The non-academic job search (Part 1)

This may come as a surprise to you, but I’ve decided after much soul searching this year that I will not be applying for postdocs this fall and following the steps to success in mathademia.  Please do not take this as an indictment of academia (though I also feel that;  each of those words is a separate link about academia & motherhood), and I highly recommend postgraduate study in math if you’re interested in it (so does Evelyn Lamb on Slate!)

I have loved my time doing something I love on a flexible schedule which gave me lots of time to spend with my son, organize conferences, travel, blog, bake, exercise, and have the life I wanted.  It’s also been very difficult to have the highly unstructured environment, little oversight, and lack of regular collaboration.  Also very little money, but I married a person with an actual job so he can support the kid, and as a young 20-something I didn’t need much money (especially with math conferences covering travel and accommodation costs!)  So I love math, I love mathademia, but I don’t love teaching enough to do it full-time yet, and I don’t love research enough to want to move my family only to move them again 3 years later, and possibly 3 years after that again.  Hence I am starting my non-academic job search, and I thought y’all could join me on my journey.

When I first started toying with leaving academia, a friend of mine who also has a Ph.D. in math told me: the hardest thing about leaving academia is deciding to leave academia.  It’s been several months of pro/con lists, discussions with friends and family, and days of feeling sad and hopeless vs. days of feeling inspired.  You can’t help but feel like a failure when you make this decision, because all the exemplars of success that surround you are academics.  And that’s not even true for me; I try to know a range of people who do different things, but still in my day to day life and work it’s all professors etc.  Anyways, I got through this stage but it was rough.

Next I got some books!  Specifically, In Transition and What Color is Your Parachute? + Workbook.  I’d heard of Parachute, and I talked to a friend on the phone who used to be in consulting who said that everyone who left his company was given a copy of In Transition.  So I spent a few weeks working through these, which was mostly about soul-searching and there’s some practical advice in there about informational interviews.  In those weeks I also contacted career services at Yale (they have someone dedicated to alumni) and UT Austin and got some short and helpful advice.

I rejoined Amazon affiliates so I could put these pictures in this post.  Buy the books from links above, I get money!

After using the books and career people and narrowing down to a few fields that might interest me, I used LinkedIn and the internet to find companies in those fields in the locations I’m interested in (Austin, where we are now, and where our families are).  After a few days of searching, that got me a list of 50 or so companies in a file I called “first impressions”, which I then went through again and checked out all of their websites which took another several days.  I deleted all the ones I couldn’t imagine working for or which didn’t exist anymore, which brought me to a list of about 20 companies.

I figured once I started contacting people they’d google me, so I updated my website and made it pretty and fancy!  Then, using my CV as a starter and a template that one of the career counselors sent me, I wrote a resume targeting these fields.  Based on that, I updated my linkedin.  The website took me an afternoon several months ago, the resume took me two weeks.

How many pictures of myself did I put on my website?  A lot!

In the meantime several more companies got added to my list: I’m on several email lists and one alum sent out a note that his company is hiring, I looked on vault.com which ranks consulting companies on lots of metrics, including “work-life balance” and “least amount of travel” so that added a few companies, and I added a few dream companies (AAAS) which are not where I want to live but why not explore them and figure out what makes them dreams, and what things I want in the job I end up getting?

So about two weeks ago I added another sheet for contacts to this growing excel file which still has the name “first impressions”, and I used LinkedIn to find people who work at and people who used to work at each of those companies who are in my 2nd degree networks, and I wrote down their names and the name of my connection to them who can introduce us.  I also used LinkedIn to find people who were alums of any of the schools I’ve been affiliated with.  Now I’m starting to do informational interviews with those people- I asked for half hour phone conversations, but after the first one last week I think 15 minutes would suffice.  To get introduced, I write an email to our mutual connection and include at the bottom of the email an introductory note to the person I want to connect to, so our mutual friend can just forward it instead of having to write a whole long thing.

What’s great about informational interviewing people who used to work somewhere is they have no skin in the game if I end up at that company.  They can tell me why they left!

If you couldn’t tell this has been a summer-long project that I started at the end of May (at least, that’s when I redid my website).  I didn’t start out the summer knowing any of these things, neither what the tasks were nor how to do them, but I talked to that former consulting friend for an hour in May and he made all of these helpful recommendations, and I talked to the Yale alum counselor for a half hour in June, and I met with the UT counselor in July who gave me concrete advice as well.

I’ll keep you updated every few months with the progress of this!