Stories from Beyond Academia #13: Ashley Ruba
(PhD in Developmental Psychology)
If you’re reading this series, then you’ll be well aware that there’s a lot of people out there who are wrapping up their PhDs or postdocs and aren’t too sure of what the next move is. There’s a big hunger out there for advice on how to successfully transition out of academia - that’s part of why we’re doing this series.
Dr Ashley Ruba is one of the most visible people talking about this transition online: on LinkedIn, on Instagram, and on Twitter, and in her ‘After Academia’ course (details available at her website: www.ashleyruba.com). Since bursting into prominence thanks to her transparent discussion of how and why she left academia behind, she’s garnered an online following who are keen for more info on how to make the transition themselves.
We talk to Ashley about her career pivots, the importance of de-stigmatising the pursuit of non-academic careers, and why we should talk about money. She gives some great insights into why stereotypes about industry careers are wrong, and the importance of networking in a changing job market.
Jonathan McGuire: Hello Ashley, and welcome! We came across you on Substack, but you're much more prolific and well-known on Twitter and LinkedIn where you're a really visible and popular voice about non-academic careers for people with PhDs - having followed that path yourself, even though that wasn't the path you originally intended. Could you tell us a little bit about why you pursued a PhD and what you researched in your PhD?
Ashley Ruba: When I started studying psychology as an undergraduate, my goal was to be a therapist, and I wanted a graduate degree because I just always really loved school. I originally wanted to go to med school and become a psychiatrist, then I thought I might do a clinical psych PhD instead. And then, when I was in undergrad, I started conducting research in a language development lab, looking at how young babies learn language. I thought, and still think, this is fascinating, because young kids learn so much so quickly in the first few years of life. It's mind blowing that humans can learn that fast. And I ended up doing an undergraduate honours thesis on how babies learn labels for emotions, and just got really deeply into research. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a therapist and so right when I was about to graduate, I decided to do a PhD in developmental psych instead. I had these very specific research questions I wanted to pursue. There were not that many professors in the US looking at early childhood emotional development with babies, and I ended up moving to Seattle. I grew up in North Carolina, on the East Coast, so moved to the West Coast of the United States for a PhD in development psych to study how babies learn about other people's emotions. So how does a baby learn what a smile is or what a frown is, and how do they learn to move through the world and regulate their behaviour?
And I really loved research, I was good at it, and I was told ‘you should be a professor’. And that was the only career path I really considered, until the last year of my PhD…
And I really loved research, I was good at it, and I was told ‘you should be a professor’. And that was the only career path I really considered, until the last year of my PhD when I sat on a faculty search committee and saw the process from the other side, and I just thought ‘there's no way I'm good enough to do this’. And at that point, I started looking into UX research because I was living in Seattle and it's a tech hub, and it was a popular career path at that point for Psych PhDs. But then I ended up applying for one postdoctoral fellowship, and I got it and decided to keep going in academia. I moved to Wisconsin, in the middle of the country, where I didn't know anyone six months before COVID happened. And so I spent most of my postdoc in COVID. I was piloting my very first study the week that my university completely shut down and I still managed to crank out a bunch of publications, but by the time I was entering my third year I was just becoming really jaded with academia and my mental health was really suffering more than it had been and, for a variety of reasons, I decided to leave. I ended up actually pivoting into UX research, I worked at Meta for a year, and now I'm a Human Factors engineer at Arthrex, which is a medical device company - we build medical devices for orthopaedic surgery.
JM: Now you mentioned that UX research was a popular career amongst Psych PhDs in your cohort and sounds like that was really by virtue of the geography almost! What was it about UX research that prompted you to go further along that path?
AR: Initially, I just started talking to people who had graduated from my program, and it seemed like that was the only thing that people were doing! But also, at that point I’d really started liking Seattle and I wanted to stay, and it seemed like a reasonable career path. That was 2019. I made a LinkedIn, then I essentially had Google and Microsoft throwing UX contract offers at me, and I didn't really understand what the field was, I didn't have any product experience. Obviously that is not the case now, fast forwarding four or five years, the field is much more competitive. But yeah, I really had no idea what UX was, and I wasn't sure that it was something that I was going to really like which is ultimately why I took the postdoc instead of any of those contract offers - it was a really prestigious postdoc and a way to keep going in academia.
