Every ounce of Britishness in my body is deeply uncomfortable writing
this post but over the past 12 months I’ve twice been invited to speak
at careers panels at conferences and both times I’ve had really positive
feedback from young academics looking to hear more about alternative
career paths post-PhD. So to save me from giving this
talk again, this post
outlines (as best I can remember) some of the decisions I’ve made in my
career and how I’ve landed where I am today.
» Who am I?
This seems like a reasonable place to start: My name is Arfon Smith, I
am a lapsed academic (I have a PhD in Astrochemistry) and I work for a
company called GitHub leading their engagment with
the research community.
» I have no idea what I am doing
Seriously, looking backwards it’s usually possible to construct some
deliberately followed pathway between the things you have done with your
life but if you’d asked me when I was 17 what I thought I was going to
do with my life I would have told you I wanted to be a commercial
airline pilot. If you’d asked my towards the end of my degree I would
have said I wanted to learn how to make wine professionally1
and if you’d asked me post-PhD I would have told you that I was going to
re-train and study medicine. None of these happened, all I’ve done
through my career is be responsive to interesting opportunities and not
be (too) scared of taking a leap of faith.
» So what did I study?
At high school I student Maths, Physics and Chemistry. Mostly because
they were my favourite subjects but I also had heard (correctly it turns
out), that by combining these three subjects (especially the Maths and
Physics) it was more like studying for 2.5 A-levels because there was so
much overlap in the content.
I then enrolled at The University of
Sheffield in the Chemistry program.
I got pretty good grades at high-school and so when picking a degree
program I was optimising for my deep interest in going somewhere with
excellent climbing but also somewhere where I could get a ‘decent’
degree. In the late 90’s, Sheffield had a pretty good Physics program
but a really good Chemistry department. I knew I didn’t want to study
Maths any further and liked Physics and Chemistry pretty much equally.
Psyched about the climbing in and around Sheffield I picked Chemistry.
» Chemistry, not so much…
So it turns out, I’m not that into Chemistry. After the first semester I
realised that while Chemistry was interesting enough, some people were
waaaay more into it that me. Plus we always seemed to be in the lab when
other people were in the bar.
Towards the end of my first year I had reached the firm conclusion that
I wanted to stop studying Chemistry as soon as possible. I’d
supplemented my first year studies with all of the undergraduate
Astrophysics modules (taught in the Physics department) and had really
enjoyed these and so I started talking with university administrators
about switching degree programs to Physics/Astrophysics. This was pretty
much impossible without completely re-doing my first year (I’d missed
all of the Maths that they teach in year 1 Physics). Not wanting to do
this so I decided to get my head down and get out as soon as possible by
switching from a 4-year MSc program to a 3-year BSc.
» Significant decision #1
Finishing up a degree I wasn’t interested in was hard. I found it
difficult to motivate myself to attend lectures and realised that with a
modest amount of work I could probably scrape a 2.1 (which I did). So
during my third year I pretty much checked out but did just enough work
to exit with a reasonable qualification.
Luckily for me, my final year project was supervised by a professor
named Tony
Ryan.
He noticed that I wasn’t particularly motivated and challenged me about
this. We chatted for a few minutes one evening in his office and talked
about how I was lacking motivation for Chemistry. He asked what I was
interested in and I mentioned the Astrophysics I’d studied in my first
year and how that was the most interesting thing from the last three
years. He then said something that turned out to be pretty significant:
You know, there is this thing called ‘Astrochemistry’
It turned out there were funded PhD positions available just 40 miles
down the road at The University of
Nottingham in a subject that I was really
interested in (space stuff) and that needed someone with a solid
background in Chemistry. A couple of conversations with my (future) PhD
supervisor later and I was signed up to work with him for the next 3-4
years. Here’s a picture of me using a giant telescope in Australia:
» The PhD years
Firstly, I should point out that until someone pretty much offered me a
PhD position I hadn’t really thought that hard about a career in
academia. To be honest, I didn’t really have a very firm idea of what I
wanted to do after finishing up as an undergraduate and the option of
spending another few years at university seemed like a pretty reasonable
choice.
Given that I haven’t followed a ‘traditional’ academic path, people
sometimes ask if I regret spending time getting a PhD. In short, no. I
have very fond memories of my time as a PhD student (even with the
standard tensions with your supervisor), I got to travel the world, met
interesting people (including my wife!) and had ample time to learn new
skills which turned out to be pretty important later on.
If I could describe my PhD in one line it would be this:
As interested in the code I was writing as the results being produced.
Basically I found academic research to be interesting, but not
interesting enough. If you ever experienced impostor syndrome when
arriving at university as an undergraduate then try being a new PhD
student. By definition you’re working with some of the smartest people
around and I realised that my peers were both better at research than me
and more motivated by the work they were doing. For most, academia is a
labour of love (you do get paid, but relatively modestly) and so you
have to be willing to put in the hours to stay on top of the literature
and ahead of your peers. It is widely
recognised
that there are far more PhD positions than there are permanent positions
in academia and so if the ultimate goal2 for a PhD student is
to one day be a professor then the vast majority of people fail.
