Thread by @DavidJohnBaker

A few months ago I wrote a very long blog for @CommitteeSysmus on advice that I wish I would have heard when I was a graduate student about getting a non-academic job.

sites.google.com/view/sysmus/bl…

I'll thread the major points below because it's a long one (4K words)

There are a lot of resources on how to keep going on in academia, but as we all know, we can't all immediately go from PhD to more academia (AND this was all originally written pre-COVID) but there's not a lot of good resources to help people prepare for that as a student.

So I wanted to just pass on many words of wisdom that I think I would have found helpful a few years ago (esp since my first job out of PhD was helping people land junior #datascience jobs) and not just say what to do (ewww) but rather my thoughts on why.

The four pieces of advice I give for #musicscience students are:

1. Make a @LinkedIn account but don’t position yourself as an academic.
2. Ask people who do the job that you are interested in doing for help.
3. Create an online presence.
4. Get better at programming.

Regarding #1, many academics don't get LinkedIn and in the post I theorize why, but the punchline is that you need to realize you're getting hired to do something that is not what you have been doing and you need to demonstrate you understand that.

On #2 It's the tired advice that you need to network because you'll probably get your job via a connection rather than a cold apply. The more friends you have the better, make friends early, pull other people into your network, if you're having trouble with this

for whatever reason, I'm always open to helping introduce you to people if there's something blocking your path. Importantly, we can't turn a blind eye that these networks are difficult to get into and there's always hidden curricula in favor of those "in the know".

On #3, it's helpful if you can demonstrate you can be useful and communicate well before you get your job. The competition is intense for some work and anything you can do to help yourself stand out is going to be better than doing nothing. It sucks to have to have to

feel like you are continually having to prove yourself (doing free labor IMO) but those who do have some online proof beyond their resume of their ability do shine when it comes to interviews.

And lastly #4 is just saying that if you can invest being good with computers, it's going to open up a lot of doors for you. IMO this means learning an open source language for your data viz/analysis (who wants to hire someone who needs a $2K software to run a regression?)

or plotting or web stuff or whatever. I offer some resources on this in the post, but again, I'm always open to helping people get started and push through the awful learning curve associated with this (and feel like I am better at helping now after having it be my job)

IMO the benefits of investing in the possibility of not going straight to an academic job far outweigh putting all the eggs in the proverbial academic basket. Not saying you can't return to it, but for your own mental health I've found it's liberating to know it's not academia

or bust because sometimes life happens and you can't just think about yourself and your career.

I also heard that I'll be presenting a workshop for SysMus this fall talking about all this stuff, so if you're planning on attending and there are things you want me to

cover in that, let me know.

And to sound like a broken record, if anyone wants to ever talk about this stuff, please just DM me or send me an email. I'm always willing to help students.

Thanks for reading the thread, I hope it's helpful and would love to hear your thoughts.