And then, in 2022, when I was applying for non-academic jobs, I did something that I now recommend people avoid, which is I applied for everything. I applied to UX research, I applied to research scientist positions, market research positions, any kind of research position. And the first job offer I got was for an entry level UX research position. And I wanted to leave academia so badly that I just took it. I think my life would have been a little bit different had I picked a research scientist career, something like that. But what I would come to like about UX research is that there's a more tangible impact than my academic research. I was studying babies and I was publishing papers that only probably a handful of people really cared about. It seemed more like an intellectual passion project than something that was actually helping people. I also felt really siloed in my research area. When I'm doing these studies now, I'm collaborating with sometimes 20 plus people on different teams, designers, engineers, product managers, and everyone is working together towards the shared goal, and I like that feeling more than tinkering away at my desk without anyone to bounce ideas off or anyone who's really supporting me.
I work in healthcare technology, so I'm on the digital technologies team at my company. And the projects I'm leading right now are in medical augmented reality - augmented reality was something that I started working on at Meta. I never thought I'd work in tech, never thought that'd be interesting, but I just think it's really cool to be on the cutting edge of new technology that's coming out in the world. And that's something that really excites me.
JM: It's funny that everyone was going into UX. I remember when I left academia, I experienced something very similar. But instead of UX, it was ‘if you leave academia and you've got a Psych background, you become a data analyst, that’s what you do’. And that's what I did. Maybe I was suffering from a lack of imagination at that point, but it came across to me as ‘that's THE job that the Psych people get’.
AR: I think UX was a much easier career path to get into, almost to the point where I think there's a lot of misinformation about how easy it was, and I think there's still a lot of misinformation about how easy it is to transition to that career, that's it's the only career that's available for PhDs in the social sciences. And I think it's just because the salaries are really high: I didn't know I could make this much money with a developmental psych PhD. And I think that's why it’s become really well known, but there are tonnes of other career paths that people can consider that aren't UX research. And I think more and more people are doing that because the tech layoffs really just wrecked the field. And hiring has slowed a lot more and it's a lot more competitive to break into than it used to be.
JM: Yes, conversations online seem all about how times have changed… You mentioned that when you went into UX research, you felt like you didn’t have much of an understanding of what that involved. I’m sure you didn’t rock up on the first day asking, ‘so what does a UX researcher do?’, so I'm wondering was there anything specific that you did to prepare for moving into UX research, either before you moved or immediately after the move?
AR: When I first started learning about UX research, when I was still in my PhD program, I did not really look into it that deeply and I didn't really know what a UX researcher did. But when I was going through the interview process for the entry level job that I got, I read books, I listened to podcasts, I followed people on LinkedIn, I read blogs, because, ultimately, if I didn't know anything about UX, I would not have gotten through those interviews. And I think because I actually did prepare pretty substantially for those interviews, which included me giving a presentation that was essentially a UX takedown of a popular app online, I was offered a salary that was higher than what they told me that they were going to be able to give me. They really clearly wanted to hire me because I had done my homework. And so I knew what I was getting into as much as I could without actually having any product development experience. But what was surprising to me is that when I first started my job, the transition wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. It really felt more like I was joining a new research lab where the methods were different, the protocols were different, but at the end of the day it was still research.
The one piece that was missing for me, and that's missing for a lot of PhDs, is knowledge about product development and the product development lifecycle: what does it mean to develop a product from start to finish, what are the steps that you have to go through, how do you make it marketable. And then in my field of medical devices, there's extra processes to follow because we're putting things inside of people, so we need to make sure that they are safe and effective and not going to hurt people, and we have to submit proof of all of this to the FDA or the EU or whatever’s required for the country you want to market these things in. And so that's a whole other regulatory process that we have to go through. I'm currently in the middle of that right now and learning a lot about it. But it is ultimately like a research career which is the thing that I really liked doing in academia.
