Stories from Beyond Academia #21: Susi Seibt
PhD in Chemistry
We’ve all heard plenty of stories about how openness to experiences, taking chances, and being ‘in the right place at the right time’ can lead to all sorts of wonderful opportunities across the course of a career.
Of course, ‘luck’ is nowhere near the whole story: skills and experience (like from a PhD, say!), and being able to talk about them in a compelling way, are generally a precursor for getting to that ‘right place’, and are certainly necessary for capitalising on any such chances that materialise.
In this Story from Beyond Academia, we talk to Dr Susi Seibt – an industry-based Research Scientist, Radio co-host, Youtuber (you can find her on TikTok too) and Superstar of STEM. And her story is truly an example of how, with a solid foundation of skills and experience, being open to opportunities and taking chances can lead you to incredible places.
Susi’s PhD is in Chemistry, and even her that has a fun story with her being the first person to complete a joint PhD between the University of Melbourne (Australia) and Bayreuth University (Germany). We talk about her career journey so far, and how this world-first PhD experience led to a job, how differing practices between Australia and Germany in using million-dollar Synchotron equipment led to a job, and with her experiences across all sectors, we discuss the benefits and challenges that exist across academic roles, professional roles within the university sector, government roles, and roles in industry.
We also hear about how a hunt for hiking toothpaste turned Susi into a Youtuber, with her content creation strategy based on scientific curiosity across all manner of everyday things, and how she brings her authentic self and carries her passion for science into both her day job and her Youtube channel.
Jonathan McGuire: Welcome Susi, and thanks so much for taking the time today to talk about your post-PhD career path and the work you're doing with Shelium. I want to start this chat back at your PhD because you've got a pretty cool story, with you being the first person to complete a joint PhD between University of Melbourne and, I’ll probably get the pronunciation wrong here, Bayreuth University [Editor’s note: Jonathan absolutely butchered the pronunciation, like Beirut but with an H on the end].
Susi Seibt: So close. No, not even - it's called Bayreuth not Beirut, which is in Lebanon.
JM: I had that so wrong. Wow.
SS: That's all right, it's very German. You're not the first and you won't be the last.
It's in a lovely little town in Bavaria in Germany. It's very famous for people who love classical music because it's the home and birthplace of Richard Wagner, who did a lot of famous operas. He’s also famous because Hitler was a very big fan of him, but we're not gonna talk about that.
I didn’t actually plan to do a joint PhD - it's a fun little story and I guess the question always is ‘how did you become the first?’ If I'm honest it was entirely by accident, although it might have been a grand plan of my supervisor in the background. I did a Bachelor of Science and a Masters of Polymer Science at the University of Bayreuth but I didn't plan ahead because I was just caught up in the moment enjoying life as a student without scholarship and fees and things.
So at the time the supervisor of my Master's thesis came and asked me if I had plans for after my Masters and I said no and he said “That's good because I have a PhD position for you.” In Germany you get paid to be a PhD student, it's the equivalent of the Australian scholarship, but you get paid to run lab courses and whatnot. And so, do your PhD in your ‘free time’. So yeah, he was like, “I have a position for you and do you want to do it?” and I thought more of the same, that sounds good. So I became a PhD student.
I always wanted to go to Australia and I had the offer to do it during my masters as an exchange semester but I couldn't afford it. So during my PhD my supervisor had a whole bunch of scholarships and said that if anyone wanted to do an overseas trip for a visiting research assignment, to let him know and I'm like “Here, here! I want to go!” So I came to Melbourne for three months.
What he didn't tell me at the time was that he was coming to Melbourne to sign a memorandum of understanding to set up these joint PhDs and a program that he was spearheading. Him and my host in Melbourne were plotting in the background so he was here and I had a meeting with him and he's like, “It seems to be going well and your topic is aligning nicely,” and I'm like “Yeah, it's a great time,” and he's like, “Right, so what if you could come back?”
JM: You got scammed into an incredible experience!
SS: It's like this devil scenario where you sign your soul away without knowing, and then afterwards it hits you. But when it's 35 degrees out and you're sitting over dinner with a glass of red wine, you don't think of the negatives. So yeah, that's how it started.
