Career Options to Explore after Graduating with a PhD

One of the best career options to explore after you've graduated with your Ph.D. is with postdoctoral fellow positions, depending on your area of specialization. If the degree you've gotten suits itself to academia, being a post doctorate fellow may be your next step.

Postdoctoral fellowship opportunities are quite rare, but they do exist and they have some distinct advantages over traditional postdoctoral work, depending on the direction you want to take your career in. However, there are some disadvantages too, and you should know about these before you decide whether or not a postdoctoral fellowship position is for you.

Looking for postdoctoral fellowship opportunities

One of the best places to begin to look for postdoctoral fellowship opportunities is actually right where you're pursuing your doctorate itself. You can begin to research the possibility of doctoral fellowships while you're still working on your degree. That's not to say that you're likely to get a job right where you're going to school, but you can begin to network with advisors and other colleagues to find opportunities elsewhere. This gives you an edge over someone who doesn't have this type of resource available to them. One of the reasons for this is that your advisor can certainly recommend you as someone who is certainly good in your field, and they may be able to put your name in for PhD job openings that haven't even gone public yet.

If this resource is not available to you, take heart; you can still look for postdoctoral fellow positions on the Internet. In addition, job sites list positions in just about every area, so you should be able to find a Post Graduate position in the location you want to be in as well as your particular area of specialization. Keep in mind, though, that even though these positions are quite plentiful, they're also highly competed for. Therefore, it's not a given that you'll get a position simply because you apply for it, but you do have many opportunities available to you.

One thing to remember is that even if you do take a postdoctoral fellowship position and find that it is lacking, remember that it won't last forever. The position will last anywhere from six months to five years, so it's temporary. If you find it constricting, remember that you will be able to move on from it eventually and sometimes quite quickly.

In addition, especially if your area of expertise focuses a lot on research, you're going to have almost unlimited time to do research on your own when you would otherwise not have been able to if you took a postdoctoral fellowship position. Therefore, you may want to consider taking such a position if you're going to find this research time valuable.

Finally, this is one time in your career when your time is really going to be your own for the most part. You'll usually have much less responsibility and greater freedom than you will at any other time in your career. For this reason alone, it's worth considering a postdoctoral fellowship position, although of course the final choice is yours.