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Alternative Careers in Science: Leaving the Ivory Tower

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Alternative Careers in Science describes the various career tracks available to scientists and gives the inside scoop on the skills and personality types suited to each profession. It also contains important information regarding career expectations and salary potential.
This book will allow scientists to compare career opportunities. Each chapter covers a different career track and includes the basic job description, qualifications, responsibilities, and what career opportunities stem from each position.

Key Features
* Illustrates a typical day's scenario
* Explains what career opportunities stem from a position
* Describes the basic job, qualifications, responsibilities, and expectations
* Covers how long to expect to be in a training phase
* Shows existing steps in the promotion ladder and salary ranges
* Presents a different career track in each chapter
* Allows scientists to compare career opportunities

267 pages, Paperback

First published January 15, 1998

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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
Profile Image for Blue.
1,186 reviews54 followers
July 5, 2010
This is a useful read for where one can go after some specialization in the sciences. Each career path is a personal account of one person, which makes this book interesting and unique, but also makes if hard to relate to at times. Overall themes in career search and how to switch may emerge, depending on how attentively you read each account. Some updated stats on careers of scientists would be a useful addition to this book. As the landscape of the science careers change in the coming decades,imagine this book may change or other may be necessary, to address the impending collapse of the science machine, in overdrive on cheap and highly-skilled labor. As Beryl Lieff Benderly so aptly describes it in her article, The Real Science Gap, it is a problem of labor, not education...
Profile Image for Svetlana Kurilova.
204 reviews18 followers
August 9, 2017
Good overview of the career paths outside of the conventional academic one. The take home message for me is to look outside the box and have no fear for trying something different.

I was reading 2nd edition published in 2006 but described careers were from 70-80s and sometimes 90s. Now, we have jobs and fields that did not even exist a decade ago. Therefore, I thought the information in the book was pretty outdated.
Profile Image for Corey.
679 reviews32 followers
June 1, 2014
Each chapter of this book is the personal story of one scientist’s journey into a career outside of academia – how they chose the career, what it took to get there, and the daily requirements of the new career. As silly as it may seem, a lot of this information was pretty invaluable. From my experience, when you study science at PhD level, you really don’t learn much about career alternatives at all. I (and many others I know) came out of the PhD feeling that I’m only qualified to do academic research, although logically that level of education should open doors, not close them. I only read the chapters of this book which directly pertained to careers which I would consider pursuing. The honesty with which people describe their careers is heartening… after having read this I feel much more confident that it is possible to move away from academia and it is really not that big of a deal at all.
Profile Image for Wendelle.
2,026 reviews62 followers
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November 12, 2017
basically, develop and sell practical technical skills beyond the quantitative mindset you obtained from your degree
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews

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