Reply to what should I do after a phd and staying at home for two years? Advice needed.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]After all the above education, you feel you only have 4 options, and, 2 of them involve further education?? How about getting a job?! Ya know, one that pays $$[/quote]

Of course she has other options.  She could wait tables or nanny or become a secretary--but that would make even less use of her education than the ones outlined above.  If you think that getting a PhD means that you can easily get a job without further training, then you know nothing about how science works right now.  For many jobs, it would require doing a postdoc (which if you are really unhappy at the bench would seem like a miserable option), which is basically like being a graduate student just for slightly more pay and no degree and no guarantee of anything afterwards (and while it used to be 2 or so years, I have seen people do postdocs that are now 5-7 years in the biological sciences these days).  Given the way the job market is, for biologists in particular, to land a job in industry (or sometimes even things like being an editor for a journal), counterintuitively you need more training in the form of a postdoc post-PhD.  To transition into law, healthcare policy, certain sorts of business roles, further education post PhD is either necessary or helpful for getting your foot in the door.

You could say, "oh you shouldn't have gotten a PhD."  That's not really helpful, that's the "buy a time machine" advice.  Given that 10% of PhDs in the scientists have the career that they are trained for (becoming an academic), it's pretty common to have a lot of issues figuring out how to pivot to a new career later on.[/quote]
+1
It's pretty clear a lot of the posters have no clue about the biomedical PhD process and current job prospects.[/quote]

Yeah, but the posters do have a clue about the other paths she is looking into.  So yeah, maybe we don't understand what she needs to do to get a job in the sciences. According to you, she needs a post doc. But she says she doesn't want to do a postdoc, so that path is pretty moot. She's looking at other paths that are a jump in a total different direction. But since we know what those other directions require (like law), we're telling her she needs to think long and hard about spending $150k and busting her butt to do well in law school, only to have a job that requires tons of hours competing against a bunch of 26 year olds who don't have kids at home.  So it doesn't really matter whether the people advising OP understand what it takes to get a job in her field - since she doesn't want to be in her field. [/quote]

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