Thanks for joining me!

Hi,

Before sharing my full story about transitioning from academia to the industry, I will give you some background info and brief introduction about myself…

I am Ines, originally from Austria, but I currently live in Germany with my husband. I am an Astrophysicist and received my PhD in Natural Sciences (with primary focus Astrophysics) at the University of Graz in April 2018. My PhD thesis dealt with the characterization of extrasolar planets.

In the final months of working as a PhD researcher at the Space Research Institute in Graz, I decided not to pursue a career in academia anymore – for different reasons. This felt like a risky and, at the same time, exciting decision, but I knew that staying in academia would not be an option for me anymore.

More than 6 months after leaving academia, I finally found my new job… (I use the word “finally” because I thought that I would find a new job earlier than that. I simply had no idea how long this would take..)

One of the great things about my new job is that it is even connected to Astronomy (yay!), but my role is very different from my previous job(s) in academia. Don’t get me wrong – I did not leave science because I wasn’t interested in Astronomy anymore. I just felt like working in science was not the right “thing” for me.

To summarize – leaving academia to work in the industry was a challenging process, which brought up sooo many questions along the way! (It also did not help that I moved to a different country during this time, lol.)

This is the reason why I decided to share the story of my journey with you and write about the transitioning process, the challenges, my new job, and other things that cross my mind 😉 on this blog. I am also really curious to hear if you had or have the same thoughts/issues/experiences when you read through my next blog posts – I will post part 1 of my story very soon!

-Ines

The attempt to take a picture with the Milky Way during my visit at the ESO/VLT in 2016.