Name: Ren Lopez (she/her)
PhD: Materials Science & Engineering, Northwestern University, 2023
What was your main area of research?
I used machine learning and graph theory to identify novel materials for specific target applications.
What is your current job?
I am a Data Scientist at the Chicago Police Department in Chicago, Illinois.
I collect, clean, and analyze data with various models and statistical tools.
The best part of my job is the variety of data available.
How did you find this position? What were the career steps you took to get to where you are now?
I found this position through Indeed.
PhD graduate ➡️ Data Scientist
Why did you decide to not pursue a career in academia?
Academia always felt exclusive and unwelcoming. So it was an easy decision! My PI was also very supportive and sent me data scientist job postings when she saw them. Once she even told me about a data science job she heard mentioned on the radio during her morning commute!
What advice do you have for someone getting their PhD and looking to pursue a career outside of academia?
Almost everything in a PhD is transferable, especially soft skills, but interviewers unfamiliar with PhDs need to be told that. You learn to communicate results (papers and posters), to work with different levels of authority (PI, postdocs, other grad students), and to identify domain experts when your own expertise is limited (experimentalists versus computationalists).
I treated every interview as practice for the next one - took the pressure off :)
I worked as a data science consultant in grad school and volunteered for a prison education program, both of which helped me pivot to a non-STEM data science role.