Alberto Pepe edited blogpost.tex  about 10 years ago

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Leaving academia is the talk of town. And, apparently, \href{https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7336927}{it's not possible to fully leave academia unless you write a detailed blog post about it}. So, here's mine.  I resigned from my postdoctoral position at Harvard two months ago. Yes. Last week I attended the ScienceOnline Annual Conference and Eva Amsen of F1000Research discussed the infographic below in a session called "Alternative careers in science". The graphic shows that over half of PhD graduates in science leave academia right away, with only 3.5\% eventually pursuing a research or teaching career in academia. While the graphic seems to be based on recent post-PhD science careers in the UK (it's not entirely clear), it is probably generalizable to other countries. What I find surprising is that so little PhDs actually stay in academia.