That’s part of why I signed up for the BCF BioBusiness Summer School in Amsterdam this June. I already knew, somewhere in the back of my mind, that I wanted my next step to be outside academia. What I didn’t expect was how much this week would reframe not just where I was headed, but how I valued everything I’d already built during my PhD journey.

A Map I Didn’t Know Existed

The format of BBSS is pretty straightforward: a week of lectures from professionals across the BioBusiness industry: consultants, venture capitalists, patent lawyers, entrepreneurs, business developers, alliance managers. People whose job titles I could barely have defined a year ago, let alone imagined pursuing them for myself.

What struck me first was just the sheer range of it. In academia, career conversations tend to orbit a fairly narrow set of roles: you start as a PhD student, move on to being a postdoc, and maybe eventually you become a PI, if you’re feeling adventurous. But over the course of five days, I watched that map expand enormously. Someone who started their career in a wet lab now structures finance deals for biotech. Someone else spent a decade doing hardcore science before becoming the person who negotiates the partnerships that get a drug from one company’s shelf to another company’s clinical trial. It was the first time I really understood, viscerally rather than abstractly, how many doors a PhD can actually open in industry. And not despite the level of specialization, but in some strange way, because of it.

The Session That Reframed Everything

Of all the sessions, one has stayed with me the most: a talk by Wen Koster on transferable strengths and what really changes when a scientist moves into industry.

The core idea was quite simple, and yet it landed like something I’d needed to hear for a long time: a career transition is not just a matter of learning new skills. It’s a full identity shift: in how you perceive your own value, in how you convey it, in the very language you use to describe it. What earns respect in academia (a well-cited paper, a technically flawless dataset or years of deep, solitary expertise) is not automatically what earns trust in industry, which reads value through impact, delivery, and how well you work with other people under real world constraints. Still the same person. Completely different signal.

Sitting there, I found myself doing an uncomfortable but useful bit of math. Four years into the PhD, I could rattle off my technical skills without blinking: iPSC differentiation protocols, 3D culture systems, working with organ-on-chip platforms on a daily basis. But when I tried to name the other things I’d developed along the way, the exercise got harder, and more revealing. I have spent years coordinating a project with shifting collaborators and even more shifting list of tasks. I’ve had to make judgment calls when the data was ambiguous but a decision still had to be made. I’ve translated highly technical findings for people outside my field, and sat in rooms where I was the only person who understood a particular assay well enough to say whether the results could be trusted. None of that shows up neatly on a CV, but all of it, I now understand, is exactly what industry is looking for.

That, for me, was the real take home message of the session: PhDs tend to undersell themselves not because they lack value, but because they’ve been trained, for years, to measure value using academia’s metrics. We have a great deal to offer to industry as deep experts in our particular topics, but we also quietly develop a whole second skill set along the way: resilience under uncertainty, cross-disciplinary communication, project ownership, judgment under ambiguity. We just don’t consider to “sell” it, because inside the lab, nobody really asked us to.

Learning to Translate, Not Just to Transition

If there’s one shift in mindset I’m walking away with after the summer school, it’s this one: leaving academia isn’t about abandoning what I’ve built, it’s about learning to translate it better.

“I optimized a complex multicellular in-vitro model” is true, and it is also, to someone outside my field, almost meaningless. “I helped structure a complex biological system into something robust enough to inform real decisions about drug safety” is the same fact but told in a language industry can actually understand and appreciate.

That reframing matters more than we might think. It’s the difference between walking into an interview and listing all that I did versus being able to state clearly what changed because of the way I did it. And, also, what that shows about the kind of collaborator, decision-maker, and scientist I have become.

I don’t have my next job yet. I don’t even know for certain whether I’m more drawn to building value inside an established company or something closer to my own venture, a question this week posed just as effectively as it answered. But I’m leaving this summer school behind with something more useful than a decision: a different, more honest way of seeing what I already bring to the table, and a new kind of language to say it out loud.

For anyone else finishing a PhD and wondering whether their years at the bench translate to anything beyond it - trust me, they do. You may just need someone, or an experience like this one, to help you phrase it in a language the rest of the world already speaks.

By Theano Tsikari