Category: Certara Insight

Before I started my PhD I knew that I wasn’t interested in a career in academia. I wanted to do a PhD and was very interested in my research field (the control of a replicative endonuclease using phosphorylation), but beyond that, academia didn’t feel like the right place for me. That’s not to say that I knew what I wanted to do; my plan was to finish my PhD, go travelling and then figure that out. In January 2020 I submitted my thesis and left for Australia. I planned to spend 6 months travelling, but instead found myself in the middle of a global pandemic on the other side of the world. I returned to the UK shortly before it locked down to work on the family farm.

After completing my PhD at the University of Bath, I landed a post-doc position at a small drug discovery company in Oxfordshire. Unfortunately I was made redundant within 18 months of starting my career as a research scientist. When I started to think about what to apply for next, I decided that I didn’t want to look for another lab-based job. I found lab work frustrating when experiments or equipment stopped working, and did not enjoy the repetitive nature of the day-to-day tasks I was involved in. I knew someone who had recently moved into medical writing and thought it sounded like an interesting way to move away from the bench while still using the knowledge and communication skills I’d gained in my PhD. I was a little apprehensive about moving to a desk-based job but decided to give it a go.

I took the long route into regulatory writing. After an undergraduate degree specialising in pharmacology, I did a PhD in cell biology, and then fell into that trap laid by universities: the idea that continuing in academia is the only possible career choice. That is definitely not true, but I think that the experience of project management and awareness of scientific data and literature that I gained during my two subsequent post-docs were valuable when starting out in regulatory writing.

By the time I’d reached the final year of my PhD in pharmacology, it became clear to me that the mornings when I woke with a spring in my step were those when I was preparing for a conference talk or poster presentation, not a day of experiments. While I had a genuine passion for my PhD project, continuing lab research just wasn’t something I could see myself doing.