The PhD Career Stories podcast was born in 2016 following the dream idea of Dr. Tina Persson, a career coach and former assistant professor in Molecular Biology. From her experience as a coach, recruiter, and researcher, she realized that many PhD students and postdocs feel anxious and stressed due to uncertainty regarding their professional future and have difficulties positioning themselves on the job market. Surveys featured in Nature support this observation: 74% of doctorate students felt that their programme was not preparing them ‘very well’ for a satisfying career after the PhD, and as much as 56% of postdocs share a very pessimistic view about their job prospects.
“There is no secret trick or specific personality required to build a successful career after a PhD. All PhDs are unique with their own stories — stories I’ve been longing to tell.”
Dr. Tina Persson, Career Coach.
With this in mind, the idea to tell PhD stories developed into a podcast project. Together with her coachées at that time Dr. Michele Manzo, Dr. Paulius Mikulskis, and her colleague from the Karolinska Institutet Dr Maria Sjögren, Tina formed the first production team, and soon the first episode was published. Shortly after, Dra. Jo Havemann joined the team to support podcast communication and recruiting new speakers.
You can hear more about how this adventure started on our #27 episode.
Since then, the team has constantly been evolving: many wonderful people have contributed their time, skills, and passion to drive and improve PhD Career Stories. Together, the volunteer team recorded, produced, and published over 100 podcasts, providing a platform to 76 speakers from over 20 countries to share their career journeys and experiences.
What we do
In the PhD Career Stories podcast, we share stories, personal experiences, successes, and failures of people after completing their doctorate.
Our mission
Our mission is to inspire you, to create a variety of role models for future PhDs and, in doing so, encourage doctorate students and postdocs on their career paths.
Our vision
Our vision is to create a global community of PhDs, bringing together nationalities, languages, cultures, and scientific disciplines. We want to become the storytelling channel, where everyone can participate and share their journey and experience, so we can learn and grow with each other.