JM: Sounds like there's been an almost wholesale translation of the research skills there. I'm wondering if there are specific skills or experiences or bits of knowledge that you feel was transferred over really well from that dev psych academic space into UX and now this human factors role?
AR: Just understanding the whole research process is one. I was involved in data collection for a study that I was leading today, and for that study I needed to be able to ask questions and develop a study protocol, for example, what variables are we testing, how are we going to operationalise them, what are our independent and dependent variables, things like that.
And then, after the research process, one thing that I've always really liked doing and that I've been good at is writing, and so I've always been really complimented on that. I think academics tend to be really long winded, and I really don't like it that much. A lot of UX research is presenting findings in a very succinct way because we don't write 40-page papers, we're writing smaller research reports. At Meta we were only doing PowerPoint presentations. So you really need to just be brief and to the point about what you've done and not get lost in the weeds at the methods section.
Public speaking is also something that I end up doing a lot when I am reporting findings or I am talking to people on other teams, so talking to engineers, talking to designers, who don't have a social sciences background. At Meta, I found that I was having to explain statistics quite often - answering questions about graphs and confidence intervals, explaining that these things aren’t statistically significant even though the means are different, and we can't really draw conclusions from these. Things I never thought I’d do, things I didn’t do in academia.
But I’d say research, writing, and public speaking are the main skills I’m drawing on most days.
JM: Yes, I've done a lot of explaining statistics to people in my career too. Particularly having that conversation where I say ‘statistically, these two things are indistinguishable’ and they reply with something like, ‘sure, but could they be different’...
AR: Or ‘this bar is higher than the other bar’, and I have to tell them that doesn't matter…
JM: Yes! Now you’ve mentioned a couple of times already that thing you’re not supposed to talk about, which is money. I think there's a conceit amongst people with academic training, and particularly those working in academia, that you do academic work because it's a vocation. Any consideration of money is profane in some way. I believe you've had some backlash from talking about money?
AR: I have, entirely on Twitter. I shared a tweet that included my salary at Meta, which was about US$160,000. This was over three times as much as I was making as a postdoc and six times as much as I was making as a grad student. And that didn't go well. I don't know that I expected it to go great, but I got a lot of responses defending academic salaries and bashing Meta as a company.
So yeah, I think we don't talk about money a lot. Interestingly, money wasn't even one of the biggest reasons I decided to leave academia. I was doing fine on my US$50,000 a year stipend in the middle of the country, without any kids, without a house payment or student loans or anything like that. But it would be much harder to live on that salary in Seattle, Seattle is extremely expensive. I wish all academics were paid more, because they should be - we're all highly skilled researchers. And especially in the United States, the universities charge a lot in tuition. And I think there really needs to be a big rethink about the value of higher education in the United States - if it should be costing that much and if educators should be paid that little.
JM: I've told this story a million times so people reading this might be like, ‘Yes, Jonathan, we know’, but when I was looking at leaving academia I was reading some forum threads about this topic and one guy had posted about how he’d just found out his partner was pregnant, how he’s really looking for a job with some more stability, and just asking for advice about viable non-academic career paths. And the first response was from someone who just wrote, ‘you obviously never cared about science’.
AR: Yeah. So I never got those comments saying that I wasn’t a scientist anymore, but I did get comments about ‘selling out’. Especially because I was working at Meta. But even when I wasn't working there, I was still making and am still making over US$100,000 a year. And my current job is an associate level position, it’s not even a more senior position, so my income is only going to go up as I advance in my career. It's just something that I don't really talk about, and again, I'm in a privileged position, because I don't have kids and I don't have student loans. But I also don't have a house, I would love to buy a house in Seattle but it's really expensive. And I remember being a grad student here and thinking ‘I'll never be able to buy a house here’ because I don't make any money. But now, I feel like I actually make enough money that at some point in the next few years, I hope that'll be possible for me, and I can get out of the rental market.
