A doctorate of philosophy (Ph.D.), where the word philosophy means the love of wisdom, is generally not a degree to be pursued lightly. It is the fruit of commitment over numerous years of often grueling research under meager pay, where a large part of your well-being depends on the Principal Investigator, how many grants they can pull in to keep the research going, and what their general disposition is like. Graduate students are often expected to earn their keep by teaching undergraduates, in addition to taking their usual course load and research work. The pursuit of a doctorate, because it is so intensive and demands utmost dedication and sacrifice to the field for several years, is often held in a sacred light in intellectual circles. However, in more recent years of educational globalization, a graduate program has served as a catch-all for recent graduates without the prospect of alternate employment, those looking to maintain their student status for fear of having to return to a potentially grim future in their home country, and graduates who weary veterans have cautioned in their field that post-graduate education is a must for building a career. Hence, the decision to pursue a doctorate, especially for an international student, sometimes isn’t entirely borne out of scholarly thirst as it perhaps should be. I was one of those students that chose graduate school more to sustain myself in the United States than out of the burning desire to study evolutionarily conserved cell signaling pathways in vertebrates.

After college, I got into a developmental biology graduate program in Potsdam, New York, but I was on the fence about going. A few of my family members had strongly advised against going to a mid-tier university for graduate studies, thinking it would hurt rather than help my prospects of gaining employability in the United States. Contrary to this was the advice I had gotten from my undergraduate adviser, who suggested that I upskill myself by enrolling myself in a graduate program rather than taking a year off after college. I remember my 22-year-old self being rife with confusion, and the divergent advice I received from multiple directions only added to the stress that one wrong move could derail my career. Fortunately, I was yet to discover that life didn’t work like that. There would be no “wrong decision” that would lead to a “wrong outcome,” just a different decision leading to a different outcome. After much deliberation, I followed my adviser’s advice and accepted the graduate position in New York.

Fairly early on during my Ph.D., I remember feeling anxious about the work I needed to do to graduate and restless to get out of where I was. Three years in, I was actively thinking about abandoning my degree and was simultaneously plagued by guilt for wanting to throw away a steady job in exchange for stubborn hope of something better. Couldn’t I stick it out an extra 2-3 years and graduate the program with a fluffy robe, a cap with tassels and have the distinguished three letters forever trail my name? Probably yes. But it seemed too high of a price to pay at that point in my life. As a relatively young scholar of 25, I wanted to see what else America had to offer outside of a charming upstate New York atmosphere and an 8-stoplight town. I wanted to rub shoulders with more people my age and have fellow colleagues to talk to instead of silent, stoic fish swimming relentlessly in their clear plastic tanks around me (tanks that we immaculately cleaned, by the way). I craved to have a better social life and have more than two bars to go to on the weekends. I wanted to drive 10 minutes for good sushi, not an hour and 45 minutes. I pined for a life where I lived each day growing in unprecedented ways, and I knew I was looking for more than what this beautiful, small town in New York’s Adirondack region could offer.

My desperation to get out of school and, consequently, the small town was so high that I went back and interned at a place I had as an undergrad, West Point, PA, a suburb of Philly. It was one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, and I was eager to get my skin in the industry’s game. The goal was to turn the apprenticeship into a full-time gig, which would be my ticket out of grad school and get my foot in industry’s door. However, tired of wearing uncomfortable slacks and button-down shirts and weary of an internship that seemed to be dead-end, I concluded my time in Lansdale in August of 2014 and returned to New York.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of good mentors and bosses (if you’re lucky, both of which can be the same person) in a journey of this sort. Your boss doesn’t have to be your friend or your mentor, but you can consider yourself lucky if they do happen to be. I consider myself lucky.

