How to align your values with your work

An academic scientist stays true to himself as an industry expert

Jun 13, 2023

Today I continue my interview series with academics who have successfully transitioned to industry. Matteo Tardelli is my third guest in this series.

I first became aware of Matteo on LinkedIn, where we share many mutual connections, including Ginger Lockhart. Matteo is presently Senior Biomarker Scientist at Owlstone Medical in the UK. He has also worked as a Life Science Consultant and as a lab scientist for biotech companies. Matteo published more than 24 papers in leading science journals as a PhD candidate and postdoctoral researcher, but after many years in academia he decided to take a leap beyond the traditional tenure-track path. He sought out experts and career coaches, learning everything he could about the transition from academic research to industry. The result was two books with actionable advice and practical tools for PhDs seeking industry jobs — The Salmon Leap for PhDs and Beyond Academia. We discuss both books in today’s conversation, and Matteo offers a little impromptu advice for translating my own academic leadership into industry language.

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A Conversation with Dr. Matteo Tardelli

Joshua Doležal: I really enjoyed your book, Beyond Academia, and it's been a lifeline for me as I've been ramping up a serious job search myself. There's a whole genre now of these books. And this is your second one, right?

Matteo Tardelli: Yeah, that's my second one. The first one is called The Salmon Leap for PhDs. And it was more of a tryout as I was transitioning myself into industry. In Beyond Academia, I really tried to put together conversations that I had with people with these jobs. So I didn't feel like I was writing it by myself. It felt like more of a common effort with other people, so that made it fun.

Joshua Doležal: I'd like to start with The Salmon Leap. Why did you write that book? You said it was part of your transition process?

Matteo Tardelli: Yeah, so back in the days, it was COVID times, right? So I was really trying to understand the job landscape outside of academia as it was a little bit of a wake-up call for everyone. So we are all looking for different things and I guess this was a good time for me because I was having a little bit more time to really be intentional about my career. So that was really an effort to summarize what I was learning in this time of my life. And I did some career coaching. Of course I was speaking with some hiring managers and I was really trying to attend as many career development courses as I could at my uni back at Cornell. So I was like, at some point, wow, I have so much knowledge in this field, I just need to put it together for someone else and share it with others because I was also seeing with colleagues that they didn't have much idea either what to do next. So I found it a little bit of a common struggle.

Joshua Doležal: Well, you’re right that many of us just live in a bubble in academia. And I can't tell you how many people I've talked to who have told me they would have no idea what they could do – be a barista or something – if they left academia. There are so many possibilities that are just unknown. So having a resource like that is invaluable.

Matteo Tardelli: I think for me this was really the case, not having any idea about several kinds of job positions out there. So my book was going to be a great tool for people to understand a bit about what's out there for them.

Joshua Doležal: So you said your second book, Beyond Academia, was more collaborative because you did interviews and told other people's stories. What other gaps were you trying to fill from The Salmon Leap in that book?

Matteo Tardelli: I think in general I was really trying to really understand what a job is like and really hearing from people what the pros and cons are on specific positions. So for instance, I was writing already in The Salmon Leap a bit about positions like academic editors or science editors, but in Beyond Academia I really went through a ton of interviews to hear from people what this is all about, really, what's your day-to-day like. And I think that was valuable also for me to understand as I was in another transition myself. I wanted to transition back to biotech after some consulting. So it was easy for me to get these informational interviews booked in with the excuse that of course I was writing for the book. But it was also a great thing to be aware of. So I think, in general, these two mix of things and the motivation also for myself to really develop and discover was the driver for that.

Joshua Doležal: One feature of Beyond Academia is an appendix with scripts. So you have scripts for how to connect with someone on LinkedIn or how to politely ask for an informational interview. You have a sample resume and sample cover letter. So it's very practical. And those are additions as well from The Salmon Leap, aren't they?

Matteo Tardelli: Yeah, absolutely. I also included QR codes to those resources, and I think that makes it much more usable for people as well. Because a book is a book, right? It's a physical object and you want to transfer that into something that is online. And I was like, well that's a little bit of a challenge right now. So I tried to create this QR code where readers can just scan and then get access to a very easy Google document that I put together for them so they can copy and paste this content accordingly.