JM: Absolutely, fingers crossed! I should say, what I encountered when considering non-academic careers, that was years ago. And at that time, it seemed like no one was talking about it or if they were, it was either in a derogatory way or in very hushed tones. And now, a decade later, it seems like people are still pretty hungry for info and things are somewhat less hushed: you've got something like 60,000 followers on various platforms. Do you think that attitudes towards non-academic careers are changing so it’s becoming more acceptable to talk about? How do you see things happening culturally out there?
AR: I mean two years ago, when I was still a postdoc and about a month away from deciding that I was going to leave academia, I just didn't know anyone who was publicly talking about any of this. And anyone who I did talk to, the conversation was very hushed, like there's a lot of disappointment around it: ‘Oh, I've been a postdoc for five years and I couldn't find a job and now I'm leaving and I'm really sad about it and I didn't want to leave but I can't do this anymore’. There didn't seem to be a lot of people who decided to make this choice and were really happy and talking about it. And so I feel like when I started being that person, especially on LinkedIn - when I started posting on LinkedIn not even a year ago, there weren’t a lot of people in the space and my account blew up, I got 20,000 followers in two months. It was wild. And I have a lot of people reach out to me and thank me for even just talking about it - more than offering any kind of career advice, just normalising that people can be happy outside of academia. But there clearly is still a stigma around it: I post on Twitter (X) and then I post on LinkedIn, I'll post the same content and receive just completely different responses. Twitter is still very much ‘academic Twitter’: I ran a poll there and half of the people who responded said that they're never on LinkedIn. And so whenever I talk about leaving academia there and a post gets really popular, I'm called anti-academic, people have called me obnoxious, I’ve just experienced a lot of bullying and harassment from faculty, from professors. It seems like any discourse talking about the problems in academia or that there are other careers out there… yeah, I find it very weird given that I spent a decade of my life in academia and really wanted to be a professor. But on LinkedIn, it's a much different story. I can give you names of 20 people who are somewhat regularly posting about non-academic careers. I'm definitely one of the more active people for sure. There just aren't enough loud and really prominent voices in the space yet, but I'm hoping that will change as time goes on.
JM: I find it so surprising that people who are in academia would respond so aggressively! In one of our other interviews, we spoke to Dr Mark Williams who left academia after being a tenured professor for 20 years. And we asked him ‘How did you feel when your PhD students left academia?’ And we talked about how academia is a really weird structure where you’re kind of training your competition. Your PhD students matriculate and then they’re going for the same grants as you. So from a purely selfish perspective, it's actually great when they move into non-academic careers because it's one less competing for those grants! But, on a more serious note, he said he just wants to see his students be happy in whatever they do, so it’s hard to understand the mindset.
AR: It is a really weird mindset. I experienced some toxic academic bullying from faculty when I was a postdoc. There was one tenured faculty member who decided that I scooped her research, which I didn't do, and then she was saying unkind things about me behind my back which I found out about later. But of course, she was tenured, so I wondered why it would even matter to her. I think she was upset that I had gotten all this press coverage, but it was just really bizarre and seeing how other professors who I worked with responded to that situation and realising that I really didn't have any support when that was happening. It really highlighted how tenured faculty will never confront one another because there's no incentive for them to do that. So everyone might just stand by while toxic behaviour continues and there's no mechanism to have bad faculty be fired or anything like that. I saw the person who I would have to become to really succeed in academia and I just thought, that doesn't align with my personal values. I'm gonna leave.
JM: Speaking of negativity, you've previously said how the posts of yours that seem to get the most traction are the kind of sad and ironic takes on academia. It’s interesting that these are the ones that get really picked up. I’m wondering what do you think we can do as a community to shift that and get people to sort of see the positives that they've gotten out of undertaking a PhD?
When I started my PhD, I thought that if I have a PhD then I could get any career I want - I'm getting the highest degree that's available, surely I should be set, career-wise, for life. And that's just not true.
