Engineering Ph.D student Colin Carpenter Th '09, confronted with hiring freezes at major corporations, has broadened his initial job search to include post doctoral fellowships in academia. Carpenter is not alone in this approach, and as students finishing their fellowships also have difficulty finding jobs, more fellows entering the market may further aggravate the problem.
"There are too many people in those post doc positions and no where for them to go," chemistry department chairman David Glueck said in an interview with The Dartmouth. "There will be a problem there unless the economy recovers."
Students may currently have more opportunities to pursue post doctoral fellowships because of money allocated for research by the federal economic stimulus package and increases in the budgets of the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, according to biology department chair Tom Jack.
"That will really benefit post docs and people looking for post docs, because there is a lot of money going into hiring people," Jack said.
Increased competition among recent Ph.D graduates for jobs may create "some push back" in the job market, computer science department chair Andrew Campbell said.
"A company like Cisco or Intel or Nokia may pick up Ph.D students where they typically would take masters students, so employers may find themselves being able to pick up people with more advanced skills," he said.
Despite the recession, Campbell said he believes strong Ph.D students will not have difficulty securing employment, though the number of offers each student receives may decline. This may not be the case for average Ph.D students, Campbell said.
"They may not go to the 'star' company they want to and thought that they could target," he said.
Jeremy Ouellette Gr '09, a physics Ph.D student who has secured a job in the private sector, said finding jobs in industry was more difficult this year than it might have been in a better economic climate, forcing many of his peers to be more open-minded.
"When times are tough, you have to broaden your horizons," Ouellette said. "Maybe somebody who said, 'I want to go into industry' may think about taking a post doc and waiting it out a couple years."
Assistant dean of graduate student affairs Kerry Landers, who helps with career counseling and professional development for Dartmouth's Ph.D students, said she emphasizes the importances of networking and having a "Plan B" .
Carpenter said that networking had previously allowed many of his peers to find jobs, but that he has not had the same results.
"People from my group had typically gotten jobs in industry based on connections from attending conferences, and I feel I've made the same type of connections, but people tell me they have hiring freezes and to look out but there just is not much hiring going on," Carpenter said.
