Put your PhD to WORK!

Peter S. Fiske, PhD

Whats a PhD worth, and where can it take you? Newly minted PhDs can find this question puzzling and sometimes frustrating as they consider the familiar academic employment pathways ahead of them versus a larger, but poorly illuminated, set of pathways to destinations unknown. In this keynote address, Dr. Peter S. Fiske discusses his first-hand struggle to identify a career path after grad school and find job opportunities that played to his strengths and interests. Along the way, he discovered that the PhD can be an extremely high-value degree - if you learn how to recognize the transferable skills you developed in grad school and how to present them to prospective employers.

About Our Keynote Speaker

Dr. Peter S. Fiske is the Director of the Water-Energy Resilience Research Institute (WERRI) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. WERRIs goal is to orient and align the water-related research programs at LBNL to address critical gaps in the reliability, efficiency, and sustainability of water-energy systems in California and the nation. He is also a frequent writer and lecturer on the subject of career strategy, entrepreneurship, and leadership for scientists and engineers. He has been a keynote speaker or guest lecturer at some of the leading research universities in the United States including MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Northwestern, Princeton, and the University of California at Berkeley (where he teaches at the Haas School of Business). He is a founding faculty member of the Department of Energys I-Corps Program. He is the author of Put Your Science to WORK!, numerous articles for the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences career website ScienceCareers.org, and presently writes an occasional column in the journal Nature.