It was an experience! At the bottom line it was incredible, but it did have its challenges. Being the first in any University-related program is a nightmare, in part because joint PhDs are basically in fulfilment of PhD regulations at both places, so I had to enrol in both unis, I had to follow the guidelines that they have in Germany and the Australian system. Even though I was almost a year into my PhD I had to do all the requirements like language tests and qualification to prove that I was worthy of being a PhD student. I'm eternally grateful for both of my supervisors that did a really good job guiding me through this maze of university systems. In the end, though, it was a great experience - I got to spend a year in Australia, I got to be part of two research groups, I got to do a lot of really cool experiments and access a lot of really different and great state of the art facilities. There were many positives to it including learning how Melbourne is as a place to live and deciding to stay here, but it had its challenges too. So, if people see the flashy side you have to be realistic about it, but I do highly recommend it for the adventurous people out there.
JM: I'm a little jealous, it sounds really cool. What were you researching during your PhD?
SS: I did a PhD in physical chemistry, and I was looking at the mechanism and the kinetics of particle growth and assembly. The biggest example is probably semiconductor quantum dots, nanoparticles that are made of semiconductor materials and everyone nowadays knows these because they're in our QLED TVs. These are the things that make LEDs so insanely bright and they have intrinsic properties that mean that the size of these particles defines the colour that they give out when they're excited by light. If you shine a light on them and they're small then they're blue coloured and the bigger they grow they go through the whole spectrum all the way to red which is really lovely because you can tune the size by the reaction and therefore you can tune this spectrum and the colour that they bring and they're insanely bright.
If you think about the typical chemists you have your beakers and you pour A into B and then poof, a reaction happens with explosions and smoke everywhere. These reactions are often really fast and that means it's not very controlled, like in a car when you go really fast you feel like you have less control, the littlest movement steers your car off the road. It’s the same with these reactions, if there’s a slight imperfection in the glass or it's not perfectly clean it can ruin your whole reaction.
You can tune reactions to tune the size and therefore the colour, so I developed a system where you really slow the reaction down, it's called microfluidics. Basically you let the reaction happen in channels that are the size of a human hair, a few microns wide. While the same physical laws of the natural world apply they make very different scenarios on that scale - reactions are not driven by turbulent mixing, they are driven by diffusion and that slows them down, which means you can transfer really fast timescale into a distance scale along a device which is amazing because that means you can basically stop your reaction in time.
I did that to investigate what tunable characters of the synthesis influence in the outcome at the end. It was quite challenging but also very, very interesting and opened the doors for a lot of things for me.
JM: That sounds fascinating, completely out of my realm of expertise.
SS: Yeah, many people say that. It's hard because if you talk to scientists in Australia, a lot of PhDs are very application driven. And I mean it has its applications, yes, but I did physical chemistry and physical chemistry has a lot of fundamental science at its core. And fundamental science is something that Australians don't do that much, which is really sad because it is often the gateway into so many really good applications and so many things you learn that make your life so much easier. But yeah, I feel like it's sometimes a bit undervalued, so I'm always happy to chat about my humble beginnings.
JM: I remember back when I was in academia, I was doing cognitive science and I was doing stuff that had no real world application. And all the grants applications, you have to explain how this is going to be broadly applicable. I'm like, ‘there is no application; just give me grant money, please.’
SS: This is literally how it feels, right? There's always, “What benefit does this have for the Australian economy?” And you're like, absolutely nothing.
JM: Yeah, nothing. It might actually make things worse.
SS: So true.
JM: So after the PhD, you stayed in the uni sector for a while, and if I'm correct, you did both some professional side and some academic side work, is that right?
SS: Yeah. So I had to go back for a while at the end of my PhD because with all the regulations I had to submit it in Germany and Germany is in some ways a little bit backwards. You have to submit your printed PhD thesis in person and sign it in front of the admin person that you submitted to, just so be sure that it's really you. It's ridiculous. So I had to go back and do that.
JM: In Australia, I remember I handed mine in and then went back to work. Such an underwhelming experience.
SS: I know. When I did it for the Uni of Melbourne, you just had to upload it online and just click a button to say submit. And it's just like a scrolly wheel that lets you wait until your thesis is submitted and you just sit there, right? Anyway.
JM: They should send someone around with a bottle of champagne or something.
SS: I know. It's really underwhelming. It's so anticlimactic. Maybe the German system is better in that regard because someone actually receives it.
