Wesley Beckner
After defending my thesis in 2019, I set out to join a different kind of lab—a startup. A fresh data scientist venturing outside the graduate school sandbox, I began my journey of learning valuable work experience lessons. First, I learned to work with lots of different kinds of people and leverage divergent skill sets. In graduate school you'll frequently work alongside collaborators, but as first author, you will always have a major contribution to every facet of the publication and research. This is not true when you work on later projects in your career. The other members of your team are there to allow you to focus on what you do best (and you're there to allow them to do what they do best). So, a different quality of trust and delegation must emerge to achieve the highest synergy, where 2 + 2 > 4. Meshing the personalities, however, can be tough. Something I hadn't noticed was how homogenous a graduate student population can be. You and your lab mates are in the same field, you have similar background training, you're motivated by similar things, and you're cohabitating a region with certain norms and culture. When you leave the sandbox, you're going to encounter people with vastly different opinions than your own. Things that felt PC in the graduate bubble, will no longer be PC in this new circle. I had to learn how to get along with people, despite their opinions.
The second learning point came about in the area of self-care. In school, it's easy to adopt a habit of putting off self-care. You'll approach things like exams and due dates with a feast or famine perspective: "I'll get out and do the thing I enjoy when I don't have this on my plate." You'll do that with long periods of drought where you're really knuckling down. In school, this sort of behavior can have a plus side. Because you are on a rhythm with others in your cohort, it can foster a sort of community, a shared cycle of highs and lows with your comrades. In your career, this will likely have the opposite effect. No one is on the Crazy Train with you, and you'll find yourself distracted by your work even when you're supposed to be having time away from it. After realizing this, I changed my day-by-day approach to productivity and self-care. I made sure that 99% of my days were good ones, where I wasn't living for the future. That took a lot of time and habit forming and is still something I'm working on (maybe that's a lifelong project!)
Overall advice to life after graduate school, is to constantly evaluate yourself and your situation. You have the scientific mindset—apply it to your life! As described by Eckhart Tolle, you can either change your situation, leave the situation, or accept it. All else is madness.