A PhD Is Not Enough: A Guide To Survival In Science

Despite your graduate education, brainpower, and technical prowess, your career in scientific research is far from assured. Permanent positions are scarce, science survival is rarely part of formal graduate training, and a good mentor is hard to find. This exceptional volume explains what stands between you and fulfilling long-term research career. Bringing the key survival skills into focus, A Ph.D. Is Not Enough! proposes a rational approach to establishing yourself as a scientist. It offers sound advice of selecting a thesis or postdoctoral adviser, choosing among research jobs in academia, government laboratories, and industry, preparing for an employment interview, and defining a research program. This book will help you make your oral presentations effective, your journal articles compelling, and your grant proposals successful. A Ph.D. Is Not Enough should be required reading for anyone on the threshold of a career in science.

 (53 customer reviews)

Just as the title said, a PhD is not enough! Getting a PhD is just the beginning of a scientific career. There are many important "life" skills to learn. This book is unique in that it tells you what you need to do after you have your PhD.Another very precious thing that this book reveals is that going directly to academia after your PhD is probably not the best way to establish yourself as a scientist. There are too many duties (teaching, handling the students, departmental meetings, etc) that demand your time that you won't enough time to do the main tasks - bring in a grant, reseach and publish. A better way is to go to an industrial or govermental lab and establish your scientific reputation there. You won't have the distractions and can concentrate on getting grant, research and publish. After you are established, you can go to academia easily, if you so choose.Finally, the author reveals another big secret - pursue your long term research goal by a sequence of...Read more

I have just begun a PhD program in engineering, and find the sobering wisdom contained in this book to be invaluable. The book is actually aimed at freshly minted PhDs, and serves to guide them as they plot an often precarious career in science and/or engineering. Despite this, the book contains a lot of advice that graduate students at the beginning or the middle of their program will find extremely useful. Feibelman is able to say in little over one hundred pages what most academic advisors almost always do not (and often purposely will not) get around to saying.The first chapter of the book starts out with some scary examples of how freshly minted PhD holders quickly go wrong. The second chapter of the book gives some very practical advice on how to choose the right advisor for you- an often repeated mistake many graduate students make (including myself). The advice in the second chapter serves grad students and post docs equally well, and could almost be...Read more

Feibelman has done a great service for future scientists in writing this book. Although a quick read, it's dense with good advice for budding scientists, whether they be at the grad student, postdoc, or assistant professor stage of their careers. For example, he advises against showing an outline at the beginning of a talk because it is as superfluous as it is ubiquitous. (See the review by Gregory McMahan for more specifics.)The only shortcoming I find with the book is its focus on high level research. As a top scientist at a government lab, Feibelman directs his comments to those whose aspirations are similar to his. Not all of us who do research aspire to, or can, be tops in our field however. If you're looking for a book that tells you how to balance teaching and research or how to survive in different types of academic institutions, for example, a better choice would be Tomorrow's Professor by Richard Reis. Feibelman focuses only on the research side of the coin...Read more