But anyway, so I had to do that. And at the time, because I was the first joint PhD student, this whole program was supported by the international office of my German uni because it's quite prestigious to say you get joint PhDs with foreign unis, especially in science. It's quite a common thing in law apparently, and economics, but not so much in science. They tried to foster this a little so at the time they made the strategic decision to open a gateway office in Melbourne, and they were looking for someone to manage it. And because I'd literally just come through the whole system and knew all the quirks of the admin systems on both sides, the international office asked me if I would like to manage this for a while.
I had nothing lined up because I didn't plan ahead that far. I was like, I’ll move to Melbourne and see what happens. And so I was happy to do that for a while. I started as a manager of that office to foster more international relations and enable more joint PhD students in that program, but also setting up others. It was quite cross-disciplinary, very, very interactive and international because on the Australian side, it was basically managing interactions of that specific German uni with the whole APAC region. I also had a colleague that was sitting in Shanghai and we were working together on that. It was a quite good experience to see how to foster international collaborations and how to set them up.
It was quite good to have someone that just came through the joint PhD system and knew about aligning uni systems, but at the end of it, I felt a bit lost and I was missing the science a lot. It was a bit of a harsh withdrawal coming from a full-on lab-based PhD to full-on management. Also, to be very honest about this, there seemed to be a lot of misogyny in those scenarios and in those roles. So it was very sad for me to come from very diverse and very open-minded research groups who were very internationally set up and then come into these admin roles, and most of the people treated me like a secretary, and most of the people were shocked that somebody who looked like me and is my age and my gender has a PhD in science and then does this.
I was just a bit taken aback by that. And that's super disappointing. But it also kind of gives you a bit of a peek behind the curtain of universities in a way, which it teaches you a lesson one way or the other. I'd say it definitely taught me that I am not satisfied with the status quo in a lot of things, and that's probably also why I decided to leave that role because I also am very vocal about these things. So yeah, I didn't always make the greatest impression on people who thought that I should behave a certain way and I did not. So that's sad, but anyway.
JM: Well-behaved women rarely make history.
SS: Yeah, pretty much. It is what it is, sadly. But at some point, the science was missing for me, that's the truth. And having that situation made me feel very patronised and not taken seriously even though I have a PhD in science, so I felt the urge to go back to, I don't know, I guess a comfort zone in a way.
But also if you have just spent all of your time in a lab and then writing a thesis about all your amazing lab work, it's just a really harsh change of scenery to then sit a desk and have a lot of international conversations about how to set up certain double degrees and joint degrees and how to facilitate more interactions. So I kind of wanted to be the person doing the science and not just talking about the science. And so I got a position back in academia as a postdoc at RMIT at that point, and then working at RMIT for a year in full-on academia, which was actually a quite good experience. The people there were very friendly and very open. And that was also a complete change of background for me because I came from hardcore chemistry and I went into hardcore engineering, which is, it's a difference. But yeah, that was quite interesting.
JM: So it was from the RMIT postdoc that you then went into government?
SS: Yes, I always joke a little bit about how my career path went, because I always say I phased myself out of academia slowly. I went from a postdoc, hardcore academic system with grants and all, to government, still very much on the academic side but more in a facilitating role I guess. And then from there into hardcore industry, which is not academia and the complete opposite of the scale. But yeah, I was gentle to myself and did it in phases.
…I phased myself out of academia slowly. I went from a postdoc, hardcore academic … to government, still very much on the academic side but more in a facilitating role … into hardcore industry, which is not academia and the complete opposite of the scale.
I was at RMIT for a year before I got headhunted for the position at the synchrotron. Doing a PhD in physical chemistry meant that, as I said before, I got to use an incredible spread of national and international facilities, one of them being the international synchrotron.
My supervisor in Germany was an expert in a technique called small angle X-ray scattering, which is similar to how you can imagine your X-rays taken at the doctors, except we are not taking images, we are taking the signal of photons hitting a detector, and then you can interpret this to get information about your sample. So I used to work on a lot of proposals for the synchrotron in Germany -the DESY in Hamburg, and we used to go there as a team very often.
Then because I was in Australia, I couldn't participate in those trips anymore. But the research and the data that you collect there was vital for my PhD so my supervisor here got me to apply for beamtime at the synchrotron here. It’s a funny story because that is the classic example of how international research opens doors for you, because the German synchrotron operates in a very different way than the Australian one.
