sey071

I recently ran a poll on Twitter to learn more about the most common career paths after the PhD. While three of the options that I listed are perhaps the textbook options (postdoc, assistant prof - directly assistant prof - postdoc, industry), I learned that there are a variety of options out there. As a result, 1/3rd of all correspondents selected the "other" option. Some clicked on other because they just wanted to see the results, but the majority explained the different career path they followed. I also learned that in the humanities, postdocs are much less common. Here you can find the wake of this poll:

I've mentioned it before, but after defending my PhD, I felt sad and experienced some "withdrawal" symptoms after being very focused on my PhD. The first paper I wrote after defending came together very slowly. I defended in June, still had until September on my PhD contract (but no project defined yet at that point), didn't know if I'd be able to remain working for TU Delft (and fretted about it, a lot), and would only start my new job in November in Ecuador (and could pretty much do any research I wanted there, which was scary as well). I wanted to know if my experience is in line with others, so I ran a poll. You can see the wake of this poll and the results here:

This post is part of the series PhD Talk for AcademicTransfer: posts written for the Dutch academic career network AcademicTransfer , your go-to resource for all research positions in the Netherlands. These posts are sponsored by AcademicTransfer, and tailored to those of you interested in pursuing a research position in the Netherlands. If these posts raise your interest in working as a researcher in the Netherlands, even better - and feel free to fire away any questions you might have on this topic! A topic that we've discussed a number of times on this blog is "life after the PhD." We have discussed career options after the PhD , I've given advice on what a reader should do after the PhD , moving around the world for your career after the PhD , working as a scholar in the gulf region , the job interview , the benefit of your academic skills for future employers , how to frame your mind for a job after the PhD , how to find a job outside of academia , how to plan an...