Providing Doctoral Students Business Skills for Whatever Profession They May Pursue
Alexander Gold, a PhD candidate in microbiology at BU, described as “transformative” his time participating in BU Technology Development’s OTD Analyst program.
Mengjie Yuan, a PhD candidate in BU’s School Medicine, described her participation in the Analyst program as a “very important experience for me”— one that helped her gain a coveted job offer from the global management consulting firm, McKinsey & Co.
Elissa Everton is another PhD candidate in the School of Medicine. The Analyst program was one of several developed by BU Technology Development (OTD) that Everton described as critical to her landing a dream job Clarion Healthcare, a life science consultancy that will have her working with some of Boston’s most promising biotech startups.
Catalyst, a second OTD program jointly launched with Innovate@BU, “really exposed me to skills I’ll need [as a consultant] that PhD students normally don’t learn doing their bench work,” Everton said.
Helping to broaden the skill set of BU’s doctoral students has been central to the mission of Rana K. Gupta, former BU Director of Faculty Entrepreneurship. Until recently, Gupta also offered a bi-weekly series titled “Unlocking the Black Box of Business” for post grads, postdocs and anybody else who wanted to attend, aimed at introducing an array of business concepts that can be helpful in any profession.
“Doctoral students ask me to help them learn skills beyond research to broaden their potential to find a job after earning their PhD,” Gupta said.
That describes Johannes Becker, who in 2017 arrived on BU’s campus certain he wanted a PhD in computer engineering but not sure what he would do once he had earned it. In his third year on campus, Becker began a year-long “Lean Launch” program aimed at helping doctoral students determine if there’s a need for the technology they are working on in their PI’s lab. Taught by Gupta and Alice Nichols, a National Science Foundation (NSF)-trained and certified Innovation Corps (I-Corps) instructor, participants learned how to identify the needs of potential customer, create an eco-system map, and learn about the business model canvas, among other skills.
“All these things,” Becker said, “that you don’t usually learn in a PhD program.” In the end, Becker and his faculty advisor concluded that there was no market, at least not yet, for the wireless security tool that they were developing. Yet he does not doubt the program’s value. He cold-called 35 people in the wireless field when assessing the market potential of their idea – which both sharpened his skill set and helped him broaden his network while still in school.
“I’m pretty sure without Lean Launch, I wouldn’t even have considered joining the company I’m with now,” said Becker, who went to work for a promising young wireless startup after earning his doctorate in April of 2022. “And it definitely equipped me with a lot of tools that I’m actively using now.”
Elissa Everton also arrived on BU’s campus eager to earn a PhD in biomedical science even if she did not yet know what she might do with it. For her, the school’s Catalyst program proved pivotal. There, Everton was the member of a team that helped a BU professor determine if there was a need for his idea. To answer this, the team engaged in “customer discovery”: reaching out to people working in potential target industries to find out what their pain points are and what keeps them up at night.
“There were so many parts of Catalyst that were rough and really pushed me,” Everton said. “But I’m glad I went through it because so much of what I learned will be relevant when I’m consulting.” Much of her work when she starts in the fall will require her to conduct what she called an “opportunity assessment” for small biotech companies. What is the market potential of their idea? And if a company has multiple assets, which seems the most promising?
“Everything about that program will be relevant to my new job,” Everton said, including the diplomacy they needed to demonstrate when letting faculty members know that the idea they had spent years working on did not hold the promise that they had hoped it would.
Alexander Gold was in his third year at BU when Technology Development unveiled OTD Analyst. The idea behind this ongoing program started by Gupta and his colleague Frances Forrester, PhD, Director of Business Development for Medical Technologies in Technology Development. “The OTD Analyst Program was launched to help a post grad student build his or her market value,” Dr. Forrester said. “Whether you envision a career in academia, industry, or the public sector, learning about how to convey the value of a technology and identify potential applications and markets is a valuable skill you can put on your resumé.”
“The program was really an opportunity for me to hone skills like communication that you don’t typically get in a lab-based education,” Gold said. After completing the OTD program, he started working part-time at an investment bank in Boston that specializes in the life sciences.
“Looking at my field from the lens of the market was really eye opening for me,” said Gold, who is slated to earn his PhD this summer. “It was very influential in shaping my next steps and what I plan on doing after defending my dissertation in the summer.”
The ability to synthesize great mounds of information and succinctly communicate complex concepts were among the skills that Gold and others learned in the Analyst program. “We had assignments where you’d have to read about a patent or read a long review about a technology and summarize it in a one-page PDF,” said Mengjie Yuan, who will go work for McKinsey after completing her PhD in the School of Medicine’s Nutrition and Metabolism program. “It’s critical in my field that I can summarize and pinpoint and extract what’s most important from a lot of information.”
Yuan would get no argument from Chenguang Peng, who took a job with the Boston Consulting Group after earning his PhD in biomedical engineering. Peng, too, was among those students participating in the inaugural Analyst program. Honing an ability to succinctly communicate complex concepts is a skill that has been critical to his everyday work life. He learned about project management as part of the Analyst program and also, he said, “the ability to take a complicated scientific idea and extract the business implication efficiently.”
Once accepted, Analysts remain in the program until they start to prepare for their defense; Breanna O’Rielly will defend her PhD in September but has already secured a position as an Associate at a management firm that invests in biotech ventures. She describes two major ways that the Analyst program helped her navigate the job landscape. “First, I learned how to take on new fields that I didn’t have a background in and quickly make sense of them”, she said. “Second, I learned about clear and concise writing. The format of the (assignments) really pushed me to pick my words and structure my thoughts.
These skills helped me during my interview process for my future job. During the interview process I was asked to learn a new therapeutic landscape and summarize takeaways.” For Rana Gupta, BU’s Director of Faculty Entrepreneurship from 2018 to February 2024, the expansion of his mandate to include doctoral students has proven rewarding: “They didn’t know the importance of learning what is the market need and who the customers might be for a product or service. Now if they’ve taken one of these programs, they can use these skills in any profession they choose.”
By Gary Rivlin