As a laid off postdoc, I turned to a side hustle—and found a new career

From ScienceMag:

We came to the end of our regular weekly lab meeting and were about to leave when our principal investigator (PI) announced he had something important to share. “I’m sorry team. We’ve run out of funds, and I have to let you all go.” Looking around the room I saw a mix of confusion and shock on the faces of the other lab members—another postdoc, a lab technician, and a handful of graduate students. As it began to dawn on me that I was being laid off from my postdoc position, I tried not to panic. I told myself that with my Ph.D. and two bachelor’s degrees, surely it wouldn’t be too difficult to find a job. My job search didn’t pan out the way I’d hoped. But luckily, I had an alternate income stream to fall back on—one I’d cultivated during my postdoc.

Three years earlier, I had finished my Ph.D. and moved with my family across the country to start a research position in the PI’s lab. Becoming a postdoc wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do. But I was an international scholar on a visa who didn’t have many career choices open to me, and it felt like a safe choice that would help provide for my family. I also imagined it would help me with the goal I had at the time: to be a teaching professor.

Soon after arriving, though, I realized that although my postdoc salary was twice what I earned as a Ph.D. student, it wasn’t enough to cover rent, food, gas, and other basic expenses in pricey California. I thought I might need to take a second job in retail to keep up. But after searching for ideas online, I discovered freelance writing as an option, which I could do from home at night after my son went to bed.

I found my first gig while browsing Craigslist one day. A local web designer needed someone to write social media and blog content to help her advertise her business. Within a few months, I found other clients and grew this side hustle to about $1200 a month. I enjoyed the work, and it was a huge help with the household budget.

After my postdoc ended, I kept writing. But my goal was to secure a full-time position to support my family, and so I spent most of my time searching for and applying for jobs. I submitted applications for scores of positions I thought I was qualified for inside and outside academia. Most resulted in rejections or no response. About 6 months into the search, I began to feel defeated. Was this what I got for working so hard in grad school? To have nobody even acknowledge my applications? I felt like a complete failure—that with all this education, I was unable to secure an offer for a full-time position.

That’s when I decided to stop applying for jobs and focus on growing my writing business, an option that was open to me because, by then, I was a permanent resident and didn’t need a job to maintain my immigration status. My writing work up to that point was mostly focused on projects that didn’t leverage my scientific training—blog posts for finance websites, sales emails for dermatology practices, for instance. But I thought that perhaps I could find opportunities in science writing specifically.

So, I began to share my thoughts on subjects in the sciences and samples of my writing on LinkedIn. Shortly after I started doing this, health and science companies started to reach out, wanting to work with me. For the first time in more than a year, opportunities were coming to me, a welcome change from the fruitless searching I had been doing. I was able to build my portfolio and gain confidence in my new field, which eventually led me to dip my toes into the job application waters once again. I was ecstatic when, finally, I received an offer for a full-time science writer role at a life science marketing agency.

When I started my journey as a writer, I viewed it simply as a side gig. But it eventually grew into a career that brings me joy. It kept me afloat when I was coping with the grief and loss of purpose I felt as an unemployed Ph.D. graduate. It also showed me that there’s room to think creatively and build new opportunities for yourself. Sometimes good can come from a path redirected.

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