Introducing Peter

Hello!

Like Geoff, I embarked on my PhD when all around me (including my father - a Ph.D. Geoscientist with the Smithsonian) were telling me I could expect a wave of academic retirements to open up numerous employment opportunities for me when I graduated.

But as I approached the last year of my Ph.D. not only did I hear about a huge mismatch between hopes and realities, but I myself was no longer sure that the academic pathway was the right one for me. While I had a generally successful graduate school experience, and remain good friends with my Ph.D. advisor to this day, I admit that I was a "problem" graduate student. I got involved in all sorts of extra-curricular things and even did some extramural research that didn't go over very well with my department. It seemed that I lacked that obsessive-compulsive disorder that was the hallmark of a good academic!

After meeting with a wonderful career counselor at my university (Dr. Al Levin), I realized that the issues I was struggling with were common throughout graduate school:

• What are my career options at this point?
• How can I find a fulfilling career that I will love?
• Did I waste my time doing a PhD?

Al and I decided we would set up a career development workshop for Ph.D.s at the Fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco in December, 1993. Though poorly advertised and barely acknowledged by AGU, the workshop attracted a throng: graduate students and post-docs were sitting in the aisles and standing out in the hallway. We had clearly hit a nerve.

Since that workshop I went on to study the career development process as it specifically applied to early career scientists. I kept getting invited to give the workshop and, in 1996, put together a book on the subject: To Boldly Go: A Practical Career Guide for Scientists. That book, published by AGU (and never publicized beyond the geosciences) found its way out to the broader community of young scientists and engineers and helped provide many thousands of young scientists with a practical and hopeful strategy to take control of their tattered careers. I followed up that first book with a 2nd edition: Put Your Science to Work in 2000.

I also give career development workshops at major research universities and national labs around the country. I may have met you at one of these: over 8,000 graduate students and post-docs have attended my workshops over the past 13 years.

I have a "real job" now, and a family and plenty of things that keep me busy, so you might ask: why am I spending time on this??? The answer is simple: I believe that young scientists and engineers have the capacity to change the world. I love helping people at a very critical moment in their lives, when some good advice can have the biggest impact. The system of graduate education in the sciences has some profound problems, and these problems are NEVER going to work themselves out on their own. Rather than beat my head against that wall, I like to work with the people who have the most at stake: young scientists and engineers themselves. Helping you to understand the true range of your opportunities and encourage you to make the best contribution you can is probably a greater service I can do than any scientific research I might have done had I stayed at the bench. Along that line, you might also want to check out my monthly column on ScienceCareers.org entitled Opportunities Like Geoff, I am looking forward to a stimulating conversation and some good ideas to come.