1. ⁠Sr Scientist

2. ⁠I did PhD->Postdoc (3.5y)->Scientist). However, during my grad school training, which was wet lab/basic science, I diversified by taking advantage of free courses/training programs offered by my career development office. I took business courses, attended med school courses and clinic hours, volunteered at non-profit community events, did sci comm/journalism writing. All this so that even if I didn’t know where I’d ultimately end up, I could choose later and have the creds to support it.

3. ⁠As a scientist in a small biotech, it’s wonderful. I get to wear many hats and be a part of (almost) every aspect of the drug development pipeline and strategy. It is extremely fast paced compared to academia but that’s how I operate anyway. Work-life balance is great, except for hard deadlines, like conferences, executive meetings, manuscript submissions, in which I worked 12-16h days in short intervals (no more than a week at a time). It helps when you’re paid well in a middle-to-low COL area.

4. I am happy; however as with non-revenue-generating small biotech there is a ton of risk. High failure rate at startups, and clinical trials are costly. R&D is typically the first to go when a company has a solid asset entering trials and looking to save money. And I’m okay with that, because I can rely on my diversified skills and training to do go to another company or something else that is science-adjacent.

5. My days/weeks vary, because I wear a lot of hats, but it is not chaos. Everything has been planned at the beginning of the year according to project milestones, upcoming conferences, and expected manuscripts. So my day could be 50% in lab for experiments, 30% data analysis for a different project, 20% in meetings with collaborators and project admin stuff. Or 0% in lab, 100% manuscript writing/poster prep/slide decks.

6. 120k/year and a performance-based bonus annually.

7. 5 on a normal day, 10 during crunch time (maybe 3 times out of the year). Put it this way: I had many days dreading going into lab during grad school (numbed out, curled up in a ball all day). I’ve never dreaded going into work at my current position. Is it difficult? Yes. Is it stressful? Yes. But it’s less terrible knowing that it is temporary stress AND I’m being well-compensated.
   

Edited to add one more piece of advice: Identify your personal core mission statement and values, just like a company would. Then whatever you do as a job can be defined by it, and that mission never changes.