Swimming from academe to your first industry role
Swimming from academe to your first industry role
Job search strategies from Aditya Mahara of PhD to Industry
I’m excited to continue my interview series this week with Aditya Mahara. Aditya is a senior product manager with Medable, Inc. He earned a PhD in Biomedical Engineering at Dartmouth College in 2017 and found his first industry role at Siemens later that year. After working for AstraZeneca for two years, he landed his current role at Medable.
I spoke to Aditya about how he knew that academe was a poor fit for his goals and interests, the mistakes he made early in his job search and how he perfected his approach later on. I love his metaphor of swimming blindly in the ocean as an early job seeker before resting on the shore and taking stock of the islands he might target more purposefully. He offers great tips for asking better questions in informational interviews and for leveraging human interest to your advantage even in more formal interview settings. I hope his advice is as useful to you as it has been to me.
Aditya is also the founder of PhD to Industry a coaching service for PhDs, particularly in STEM, who are looking to kickstart their careers outside academe. Check out his online archive of free resources, including his Ultimate 4-Step Playbook for Job Seekers. You can sign up for his newsletter or book a free consultation to see if he would be a good fit for your career transition.
Today’s interview is free for everyone. To access the archive of conversations like this one and upcoming interviews, such as my next one with Larry McGrath, a senior researcher for Amazon Prime Video, please consider upgrading your subscription today.
A Conversation with Aditya Mahara
Joshua Doležal: You mentioned in one of your posts that you immigrated to the U.S. Was that for the PhD program, or did you come with your family earlier?
Aditya Mahara: Neither actually. I moved to the US when I was 18 or 19 for undergrad. And then I went to graduate school and I stayed, I married an American woman. Now I have a half American, half Nepali son. So this is home now and I've been here since 2008.
Joshua Doležal: Do you go back and see your family in Nepal?
Aditya Mahara: Yes, I do. I used to go much more frequently, but since Covid I've been there only one time. Now traveling is a little bit difficult with a two-year-old, so I haven't really had the guts to kind of, constrict a toddler in a 24-hour flight yet, but I think we will be going next year.
Joshua Doležal: Two-year-old on an international flight. That would be a heroic effort, for sure. Well, when I was looking at your page initially, I was a little confused because I think of biomedical engineering as a degree you would get and obviously go into industry. It seems a very technical applied field. So I'm curious why there was any sort of transition or pivot for you. Were you initially thinking of being a professor in that role? And if so, why were you thinking that track as opposed to a higher paying, more flexible industry position?
Aditya Mahara: That's a good question. I was thinking of a professorship, and the reason being, the conversations happening at an early stage in my career were primarily with academics. Their impressions were that academia is best, you know? I just didn't know the possibilities beyond academia, to tell you the honest truth. So for two, three years I thought this was it. I was all right, so success equals professorship, tenure, all of that.
Joshua Doležal: Well, was it a crisis of the soul, where you just didn't feel right moving in that direction? Was there a lack of opportunities? What caused you to really rethink all of that?
Aditya Mahara: It was both actually. The soul searching was first, and then the lack of opportunity became evident. One time a lab colleague was gone for a whole week and he came into a meeting really tired. He was really low. And I asked what was happening.
And he was oh I wrote a grant to keep funding in the lab. And I haven't slept in six, seven days properly. And he had a young family and he basically had no time for them. Day, night, there were no barriers. Summers were not even a thing.
I was absorbing that for years, but it never really materialized until that moment in the meeting where I knew, that's not the future I want. I want to have time and energy to do things, keep a work-life balance. There has to be another way. Then I started talking to people and immediately a whole world opened up in industry for me.
Joshua Doležal: You said something on LinkedIn a while back about this very thing, that you sort of thought of academic life as all consuming and working too much, but now you work 24/7 basically. So you haven't avoided that. Do you have more flexibility or something that makes it more palatable even though you're still working all the time?
