Hosted by Merck
This summer, we will be featuring blog posts written by PhD students who participated in Career Services’ Career Exploration Initiative (CEI), a program that helps doctoral candidates explore their career interests through networking opportunities with advanced degree professionals. Click here to learn more about CEI.
Coming into the PhD Career Exploration Initiative as a third-year PhD candidate, I wasn’t sure what I wanted my post-PhD path to look like. I applied hoping the program would help me decide between academia or industry. What I didn’t expect was how much it would sharpen my thinking about what I value in a research career, regardless of where that career ultimately lives.
I was paired with Dr. Nicolette Heinsinger, a Senior Scientist at Merck, and we met once a month throughout the fellowship. Our conversations ranged from her own journey out of academia into industry, to the day-to-day of her current work, to candid pros and cons of both worlds. Because of proprietary considerations, I wasn’t able to work directly on a Merck project, but Nicolette more than made up for it by connecting me to colleagues across the company.
I had informational interviews with industry co-ops, postdocs, scientists, and PIs across a variety of disciplines. She also hosted me for an in-person site visit, where I toured the labs and was introduced to several Merck PIs and the VP of the neurodegeneration arm of their neuroscience division. That site visit ended up being the most valuable interaction of my fellowship. Sitting across from senior scientists and articulating my work in a way that emphasized translational impact forced me to think about my own science differently and gave me a clearer sense of how to communicate it to any audience.
The most surprising thing I learned was that the parts of academia people often warn you about, such as grant writing or the constant ownership of every experimental decision, are parts I genuinely enjoy. That insight didn’t settle the academia-vs-industry question for me, but it sharpened my sense of what I value in scientific work and what I’d want to protect in any role I take next. I also learned that an industry postdoc is a real and increasingly common path, and that postdoctoral experience (academic or industry) is far more common among industry scientists than I had realized.
Going forward, I plan to keep networking in both directions regardless of where I think I’ll land in two years. CEI reinforced for me that career exploration isn’t about ruling things out, but is about understanding the trade-offs well enough to choose with confidence.
To any PhD student weighing whether CEI is worth the time: if you have any uncertainty about your path, it will give you a kind of clarity you didn’t know you needed: clarity about your values, your strengths, and the trade-offs you’re willing to make. Whatever direction you ultimately choose, you’ll come away with mentors and a network in industry that will matter down the road.