In Australia, you have a team that's in charge of keeping the instrument running and helping you: setting your experiment up and then facilitating your research and troubleshooting with you and whatnot. But Germany was very hands off in that regard. So they taught us how to use everything - every motor, they taught us how to move them, how to set it up, how to change setups.
We have photos of us holding these million-dollar detectors up on a crane at 3:00 AM and being like, ‘don't drop it, don't drop it’. It's terrifying. But also, you lose respect for money very quickly at these places. So they teach you very hands-on, and then in Australia I came with that experience and was like, okay, I need to prepare and do this.
But the Australian beamline team just did everything for you. They're like, all right, you go grab a coffee, we’ll call you when your set up is done and ready and you can just put your sample in. And I was like, what? It's like I don't need to do anything. And so they're incredibly efficient at this as well. So I was discussing with them how I want it set up and if we can move detectors and how to code our own little motor in or whatever. And they were so impressed that I brought such a huge background of knowledge that they offered me a position when it became available and headhunted me from that position in academia. So yeah, that was my way out of academia into a national lab facility where I stayed for about three years.
JM: That sounds like a very smooth transition, actually. Did you do anything to prep for that change or did you just go, ’alright, well I'm going to turn up on the Monday and see what happens’.
SS: It was a fairly smooth transition, mainly because I knew the team really well. In all honesty, that was my dream job in my dream team and it couldn't have come at a better time. I was elated that I was able to work in this team at this facility at the time and just really soak up the knowledge and everything. So it was fairly smooth. And I guess when you have met your team before and you've met the people, then starting on the Monday is not that much of a challenge. It's not that anxiety-invoking, I guess. Obviously because they headhunted me, I had a much-reduced recruitment process, so it wasn't as jarring, being all awkward and having to tell them my life story even though they already knew it.
So it was quite nice to do that. But I guess it's always different to leave academia and start somewhere else. Academia has a lot of freedoms, but also challenges. It's a bit like you make your own career in a lot of ways. If you work hard, you get the reward because you can get better collaborations, you can get the papers out. It's a bit like you are self-dependent - it's the same as self-employment in a way. I guess if you work, you work, if you don't work for it, you don't work for it. Whereas when you leave - suddenly I wasn't doing my own research anymore, I could have been interested in topics and I wouldn't pursue them because all of my time was supporting other people's research.
So you have to get on board with other people's ideas and other people's experiments and you can suggest to them to do it differently, but they don't have to listen to you. And in the worst-case scenario, they do whatever they want and break the instrument and then you get called in the middle of the night and have to fix it. So there were also a lot of taxing elements to this job, even though I loved it. But you feel somewhat personally responsible for other people's success - it takes a certain type of person to be okay in that role. It was a definite challenge to adjust to that kind of scenario, to not be your own driver of your own research, but just be on the sidelines facilitating other people's research, but then be held responsible that everything works smoothly for them, which is a bit of a mind-fuck really, because sometimes it is just out of your control.
JM: I think that's the thing. We talk to a lot of people who are considering moving out of academia, and they say “But what if it's boring? At least here I get to pursue stuff that I find intrinsically interesting,” And the answer is like, well, sometimes, probably it will be.
SS: I don't think so. I think there's a lot of jobs out there that offer a great sense of security without being boring. It really depends on which job you choose and your team as well. All credit to my incredible team that I had in that role at the synchrotron. They were amazing in facilitating anything you wanted to do. If you wanted to experiment with a new setup or a new technique or make anything better, it was all ‘go for it’. There was no holding back at any point in time. So that was definitely not boring. No day was ever boring.
JM: So you stuck around there, I think you said three years?
SS: Yes, yes. It was a transition that wasn't a hundred percent planned that way. Unfortunately at the time when I was at the synchrotron, they underwent a structural change in how the whole management and team structure was set up. And in my team it led to a lot of friction. And it came to the point where my life was impacted by that because the job takes a lot out of you. We were dedicated to delivering the best possible outcome for our researchers, which means that you take yourself and everything that comes with it, your life, your time on the backseat. So you have a lot of long days. You have on-call time at night, you work on the weekends because it's a 24/7 operation.