Aditya Mahara: I do work a lot, but some of this is by choice and I have good energy. I was never really a fit in academia, because it was sucking energy, so I never felt at peace with academia. Whereas in industry and even the things I'm doing on LinkedIn, I look forward to writing a post and I look forward to helping, so it doesn't feel as draining, even though the number of hours might be similar. That brings in a whole different kind of freedom.
Currently I have a full-time role, so I have to perform there. But all the stuff on LinkedIn, coaching, all of that I'm doing for fun. So it doesn't feel it's energy sucking at the moment because I'm not doing it for a need. I'm doing it for a want.
Joshua Doležal: The energy part of it is important. If you feel it's sustaining you. I remember one of my mentors used that word: pay attention to what sustains you and those things that chip away at you that really sap your optimism. If they're soul-draining, then that's something to pay attention to for sure. Well, so you talked to some people and it sounds that opened some doors in industry. Is that how you went from a graduate student to your first industry role at Siemens Healthcare?
Aditya Mahara: It was. And basically that's how I opened that door. Surprisingly the connection I had was from undergrad. They started a conversation with some folks in Siemens and that's how it went through. And I got a random email from somebody who noticed my resume and she said, Hey, would you want to talk? And I said, Yes! So I actually drove to the office the next day to talk, even though she probably meant to call. So I forced the issue a little bit. But then that turned into a full-time role after a few interviews.
The networking took me almost 12 months. I was exploring for a long time before something materialized.
Joshua Doležal: Were you exploring purposefully or were you exploring blindly at that stage?
Aditya Mahara: Blindly initially. And then it became purposeful in the last three months of the transition. I also didn't really know how to handle the question, How can I help you? When I used to get that question in networking calls, I just didn't have an answer for the first nine months. I’d say, oh I'm looking to learn. And then the conversation ended. It was difficult to continue. But when the conversation flipped from, “Hey, I just want to learn,” to “Oh, I see a role open in your marketing department, and I applied.” Then that became more action oriented, and then they would say, “Oh I know this person. I can connect you.”
Joshua Doležal: Your metaphor for this is that you were swimming and then you found the shore and just took a breather and really looked around you. And then I think you said you saw this string of islands to follow. So was that the networking piece where they were saying, how can I help you, and you were saying, just looking to learn? You had to really just take a break, rethink your strategy, and then those conversations led to this series of islands that you could see?
Aditya Mahara: So with that metaphor, what I meant with the string of islands was basically the first is the hardest transition. After you reach land the first time, then you're not paddling, right? Then you can look up. You're looking around. And then far across, I saw many islands, meaning after my first role, all of a sudden many opportunities were significantly easier because I didn't have that initial bar of friction that I did for my first role.
Joshua Doležal: Your brand is “PhD to Industry,” so you're actively trying to help other people follow that same path that you have. I’m in the swimming blindly phase myself, paddling somewhere, I'm not sure where I'll end up yet. Have you been able to get anyone else to that first island? Do you have a success story from coaching clients?
Aditya Mahara: I do. The thing is, I never did it for money until recently. So I've coached different parts of the job search journey. I’ve been part of 12 different journeys. But now I'm helping somebody start to finish and that's more of a three-month engagement. Because before it was one-off calls. The only success stories I can share are my own three times. I've done it three times now and I use the same method again and again.
Joshua Doležal: Can you describe your four stages? There's discovery, there's exploration.
Aditya Mahara: So, I actually just made a quick chart a couple days ago. Cause I was trying to put these thoughts on paper, myself.
Joshua Doležal: You know Joe Stubenrauch from LinkedIn as well, and he definitely talks about prototyping. So you try out a few different things and that would be similar to your discovery or define stages. You pay attention to the energy. Is it fun? Is it sustaining? And if it's not, then you go back to the beginning and if you find something that is fun and sustaining, then you pursue it. And his whole thing is either you shadow someone to gain some experience, or you start building artifacts, a case study or something that would go in a portfolio to demonstrate, not just that you have the skill, but that you are using it to solve a problem in the industry that you're pursuing. So that sounds similar to your upskilling or “develop” phase.