AR: A question I get asked a lot is ‘should I even do a PhD?’ And I asked this question on LinkedIn and on Twitter, and people's answers were really interesting - people didn't have great reasons for doing a PhD other than it's your passion and you want to contribute to knowledge. Not anything that was related to helping establish a career in a particular field or anything like that. When I started my PhD, I thought that if I have a PhD then I could get any career I want - I'm getting the highest degree that's available, surely I should be set, career-wise, for life. And that's just not true. When I talk to a lot of PhDs, they are really frustrated. Like ‘I spent six years doing this and now you want me to take an entry level job?!’. And I think probably you’ll get promoted really fast, but that's where we're at. We didn't pick a degree that was as practical as some other degrees are. So I think there are good reasons that people are frustrated with academia.
How can we be more positive? Honestly, I don't know. I do feel pretty jaded with the academic system and how it treats young researchers and women and people who are queer, non-white, or neurodivergent. I experienced a lot of these things, and that's also a reason that I decided to leave. So how can we be more positive? Maybe you’re asking the wrong person! I did have a really good graduate advisor, and that's the number one thing that I tell people: if you're going to do a PhD, you have to make sure that you pick a good supervisor because if you don't like them, you might not finish the program, it doesn't matter how smart you are. It's really the ultimate deciding factor in your experience. I also enjoyed getting to tinker around in a research area for five years and really develop my research skills. Could I have done that in a master's program? Probably. Did I need to suffer as much as I did? Probably not. But here I am. I don't like to believe in regrets or anything.
JM: The ‘should I do a PhD?’ question may actually be the wrong question. It’s like asking ‘should I do a marathon?’ Well, if you're interested in doing a marathon, sure. There might be very good reasons for doing a marathon. But it's not going to help your career. So maybe a PhD falls into that category. I can see some similarities about the length and amount of discomfort that one experiences, but maybe I’m pushing that analogy too far...
Anyway, we spoke about some people who have toxic attitudes toward people seeking non-academic careers. But I think there are also people who find the idea of non-academic careers appealing but aren’t sure what to do next. What do you think are the big information gaps that need to be addressed?
AR: The first one is ‘What do I even do?’ I was talking to someone today who is a math PhD and that's all we talked about for like 30 minutes: he had no idea what career options are out there for him. And we just talked through things he’s interested in, because I think with some degrees, especially degrees in the humanities, like a history PhD, it isn't necessarily clear. I think the people are trying to find the answer to ‘where can I study this thing outside of academia’. But there's probably nowhere in the world where I can do the research I was doing with babies and emotion perception. So the question instead needs to be ‘what marketable skills do you have’ and that's a really big mindset shift. It's really hard for people to wrap their heads around, and that's why people struggle to write resumes - they just go on and on about what they studied, but people don't hire you for that. They're gonna hire you for the skills that you have and how those skills match particular roles. So I think there's a general lack of knowledge about what's out there.
Then, even if people do have a general idea of what's out there, they might think ‘I'll just write a resume, and then send it out to all these job ads’. Usually, the resumes aren't hitting the mark, because we've all been used to writing really long academic CVs that are not at all like what a non-academic resume is. And then there's this misunderstanding of how to network - academics don't network, most academics are not on LinkedIn, have never used LinkedIn. I love LinkedIn, it’s my favourite - I never thought I would say that, I was very, very much a LinkedIn hater for years. But I think there's a lot of misunderstandings about what it means to network and like, how to sell your skills and things like that.
So there are these big knowledge gaps every step of the way in the job search process.
JM: You mentioned you've started working one on one now with people who are looking at making this transition. What sort of issues are people coming to you with - is it things like where to begin and presentation of information?
AR: Yeah, I do one on one meetings and I’ve also started a group coaching program. I built that program based on these issues because for almost two years I talked to a bunch of people for free, so I got a good sense of what people were struggling with. For some people it’s not knowing what to do. A lot of people are wanting someone to look at their resume because I think a lot of people think that's the problem - if they just had their resume correct, then it would work. But actually that's just not the state of the job market right now. And so a lot of what I’m doing is looking at people's resumes. I also look at their LinkedIn profile. Most of the time, it's really not filled out or complete or targeted for whatever career they're looking for. I also see people just applying for everything and not just selecting one career field to target. And then there’s not understanding how to network and the power of networking and how that is really the thing that opens the door for jobs. Networking is the only reason that I got the job that I have now - I got my job from a LinkedIn post that I made: that is how I connected with the hiring manager, that's how they knew that I was looking for work, and that's when he like reached out to me and told me that he had openings on his team. Otherwise I never would have heard of or applied for this job! And then I think there's also mistakes that people make during the interview process. But the biggest problem I'm seeing is like PhDs just not even getting to the interview process.