And so the structural changes that happened at the synchrotron at the time led to a lot of friction in the team with the management that was put in place, which led to a lot of my colleagues leaving, which led to the workload on me and my colleague that remained increasing and increasing. And it came to the point where we were overworked, understaffed, and generally also not treated very well for it. And just, again, a lot of it comes down to perception, but if you dedicate your time and your life to this, and I'm talking like 12, 14 hour days, six, seven days a week, and it's just become so taxing and then feeling like you are also targeted in a way and perceived as a threat when you try to do really good work was something that I personally just didn't agree with that well.
And so the values that were portrayed to me just didn't agree with the ones I held and also not the ones that I imagined this job to hold. And as I said before, I can never settle down for a status quo when it goes against what I believe it should be or if it should be better. And so I can't sit still and hold my tongue. It's not me. I wear my heart on my sleeve. Everyone who knows me knows this. I'm opinionated and I voice it. And so that also caused a lot of friction because I'm not a person to hold back on a lot of things.
But it became difficult because it was still in a way, a little bit like academia where your direct hierarchical line was very much influencing where you went with your career. And so the moment that you said something that was not well perceived, it could have dire consequences on your performance review. So I made the decision to leave that place and find another job.
It was still a research position. It was outside of my, well, it was in a Venn diagram with my area of expertise - I work in biotech now. So for a physical chemist, that is a component that I had not touched very much. I started studying biochemistry, but that was as far as that went, a few lab courses in my undergrad. And so that was interesting. And again, never boring. So I am a person who is constantly learning and very happy to learn and broaden my horizon and try to find new applications for the knowledge I already have. So that was so interesting to me because it was, as I said, an overlap with my already established expertise, but then something new in an environment where your job is secure, you get a pay increase, and you're just in a big company that offers a sense of security to it. That was a sweet deal.
The other thing, and this is a driver in life that I think a lot of people underestimate, it was closer to home in the literal sense. I live in the west of Melbourne, and so driving out to the synchrotron was a 1 hour and 20 or 30 minute car journey each way every day. Doing that after so many hours of work, it becomes almost unsafe. I had moments where I had to call my husband on the way home because I was so tired. I was like, I need to talk to you to stay awake, to focus so I can drive home safely even though the roads are empty.
Now, I have 20 minutes cycling each way to work. I have not used my car to go to work once since I switched one and a half years ago. And that is the greatest thing for me because I hate using the car to go to work. I always cycled to work and to uni and to school or took public transport. So having that freedom and having the commute and the open air and with a bit of physical exercise is the greatest benefit of the job switch apart from having a secure position in a company that's secure on the market.
JM: I think one of the things you've touched on there for me is that people really worry about whether the work is going to be interesting, but some of the things that really drive how happy people are in their job are things like do you have a supportive manager? What's the work culture? The logistics of things? I used to have a job that was an hour and a half each way. You finish late and you're like, great, I'm not going to get home until midnight.
SS: You don't even realise how messed up it is until you are not in it anymore. That was just normal for me for a long time. And it's hilarious because my partner used to work at CSIRO while I was at RMIT, so it was like the opposite commute while I was cycling to work, he took the car and then I used to go to the synchrotron and he worked in the city, so he used to cycle it. I took the car and I hated the drive. And I'm German, I live in cars. I don't mind driving, but commuting is just such a big part of your day. It loses you two to three hours. And people are like, oh, you can listen to podcasts or music or whatever. It's stressful. It's just stressful. You cannot relax. Your heart rate is always up. It's literally physically taxing.
I remember the first week I was at my new workplace, and I had a bit of a longer day because we did the first big experiment in the lab and it was all new to me, so it all takes a little bit longer. And I came out of the lab at 6:00 PM. Mind you, in industry, that's a rare occurrence that you have a longer than eight-hour workday. And then I came out of the lab at 6:00 PM and I was like, oh God, I have to go home now. My whole evening is gone. I was home at 6:20 and I was like, what am I going to do with all of this time? I took my dog to the park for an hour because I didn't know what to do.
JM: Well, if no one else is happy about the new job, your dog probably is.
SS: It shows you how messed up you get to normalise an hour plus commute, that it's just the moment that you don't have this anymore, you're just like, what is going on? I have all this time on my hands.
JM: And with that I’ll segue to a different track, which is what you're doing with some of that spare time. I'd like to talk about your YouTube and TikTok channel Shelium, and also you've been selected as a Superstar of STEM. Was the Superstar of STEM thing because of Shelium or was it your work elsewhere? Can you tell us about those two things?