Aditya Mahara: I think a lot of this is intertwined between discovery and upskilling. The portfolio piece makes sense for specific roles UX research or instructional design, all of those roles, maybe a designer role. I think not every role needs a portfolio. as long as you can communicate your value during the interviews. But for some specific roles, it's almost a necessity at this point.
Joshua Doležal: I'm curious about your role now as a product manager, because I know that's easy to confuse with project manager. All of these job descriptions sound similar. What are you doing now as a product manager?
Aditya Mahara: I think if, if I were to basically, first of all, distinguish between these two, the way I see it, this is a gross oversimplification, but project management for me is delivery and product management is strategy.
Some of the work I do currently is coming up with proper definitions for the problems we want to solve for primarily in the healthcare software space. So we're talking with nurses, we're talking with patients, we're talking with doctors in the clinical trial space, and basically our goal is to create technology to solve that problem.
And it's all about strategy. What problems to solve first, what designs will actually solve the problems. So I'm working pretty much 80% of my time in that problem space. The definition, priorities space. And then delivery is, to me, part of productizing that solution, which is about 20% of my work.
Joshua Doležal: So are product management or project management areas where you would be less likely to have a portfolio, or would there be artifacts that if you were looking at another island and you were going to try to get there from your current position, you would have artifacts from your role that you could use?
Aditya Mahara: I've seen some people use artifacts. I don't have one even now. This is my third product manager role. And I've, never had a portfolio. I focus on communicating value during the interview and that's what I've been using. But I do know some product managers have websites where say, Hey, these are the products I worked on. PMP certification, I believe, is what has weight in the project management world. So I think different roles have different expectations of the material you need.
Joshua Doležal: I've been thinking about project management and I'm still very much in the discovery stage, and so I've only spoken to one project manager who came from the humanities and is presently working in that role. Maybe I need to perfect my informational interview technique, but I got some recommendations of what I need to learn. AGILE methodology, Waterfall methodology. This would be part of the upskilling, I suppose.
I could probably generate artifacts that demonstrate mastery of those two methodologies. but I still need to understand what those artifacts would be if it's a statement of work, if it's a spreadsheet. What the things that a project manager would create to solve those problems or to apply those methodologies might be. So that's something I'm looking into in the future.
But this evolved out of a conversation with a career coach and she was just asking me to tell stories about my academic experience. And I taught for 16 years at a private college and was a full professor, held many leadership roles, and a lot of those roles were project oriented. So I had to either get policy proposals passed or I had to hire visiting speakers. I launched two year grant-funded podcast. So I wrote a grant with a colleague for $40,000 to launch an oral history podcast about the Midwest.
We did everything with promotion. We did everything with recruiting guests. We recorded the interviews ourselves and did public engagement. All of these things were part of a very large, very multi-layered project. I don't know that that project solves a problem for anyone in business, so I can't really just say, here, look at my website. Right? It's evidence of a lot of skills that I hear people talking about in project management, but that artifact means nothing to someone who's in a business context. So, I feel at this stage I can't translate that directly. But at the same time, I don't think there are sample podcasts that I could create as part of a portfolio. So I'm feeling a little bit stuck on that stage of my process.
Aditya Mahara: I think the portfolio approach is acceptable or almost expected in some roles, but not for all right? So that is just one mechanism to prove proof of work or proof of skill for a project manager. Sure, it could be one of the ways to do it, but it's not the only way. So I think you're a great storyteller. I think in interviews, as soon as you land interviews, your experience with this podcast as stories during interviews, that's already going to be much more impactful than putting it in a portfolio.
Your coach is doing really good job of eliciting your stories. Because in the end you're going to tell stories to get that interview turned into a job. So I think it's not always about creating portfolios. It's more about the storytelling on all the skills you already have. And you honestly have probably more than early stage project managers. You have a lot of leadership, activities, grants, all of that translates into all these project management skills.
