecks are bi weekly, and so that means twice a month, right?
Kyle: So it's already going to be half. And then they withhold taxes, and then I withhold from my 401k. I withhold for health care. So the paycheck size, like it looks a lot smaller. Um, and that's fine. I still make more in a month than I did as a postdoc, even after all that stuff. But yeah, I think the other salient difference is the investment in long term savings and health insurance, a health savings account, which is one of these like weird little advantages that you get in corporate America, where you basically do a pre tax.
Kyle: Withholding of your salary, you invest it and you can only ever spend that money on healthcare needs, but they also never tax the growth and you take it with you from job to job. It's just growing tax free. That's one of those things I didn't know about before I got like a permanent position offer with these benefits.
Matt: What would you say, zooming out a little bit, what would you say are the skills that, we learn a lot of skills when we're in academia. What would you say are the subset of skills that you took from academia and were able to put to use in industry and Basically helped you get the job. Yeah. Or jobs, total.
Kyle: Yeah, I feel like this might be surprising, but the biggest thing was like, learning how to talk with and manage, like, PI conversations. Learning how to talk with the kinds of people that would be, like, equivalent to, like, your managers on the industry side. Um, that's vital. It all comes from communication, in my experience.
Kyle: I think that's true from the job interview stage of realizing where they're coming from in terms of their personal perspective and their business need. And then definitely when you're in the job, understanding what are the priorities from your manager's perspective, from leadership's perspective, and how do you coordinate that with your team members on the ground to Divide things up and make sure that everyone has ownership covered of all the necessary components, making sure like all the bases are covered, essentially.
Kyle: I, on top of that, of course, there are the quote unquote hard skills or like technical skills, like knowing how to plan an experiment was necessary in my first job and having some scientific knowledge about like how nerves work, like how the nervous system works and how biological tissue works. And in my current job, I got the job because I demonstrated that I was really good at R and primarily using the tidyverse within R, at least as far as they did the like assessment with a live coding portion of my interview.
Kyle: So it was communication first, and then after that, really just the proficiency in
Matt: technical skills. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So not every grad student who's listening or academic is going to be from the social sciences. And I know you've probably talked with a wide range of grad students. What do you see across fields or specifically in the social sciences?
Matt: What do you see grad students and academics doing wrong when they Go to make their transition to industry. What could they do better? Yeah.
Kyle: Yeah. I think the main thing is, um, adjusting your perspective and looking at it. You need to look at things from the perspective of the business. And that might sound like basic or trivial, but it's really fundamental because for so long we've been in this academic environment.
Kyle: It's not that you can't relate to the business setting. It's just you need to adjust your language. You need to think about things the way they think about things and you need to communicate to them that you get where they're coming from. The other big thing in this one, I It pains me to say it, but not having work experience from all the time that you've been in grad school and as a postdoc can make it so hard just to get the first interview.
Kyle: And I feel like this might be where I differ from some of the people that like offer advice on the post academic job search. I've just seen from my own experience, like I refer people to my company and if they don't have prior industry experience, they're like, well, we can't really consider them. Yeah.
Kyle: The challenge is that your experience and your skills are definitely good. But if they don't get how that directly interfaces with their needs, I, they're just not going to prioritize that they're going to prioritize other people. Even if they're less skilled, like even if they don't have a PhD, like they're going to prioritize someone probably who has two to three years of industry experience and just has the basics down.
Kyle: And I don't think that's fair. I don't think that's necessarily reasonable, but this is just how a lot of hiring managers on the industry side tend to operate. And this is one reason why, why I've tried to emphasize and why I know you emphasize. Applying to so many companies just to get started, because you really need to cast a wide net, I think, to find the hiring managers that have a better understanding of where you're coming from, but at the same time, the burden is still on us to communicate like what we did in terms that they feel speak to them.
Kyle: So it's an immense challenge and frankly, all the individual solutions and advice I've tried to offer. It pains me that it falls short. Thank you. In this way, because it's a massive, like systemic problem. I think it's an issue that a lot of people face. And I think this is probably one of the biggest reasons why people say, I haven't been able to find a job in a year and I'm not really seeing a sign of things getting better.
Kyle: I just want to be honest about why I think that's happening. I don't necessarily have a solution because I can't go back in time. I couldn't change the fact that I didn't like doing an internship. When I was in grad school, right? But the best that we can do is adapt our language that's communicated through our resume, through our LinkedIn profile, and then in the interview itself, when you get to that stage.
Kyle: So. Yeah, that's what I think about it.
Matt: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And before we move forward, I do just want to say you're very active online, you share a lot of advice, would you remind me and plug away with where you are most active and where you'd like people to follow along with you and your advice and your journey?