JM: I've done lots of hiring, I've seen probably many thousands of resumes now, and yes, you can tell the ones that are scattergun. The other thing I see is that no one likes to write a cover letter. People clearly hate them.
AR: I hate them too!
JM: I don't think anyone likes them: I don't like writing a cover letter. And I see comments online of people saying, ‘I refuse to write a cover letter’. But I’ve gotta say, particularly when someone is transitioning from academia into industry, if you’re looking at just the CV or the resume on its own you can have questions about whether the person even knows what they’re applying for. But a good cover letter will explain how the PhD transfers to the role being applied for. I might read that cover letter and, if I could understand the argument, then maybe I'll interview you. I think everyone wants the resume to be perfect. But a cover letter that’s slapped together like ‘Dear Hiring Manager, I'm interested in the job you have advertised. I believe I'm skilled. Please see my CV.’ is going to make me wonder…
AR: I totally agree with that. I don't like cover letters, and I don't think I've even written them for the last two jobs that I’ve had. Meta didn't even have a space to upload them. And I didn't upload one for my current job. But I did when I was transitioning out of academia to explicitly cover what I’ve learned from 10 years of studying babies, I’m really good at dealing with unique research obstacles because of my day-to-day life! Like, have you ever tried getting a 14-month-old to sit still for 10 minutes? It's really hard! Babies are fascinating, but I'm secretly glad I'm not doing that particular kind of research anymore!
JM: I can imagine, I don't think I would be particularly good at that research! To finish up, you write a lot of advice for people seeking non-academic careers, you run group coaching and one on one sessions. What's the number one piece of advice that you'd give to someone who's just started considering this switch, whether that person is nearing the end of a PhD, or end of a postdoc, or just thinking ‘this life doesn't seem right for me’?
AR: Get on LinkedIn. I think there's so much networking that you need to do to transition out of academia, and I feel like when people don't know where to start or what career they’re interested in, then just get on LinkedIn and start messaging people in careers you’re interested in. It’s good to have something in common with a person you’re messaging, so especially look for people with PhDs, from your university, or they’re friends of friends. Just start talking to people and figure out what's out there. You're not going to do that if you're on Twitter or another social media platform, other than LinkedIn. I think if I could go back in time as a PhD student, I would like to be on LinkedIn, networking and building a network so that when the time came for me to apply for jobs, I had people who I could reach out to. Those people I could message and say ‘Hey, I'm looking for a job in this particular field. These are my skills.’ That's a lot better than just making a resume and applying to a bunch of places. I also really tell people to post on LinkedIn. Very few people listen to me, but like it’s a really great personal branding platform - I'm a really big believer that if you invest a lot of time in networking and giving to your network, which is what I do every day, I think that if for some reason I were ever laid off, I could just make a post and I think, of the 35,000 people who follow me, someone will know someone who can you maybe have a lead for me. I've invested a lot in the platform for my career, and it's opened a lot of doors for me, so that's my big suggestion.
And with that we thank Ashley for such a candid and in-depth interview, and for the work she’s doing to promote the value of non-academic careers. We agree that there needs to be more people out there fighting the good fight!
If you’re not on LinkedIn already, jump on and give us all a follow - Ashley, Sam, Jonathan, Sequitur. Hopefully we’ll see you take some of Ashley’s advice and start posting on there too. And if you are a PhD who has moved beyond academia and you are interested in sharing your story, please get in touch - we’d love to hear from you.
Interviews have been edited for length and clarity. Views, thoughts, and opinions expressed by persons interviewed in this series are solely that of the persons interviewed and do not reflect the views, opinions, or position of Sam, Jonathan or Sequitur Consulting.