How to Land Your Dream Job After Graduate School?

Overview

It's near the end of graduate school, and in the midst of performing research, giving conference presentations, and writing research papers, you need to find a job to jumpstart your career. But how do you translate your research and coursework into a story that would entice employers to even consider you? Furthermore, how do you expand your network without physically meeting potential employers in conferences (at the time of writing, Covid-19 is turning all conferences into virtual ones)? This blog post summarizes crucial steps and tricks to help you land your dream job post graduate school. While this page is written for nearly graduating PhD students in their 4th / 5th years, these tips and tricks may be helpful for job seekers broadly.

You are a graduate student aiming for your dream job post-graduation. After your preliminary exam, you have to face many challenges before reaching your dream job, such as the "publish or perish", Covid-19, being scooped (i.e. someone publishing similar work before you), or the notorious "Reviewer 2" who will be very critical to your paper without even reading it. Image credit: Grace Nguyen.

Originally published on: 01/19/2022Last updated on: 05/05/2022