Data Analyst Reflected on Her Values

Name: Pamela Fuhrmeister (she/her)

PhD: Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, University of Connecticut, 2020

What was your main area of research?

The goal of my PhD research was to better understand how people learn the speech sounds of a foreign language, especially in adulthood.

I used behavioral methods (e.g., tasks on a computer that involved listening to sounds) and MRI to investigate why this seems to be so difficult for adults compared to children, what brain regions allow us to learn unfamiliar sounds in a new language, and why some people seem to have an easier time with this than others.

What is your current job?

I am a Data Analyst for Heimstaden Germany in Berlin, Germany.

My main responsibilities consist of doing ad hoc analyses for colleagues and management in the company so they can make more informed business decisions, performing regular checks to ensure data quality, and doing time series analyses for forecasting.

What is your favorite thing about your job?

I love the people I work with and getting to learn new analyses or apply ones I've done before to new contexts.

What is the most important skill you developed or experience you had during your PhD that now helps you in your current position?

Distilling complex questions or problems into the most important takeaways and presenting these findings to non-technical stakeholders in a clear and succinct way

How did you build the skills necessary for your current role?

I attended many training workshops or did online courses/self study on statistics, programming, and science communication.

How did you find this position? What were the career steps you took to get to where you are now?

I applied to their job ad on LinkedIn/.

PhD graduate ➡️ postdoctoral fellow ➡️ data analyst

If someone is interested in a similar role, what would you recommend they start doing now to prepare?

For many data analyst roles, someone with a PhD in a quantitative field will already have most of the skills they need. They might need to learn a few more tools (e.g., SQL), but those can usually be learned pretty quickly on the job.

I think the most important thing is to learn to communicate to employers that you indeed have these skills. I'd suggest participating in workshops or webinars that teach you to do this, or making a portfolio of some data projects and putting it on GitHub or your personal website. These can just be your PhD work (but communicated at a high level!), so you don't even have to do extra projects. :)

Why did you decide to not pursue a career in academia?

I knew going into my PhD that the chances of getting a permanent faculty position were low, so I always knew it was a possibility. I also knew from the beginning that I was not willing to make a lot of the sacrifices that are sometimes necessary. For example, I am not willing to move just anywhere for a job, and I don't want to be tied down to a particular location possibly for the rest of my life.

At some point in my postdoc, I started exploring other possibilities, and I found out that there are so many interesting things you can do outside academia! I started to realize that doing interesting work (with a permanent contract!) in a location I chose was most important, so I ultimately decided to leave academia.

It took me years to make the decision, but when I finally decided, it felt right and was a pretty easy decision in the end.

What advice do you have for someone getting their PhD and looking to pursue a career outside of academia?

First, don't be afraid of leaving academia. I feel like there's a general sentiment in academia that it's the only job where you can do meaningful work, and while it's certainly nice to be able to work on a topic you choose, there is just so much interesting work out there.

Another thing that helped me was to take the time to reflect on my values. I thought about what I liked about my academic work, what I didn't like, what I'm good at/not so good at, what I wanted to do every day, and what I wanted my life to look like. Then I started to look into jobs that would align with those values.