SS: Oh, that's a good question. It's the chicken and egg, right? YouTube came first. YouTube is my little COVID baby, I guess. Everyone developed something during COVID lockdowns in Melbourne. Some of us have an alcohol problem now, and some of us have a YouTube problem.
It came out of COVID lockdowns, although I didn't think about becoming an influencer. That wasn't my mindset. But in-between lockdowns, there were points in time, even though people barely remember them, where we had freedom and could do things. And one of the things was going out in nature, which I love and so does my husband. And so we do a lot of camping and through-hiking where you carry all your stuff. You carry everything in and out, so you can't leave your rubbish behind because we are kind to nature and leave nothing but footsteps. But one of the most annoying things is toothpaste. It's just a pet peeve of mine that I always have to carry these massive ass toothpaste tubes, and they always squeeze out in the bag and everything is covered in just white paste that just looks disgusting, like a bird pooped into your pack.
And so I was like, can we not buy a little tiny glass jar with some of these toothpaste tablets that you just chew and then you can brush your teeth and there's like no waste to it? That would be so great. We tried to find them in all of Melbourne's eco stores that you can find in the most hipster suburbs. And none of them have fluoride in them, none of them. And if you ask some of the people that work there, if they have these tabs with fluoride, you go down a rabbit hole of conversation. In the beginning I was very amused by this, and eventually I just became more and more annoyed because the science behind this is really clear. And so I got this whole spiel about how fluoride works and why we should have fluoride in our toothpaste. And no, it doesn't kill us. And no, it's not in the water in Australia. Eventually I was like, I should just make a video of this so I can be like, “Can you just watch this? Look, I have animations and things.” So that's how my channel was born. I wrote a script and put all the science in.
Everything is backed by literature. I do a proper literature search, look into papers, put in references, but it's kid-friendly and it's very entertaining. I keep it very light-hearted to keep people engaged and just tackle topics of everyday life. Some are deeper, some are more entertaining. I have friends who have asked me about topics that I took and made a video about, I’ve had comments left on my videos that I take up and make videos about if they're interesting. I have some new ones come up that are a bit more on the pulse of things. So yeah, there will definitely be more.
It's born from a point of frustration, maybe as much as love, because for me it's like I love science. Science is everywhere. And I became a chemist because I was fascinated by the fact that everything you see is made up of something that you can artificially make - the air that we breathe, the sky, the things on your desk, like the pencil in your hand, your glasses, anything is made of stuff, and you can make it from building blocks of atoms. How incredible is this? And even just water, this tiny molecule shouldn't behave the way it is, but because it has this kink in it, it just does the most incredible things and it keeps us alive. And it's just so incredible where I'm like, how can people not be fascinated by this?
But then also with science comes a mindset of questioning things. Why is the grass green? Why is the sky blue? Why is our laptop screen so bright and our phone screen sometimes cracked? Why does our battery overheat and how does charging work? Why does our beer in the glass have bubbles? Why do we burp? Why do we yawn? All of these things where I'm just like, there's so much, and I don't understand how people cannot ask these questions. And I do understand if people ask the questions that it's sometimes really hard to get the answers. So I feel like I'm just sharing the love with everybody. That's my goal.
JM: I love how passionate your voice got when you were talking about that. I can feel it. I feel energised by how psyched you are about that. And yes, if more people were curious about the world than you would hopefully have fewer people saying weird things about fluoride being a mind-control drug.
SS: Pretty much. But it goes beyond this, right? Because if people would be more curious about the world, there would be a lot better conversations happening. And genuinely, I think we would question a lot more things. And again, this is a mindset, and I always called it a tool set, and I stole this from Carl Sagan, one of the greatest science communicators ever, but he wrote a book, The Demon-haunted World - Science as a Candle in the Dark, which I highly recommend to everybody. In that book he describes a baloney detection toolkit, which I think science is, and he thinks the same.
So he has these tools that you get when you have, I don't want to say a scientist mindset because everyone can have it, but there's this moment when you question things and then you question another thing, and then you question all of the things, and then you try and find the answer. And you question the science too and see that science always gets better and changes its mind because you get more data and therefore you have more information and can come to different conclusions. And it's a thing of beauty really, to see people find this in their life and to realise that they can be part of this. There's no wall, no red tape, everyone can do it. Everyone should be doing this.
