Young academics have to make a decisive career choice: either to pursue a science career or to look at alternative options of which there are many. The choice for a science career generally results in a postdoc position as a first job after one's PhD. But of course there are several other pathways to go into after finishing your PhD. At PE&RC, we notice, however, that people generally find it difficult to decide which direction to go into after finishing the PhD project. For one, this is because they do not so clearly know what to expect from the different career paths, or because they have never really analysed their ambitions, strengths, and weaknesses, or because they have just been too occupied with finishing the PhD to think about anything after that at all.
Here, we try to create a space where our PhD candidates and postdocs can find more information about the different career options following up on a PhD or postdoc position, and we also aim to share some of the PE&RC alumni experiences here. They provide perfect examples of career options after your PhD or after your postdoc.
From here, you can browse further into the different career perspectives, by clicking the items in the non-exclusive list of options below.
We have reached out to our PE&RC Alumni and have asked them what to do now, and whether they'd be willing to share some details about their post-PhD careers and experiences. We received lots of positive replies, and that's why we're now making some of these short stories available to you! To inspire you and to give you an impression of the post-PhD experiences of our former PE&RC PhD candidates! You can read some of these experiences here.
Here, you will find an overview of career-oriented courses organised or supported by PE&RC or its partner institutes. If you know of courses that should be in this list, but are not currently here, please send the name and link of the course to office.pe@wur.nl, so we can include it here for others.
We would like to provide an overview of other career-oriented activities here, such as Career Days, excursions to PE&RC alumni, Open Days at research institutes or companies, etc. If you know of activities that should be in this list, but are not currently here, please send the name and link of the activity to office.pe@wur.nl, so we can include it here for others.