Career Focus
Making the Leap from Grad Student to Professor
Doing a teaching stint right out of graduate school is an often overlooked alternative to carrying out a postdoc that can allow you to explore new topics, interact with students and keep your options open.
Where my story begins is familiar to many—in the land of “need to find a job.” In late 2009, I was a University of Maryland Chemical Physics graduate student working in the Optical Tweezers Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Md., U.S.A. I was nearing the end of my stretch as a Ph.D. student and wondering, what now? Where would I go next?
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