Joshua Doležal: Well, one thing that Joe told me as well is that a lot of times where an academic will land an industry is lower than they might expect. So sometimes you would apply for a certain position and you might be hired by the organization or company, but they might downscale you to an entry level role. I'm hoping my readers learn about my search with me because a lot of them are in the same boat that I am. I don't know if project manager is a role that is just unattainable for me at this stage, or if I need to be setting my sights at an associate project manager or coordinator, or something that's lower in the organizational hierarchy that I could then use to leverage within an organization.
Aditya Mahara: I think you're more than capable of project manager. I wouldn't even look beyond, anything below that to be honest. I've worked, in the last eight years, I've worked with all kinds of project managers and you're highly skilled already except for maybe the software AGILE piece. So that can be done through certification or maybe shadowing, as Joe was saying. If you want to go into project management in a software company, then I would probably try to get a quick month or two shadowing experience to get that feeling. And that will be more supercharged training than any certification, any portfolio. These don't really have to be official. Right? I usually advocate for people just doing things, rather than waiting too long. Maybe startups and other smaller companies will be more open. Because the larger the company, the more bureaucracy, the more red tape and they'll say no, we have privacy rules.
I would target small companies, talk to project managers there in the industries you want to be in. So it could be software, it could be hardware, it could be anything. I would try to shadow people and maybe just even get a part-time role, unofficially if it's low pay or unpaid, I mean, it is an extreme incentive for them to have you on board. And sometimes, most times, those convert into full-time roles anyway, just, forcing your way in a little bit, you know?
Joshua Doležal: It's a way of getting the experience. And it sounds to me, you're recommending that I do this in person locally as opposed to trying to shadow someone remotely. Is that fair to say?
Aditya Mahara: I think initially, in-person would probably be the best for learning. And then after you get a sense, you could even switch the same one to remote, because I think the marginal utility of that in-person learning drops off pretty significantly after the first few interactions. Because every week it’s the same meeting, right? So if you do one week shadowing and let's say if you even go…where are you based right now, by the way?
Joshua Doležal: I'm based in State College, Pennsylvania, where Penn State is.
Aditya Mahara: Okay. So I'm just making stuff up. But let's say you find a very cool company in San Francisco. I would even go there for a week and then after that, turn that into an online thing. So then you're not limiting opportunities within just a local area. That's just an idea. And then you could probably do it for two months or one month.
Joshua Doležal: I'm a bit limited because I have three kids. So, you know, going to San Francisco for a week is perhaps not in the cards, but I appreciate all these examples. I want to back up just a little bit, and this might be an unanswerable question for you, but I'm gathering multiple perspectives on this. Some say that people in the humanities don't really have obvious transferable skills. The burden is to show that they are competent in the industry space. And then once you join a team, everything that you acquired as part of your research, as part of your teaching agility or innovation becomes immediately apparent. But you can't say on the front end, oh, I have a PhD in American literature. That doesn't mean anything. If anything, it's an impediment. That's a little bit different from you, because your degree is in a technical industry-friendly field. So I assume that that gap is considerably greater for someone coming from the arts or from the humanities. Is that fair to say?
Aditya Mahara: I think it is, unfortunately, the gap is wider. But I don't know about that no skills argument. I don't believe that. For technical roles, sure, that makes sense. If it's actually an engineer coding or if it's a chemist in a lab mixing chemicals, that makes sense. But the majority of roles in industry are non-technical. And for that, everybody's on a level playing field. It also depends on your end destination. I didn't even go into a technical role myself, even though I do have a technical degree, so I was competing with everybody on the basis of soft skills leadership, management, writing, and honestly, you are an expert at most of those things already. You're a great writer. You have leadership skills, you've taught people, mentored people, so there is no gap, for me, for the roles that you may be targeting anyway. Now if you want to be an electrical engineer and solder things, then yes, there's gap.
