In our series of blog post written by former Geiger group members Dr. Hilary Chase (PhD Defense September 2017 on “Experimental and Computational Approaches for Probing Atmospherically Relevant Interfaces”) reflects on her Graduate School experience at NU:
As a business analyst for a fund, you might be scratching your head as to how and why I am contributing to a blog post related to life after getting a chemistry PhD. I don’t work in a lab anymore, I don’t tune OPAs, and I am certainly not plasma cleaning any optical windows these days. However, my graduate school experience certainly equipped me in my new career and I’ll tell you why.
As an analyst, I am a part of a team managing investments in technology (including chemistry and materials) and intellectual property, and finding new homes for these technologies. In order to provide any input, I need to be able to be able to quickly develop working knowledge for new technologies that I may not necessarily be familiar with. This skill is necessary for a broad range of careers, including patent law, consulting, technology transfer, etc. Graduate school prepared me for this. I learned to be comfortable reading a lot of literature, picking out important nuggets, and developing a general working understanding of the paper or article even if it was outside of my area of expertise.
Not only do I need to understand technical information as analyst, but I often need to communicate that information to a broad audience (including science and non-science folk). In graduate school, particularly in Franz’s group, you truly work at developing strong communication skills through writing papers and blog posts (like these!), and presenting in group meetings and conferences. You learn to how to take complex information and present it in a clean and well thought out presentation. In any field that combines science/technology, data, and business, you need to be able to not only be engaging to your audience but effectively present information clearly and concisely. Graduate school, particularly working with Franz and his research group, provided excellent training.
As an analyst, I often analyze and present data to help summarize complicated portfolio information, help drive business decisions, and develop strategies. Therefore, it’s important that in an analyst role, you understand how to analyze and present data effectively. It also helps to be able to defend data and justify conclusions in the working world similar defending a PhD, fielding questions in group meeting or after presenting at a conference, or writing peer-reviewed papers and addressing reviewer comments. Unfortunately, you don’t get champagne every time you defend something at work!
I really could go on and on and tell you how graduate school prepared me for the working word, but I’ll wrap this up. Graduate school is a unique time where you have the opportunity to collaborate with people across the globe, develop experiments with state of the art technology, solve fasciating problems, ask thoughtful questions, gain some confidence, manage multiple projects and teams, teach, and work with extremely intelligent people. All of these experiences translate into the world I currently reside in that is focuses mainly on business. I get asked all the time why I decided to follow this path, and it is often called “non-traditional”. I wouldn’t call it “non-traditional” – it’s really just one of the many wonderful paths you can take as long as you understand the value of the grad school experience and the unique skills you develop from it. While I am not in the laser lab anymore, or in any lab for that matter, graduate school equipped me with a unique skillset that has really helped me as a business analyst.