Chad over at Uncertain Principles has been doing a great series of interviews about career paths other than academia, in The Project for Non-Academic Science.

One of the difficulties with trying to broaden the usual definition of scientists is that there’s not a lot of press for non-academic science. Academic culture is so strongly focused on academic careers that people don’t hear a lot about careers outside the usual Ph.D-postdoc-tenure-track-job track. Which helps feed the stress and angst regarding the job market.

There is a listing of interviews with more to come.

I didn’t see a point in volunteering, since I have my own (albeit smaller) platform, and I’ve already given a career path summary this hits most of the main points in those interviews. A few details that are missing are about how I got my current job and how someone else would go about getting a similar job. I got it through informal networking — I already had met my current boss because atomic physics is a small, and therefore incestuous, community, and I got an email that was forwarded a few times advertising the position. I had already responded to an earlier advertisement for a position, which was later withdrawn due to funding issues, but used that to finagle a visit to the Observatory after a conference in DC. So when a job opened up for real, I was essentially “pre-interviewed” for it, and since I had the requisite background in laser trapping, I jumped on to the short list immediately. Since there really aren’t academic programs that do timekeeping, the prep work is all in the atomic physics for atomic clock R&D.

If I were going to do a full interview, I would interview myself like William Hurt did in The Big Chill

So you went to Oregon State University to enter the doctoral program in physics. And you just had to finish that dissertation.

I didn’t have to. I’m not hung up on this completion thing.

Then you had several jobs, all of which you quit.

What are you getting at? They’re called postdocs. I was evolving. I’m still evolving.

But your real claim to fame came as a cartoonist in Physics Today

I wouldn’t call it fame, exactly. I was a few cartoons, and I may have had a small, deeply disturbed following.

What are you doing now? Or I should say, what have you evolved into now?

Oh, I’m in research.

What are you researching?

Umm, an atomic device.

What kind of atomic device?

I … don’t … have to answer that.

Sorry, gotta go.

Just answer that last question! (muffled struggle, fade out)