Joshua Doležal: I can say, having used the QR code, that it opens into a very convenient Google document, which I've actually used myself, not for the LinkedIn stuff so much, but I did use the resume template and also the cover letter as a general starting point. And I've applied for three jobs using documents adapted from that. So, no proof of concept yet. No return on those yet, but it's at least helpful not to be reinventing everything from scratch.

Matteo Tardelli: Absolutely.

Joshua Doležal: Well, if you're willing, I'd like to rewind a bit with your personal story and start with the moment or period where you knew that you were going to leave academe. This thing that you'd prepared for for so many years was just not fulfilling, and you knew that you needed to transition. And then how you began taking steps to make that transition possible?

Matteo Tardelli: Sure. I actually want to go back to my first postdoc because I think it's also a good example for the listeners to think about your career and be a little bit more intentional about it in the steps that you taking moving forward. Because I remember my first postdoc was really like…I was finishing and wrapping up my PhD thesis. And we were collaborating with a group that decided to take me on and then I just worked for them before I even finished my PhD. But already during my PhD I knew I didn’t want to be in academe. I wanted to leave academia and the postdoc came around and I was like, okay, well that feels like something sensible for me right now. So, without thinking too much, I took this opportunity. But right now, looking back, I should have thought about it a little bit more. I could have gained some more experience in industry already back then. But that led me to my second postdoc in New York City. Overall it was a very cool experience. Both my postdocs were really good. Coming from a wet lab background I think it was pretty easy to get an R&D scientist position in biotech because it was pretty much what I was doing in academia.

I finally accepted a position as a senior R&D scientist in a biotech company. They were Boston based and had some R&D facilities in Vienna as well. I think the experience in general was really nice because they exposed me to the way research is done in industry, which is much more collaborative. I really like to work in a team. But I think something that is recurrent for me is I always fall into the trap of accepting the opportunity without thinking about it so much.

So after that I started a position as a consultant, basically a project manager, in a life science consulting position that was really different from what I'd been doing before. It was a lot of customer interactions, a lot of presentations, a lot of trying to answer the different challenges that clients had.

Joshua Doležal: I didn't know that project manager was one of your positions, and I've been presently looking into that because I've held many leadership positions. None of that was my full-time job responsibility as a professor – teaching and research is what was in the job description. But I've been really curious about how to translate those experiences into applications for project manager roles because what I've heard from other people is it's a very natural transition. It's just different language that you use or different ways of framing it. Could you say more about what you did as a project manager?

Matteo Tardelli: It was a bit of a mix of the two. So I was on one side really making sure to meet deadline for my clients, but I also was presenting one-on-one with them. So it was a bit of a mix of these, real consulting and backend project management. It was a lot of trying to understand priorities within different projects. I used to have like four to five, sometimes even six, projects that I would manage at any given time. It was pretty complex in terms of prioritizing things. I never really learned it before in academia because I was just possibly responsible for one project and the deadlines were really flexible. Maybe in 1, 2, 3 years, you're done with the project when you run out of money. But here we were talking more about two to three weeks from the kickoff meeting with the client until when you actually deliver the project to the back to the client. So I just had to learn on the run.

Joshua Doležal: Well, I don't know if you're up for an experiment here, but I've been trying to do this in my informational interviews and I know that many of my readers come from the humanities like me. And if someone has been in academia for a long time – I was a professor for 16 years – there would be lots of these kinds of experiences.

So if you're open, I'd like to describe a couple things I did and see if we could talk about how to translate it into industry language.

Matteo Tardelli: I love that.

Joshua Doležal: Is that fair game?

Matteo Tardelli: Yeah, sure.

Joshua Doležal: So I directed a first-year seminar for six years, which was the course that was required for all incoming students.

It was a little over 500 students at my college. I supervised 25 to 30 faculty who taught the course. I had to train them because it was a writing course, and many of them were from the sciences. They had no background in teaching writing. I had to work with librarians, student development staff, and faculty stakeholders. And the biggest challenge that we faced was that I had to select a summer reading, so all the students would read this one book before they came to campus. Then we would have book discussions during orientation week. And that book would have to be teachable by these 25 to 30 faculty in all their different courses, which had shared elements, but also things that were unique.

