STEM PhD holders working outside academia: the role of social support in career transition
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper explores the role of social support in career transition experiences among science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) PhD holders working outside academia. Inter-country interview data were collected from PhD graduates from the UK (n = 10), Spain (n = 10) and Finland (n = 10) in 2022. Though the results varied somewhat by individual, they show that both engaging and disengaging experiences were socially embedded. Receiving instrumental support, e.g. time or funding, was a key factor in engaging transition experiences and the lack of it in the disengaging ones. Job stability, work-life relationships, personal values, the work environment, work-task fit, and finances contributed to the engaging and disengaging transition experiences across the countries. This paper is one of the first qualitative studies focusing on STEM PhD holders’ social support and (dis)engaging transition experiences to a career beyond academia in a cross-national setting. The findings help to understand better STEM PhD holders’ experiences beyond academia. The results can be used in doctoral education and PhD careers’ development.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it