Look Beyond Academia to Find Jobs With a Science Ph.D

While earning her Ph.D. in chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis, Natalie LaFranzo, 29, spent hours in the lab developing techniques for studying how neurons communicate. By the time she graduated in 2013, LaFranzo's CV included a respectable list of publications and conference presentations that could well have led to a postdoctoral fellowship and eventually a faculty position.

Except that she didn't want either of those things. "I realized that the academic world wasn't where I was headed," she says. Instead, she began tailoring her experience for a career in industry. At graduation, she jumped to a St. Louis startup that contracts with academic, government and industrial labs to do specialized DNA and RNA sequencing experiments.

Scientifically inclined college grads may well wonder whether a Ph.D. is worth the toil and relative poverty these days, when the academic path is so narrow and crowded, and unlikely to lead to the tenured professorship traditionally considered the pinnacle of success. Only 42 percent of people with scientific Ph.D.s today work in academia.

But many doctoral students, like LaFranzo, feel they get the best of both worlds: They can immerse themselves in the research they're passionate about, usually free of tuition and with a small stipend, and graduate to find companies willing to pay a premium for their advanced research skills, independent thinking and dogged determination.

[Learn how Ph.D. programs have gotten more practical.]

The most recent stats from the National Science Foundation, which tracks employment in scientific disciplines, show the unemployment rate among Ph.D.s running a third of that of the general population -- 2.1 percent versus 6.3 percent -- as of February 2013. As for starting salaries, NSF surveys show a median of $98,000 for science and engineering Ph.D.s in private industry, compared with $60,000 in academia. Young math and computer science grads in industry commanded a median of $115,000.

Once in the workforce, they can watch their original research turn into products and services rather than journal papers.

"I realized that what motivated me was seeing how my discoveries would relate to helping people now, not years in the future," says Julia Woertink, 34, strategy leader for research and development at Dow Chemical Co., who wrapped up a Ph.D. in chemistry at Stanford University in 2010.

In addition to industrial research, opportunities for people with advanced STEM credentials abound in fields like consulting and finance.

[Discover the Best STEM Jobs.]

"One of the nice things about being a mathematician is that so many employers are looking for logical and quantitative skills," says Ashley Pitlyk, 29, who earned her Ph.D. in math in 2010 from St. Louis University in Missouri, spent one year teaching before deciding to leave academia, and went to work for consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton in Washington, D.C.

What about physicists, who have perhaps the least obvious nonacademic career path? The data show that more than half of physics Ph.D.s wind up in industry, while only 1 in 5 stay in education, says Steven Lambert, an industrial physics fellow for the American Physical Society, which tracks the employment status of members.

APS research shows that Ph.D. physicists can be found in any number of fields, including business and finance, computing and even intellectual property law, where their scientific know-how can help them analyze patents.

Graduate schools are beginning to recognize how widely their students scatter, and are realizing that they need to take nonacademic career paths into account when designing their programs.

[Learn how students can merge interests in science and medicine with an M.D.-Ph.D.]

Washington University in St. Louis' career center, for example, has earmarked an adviser specifically for students pursuing science Ph.D.s. The University of Wisconsin--Madison recently started a professional development initiative that includes goal-setting, an individualized personal assessment process and career exploration.

As with any Ph.D. program, the quality and the value of the experience often rests on finding the right adviser, one who is not biased against a career outside the ivory tower and who preferably collaborates with industrial partners.

"Make sure the professor is doing something that you're interested in and that there's reasonable support for that project, because you can be in trouble if the money disappears," advises Lambert.

Some universities have forged active industrial partnerships, adding internships or cooperative education experiences and providing access to funding and professional connections. Dow is investing $250 million over 10 years in partnerships with 11 schools. The funds support new lab space and equipment, graduate student tuition and stipends, and research projects in arenas from electronics to energy storage.

Even if a university doesn't have such formal relationships, individual professors might. Brenda Zhuang, 35, who earned her Ph.D. in manufacturing engineering at Boston University several years ago, recalls benefiting from a consortium of companies organized by a group of BU professors that met every six months to review students' research. Through those connections, Zhuang found a spot as a software engineer for MathWorks, a scientific computing software company headquartered in Natick, Massachusetts.

Woertink says working in grad school with a variety of partners, both in the U.S. and abroad, has served her well at Dow, where she has to be effective within the global organization as well as with customers. "I would advise anyone interested in an industrial career to get experience with collaboration," she says.

This story is excerpted from the U.S. News "Best Graduate Schools 2016" guidebook, which features in-depth articles, rankings and data.