About a week after finishing my thesis, a friend asked me to give one of her students some advice on doing a PhD in a biological subject. Here is an edited version of what I wrote.
I'm going to talk about laboratory-based PhDs as these are what I know.
The first thing you need to decide is why you want to do a PhD. Doing a PhD is a big commitment and it takes over your life for a few years. I have known people go into a PhD because they thought it would be three more years of being a student allowing them to put off career decisions. It is not like that. You have to really want to do a PhD for it's own sake.
A book I would recommend is How to Get a PhD by Estelle Phillips and Derek Pugh. It deals with
My colleague Allison Wyndham has written a very good article entitled What is it like to be a PhD student? Advice to Prospective Supervisors, which is relevant for both students and mentors.
There are lots of careers that you can do with a biological PhD. The most obvious one is carrying on with scientific research. But in the UK, a PhD is not a pre-requisite for a career in research science. You can go in as a graduate and become a scientific officer. This way you still get to do the experiments and you get proper job security and remuneration - unlike the postdoctoral scientists who are only on 2-3 year contracts and are on a much worse pay scale. The only thing not having a PhD will prevent you from doing is to stop you becoming a principal investigator. This takes you away from the bench and makes you the one doing all the thinking so that your staff test out your theories in the lab. So if you want to spend the rest of your life doing bench work a PhD may not be the best option.
If you do make it to the end of you PhD and you're looking for a good binder in London, I heartily recommend Blissett's in Acton.
My former classmate Kat Arney has written a very amusing series of articles about the harsh realities of life as a research scientist.
As for non-laboratory based options after a PhD, there are many. I would strongly recommend the book I read when I decided not to do a postdoc. It's Alternative Careers in Science: Leaving the Ivory Tower edited by Cynthia Robbins-Roth. It has twenty or so chapters each written by an ex scientist on different careers including things like journalism, publishing, strategic planning, intellectual property, science policy-making. It's an American book so some of the finer details aren't applicable for the UK but it's still very useful.
Now a little bit about me. I'd pretty much decided from the age of 18 that I wanted to be a investigator in molecular biology. I spent my summer holidays during my undergraduate years doing lab jobs. I began my PhD in October 1998 still with the same career goal. I learned loads about myself, the nature of a PhD, my strengths and weaknesses and had a lot of fun. At the same time it was hard work. I started off doing 50 hour weeks and by the end was doing 75 hour weeks. Nobody makes you do all these hours - it just becomes an obsession.
I was very lucky to have a great supervisor and I would strongly recommend getting in touch with a prospective supervisor's former students to find out how they fared. Be warned about going with someone who has never supervised before. A friend began his PhD with a guy who was young and generally considered to be the next big thing in his field. Unfortunately, this guy had no idea how to relate to a student and my friend had a very poorly managed project until the head of department came to his rescue after much heartache.
I came to realise that a postdoc was not for me. As I've mentioned, scientific research takes over your life and I wanted mine back. Also, I never saw myself as a lab head and this would have limited me to a series of short postdoc contracts and no real security. Furthermore, while I love science and found it fascinating to specialise on one question for four years, I realised I preferred learning about a wider spectrum of science. Lastly, the parts of my PhD I had enjoyed the most were writing reports and giving presentations. I decided to look for a career that would allow me to develop these skills further.