Last week’s call for non-academic scientists produced a much larger response than I was expecting– more than 30 people volunteered. Thanks to all who volunteered, and if you’re interested, please feel free to contact me– it’s not too late to get involved.
As I said in that post, I plan to post a series of short interviews with people who have science degrees, but are not working in academia. The idea here is to provide information on career options for scientists and science majors beyond the “go to grad school, do a post-doc, get a faculty position” track that is too often assumed to be the default. Accordingly, I’ve sent each of the volunteers ten questions about their careers, and I’ll be posting their answers to those questions over the next several days.
Because every good project needs an acronym that could be confused with something far more prestigious, we’ll call this the “Project for Non-Academic Science,” and posts in this series will be tagged “PNAS” for ease of finding/ avoiding. I should also note that there is a blog The Alternative Scientist with a similar mission, though it hasn’t been updated since May.
I’ll space the PNAS posts out a bit, a few a day, so they don’t totally dominate the blog. The first couple will show up shortly.
Thanks again to everyone who volunteered. I hope this turns out to be helpful for young scientists thinking about their career options.