Here are three things a student can do today to maximize their industry opportunities later in their graduate career.
- Get LinkedIn
Major companies that take research seriously have recruiters specialized to recruit from academia. These recruiters seek out up-and-coming graduate students and early career professors. They tend to be familiar with your field and know how to read an academia-facing CV. I highly recommend using LinkedIn to increase your visibility for these recruiters so they can contact you with opportunities like internships and job openings. You will also want to use LinkedIn to learn about the range of job titles people with similar educational backgrounds to you end up in (e.g., UX Researcher; Data Scientist). If the job title is new to you, send them a message or a connection request with a message saying you’re a graduate student with a similar educational background and you’d like to learn about their job. I can’t guarantee everyone will reply, but many will be happy to send you a quick message or set up a time to chat.
If you don’t already have a LinkedIn, make one ASAP and encourage your fellow graduate students to do the same. Keep your profile updated with your full range of experience including your methods expertise, publications, a description of your dissertation research, conference presentations, and relevant technical skills. You can also include information about where you’ve presented research (e.g., ASA), affiliations with research centers, collaborations with co-authors, and any of your mentorship experience with undergraduates or junior graduate students.
In your bio, I recommend an introduction to your academic specialization, a short paragraph about your substantive background (e.g., social psychology, cultural sociology) and technical skills (e.g., qualitative methods, ethnography, computational social science), and then list keywords you would anticipate a recruiter searching (e.g., specializations: mixed methods research; social psychology; job titles you can envision ending up in). You will also want to include a sentence to direct recruiters to your website so that you can keep track of who is clicking through to your profile (pro-tip: use StatCounter or Google Analytics) and so you can surface more in-depth information about yourself such as links to your publications or an abstract of your dissertation.
2. Make a website
This brings me to the second point — make a decent website. It is well worth the time investment and it is as important as how you present yourself on LinkedIn. Recruiters and industry professionals are likely to first discover you through LinkedIn and then follow through to your website to learn more about your experience. Your website is your digital presentation of self and it should be given the same amount of attention you would give preparing for a face-to-face interview.
Many of the things that matter to securing a tenure-track job also matter for obtaining a quality industry research position. Your publications, conference presentations, teaching experience, and service to the discipline are valuable experiences. For instance, strong teaching skills signal an ability to synthesize large bodies of technical information and communicate it clearly to an educated but non-specialized audience. Much of your day-to-day in an industry research role will be very similar. Similarly, co-authoring projects and publications create experience working collaboratively and, in many cases, productively working through disagreements. I can promise you this will happen frequently in an industry role.
My advice is to look at your academic CV and think about what it communicates in terms of your competencies and experience. Consider the social situations undergirding the production of each CV line and what your experience in those situations means as part of your growth as a scholar. It helps to imagine graduate school more like a career you began with a strong “growth mindset.” Each year you entered new experiences that helped you “level up” or “unlock” new skills. Once you’ve thought through the implicit skills and career growth story, make this unspoken part explicit on your website.
3. Apply for internships
Internships are a great opportunity to get industry experience while still in graduate school and they will help you make a more informed decision about your career path. Though they vary widely in regard to the experiences they afford, you will learn from interviewing, working, and networking outside of your discipline. You can find internship listings in many places, including on LinkedIn.
Interviewing for industry positions is similar to interviewing in academia. You will have a series of interviews and give a presentation of your academic research. What is different from academia is that you will also need to display some product sense, especially if you are looking into UX. In other words, you will need to show you have an understanding of how research could meaningfully improve the user experience and product design.
Once you’ve started your internship, you will experience growing pains moving from academia to industry. There is new jargon, processes, and the pace of work will feel much quicker. It can be dizzying. Fortunately, interns tend to have assigned an internship manager who will have greater sensitivity to the growing pains that come with entering an industry research position. Intern managers tend to opt-in to taking on an intern because they want experience helping grow other researchers. Think of their role like a new assistant professor eagerly taking on a graduate student. Many are excited by the opportunity to use their experience to invest in others, so they should set you up for success.
An internship is also a great opportunity to network outside of your discipline. You will meet other interns also exploring industry careers, and you can find others within the company that came from a similar educational background. Use this to your advantage. Your fellow interns are like your graduate school cohort. They will share similar experiences and growing pains, and they are likely facing similar career decisions as you. Meet with them regularly so you can share your learnings and experiences to help one another more fully understand what day-to-day life is like at your job should you choose to take this path. In addition, you can leverage your role as an intern to set up time with co-workers to interview them about their experience. They may also offer to introduce you to others in the company with jobs closer to the one you might be most interested in. This could be someone with a different job title or on a different product team. As an intern, you should leverage your relatively temporary position in a way that helps you maximize your learnings so you can more confidently understand the career options available to you.
Though you could apply for an internship at any stage in your graduate career, I believe you could make it work best for you after you’ve defended your M.A. thesis and passed comprehensive exams. Having comprehensive exams and a thesis under your belt will likely set you up for greater success in your interviews because you will have greater technical training and something of substance you can present when applying. Plus, an internship is unlikely to leave you with the free time or mental energy necessary to prepare for your exams and you will not want to minimize your opportunities to learn and network. You are also more likely to find value in learning about career opportunities the closer you are to the dissertation stage of your graduate career.