My Ph.D. adviser was technically my first boss. He was one of those people that gave you the time of day. He freely gave unabated, slow, and purposeful attention to whoever needed it. At any given time, he was equally ready to talk about the far-reaching cultural impact of the Star Wars franchise or the rate of cell turnover in a zebrafish’s intestinal epithelium. The news that I needed to deliver to my advisor, that I had decided to leave his tutelage and lab after nearly three productive years, was a tough one to break. It was particularly tough because he was such an upstanding person. He was taken aback by my news of imminent departure. However, learning that my decision to leave was final, he helped me turn my Ph.D. proposal (why we want to investigate this thing and here are the questions I will hope to answer by the end of this endeavor) into a Masters thesis (here is an important thing, a few of my studies showed that there are some questions need answering, but so long for now). I spent long hours poring over scientific journal articles to elucidate the relationship between a highly conserved cell signaling pathway in Zebrafish and humans (Notch Signaling Pathway) and Extra Cellular Matrix, cell polarity, and cell differentiation. We had seen ECM and polarity-regulating proteins crop up above noise in our mass spectrometry analysis when we did differential proteomics on wild-type and pathway-mutated zebrafish embryos. The data stood the chance of corroborating existing literature in the field. Propelled by the desire to close this chapter of my life and fuelled by plenty of caffeine, gas station wooden tips, and cheap beer, I plugged away at my thesis for five long months to finally finish and defend it.

Eventually, I landed a job at a 30-person start-up in Cambridge that wanted to do something called gene editing. I had never even heard of CRISPR before, but somehow the hiring manager and I clicked; they flew me into Cambridge for in-person interviews, and pretty soon after, they sent me an offer letter pending background checks. I had just fumbled my way out of a tiny zebrafish lab in upstate NY into the world of cutting-edge biotechnology in east Cambridge, MA. It was time to bid adieu to the small village lights of New York. The city beckoned.

The first thing I remember when parking my car in Medford after a wobbly (and at times white-knuckled) 7-hour drive was how congested everything felt. I had moved during one of the worst winters the city had to endure (do you remember the blizzard-filled January of 2015?). During my first train ride into Kendall Square from Davis, however, I remember the city feeling electric in its energy; it was as if I could smell the clear sense of ambition and hustle fueled by craft caffeine. Tall silhouettes and yoga-nimble bodies shuffled past me purposefully on the busy sidewalks at Kendall as I moseyed along in absolute stupor. I saw the Charles glisten against a beautifully historic, harbor-hugging, quaint town of Boston on the other side of Mass Ave, and I knew my life had changed forever.

The first time I ever did a transfection at my first job out of grad school, my hands were shaking so violently that I almost pipetted the cargo (containing CRISPR Cas9) to an unintended well on the 24-well plate. Of course, my boss, looking over my every move as he towered behind me, didn’t do anything to help my situation. He was a humorous guy, though, and was a sincere, thoughtful, and kind person. “Don’t worry, I take my work home with me too sometimes,” he quipped when I accidentally splashed some LB media on my face while opening a strip of competent cells for a transformation. I remember how comfortable I felt in that otherwise embarrassing situation. Through relentless trial and error, feeling embarrassed by rookie mistakes but not feeling humiliated enough to quit the job the next day, fumbling through awkward presentations, explaining ambiguous data with weak conviction, and yet taking immense pride in the research itself, I was honed in the halls of burgeoning biotechs of Cambridge. One of these companies would go on to invent the first gene-editing therapeutic molecule of its kind to genetically correct and treat an inherited form of blindness called Leber Congential Amurosis (LCA-10), and the other would become one of the early pioneers of Machine Learning-driven drug discovery. The biotech industry is often criticized for its emphasis on profits and patent protection, but its contributions to humanity, such as the breakthrough COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, antiretrovirals for HIV treatment, and treatments for a plethora of rare diseases and cancers via antibody, gene, and cell therapies, are remarkable and are a testament to human creativity and innovation. One of the defining moments in my scientific career was the FDA approval of our team’s gene-editing molecule for clinical testing in patients. It took the collaboration of numerous experts in science, business, manufacturing, regulation, clinical trials, and law to bring the CRISPR-Cas9 molecule to treat LCA-10 from the lab to FDA approval. As an average student with humble beginnings, this achievement was a big accomplishment and I am grateful for every aspect of the journey. While the work I had to do to traverse the Research Associate to Scientist-with-a-capital S chasm in biotech without a Ph.D. was significant, it was not without the support of some truly great managers who not only supported me but prioritized my development as a scientist.