JM: I've heard people exclaim with frustration that scientists keep changing their minds. I'm like, “That's the point.”
SS: That is the best thing ever.
JM: That's a feature, not a bug.
SS: If people can admit when they change their mind, and that this is something that not many people do, I regard this as the highest value in somebody. When someone says, “Actually, you're right. I see your point. Thanks for pointing this out and making this so clear.” This is, for me, the biggest win, when someone changes their mind based on a solid piece of data and evidence, this is the greatest thing because this is how science works. You see new data, you can change your mind. This is the greatest thing.
JM: When I'm listening to you talk, I can absolutely see why you're a superstar of STEM because I can see how passionate you are about it and how much it seems to be part of your core values. So it's why you're a superstar, but how did that come about?
SS: I had a former colleague of mine who was a Superstar of STEM. We worked together and she's like, “Oh, you should totally apply for this. You would be great, I reckon.” It's a very competitive program. There’s an expression of interest, you send in a video and answer questions that are quite tricky. And if you make it through the first round, you get to two interview rounds before you get selected. It's very highly regarded if you get in.
And at the time, I wasn't eligible because I was on a post-graduate visa and didn't have permanent residency or citizenship yet. When I became eligible, I had two colleagues who were in the previous cohort messaging me like mad that I should apply. Unfortunately, though, I was overseas and did not see any of this, and I came back from my overseas trip the day before the application round closed, and they were like, ‘did you apply?’ And I'm like, ‘whoa, what are we even talking about?’ So I scrambled in an application in about six hours. It's quite the process. I just submitted it and was like, “If it's supposed to happen, it's supposed to happen.”
It's a program that enables you to have better communication skills, better outreach skills, better media, social media presence, and how to hone down your message, convey your passion in different forms of outreach. So in print media, in social media, in tv, radio form, whatever. I think they often select people that already have the toes dipped into some form of it. So if you do a lot of engagement through your uni or your group or your work, or you have a YouTube channel, you have a TikTok.
It's one of the greatest experiences I have had in my whole life because we are a cohort of 60 females and non-binary people and all of us are absolutely fantastic, and I'm very humble in this. I'm probably the least fantastic of all of them. And I look at all of these women and non-binary people, and I'm just like, ‘how lucky am I to be in your presence and be part of this cohort?’ And then we have group chats and we have meetings and catch-ups and workshops and whatnot, and anyone writes a message of accomplishment like I've got a grant or I've got this award. Or I’ve had a really bad day, I just experienced the most misogynistic comment, my manager sucks. And 59 other people come to your support as selflessly as anything.
I think generally people are so eager to tear other people down, and then you have this group of 60 people that does nothing but lift each other up. It's the greatest experience ever. I don't know, we are just all little sisters on a school trip. Every time we meet, there's giggling and we are all excited and we plan every time we see each other and we come to one place, we extend our stay so we can spend more time with each other. It's absolutely ridiculous. And it's just so great. Sometimes it's like my beacon of hope that this is how the world can be. There are people who have all the same passion for science and their little pocket of expertise. We all have very different backgrounds and they come together and something so great can come from it. And there's nobody cutting anyone down. There's nobody tearing anybody's greatness down. It's amazing.
JM: That sounds fantastic, and so supportive. I'd like to take a bit of a step back now: from your academic work transitioning through government into industry, I can see a thread of the technical skills that are carrying across. I'm wondering, beyond knowing how to do specific things and that very technical side of things, are there any other skills or knowledge or experiences that you think carried over from the academic world into the government and industry world for you?
SS: I'm never sure what to define as a skill, but I think one of the things that I carry with me through everything is that the best course of action for me was always to be myself, really authentically myself and also have comfort in the fact that I know what I know and just can learn a lot. This is the thing that people, they search for jobs, particularly females, where they think they need to fulfil all the criteria. I went from hardcore physical chemistry to mechanical engineering, then into a beamline scientist role, now into biotech. You grow into your role, you learn on the way, and you will find that a lot of people that are around you in jobs also don't know everything.
Everyone is on their path of learning. I think the biggest skill coming from academia is probably how you approach this. There is a skill to how you approach new topics, how you learn how to be comfortable in your knowledge and admitting that you don't know everything. But then you ask and you often find that other people also don't know and you all are for the better for it.
