Does your PhD define your research for your career?

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I would say the field of your PhD forms the foundation of your research career. If you want a career in research, then without other experience your first academic post will be closely aligned with your PhD dissertation topic. As a researcher, your future collaborations will enable you to branch out beyond your specific PhD focus. You’ll probably always be working in biological science (this appears to be your department of study?) however.

If open to industry, yes your dissertation topic is important, but your field of experience is more the focus. As you continue in industry, your PhD becomes more an indicator of research training and the specific area becomes less important as compared to an academic career. Lots of folks with a PhD wind up in an industry career that is only weakly related to their specific training.

Thank you for the insight, and yes I'm currently conducting biological science research. I'm happy to continue working in this field, I was just wondering how plausible it would be to pivot to other projects within this same space that aren't necessarily connected to my PhD research

I would say that it is an important part since it will become your specialization.

It is not always the case, in my case, my Ph.D. was oriented toward the oil and gas sector, in the geophysics part, now I am dedicated to the development of algorithms for a shipping company.

Usually, we do our research work out of passion in search of some answer, but it is not necessarily our professional path, some companies can see that we did a great investigation and project, and only because of that do they know that we are capable of other things, so I think that it is not limiting.

Thank you, I'll make sure to keep this in mind if I ever switch to working in the industry

To some degree yes, you probably won't be doing much research in the psychology field if you have a PhD in Physics but that's not to say you can't work on some adjacent research project

That being said, research skills are pretty transferable from field to field so there could potentially be some opportunities for being involved in different disciplines

Do you mean like you'll always have to research something related to what you conducted during your PhD? Not really, think of it more like a starting point and if you're interests change in the future you can always switch direction into something that you find more exciting

Okay that's great, that's kind of what I was concerned about. I like what I'm working on at the moment, but I was a bit worried about the prospect of just doing it forever.

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