It is also true that you typically don’t know how good you’ve had it till you butt heads with a lousy boss, and I think I’ve had my share of those as well. Some were so insecure in their own merit and felt the need to take credit for your work, while others shared your data with the higher-ups without including you. Some wouldn’t vouch for your well-deserved promotion because their raise was on the line, and some overworked you without justifying why. There were those who refused to try a newer, better alternative to doing things because of being accustomed to their often old-fashioned and inefficient ways, and perhaps the worst of them all, those that treated you differently because you didn’t have a Ph.D.

This last drawback was a systemic problem I faced in some companies within the industry, and often the company culture was set from the top. These companies seemed adamant about keeping Research Associates at their level, even those that had proven themselves to be capable scientists. Some RAs were actively kept out of important meetings that decided the fate of the project or disseminated information on the changing landscape of company goals, information that would have otherwise helped them understand the larger scope of their day-to-day activities. Sometimes RAs were treated like “hands” or like flesh automatons that couldn’t possibly contribute to the more cerebral aspects of the larger agenda without a ‘Ph.D.’ behind their name. In particularly grim instances, associates were subject to unfair working hours and made to internalize the falsity that they were not the thinking heads behind their work but mere labor that cranked out data. In one of the companies, after realizing I was already operating at the scientist level based on their own handbook, I fought tooth and nail to get out of the ranks of the Research Associate and into a Scientist position. I wrote an impassioned letter to leadership outlining my contributions and why they needed to give me a more advanced title and pay. I was met with polite resistance every step of the way. They tried to pacify me with a Principal Research Associate position (instead of just giving me a Scientist I position). However, I was tired of chasing the metaphorical carrot on the stick that seemed elusive no matter how hard I worked, so I left. Given these pervasive scenarios in the biotech scene, I salute the work environments that have tried to foster a flat or non-hierarchical culture as much as possible. It is gratifying to know that there are currently companies like mine that give people opportunities, meeting inclusivity and promotions based on their merit and contribution rather than whether or not they have a Ph.D. And perhaps the tide is changing, and more companies are opening up to having non-PhDs as Scientists.

The merits of getting a Ph.D. are undeniable. The onerous research that you are pretty much left to your own devices to carry out and defend, the extensive training you receive in the scientific method, the uncountable hours of reading for and writing your dissertation, frequent participation in meetings, seminars and conferences, writing and peer-reviewing papers, all add up to hone you into an expert in your field of study. However, it is also true that with solid mentorship, continually pursuing growth by learning new tools, instruments, software, and techniques, being a dynamic and cooperative player at your job, critically thinking about what you are doing day-to-day, being comfortable with a healthy dose of self-advocacy, and not letting your degree, or lack thereof, define you, also go a long way in building a rewarding scientific career in industry. A common trope that is thrown around is that a ‘Ph.D. teaches you how to think,’ and I do not refute this claim. After all, carrying forward scientific research, often in unexplored territory, is not for the impatient or non-curious. You do need to teach yourself how to think and learn how to think from people who are more intelligent than you. However, like anything, learning how to think is a muscle and can be strengthened outside the formal academic setting of a post-graduate degree.

Whether to pursue a formal university advanced degree or get alternative training towards the same goal is a difficult decision to make. However, we would be remiss to think that career advancement and fulfillment are only possible through one of these alternatives. While a doctorate in your field can lend you immediate credibility and even a higher starting position within your workplace, it is not, however, a prerequisite for the individual pursuit of wisdom and growth. Perhaps it is more important to focus on the latter anyway.