» Everything else you do during your PhD
For many people, a PhD affords you a remarkable amount of freedom. Sure
you need to check in with your supervisor fairly regularly but I often
wouldn’t see mine for 2-3 weeks at a time. This meant that there was a
fair amount of time available to work on things not directly related to
my studies. For me, I spent time noodling around writing code and
building websites.
My first experience of programming was in my first year as a PhD student
and because I was in a Chemistry department the programming language was
of course Fortran3. Around the same time I took a basic HTML
course at the university library and very quickly graduated on from
Fortran to languages like Perl. Around the same time I started to
acquire data that needed analysing for my research and so after a few
frustrating months of typing commands like a robot into a terminal it
was pointed out to me that repetitive tasks could be automated (again
with Perl).
Over the next couple of years I started building more and more websites
in my spare time, for myself, friends, colleagues and eventually clients
in a freelance capactity. The more time I spent writing code, the more I
became interested in the way the code was put together and the
programming languages I was using. Around this time I was introduced to
Ruby on Rails which had just reached 1.0.
Working with Rails was astonishing, not only was the programming
language a pleasure but the framework enforced really smart conventions
that helped level up my understanding of software design and
development.
» The post-PhD blues
As I reached the end of my PhD I realised I wasn’t cut out for a career
in academia. Research was interesting but it was clear to me that some
of my peers were one a very different path to me. I finished writing up
my work outside of Nottingham (after funds had dried up) and was awarded
my PhD in late 2006.
In the weeks and months post PhD I was pretty depressed about what I was
going to do next. I had ‘failed’ as an academic and didn’t really know
what to do next. For a short while I was a kept man, that is, I was at
home trying (and failing) to be a successful freelance developer while
my wife brought home the £££. Struggling to know what to do next it was
at this point I started to think about re-training as a medical
doctor4 as there was a family history of starting late in
medical careers. I spent some time volunteering on the wards at a local
hospital and while this was rewarding in its own way, it made me realise
this wasn’t what I wanted to do.
In a stroke of luck, a good friend of mine then pointed me in the
direction of a junior Ruby on Rails developer position at a local new
media agency. A couple of weeks later I was gainfully employed as a
developer on their web team.
» Significant decision #2
It wasn’t that the company I was working for was paricularly bad but
after six months of doing client work at a new media agency I was pretty
much done with the commercial sector. Deadlines were always tight,
clients were often assholes and there was little interest in the quality
of the work we were doing from a technical standpoint as long as ‘it
looked good’.
At a similar time to me taking this role with the media agency, a good
friend of mine Matt Wood (we’d studied for our PhDs together) had landed
a role leading the Production Software Group at the Wellcome Trust
Sanger Institute - the site responsible for
sequencing about one third of the original human genome.
Matt was hiring a team and was looking for Rails developers to build out
the laboratory management software to support the next generation
sequencing platforms that the Sanger had invested in. While this job
sounds like a dream gig, I should point out that I very nearly didn’t
apply for this job. Not because I didn’t want it, but because I didn’t
think I was qualified.
I should point out that I very nearly didn’t apply for this job. Not
because I didn’t want it, but because I didn’t think I was qualified.
The imposter syndrome and insecurities many feel post-PhD can be
crippling. The best advice I’ve ever received when applying for jobs is
to let the interview committee decide whether you are qualified or
not. Thankfully I did exactly this and I was soon working at one of
the largest bioinformatics institutes in the world.
Looking back now, it’s clear to me that Sanger was a formative role for
me professionally. I was employed to write software but was working
day-to-day with lots of academics. In many ways this role was a hybrid
of my PhD days and my time doing client work in the new media agency. It
was also eye-opening to work in an environment where the role (and
value) of software in research was well understood. There were probably
800 people on site at Sanger and around 100 of those were developing
software. Because of the highly specialised nature of some of the work
many of these developers had PhDs in a related field. So here I was,
working on a campus full of people with skills like me building tools to
facilitate the research of others. It was exciting and I began to see
where professionally I could have impact.
It was also eye-opening to work in an environment where the role (and
value) of software in research was well understood.
Thankfully, Sanger offered a large amount of money available for
professional development (Ruby training, converences etc.) and so over
the next 12 months I worked in a small team (~5 people) building
web-based tools to support the research of academics and honing the
craft of building high-quality software.
» Significant decision #3 - co-founding the Zooniverse
A year into my time at Sanger, I had a serendipitous conversation at a
friend’s wedding about a ‘citizen science’ project called Galaxy
Zoo5. The project had been wildly
successful and hundreds of thousands of people had taken part. The group
had secured a grant for two people to work full time on the project
building it out into a network of citizen science projects all with the
same basic idea: find research challenges where human cognition exceeds
the abilities of computers do crowd-source science with members of the
public.