So if you were teaching it as a scientist, you might have problem solving as your core idea, but then you'd have to make connections between that summer book and whatever scientific history or case studies you were using. So it was very complicated to select a book that could be approached from multiple disciplinary angles, so a literature person, psychologist, and scientist could all teach it.

It was also an example of audience awareness because the first-year students are still prospective students. We didn't know if they would stay or transfer. I didn't want to select a book that would be immediately volatile politically and that they would be reading with no guidance from a teacher. I wanted those kinds of risks to happen in the classroom rather than over the summer. And I suppose the other thing that took place during that common reading selection was, I had really high standards. I knew that students wanted to meet the author of the book. That's really expensive. An author of bestseller is going to ask $15,000 to $20,000 for a speaking fee. And I had $7,000.

So I would select a list of three finalists. I would contact the authors, let them know, “You're a finalist, but I have to know if you can work within our limited resources.” And if they couldn't, that might affect the outcome. Which was manipulative on my part, I suppose. But it was the only leverage I had for negotiating a contract and it worked. I got the author every time for $7,000. So I feel like that's the thing where I have actions and results. And it is a project with lots of different stakeholders. If you were to take a crack at that in a cover letter, how would you tackle it?

Matteo Tardelli: There's a lot of soft skills in what you've been doing. You just mentioned some budget management. And I think the teamwork aspect of things was also there, right? You were managing the different faculty as well as collaborating with other stakeholders. I would definitely put that in the cover letter. There were also some analytical skills – a lot of creative thinking. To select a book that could be useful for such a diverse audience was a challenge as well as communicating that to different audiences. So for the students coming in, you'll possibly not really talk jargon, while you had also the faculty where you can use your more specific language. So it's just a lot of communication skills there to adapt your communication style as well to the different audiences.

I think that's a soft skill that is also very valuable in industry. That was something that in academia was never the case for me. You'll be presenting, you'll be talking to colleagues, but you'll be most likely talking your jargon all the time. Because that's the way we communicate in science, right? While nowadays, I would possibly present to a marketing specialist or a business development person who doesn't really know a lot of about the science behind things. So I need to make a presentation that is digestible, for different audiences that have different backgrounds as well. That's a soft skill that's really appreciated in industry.

Joshua Doležal: Well, thank you. That's helpful. I've got budget management, teamwork, analytical skills, creative thinking, communicating to different audiences, and adapting communication style.

So now we've done the translation. That's the hardest thing for me, because academic writing in the humanities is willfully obscure, you know? Part of how you publish a paper in literary studies is you invent a new term. You come up with something that explains a pattern and it's language that only you and a small group of experts can understand. And that's really not how industry works. I'm getting used to the fact that what I would perceive as cliches or generalities or platitudes are actually useful in industry because they're predictable.

Matteo Tardelli: I agree with that.

Joshua Doležal: You've done a lot of remote work as a scientist, and you describe in your book how that allowed you to live lots of different places. Can you talk about how you did that? I know you balanced work and self-care. As an academic, you probably could fall prey to just working all the time, even if you're in an industry role.

Matteo Tardelli: I think the remote work side of things was a very cool thing about my job in consulting and something I really never really experienced before because being a lab-based scientist is the opposite to flexibility and hybrid work. And when I started that, to be honest, it was pretty tough to find the right places to work. So I have a partner was working remotely for a tech company back in the days. So it was really good time to be both remote and she really can adapt to different environments and she would move from one place to the other, from one cafe to the other, and would be really easy with that. While I was more like the person that needed more of an office space, I guess. I didn't really like to work from home all the time, but I would not really enjoy, and it would be a little bit stressful for me, to hop from one cafe to the other. We were in Mexico and Mexico City for the first two months of my consulting and it was really challenging to find places with a decent WiFi connection and a lot of like weird things would happen in a cafe. Baristas making noise or some people coming in playing music. So it was definitely a funny aspect of that. But I had to be professional, right? So I had to make sure, especially with client presentations, that I would find a quiet place to dial in from. And so I think generally speaking, that was really fun. We would be in a place probably for a month and then just move around a little bit. So Mexico was fine.