Joshua Doležal: That's funny! The main gap then is just as you said, getting from the shore to the first island. That's the gap. And that gap has to do with the perception of a PhD and also, the fact that a non-conventional candidate coming from academe is just not going to make it through the initial resume screening. Even if a human is reading it, even if a hiring manager is reading it, that person is much more likely to come from the industry role and be looking for someone more like themselves. What I've been hearing is that networking is the most powerful way to close that gap or get from the shore to the island because you present yourself to people, you show your competence. Whatever their perceptions are of a PhD are balanced by their actual experience of you personally. Do you have any other advice about that? Overcoming the disadvantage of being an unconventional candidate, possibly in mid-career or midlife?
Aditya Mahara: So one other piece of the slightly non-traditional approach is when you're having those conversations, during networking, maybe even during early interview stage, is changing the narrative of the conversation to a non-work topic. As soon as you're talking about work, the skills gap or whatever, the perception of the skill gap is the first thing. If that comes up, you're starting off a little bit backwards because then the conversation is basically highlighting, Hey, here's the skill gap. But let's say if you are a fan of Star Wars and the interviewer is also a fan of Star Wars, you talked there for 30 minutes about Star Wars and then Oh, we were going to talk about the job too, in the last 10 minutes. That's just a no-brainer at that point, because then there's a mutual interest. So I've used this a few times too. Not to trick people, but one of the jobs I got was -- one of the directors in Siemens during my interview, we chatted, we had a half hour meeting. He was a director of, I think, clinical operations, and I was interviewing for that. The first 30 minutes, 25 minutes, we talked about soccer and he started off the conversation and I just kept going. And I'm pretty sure he had a big say in the ultimate decision.
It had nothing to do with technical sales. It had nothing to do with work even. His assumption was everybody coming into that interview round had the capability. He was not concerned about proof of competence at that point. He was concerned about a mutual fit in the team and if I was a good person.
A lot of the time, in the attempt to prove competence, you go immediately to that, Hey, how are you doing? Tell me a little bit about yourself. And you go oh, I have x number of years. But instead of that, just take it easy, say Hey, I'm a father. I am New York based. I love soccer and, and for work, I've been product managing for seven years. See if anything sticks. Fatherhood might stick with some, soccer may stick with some, I don't know.
Joshua Doležal: I love that! I know that when we talked about coaching, you're still in process with your first client from start to finish. But as a product manager, when you are thinking through strategy, when you're being creative in this non-technical way, what does that look like? Can you give me a product without betraying trade secrets? Something specific?
Aditya Mahara: Happy to. So are you more interested in the process or are you more interested in the product aspect or people aspect?
Joshua Doležal: I’m more interested in the storytelling aspect. So if someone's reading this transcript and they don't really know what you mean by industry work being more sustaining because they think intellectual life is the most sustaining thing, how can you possibly get energy from giving value to a company, is there a story you could tell that would set that straight?
Aditya Mahara: Absolutely. So currently I work for a company whose products have touched 1 million patients. And the goal is that it's not a zero sum game, right? It's not for me. So if I solve a business problem and the business problem here is collecting data from patients from home, it's a win-win win for most people because patients from home can do it. The technology company making that technology benefits financially and clinical trials can continue to run. There's a lot of different stakeholders involved in this pipeline of, let's just say telehealth as an example where there could be a multiple win-win.
So the corporate entity making money out of this doesn't always equal abuse. And, you know, profit provides incentives for me. That's how I see it. There's a lot of good that comes from a lot of corporations as well. The biggest problems have the most value. And the value extraction is that profit piece. So if somebody's not solving real issues, ultimately they'll go out of business. So that's my angle. I don't think there was a specific example, but you could probably get the telehealth example or something.
Joshua Doležal: So you feel you're actually making people's lives better and that's what gives you energy.
Aditya Mahara: I love the healthcare space. My degree was biomed engineering and since then I've been working for eight years in different healthcare domains. First medical device and pharma, and now health tech. So that gives me energy if somebody's health has gotten from point A to B where I've helped in bettering it in some capacity.