Everyone is on their path of learning. I think the biggest skill coming from academia is probably how you approach this. There is a skill to how you approach new topics, how you learn how to be comfortable in your knowledge and admitting that you don't know everything.
I'm myself in interviews if I don't know things and they ask. I had interviews where they're like, ‘so what do you know about this?’ And I said, ‘nothing. I don't know. I'm happy to learn it and I have never done it before, but that's also a good challenge.’ I wouldn't apply for a job where I wouldn't be happy to learn certain aspects. Like now I work in biotech. I don't know much about biological pathways. You learn. I learned them too. If you have a PhD, you should be more than able to do that in a fairly short amount of time, which everyone is. So that's that. But yeah, I think that's probably one of the biggest takeaways.
JM: I've done a lot of interviewing of people for roles and it's much better to get a response of, “I don't know that, but here's how I’d go about learning it.” You can tell when someone's pretending to know something.
SS: A hundred percent. This whole “fake it till you make it” really does not fly well in life. I have not seen anybody be really successful with this because being authentic brings you so much more trust from people and you have much better connections at work. I have so many really good connections with all of my former colleagues and my current ones. For me, having good peer rapport is really important because these are the people you spend most of your time with. You really want to connect with them. And I think being authentic and being yourself - that is something that I think benefits a lot of people, mostly yourself.
JM: And also I'd say it's much less stressful.
SS: Oh my God, yes. Imagine.
JM: Having to pretend to know stuff that you don't or that you enjoy something that you find tedious. That's just a lot of extra work.
SS: It is.
JM: So as we wrap up, is there any final advice you'd like to give to anyone who's considering moving out of academia into government or industry?
SS: Advice that I would've given myself as a younger person is to be better at networking. And I don't mean showing up alone on random morning teas with people that are twice your age and not interested because they already have all of their networking done for their life. But really, if you are interested, say you are in academia and you think about moving into industry, government, I don't know, research organisations, non-for-profit, find the people that are in jobs that you think you might like to do. If you find a job application online and you think that, I don't know, let's say a sales manager is the role of your life. Find someone, connect with them, invite them for a coffee and ask them questions. One thing I have learned way too late in my life is that people like to talk about themselves as I did for the last hour, but everyone, in Melbourne particularly, is happy to go out for coffee because we love coffee and to talk about their role and their life and their skillsets and how their daily life looks.
Ask them questions: How is your life? How are your work hours? How much travelling do you have to do? Does it pay well? I went into a lot of my roles not knowing what to expect on the other side, and I probably would've been better off if I would've known. Having said that, I got insanely lucky in all of the positions I’ve had and worked with really, really great people. Again, I was always my authentic self. Maybe that spoke for me and made it a good fit for a team, but I think that is something that people don't do often enough.
I give talks and presentations for career days to schools. And we have school people, kids from schools visiting for work experiences at my workplace. And I always say to them, if you ever have questions, just find me on LinkedIn or on YouTube or whatever and shoot me a message and we can have a bit of a conversation and I’ll tell you all about my science or research or my job, whatever it is, and you can ask me all the questions and I tell you all about it because that's not a secret.
JM: I think that's great advice. I've done that in the past and walked away from those conversations going, I won't be pursuing that career. It's a really good way to get to know what it's really like.
SS: And the nicest thing about this is it's like a win-win in a way. Because whether that job is for you or not, you’ve made a connection that can refer you if there's positions coming up in the future. So the worst thing that could happen is that you had a coffee with someone who's probably a good connection in the future anyway. Because nowadays, especially in countries like Australia where some of the fields are very small and everybody knows each other, it's very, very good to know a lot of people in a lot of different fields. You never know how that connection might be valuable in the future. So I think I did not do that for a long time and I really regretted it. So I give that advice to everybody.
JM: Excellent. And I'd add on to that: you should pay for the coffee if someone's giving you the advice!
SS: Yes. I usually pay for coffee. I’ve got a lot of good coffee chats out of this advice!
And with that, we thank Susi for sharing her career story and her insights on working in the various sectors - academia, professional roles within the university sector, government and industry.
Not to mention her take on what to consider when thinking about the next step in any career journey - and how we always have more to learn, and that’s nothing to be afraid of!
If you are a PhD who has moved beyond academia and you are interested in sharing your story, please get in touch with us via our LinkedIn pages - Sequitur Consulting, Sam, Jonathan - 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.