Our guest Steve Osazuwa helps us answer the PhD question (namely, should you do one?). Since we both have PhDs, we are bringing on our friend Steve who has been successful in bioinformatics without a PhD to add his perspectives.

Topics:

* How Steve ended up in bioinformatics.

* Starting a PhD after working in industry.

* What Steve's barber thinks about his colleagues' advice.

* Would we do a PhD again?

* The opportunity cost of doing a PhD instead of going directly to industry.

Inspired by opinions seen on Twitter, we discuss whether people should stay much more than 1 year per company to avoid being judged by future employers as a job-hopper, and whether companies should be discriminating this way.

Topics:

* Benefits of job hopping, early versus late in your career.

* A debatable statement by chatGPT.

* Is it ethically okay? disloyal? greedy?

* Being loyal to a corporate entity that may have no feelings for you.

* How can employers/teams deal with the reality of short stints.

* The bus/lottery factor.

* But isn't this different for biotech than tech?

Accepting that we're all imposters in bioinformatics, we tell stories from our own careers.

Topics:

* Robert's grad school experience in a biology program coming from a computer engineering background.

* Maria's experience interviewing at grad schools.

* "You can't just go around being like, I'm an idiot. Even if you feel like an idiot, that's just not helpful."

We discuss our experiences with unofficial industry sabbaticals, aka taking time between jobs for our own projects.

Topics:

* Funemployment versus sabbatical

* Robert's 2021 sabbatical building sandbox.bio learning platform and 42basepairs genomics cloud platform

* Maria's 2017 OMGenomics entrepreneurship experience, building Circa visualization software and a YouTube channel

* Sabbatical projects helping you get the next job

* Satisfaction and meaning from personal projects

Links:

* Ask us a question!: omgenomics.com/podcast

* 42basepairs.com (Robert's genomics cloud platform)

* sandbox.bio (Robert's bioinformatics learning platform)

* omgenomics.com/circa (Maria's visualization tool)

* youtube.com/omgenomics (Maria's YouTube channel)

* OMGenomics Q&A episode featuring Robert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SfDHheyKBU&ab_channel=OMGenomics