California was even better because I would get up in the morning, jump on meetings quite early, but then by 3:00 PM I would be done. So then I could go to the beach or go for a hike. When we were back in Europe, we were in Barcelona for a bit of time and that was really great because in the morning I was doing my routine, and then I would start working around lunchtime and then work a little bit later in the evening, but never really later than 8:00 p.m.

Joshua Doležal: Was it hard not to belong to a particular community, to be solo in those environments? Your partner was with you, but you weren't, I assume, building a large friend network in Mexico City or Barcelona.

Matteo Tardelli: Exactly. That was surely a challenge, not really having colleagues within reach. Being in the lab and like just sticking around with your colleagues was very different from being fully remote and being lonely at work. Because you don't get these lunch breaks together. You don't get these casual interactions in the kitchen and things like that. But I think I could also balance that with just investing in some relationships outside of work as well. And being in these amazing places also made it really interesting. You’re very motivated to go out and explore each day because everything is new. So it balances out, I guess.

Joshua Doležal: Yeah. And so now you're back in the UK. Maybe tell me a little about your current position and what you're excited about?

Matteo Tardelli: So after some time in consulting, I was really struggling a little bit with consulting. As academics we really like to dig deeper into the science and really know everything about the science we are doing, whatever that is. And I felt like in consulting it was really not the case. I was presenting to clients that were experts in the fields and I didn't have enough time to dig deeper into the literature. So after some time it felt like I was simply scratching the surface with the questions they had for us. I was trying to answer the best I could, but of course I had such tight deadlines all the time that I really didn't have time to dig deeper into any problems I wanted to solve.

So it felt a little bit like losing purpose here and there. And then it also felt like once you present your package to a client, they run away with it. So you just come up with some recommendations. You did your best. And then you just discuss different things. Answer some questions they have. And then you just never hear back from them because the next round will be possibly about another topic. So it felt a little bit alienating. I was really eager to go back to biotech and think and strategize about science again. And that's when I found this job, Senior Biomarker Scientist. Right now I'm looking at biomarkers in a clinical setup and really trying to make sense out of it for some internal studies as well as for pharma clients. I get to dig deeper into the science, I get to make sense of the biology. At the same time, I'm not really doing bench work anymore, so I can really be flexible with my work setup.

Joshua Doležal: Forgive my ignorance. What's a biomarker?

Matteo Tardelli: A biomarker is a biological marker. It could be a compound that will come out from your breath. It could be in your blood. And the goal of that is really trying to understand if there's one of these compounds that you can tell comes in early in the disease and be able to diagnose a disease earlier than normal approaches to that. So it will be like disease-specific compounds that just go up or down in a specific state. It might mean that, for instance, you might have this specific disease in the future or you have it right now.

Joshua Doležal: Great. Well, we talked earlier about how to translate some of my management experience in higher ed into industry terms. But I think one challenge for me and for many other people from the arts and humanities is that we can't say, like you did, that being a humanist in industry is pretty much the same as what we were doing as a professor of literature or professor of art history. The skills required to write a monograph on an author are just very…there's some transferrable skill there, but it's not direct. And so, you say in your book that the resources are universal, But what I'm seeing is that the literature is really dominated by scientists and social scientists who have this quantitative strength or software expertise. So what would your advice be for people like me who don't have the same hard skills to transfer into industry? How would your book Beyond Academia help us as much as scientists like yourself?

Matteo Tardelli: I think the part about informational interviews as well as crafting a resume that makes sense in industry is really universal there. I think the part also towards the end that talks about actual interviews as well as negotiating salary can be very applicable to anyone. Also, like when I talk about values – there's a practical exercise in the first chapter that really tries to dig deeper into anyone's values. Really, you don't need to be a PhD. You don't need to be working in a specific niche. It's just general questions to try to find out and make you think about what your values really are, and if you can connect them to your work moving forward. It's an exercise that I should have done many times in the past. And I really recommend everyone to do that because it's just taking a break and really focusing on what you want next from your career.

