“Don’t You Miss Science?”

When people ask whether I miss science, they’re rarely asking about me.

I found this in my garden the other day.

A shocking, flesh-coloured stalk pushing up through the soil. Covered in slime. Surrounded by flies. And emitting a stench that smelled exactly like rotting flesh.

It was a mushroom. A stinkhorn: Mutinus elegans, to be precise.

Most people would recoil. I leaned in.

I spent the next hour on my knees in the dirt, taking photos, jotting notes, and reading everything I could find about the life cycle of this bizarre fungus. The foul smell is no accident. It attracts flies. The slime contains spores. The flies carry them somewhere new. It’s brilliant. It’s disgusting. It’s science at its best.

And as I stood back up, I realized something:

I never stopped being a scientist.

That moment put words to something I’d been trying to say to the PhDs who reach out to me, many of them afraid that leaving academia means leaving behind who they are.

“Don, don’t you miss science?”

People ask me that sometimes, often with a tone of concern.

I left academia many years ago, after a PhD, a postdoc, and years of research and teaching as a faculty member. But I’ve come to realize that when someone asks, “Don’t you miss science?”, they’re not really asking about me.

They’re asking about themselves. What they’re really asking is:

• “Did I waste the best years of my life on something that doesn’t matter outside the university?”
• “Will anyone value my PhD outside the ivory tower?”
• “How do I explain this decision without looking like a failure?”

I get it. Those fears kept me awake at night when I was thinking about my own transition.

But here’s what I’ve learned in more than four decades of working outside academia:

You don’t leave science behind. You carry it with you.

The scientist stays

If you’ve earned a PhD, you’ve become more than a researcher.

You’ve become a problem solver. A systems thinker. Someone who investigates what isn’t known yet.

You’ve trained yourself to observe closely, question carefully, analyse honestly, and make sense of complexity. That doesn’t disappear when you leave the lab.

You are a scientist in how you think, how you see, and how you solve problems.

My career didn’t leave science behind

After academia, I worked as a consultant, an executive, and a business developer. And when organizations brought me hard problems, I didn’t just see business problems. I saw systems to understand, hypotheses to test, and patterns in the data.

At GO Productivity, we worked with a company that had bought an ERP system to raise its productivity. They were struggling to get it working, and it was hurting the business. Looking at the business as a system showed what was going on. The problem wasn’t the ERP system. Their business processes had never been properly designed, documented, or optimized. The ERP was just speeding up broken processes.

We helped them redesign those processes as one integrated business system. Then the ERP became a tool that worked for them, and they got the productivity gains they’d wanted.

That wasn’t business training. That was the scientific method applied to real problems.

My PhD didn’t expire when I left academia. It became a powerful tool, and just the way I worked.

You have the same tools.

Same work, different language

Here’s where many PhDs stumble: they describe their experience in academic language that means little to an employer.

For example, instead of: “I spent three years optimizing protein crystallization protocols,”
try: “I developed systematic approaches to solve complex technical problems with limited resources, and improved the success rate.”

Instead of: “My dissertation examined the phylogenetic relationships of extinct marine organisms,”
try: “I reconstructed complex historical patterns from incomplete data, and developed new analytical methods that revealed relationships no one had seen.”

Same accomplishments. Different language. Now an employer can see what you can do for them.

Effective communication is what the other person hears and understands.

“But my research was so niche”

You might say that. But most employers care less about your research topic than about what completing that research shows you can do.

You proved you can:

• take on a project with no clear roadmap
• work independently for years without constant supervision
• master complex, specialized knowledge quickly
• keep going through obstacles that would stop most people
• explain complex ideas to different audiences

Those aren’t only academic skills. They’re what employers hire people for.

Three ways to put your inner scientist to work

1. Observe and form hypotheses. What problems in the world fascinate or frustrate you? What kinds of organizations might need the way you think? Your curiosity is your compass.
2. Run experiments. Have research conversations with people in those fields. Treat them as data collection. Look for patterns in what they value and the problems they face.
3. Analyse and translate your past. List the problems you’ve solved in your academic career. Translate each one into the language of the work you want. Practise describing your experience to people outside academia until they can explain it back to you.

You didn’t waste your PhD

Leaving academia isn’t the end of your life as a scientist.

It’s the beginning of a different kind of application, where your curiosity, discipline, and way of thinking get used on problems the lab never got to deal with.

The stinkhorn reminded me of that. A moment of surprise, questions, and wonder. Proof that curiosity never leaves us. It just finds new, unexpected places to grow.

An earlier version of this article appeared on LinkedIn in August 2025.