Kyle: Yeah, I'm most active still on Twitter, the website that used to be known as Twitter at least. And there you can find me at Kyle underscore Ireton, K Y L E underscore I R E T O N. Besides that, you can search that same name on LinkedIn. Please definitely connect with me on LinkedIn. Just add a note, maybe, that you found me through this interview.
Kyle: Be glad to connect with you. I also recently started sharing some content on TikTok. You can search my name there. That tends to be, like, really more, like, ad hoc and informal. But I'm also really loving the kind of, like, personal interactions you get to have there. So I'd be delighted to connect with folks any of those places.
Matt: Awesome. And I will have links to all three of those in the description of this episode, whether you're listening on the podcast or on YouTube, you can scroll down. Click those. So let's get back to the topic that we jumped away from which is not having work experience while you're in grad school. I have a couple thoughts in my head as to how to circumvent that, but how do you, for folks who don't have the experiences that recruiters tend to count as job experience, how do grad students, postdocs, academics,
Kyle: Yeah.
Kyle: So one hack I'll say, I don't know, it's like using that term, but a hack that I used was I changed my job title on LinkedIn for my PhD grad school, professional experience and my postdoc professional experience. The big jump happened when I changed my postdoc title to data scientist, um, almost immediately I got more recruiter DMS than I ever had before.
Kyle: And not everyone agrees with me about that. I'm telling you guys that worked for me and I never ever had a problem with that during an interview because I explained This is the most accurate way to describe what I was doing. And these are the reasons why this was my project I worked with data. I helped build models.
Kyle: We we got insights into Fundamentals of animal behavior this way.
Matt: Yeah. Yeah, and I know that some people take that as a controversial thing to do I think I think it's parallel to some advice I've received, which is to think about your resume, specifically your resume, but also your LinkedIn account as more of like marketing material and less of a legal document.
Matt: And if you're actually going to do a job application, that's the portion that. is like the more legal part, where if they do a background check on you and they talk with your employer, they'll check that the title that's in the job application matches what you had there. And of course, many employers will see a discrepancy and ignore it or just simply ask you about it.
Matt: I had a discrepancy when I got hired and they never said anything about it. And I think there's a difference between, like, your functional title and your technical title. And I think that's something that I see a lot of grad students who I talk with when they show me their resume. It'll say research assistant or graduate research assistant.
Matt: And I think it goes back to that like a mindset switch of looking through the eyes of the business and looking through the eyes of the recruiter. And it really doesn't serve the recruiter to put that title down even though it is technically accurate in your university's history. That's what they'll list you as.
Matt: It doesn't tell the recruiter what you did. And again, like you said, some people see this as controversial, but I see it as doing a disservice to yourself as well as the recruiter in the business that you're applying to when you don't give them the functional title.
Kyle: I totally agree. That's actually a brilliant way to describe it.
Kyle: I would put the functional title first, and then if you have to, put the legal term in small text underneath. But like you said, I packed, I passed my background check without a problem. I explained in the interviews, data scientist is the best description of what I did as an academic, as a postdoc, as a grad student.
Kyle: And yeah, I think we have a tendency as academics to be very deferential, to be humble in the way we present ourselves. I think that is a good value, but it's not hubris to be accurate about what you did.
Matt: Yeah, it, being able to sell yourself and your skills and your experiences goes a long way. Uh, so let's wrap up this conversation on addressing a lack of job experience.
Matt: The only other thoughts I had along this line were potentially doing a portfolio project that uses skills that you've learned. That demonstrates you can do the work in a certain field. And I had one other one. Do you have any other ways that you can think of potentially addressing gaps in experience?
Kyle: Yeah, I guess the main way that I applied this was making sure the description of my professional experiences. had descriptive bullet points of what I did and how it impacted my research project. There's a lot of good advice about quantifying the impact, but even something as simple as I implemented a new data process to increase efficiency.
Kyle: To a level we never had access to before that's impressive and that that will set you apart And I think that would apply to many professional settings Despite as we noted the challenges of having the specific work experience
Matt: as well. Absolutely and and I think that goes back to Something that was told to me and that I tell to other people It's about showing that you provided value to the organization that you were a part of And it shows you're a team player.
Matt: It shows that you are like a value add and skills can be trained, but the, the habits and the energy that you carry is probably mostly stable through jobs and through life and. Yeah, I think being able to show, yes, I benefited those around me and I brought value to the team. I think communicating that, even if the job experiences don't perfectly align, I think that can go a long way.
Matt: Yeah, I agree with you.
Kyle: Very well said.
Matt: So the only other thing I was going to say in terms of addressing gaps in experiences, and this is on my mind because by the time this episode comes out, a previous episode will have come out where I interviewed... Zeb, a PhD in the humanities who reached the end of his PhD, realized there weren't very many jobs and jumped onto a tech bootcamp and learned how to code and is now a software developer.