Chris Lintott (one of the creators of Galaxy Zoo) and myself ended up
being those two people who spent the next few years working full time
building out what became the Zooniverse.
I can honestly say that this is the first time in my career where the
job felt right. Working at Sanger had shown me how it was possible
academic research to reap the rewards of well-written software and this
was my chance to start something new in a research domain I knew.
So 18 months after leaving academia, I found myself back in a university
department as a postdoc6.
Long story short, I spend the next five years in Oxford and later at the
Adler Planetarium as the Director of Citizen Science leading a team of
~15 designers, developers, educators and researchers all working on
Zooniverse projects. It was a lot of fun.
A common pattern was emerging though in the kinds of people we were
hiring. They were typically very accomplished individuals, often with a
research background, but because they’d acquired significant programming
skills they didn’t quite fit into the standard academic model.
Zooniverse was a good home for these folks as they could come and apply
their software (and other) skills to research problems but it was a
small-scale fix for a much wider problem: researchers who spend a large
amount of time write software typically suffer a signficant career
penalty as time spend writing code is time not spent writing papers
(which is where credit is awarded).
researchers who spend a large amount of time write software typically
suffer a signficant career penalty as time spend writing code is time
not spent writing papers
» GitHub
I can’t quite remember when I first met someone from GitHub but it was
probably Tim Clem at a Science Hack Day in San Francisco. Tim and I
bumped into each other a few times over the ~2.5 years I was working at
the Adler and each time we’d talk about the role of software in
academia, what open source communities were doing right (and where
academia was going wrong supporting software development) and how GitHub
was offering value to the academy as a place for researchers to publish
their work.
At some point in those ~2.5 years it became clear that GitHub wanted to
hire someone to work in this space. To engage with the wider academic
community and work on how to better support academics using the
platform. Zooniverse had given me the opportunity to change the way
academic research was carried out and this opportunity at GitHub
presented an evolution of that challenge but at a much larger scale.
And so that’s where I am today. Working at GitHub to help make the
careers of those people who develop software as part of their academic
life more successful. Unusually for GitHub (and perhaps all engineering
companies) this isn’t just a new product that GitHub needs to build or a
discount they need to offer a particular community. Large-scale change
in how we credit research products other than papers is a huge challenge
for the global academic community and one that GitHub is a small but
important part of.
» Hindsight is 20/20
As I said at the start of this post, looking backwards it’s easy to
construct a narrative around how you ended up at a particular point in
your career. But as I also said, I generally have no idea what I’m
doing. For the vast majority of my career thus far there has been no
grand plan.
It’s now nearly nine years since I finished my PhD and it’s only in the
last three years that I’ve really begun to understand what I want to do
with my career. Could I have predicted that I’d end up at GitHub five
years ago? Definitely not. But did GitHub hire me because of the
professional experience I had. Absolutely.
» Some advice
Most PhD graduates don’t end up becoming tenured professors so here are
some recommendations for things you can do to make yourself more
employable outside of academia:
Results are important, but how you got there might count more in the
end
Outside of academia, employers are likely to care less about your
publications but the skills you acquired when doing research will always
be valuable. Whether it’s statistical methods, technologies such a
version control or programming these are the transferrable skills that
will get you a job in industry.
Share (and license) your work
When considering you as a candidate, employers will look you up online
and it’s a pretty well-established fact that people get hired because of
their GitHub profiles. If you’re writing some code as part of your
research, spend the time writing some documentation describing what it
does, slap a license on it and put it up on GitHub7.
Take a course (there are lots out there)
Whether it’s Software or
Data Carpentry or something else, there are
a number of professional development opportunities out there for
academics to learn industry applicable skills. The good news is that
time spent on these courses will also help you with your research too!
Choose transferrable technologies (if you can)
Sometimes you have a choice about what technologies to use in your
research. When you do have a choice try and pick ones that are used
outside of academia. Astronomers, that means ditching IDL8
for something like Python. If there’s chance to learn how to work with
databases and SQL then seize that opportunity and stop working with big
CSV files.
» Wrapping up
I feel very lucky to have been able to spend the majority of my career
thus far only working on problems that are interesting to me. All I can
say for sure is that I’ve tried where possible to take opportunities
that felt like a good decision at the time but have not always had the
confidence to make those decisions on my own. I’ve been very fortunate
to receive excellent career advice from a number of people, sometimes
friends, sometimes colleagues, sometimes my boss at the time. If you
can, find people you know you and who’s opinion you trust. Listen to
them as they’re often going to have a better perspective than you.
find people you know you and who’s opinion you trust. Listen to them
as they’re often going to have a better perspective than you.
Branching out our comfort zone and leaving academia can seem like a big
decision and in many ways it is. People just like you make this decision
every day and they’re probably working on fun and interesting problems
too!