So I think these aspects are really universal to any PhD in any discipline. And when you were talking about you guys having less quantitative skills, I think on the other hand, you have a lot of managerial skills as well as other higher-level skills that are much appreciated in industry and other positions which are a bit less technical than possibly mine. So I think that's also an advantage and you possibly have access to different positions that are just not accessible for me because I'm just so technical. I'll be more on the science side while you guys can have access to the company culture side of things as well as the HR departments or other buckets within the company which are not necessarily related to science. So that could be an advantage, as well.

Joshua Doležal: So I had a LinkedIn post recently, an open thread, and I did something that is a classic interview technique where you repeat something back to your guest. You know that you're doing a bad job of capturing it, and that's the idea, so that they will improve on it and give you a great answer and then you get quality content as a result. And so I said something like, it doesn't really seem like there are any other humanities people who've transitioned into industry. It's all scientists and social scientists. And that post has been viewed over 18,000 times now, and I've been inundated with people who are basically saying, “No, you're wrong. I was in the humanities and now I'm working in instructional design or user experience research or content strategy.” It's been really gratifying to see that response even though I was betraying some ignorance by making the assertion to begin with.

But you talked about self-exploration, and I meant to ask about this earlier. You've done some journaling and other things to get to the bottom of your values. And it sounds like you're recapturing an idealism that brought you to science to begin with, that you were really digging into something deeply. You were getting into the heart and the meat of a subject, pursuing truth to some extent. And I think a lot of us became academics because we weren't satisfied with surface-level knowledge or relationships. And there's a deeply ingrained idealism in that mindset that often is an obstacle to moving into industry, where we think that it's all about profits or everything's commodified. And I think a lot of us who felt like we pursued a calling feel like there's nothing in industry that could really match that. We can't be our whole self in industry. So I'm curious for you how that has been. Do you feel like you can really tap into everything that you were trying to fulfill within yourself as an academic? You can do that in industry? Or do you feel like there are parts of yourself that you need to compartmentalize and hold back from having such high expectations for your job?

Matteo Tardelli: No, I can totally relate to what you just said. I think it's really true. As academics, we have these ideals in the back of our heads all the time. And it's really something that comes with us. But also in industry, I felt like I could be myself and I could also find fulfillment in the work I'm doing. I think on the other hand, in academia, many times I felt the frustration of not being able to push things through and the lack of funding and the lack of opportunities that felt…I felt I was in a bit of a stagnant environment, where nothing was moving in the direction I wanted. In industry it’s really the opposite, it's so fast-paced.

To answer your question, I think I'm not really 100% sure. I think with time you change quite a bit. At the beginning of my PhD I was really about finding the truth and really digging deeper into the science because I was not satisfied with the answers we gave ourselves. But then with time, you face the reality that I need to publish a paper if I want to graduate and finish this PhD. And my results are just all negative. So how am I going to do this? Then you face the reality and it's not exactly what you were thinking of. After my master's, I really wanted to do a PhD. I had a few years of work experience in a pharmacy and I had this idea of academia that way that you just described it. And then, facing the reality of grant writing, paper publishing, and colleagues that are not extremely collaborative, because there's also a little bit of competition, and things like that got me to change my mind so much. So I think that was the journey for me.

Joshua Doležal: Well, it's a philosophical or existential question. I mean, on the one hand, as you're saying, it's really ironic that people think of college teaching, faculty work, as a calling. And yet the circumstances, the lack of resources, as you're saying, the lack of institutional appreciation for what you do, creates an exploitative environment that makes that calling feel like an illusion or fantasy – it doesn't match the reality. On the other hand, I wonder if the idea of having a singular calling as opposed to dozens of possible ways to live a meaningful life, if that's part of what you're describing with how you change. Do you feel now that there's not just one thing that you were born to do, you could be happy and fulfilled doing lots of things? Is that fair to say?

Matteo Tardelli: Yeah, exactly. I think so. At the end of the day, that was the learning I really got from these different transitions in different industries that were completely different, one from each other. And I could really thrive in all of those or at least in part of the responsibilities I was doing in my everyday job. At least in my life, at the beginning I was more convinced that I just had one calling possibly. But I was then learning with experience and with the different transitions in industry.

The Recovering Academic

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