Joshua Doležal: Well, this is something we have in common because my research was all in medical humanities, and I've taught many courses on illness and health and literature. It's fascinating how storytelling can work in conjunction with technology in a case such as a cancer diagnosis. So a patient feels disempowered by a cancer diagnosis. And a lot of medical language is accusatory, you know, the patient “failed” to respond to treatment.
The patient feels they're failing themselves, you know? So to write a cancer narrative to reclaim the meaning of that experience, there's no technology required except a notepad and a pen possibly. But the caregiver’s attitude toward a patient, whether there's space for that ambiguity in the doctor-patient relationship or the nurse-patient relationship is part of that larger problem of improving not just physical health, but overall human wellbeing.
Related to this, I have another question about AI. I’ve seen it predicted as an increasing part of the patient experience and because of my medical humanities background, I find this deeply concerning. Patients are already coming in feeling that doctors are automatons who wield the laparoscopic instrument but are not attuned to them as people. And so if diagnosis is increasingly outsourced to a bot, it would seem to just compound that problem. So as someone who's working in this creative problem-solving space in medicine, you could say that accuracy and so on improves patients' lives, but if people feel alienated or lonely or estranged, that doesn't entirely help. I don't know how you feel about AI and medicine?
Aditya Mahara: Sensitive topic, right? So I think there's whole series of problems that will come with it, but there's whole series of opportunities that'll come with it too. Unfortunately with advent of any new technology, there will be a lot of issues, but one example I can think of where AI could be good in medicine is just vast amounts of data processing on the background.
Not in patient care, but in systematizing electronic records. Sometimes we have a lot of information in systems and electronic digital health records all over the country, all over the world right now, where it's very unstructured and currently it just sits on some server somewhere.
But with AI, there's a possibility to aggregate a story of patients' health throughout their lifetime. And if somebody's biomarkers are off by a little bit, maybe it goes unnoticed by people, but all of a sudden AI can make those judgments of pattern and all of a sudden you can predict cancer faster. That could be a benefit of AI in the future with earlier prediction of disease.
Joshua Doležal: I see – it's a both/and thing. Do you have any favorite sort of pop culture medical shows? Do you stay away from your profession when you're watching TV?
Aditya Mahara: No, I watch almost everything. One of my favorite shows, which I guess is not necessarily in the medical space, but is part of an academic turned evil is Breaking Bad. I love the show where you know, a chemist all of a sudden is in the drug world and all the things that come with it.
Joshua Doležal: I was just thinking with the AI thing, there's a show called New Amsterdam that's a bit of a drama slash romantic comedy. And there's an older doctor, Kapoor, who's a neurologist and in a series of episodes he is carrying this iPad with him. And the iPad is making diagnoses alongside him. And he is sometimes unable to refute the diagnosis. He's resentful of it because he's spent all these years absorbing knowledge and he feels he's very charming and that his charm is part of his ability to diagnose people. But there's a tension between artificial intelligence and the living doctor. Breaking Bad is another one of my favorites, partly because Walter White, he's a world class chemist, part of this team in grad school that developed some multimillion dollar technology. But he's a high school teacher and he is so thoroughly disrespected in his role that he resorts to this, and his cancer diagnosis means he has nothing left to lose.
Another example of the AI - human debate I think is an older show, House, M.D., where you have a brilliant diagnostician who is really anti-technology. I mean, he's sort of the embodiment of the crazy genius. I love Greg House as an example because so often when he has these breakthroughs and he solves these cases that are impossible, no one can figure out what's happening in these patients, he does it at some setting that has nothing to do with his work. He's good at diagnosis because he's so eccentric. So he's playing jazz guitar or he's at a monster truck rally, or he is, I don't know, doing some crazy thing like Sherlock Holmes smoking opium or something has nothing to do with the mystery that he's trying to solve. But that ability to be curious about the world without any need to have it end up solving anything – to just gather all of these points of data that could be freely associated together – that's something that AI still doesn't have in quite the same way as a character like House.
Aditya Mahara: As you said, it's a mix of the left and the right brain and AI probably is more quantitative only, whereas the emotion comes in. All of that is very intertwined.
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