Matt: So I
Kyle: love that. Absolutely love that human.
Matt: I love that. You know him. Yeah. And I, and I love that such a dramatic shift is. It's possible and he's doing so well. And yeah, so if you go back a couple episodes, if you miss that one, that'll be available as well, if you're interested in making such a dynamic leap as he did.
Kyle: Yeah. I have seen bootcamps pay off for people. I didn't go that way myself. I would say definitely try to find someone maybe bootcamp before, just to make sure. This is a good investment, but I, that's great that it paid off for Zeb. And I have a friend who did like a user interface, user experience bootcamp, who just got their first job about six months later.
Kyle: Yeah. That can be a worthwhile way to address that gap in specific experience and Bridget.
Matt: Yeah. If you really want to change directions. And I think there's a great piece of advice of finding someone who's gone through it. I know a friend of mine. Who got his master's in public health and worked in government public health agencies for a little bit, got burnt out through COVID and went to a bootcamp and now he works as like a systems cloud engineer and yeah, dramatic shifts are totally possible.
Matt: And sometimes bootcamps are the way to do it. You can always teach yourself. That may be a little bit longer of a process. Change is
Kyle: possible. It absolutely is. You and I are living evidence. I meet more people every day that have done it. We can all do it.
Matt: Great. Kyle, what are... Let's just talk a last few pieces of advice for PhDs who are wanting to go industry.
Matt: Let's say... This is going to be coming out, if I'm on top of it, before 2024. So, we'll have gone through the 2023 fall academic job search. So, folks will be waiting to hear back or they'll have heard back on whether or not they get job interviews. And now they'll be looking into the spring and thinking about what's next.
Matt: So, for those who may not be getting callbacks and may be thinking about going industry, And they're going to be going industry probably spring to summer of 2024. What are things they can be doing in the next few months to really prepare themselves for that?
Kyle: Yeah, I really think reaching out to your people as much as you can is the best starting place.
Kyle: I have a number of friends that have gone through the academic job search experience. Some of them got jobs. So their concerns were basically relieved by that. But I, but I had talked with them about how it was a real fear. That the job offer wouldn't come through. And just the fact that they had reached out to me ahead of time meant I had them in mind.
Kyle: I had an idea of what they were like and what jobs would be good for them. I, and because we're friends, I want to help them. If they want to go the academic route, I'm thrilled for them. But if they wanted to come to industry, I was ready to put in referrals or connect them with people. So if you have any friend in industry, I feel like a lot of us have one or two people reach out, make a personal connection.
Kyle: In addition, start reaching out on LinkedIn. If you don't have a LinkedIn profile, you just need to make one and make it look like industry people make theirs look so that you're speaking the same language, right? It's not going to hurt you in the academic application process at all to have an industry ready LinkedIn profile, but it just might get you an industry job if the academic route doesn't come through.
Kyle: Yeah.
Matt: Awesome. Kyle. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Will you say again, you're on Twitter slash X. You're on LinkedIn and you're on TikTok and I'll have links for all those in the description below. Was there anything you wanted to talk about that we did not cover today?
Kyle: There's always more to talk about.
Kyle: Specifically, I could just say one final personal message, which is that I've seen a lot of people go through the job application process now, and the folks I tend to see who have the most success are the ones who are the most flexible and adaptive. Again, to mirroring the language of the business world and who are open minded about finding specific roles that might be a little bit different from what they had first envisioned.
Kyle: I would just encourage everybody to keep an open mind, take steps for yourself, learn things for yourself, and talk to as many people as you can.
Matt: Makes so much sense. All right, Kyle, last question for you. What do you think is one thing that all grad students should consider doing before they finish grad school?
Matt: Could be something fun, something funny, ridiculous, something serious.
Kyle: I definitely subscribe to Grad School Sucks, and in addition to that, I know that not every program actually allows people to do an internship, but I don't mean to always put the same note, but seriously, that will do a world of good for you.
Kyle: And for my own self, I felt like I couldn't spend the three months to do a summer internship because it would set me back, but I didn't realize how much further it would put me ahead in the big picture. Besides that, talk to industry people very early in the process and realize you do have a lot to offer and there's mutual benefit for them to know you as much as for you to know them.
Matt: 100%. Alright, well thanks for coming on the show Kyle, it was so good to chat
Kyle: with you. My pleasure man, always a pleasure, thank you.
Matt: All right, folks, that was my conversation with Kyle. I hope you got a lot out of our discussion today. Be sure to check the links in the description of this episode to register for that free webinar that I have coming up, as well as connect and follow with Kyle on TikTok, Twitter, or X and LinkedIn.
Matt: All right, I will see you all next week for another episode.