What Happens After the Ph.D.? Finding Direction and Lessons from Postdoc Life

March often brings a whirlwind of change, and twelve years ago it brought one of the biggest turning points in my life. In February I had successfully defended my Ph.D., and by the time March arrived, an entirely different kind of madness began to unfold.

By the first Monday of that month my car was packed. I had given away or sold all my furniture and shipped half of my belongings, including an 88-key electric piano, across the country. At that moment I was newly single, between jobs, and without a permanent address.

A close friend was able to take a week off, so together we set out in a sun-faded 1997 manual Honda Civic crammed to the roof with boxes and bags. We left Houston and headed west to Los Angeles, the city of movies, where I was about to start the next chapter of my journey: life as a postdoc.

It’s common to emerge from our Ph.D. on a high note, then descend into a fog of uncertainty for our future. Most of us don’t have a nest of funds saved up from grad school, so we are more anxious about securing a job than finding a career path truly right for us. In this job/career search, we often encounter contradiction.

We've been conditioned to believe our value lies in our credentials, our publications, our prestigious affiliations. Yet, “everybody” in academia has these things, so we fail to identify our unique value as a member of the tiny percentage of people who have a Ph.D. (less than 2% in the US).

So whether we are seeking research, industry, teaching, or other types of roles, many of us struggle, sometimes for years, to find our voice and value in the greater world post-Ph.D.

I, like many, went on the academic chase of prestigious postdocs and faculty positions. When I received the offer from the famous professor at UCLA, I threw my arms up in the air and shouted “Jackpot!”. “This is a beautiful postdoc,” I thought. “I’m going to make it.”

A postdoc is a time after the Ph.D. when one chooses to work as a researcher under the guidance of a professor (or senior researcher in a research-intensive non-university institution), usually for 2-3 years (usually on 1-year contracts). There's a huge range of written and unwritten responsibilities, including research, leading a lab, building a lab, managing lab safety, administrating, organizing group meetings, organizing group activities, being a role model, hosting guest speakers, applying for funding, managing funding, teaching, fixing things, mentoring.

“You need three first-author papers by this time next year if you want this kind of job,” my Ph.D. advisor said to me within my first year of postdoc-ing.

As a fiercely independent, globally traveled person who often overestimated her own abilities, I couldn’t see then what is obvious now: I was in culture shock.

I went from a university of 4,000 undergraduates to one with 40,000, a research group of around 10 to 20. Things were run differently.

Los Angeles doubled the costs of living from Houston but not the salary. (Fortunately, a fellowship came my way within my first year, making living much easier.)

All those postdoc expectations mentioned above? Now with a totally different group and leader. My Ph.D. advisor met us as a group every week and individually when needed. My postdoc advisor was famous in his field, headed a state-wide nanosystems research conglomerate, and founder and editor of the most-read journal in nanoscience. As a globally sought-after speaker, he would visit Singapore on his way from Boston to Switzerland within a 60-hour period.

His leadership style was hands-off, never assigning projects, sometimes assigning you someone to mentor when you bumped into him in the hallway, and rarely tracked your experimental plan and outcomes. When I did score a meeting with him, he’d ask “What you got?” in which case I did my best to summarize everything happening. He asked a few questions, and if it wasn’t ready for publication, he gave minimal feedback (if any), leaving us mostly on our own to figure out what to fix. While revising my first faculty application, he returned the 15-page packet to me with one line of pen on the back: “This is better, but I still do not know what you care about.”

This way of working, along with the internal and external pressure, did not land gently.

New and confusing perspectives
Los Angeles, Circa 2013

Where I am and what I’m doing now says that I care about something different from being an academic on the conventional promotion path.

On the third draft of this piece, an itching voice in my head said to re-watch Chris Gatti’s TedXTalk, “Why I joined the circus after finishing my Ph.D.” Chris grew up with gymnastics as well as an interest in mechanical engineering and once joked as a teenager that he would be an engineer by day and circus performer by night. Years later, within a week after completing his Ph.D. in Decision Sciences and Systems Engineering, he signed a contract to join Cirque du Soleil.

This was my biggest shock about being a postdoc, ironically. Yes, the credentials, degrees, and papers are necessary on paper for advancement in some types of careers. But my mentees and collaborators did not care in the moments they were dealing my brute force and overly-instructive approach to conducting research with little patience. Pressuring people because I was under pressure backfired.

In a hands-off lab environment, everyone who had the choice to work with me let me know, in direct and indirect ways, that they did not want to work with me.

Created by @biomatushiq sotak.info/sci.jpg 2007

Two realizations lit a flame in me:

1. Science is always better when multiple minds come together for creative problem solving.
2. My approach had pushed people away.

On reflection, it is a gift that my postdoc advisor was hands-off and let the human dynamics naturally shape the course of each person’s growth as a researcher and a person. I became collaborative rather than competitive, curious rather than assuming. I attended seminars on team science and collaboration. I scored a private meeting with the NIH director who gave the talk on team science during which I confessed my leadership crimes. I even apologized to those who’d dealt with me during the first two years.

Also, it wasn’t just me. Thousands of postdocs every year are under similar pressures each year to be amazing in half the time it took to do their Ph.D. Those seeking the faculty path, failing in a postdoc opens up painful decision moments – do I keep trying? Do I seek another postdoc? Do I “bail out” and go into industry? (There’s a terrible myth that it is easier to work in industry than academia.)

Plus, in academia we receive little to no training in how to lead and how to collaborate among other human skills, affecting millions of people at every level from undergraduates through senior professors

What do you want to do with that lit flame?
Los Angeles, Circa 2014

In speaking with numerous Ph.D. classmates over the past decade, I know that we have all reached at least one moment where we think, “What should I be doing with my life?”

Chris Gatti raises this question in his TedxTalk, to which he first replies, “I don’t know.”

Then he adds, “You should be questioning what you are doing and why? And then you should be listening to yourself. And in the meantime, if you don't have answers to those things, still stay productive. Everything you are doing is going to be helping you.”

I didn’t have the answers to those questions during my postdoc. By the end, I did want to be a better mentor, collaborator, and person, and over the next year and beyond, I did.

I brought my learning to my new role as a research assistant professor in Hong Kong. When I left the role after 3 years, I felt most proud of supporting 6 mentees and a dozen pre-Ph.D. colleagues, who all reached levels of excellence in research and communication that they didn’t see coming when they started.

I am also acutely aware that my lifelong practices as a singer, runner turned hiker, and home cook have built up a skillset allowing me to pave my own post-Ph.D. path that serves people and makes me happy.

I still use my chemistry background, but in a non-traditional way. I focus on human chemistry - the skills of self-awareness, communication, teamwork, and making decisions in a sea of uncertainty and possibilities. Just as we can never know exactly where an electron is in its probability cloud, the “right decision” is dynamic, constantly changing as time proceeds and conditions evolve.

So, what happens after a Ph.D.? It seems to be the same question as, “What should I be doing with my life?”

Chris Gatti developed the specialty (spoiler alert – watch the video now if you don’t want the spoiler) of teaching people how to do handstands. Why?

“It's about training people to do something they don't know how to do and don't know how to approach.” And it makes him happy.

Twelve years post-Ph.D., I am still finding my handstand, and it’s making me happy.

How about you?

Your road is yours to find.
Photo courtesy of R. Cresswell. Macao, 2025