9 Tips for Forging Your Own Path After the PhD (Especially for Policy-Oriented Social and Data Scientists)

This and last year I was invited to speak on panels for graduate students considering careers outside the traditional academic job market at Berkeley (twice), Stanford, and USC. A few things I often share:

1. Every job market is tough.
   Don’t consider nonacademic roles simply because the tenure-track market is difficult. The other side is demanding too in terms of preparation, competition, multiple interview rounds, and long waits. It’s not a Plan B at all. These positions can also be more vulnerable to layoffs for reasons that have little to do with your performance.

2. Don’t burn bridges.
   If you decide to move to the other side, your advisors, friends, and colleagues remain your most important allies. They matter whether your research career takes off inside or outside the ivory tower.

3. Don’t choose a nonacademic path only because you dislike some aspects of academia.
   That may be a necessary condition, but it isn’t sufficient. The best part of an academic job is the relative intellectual freedom. The hardest part is that you have limited choice over where you live. But you may discover deal-breakers on the nonacademic side too. You also need to love something about the nonacademic role itself. That genuine interest comes through in interviews and cover letters, and without it you can burn out quickly.

4. Use your summer/postdoc wisely.
   If you’re a graduate student, your top priority is to finish your PhD and finish it well. If you have extra time, explore internships when possible. Many people learn what they like or don’t like through hands-on experience. In a similar vein, you can also consider an industry postdoc or a postdoc in an academic lab that does applied research. In the policy space, a few that come to mind are the Better Government Lab (Georgetown and Michigan), The People Lab (Harvard), California Policy Lab (UC Berkeley), and the Urban Labs (Chicago). There are certainly more, but I know these well because I’ve either worked at one of them or have friends and colleagues there. Dennis Feehan, now a tenured faculty member at Berkeley in demography, once shared that he took a postdoc at Meta after earning his PhD at Princeton. He realized he was a better fit for academia and returned.

5. Use your campus as a platform.
   If you can’t get an internship or don’t have the time to pursue one, organize an event on your campus and invite practitioners. That’s what I did, and it’s how I got plugged into the civic tech world. Helping others connect and learn often becomes the path to your own opportunities. Be of service to others first.

6. Talk to alumni who thrive outside academia.
   If graduates from your program have moved into nonacademic roles and seem to enjoy them, ask for informational interviews. Learn what they do day to day, how they got the job, what they like, what they don’t, and what they would have done differently.

7. For policy-oriented social scientists:
   Go to APPAM (Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management). Since I’m a political scientist, APSA is my home conference, but APPAM has become at least my second home. This is where research meets practice. You’ll meet academic researchers, government researchers, think-tank analysts, and foundation staff. It’s a rare space where you can talk, network, and even interview for research roles beyond universities. And if you come from a traditional social science discipline that’s less applied, it’s a chance to see what applied, policy-oriented research looks and feels like. Policy programs do fundamental research, but many of us focus on work that’s directly relevant to practice.

8. For those interested in civic tech (going state and local!):
   Now is an especially important time to serve in state and local governments. (Many jobs in the federal or federal-adjacent space, especially among contractors, have also shrunk.) More importantly, you can build a meaningful career improving frontline service delivery and strengthening public trust. You may not always work with cutting-edge data science tools, but you will learn how real systems function, including both constraints and enabling conditions. In government, the goal isn’t to squeeze out a 1 percent improvement in model precision. The real value is identifying overlooked pain points, addressing them creatively, and helping solutions scale. Personally, I really like this mission-driven, high-impact work.

9. No silver bullet.
   If someone tells you that doing X, Y, or Z will guarantee success in any job market, that’s snake oil. Every person’s path is different. Every job market is different. Timing is different. This doesn’t mean there aren’t common decision factors worth considering, which I’ve listed above. But in the end you need to find, and forge, your own path.

Computational Social Science Professionalization Process (Kesari, Kim, Shah, Brown, Ventura, and Law 2024: 102)

One more resource for computational social science PhD students, especially those from social science backgrounds with data science skills: I co-authored an article on how to prepare for both academic and nonacademic careers. It was written with researchers working in public and private universities, nonprofits, and for-profit firms. It can help you build a five-year plan for your PhD journey.