I’m happy to report that my job search is finally over! As of July 2023, I am employed again! I’m now working as a developer in the field of conversational AI for Germany’s biggest railway company, Deutsche Bahn. This job is a really great fit for me because it combines so many of my skills and experiences – my far-away past as a web developer and media designer with my more recent past doing a PhD in linguistics. I’m also quite happy to be working for Deutsche Bahn, not only because they play a vital role in Germany’s transformation to sustainable mobility, but also because I grew up with a connection to this group. My father has worked there most of his life, and I already got to know some of the benefits of being part of this group when I was a child / teenager. I’m very excited and hopeful for this new opportunity.

My journey, there, however, was quite difficult, and this is not something that’s very often talked about. By means of sharing some numbers that quantify my job search, I would also like to go a bit into the topic of the difficult and depressing times that I advanced through this past year or so. I actively started applying for jobs in May 2022, a few months before my PhD defense. At that point I was still very confident that I would easily find a job by October – the time when I would start to be actually unemployed. Well, I kept writing and writing, and October came and went, and I was still unemployed. November came and went, and I started to lose hope. Then December, and January… and by that time, I was really desperate and aimless, starting to doubt myself and my whole life.

I have a PhD, something very, very few people have. I have so much experience, and such a diverse, professional skillset. Well, recruiter didn’t seem to think so, because it seemed to me like they just didn’t know what to do with someone with a PhD – other than write me standardized rejection letters saying “I’m sorry, you don’t have the required experience”, or, ironically sometimes also “I’m sorry, you are overqualified for this job”.

I was in a really deep hole, and it started to really affect other aspects of my life as well, such as friendships. That certainly did not help with the feeling of not being good enough that started to take over many aspects of my life. It was a really, really hard and difficult time.

However, there were a few hopeful times here and there. And the best way to show that, would be to share some statistics about my job search: I wrote a total of 123 job application in the time span from May 2022 to April 2023. That’s a lot, and out of that I got 88 rejection e-mails. Being told 88 times that I look like a really nice candidate, but that there are many other candidates that are better than me, was not good for my psyche. As mentioned, I did, however, also have some successes – I was invited to 23 interviews, equaling a success rate of around 19%. Pretty good, I guess?

In this post’s main chart, you can also see which levels of job I applied to. The vast majority were Professional / Experienced level, because that’s what is most fitting for someone with my experience. Arguably, I would also qualify as Senior for some, but my response to applications for Senior positions was pretty bad. I also played some poker and applied to some Director positions, quite obviously without success. But as they say, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

Internships were something that sparked my interest when I learned about PhD internships in the US. I thought that would be a really cool career-boost, go to the US for a few months and work with Microsoft or Apple or something, and then come back to continue the search. The US part didn’t work, most of those didn’t even respond. However, I did get the opportunity to do an internship in the field of conversational AI with an agency in Berlin. And that probably was a really big help in my later getting the job I have now. The internship, while overwhelming for the first couple of days gave me a lot of new and very valuable experiences. So while it maybe seems a bit counter-intuitive to apply for internships if you have a PhD, I think it’s something that you can really benefit from and give you a good insight within a short amount of time.

Another thing that kept my mind occupied during my job search, was the question of WHAT I want to do. If you have a PhD in linguistics, you can do pretty much everything and nothing.

sankey chat of job search

Here’s what I tried:

  • I did a lot of data analysis during my PhD, and that’s also one of the things I always really enjoyed. That’s why I decided to apply to a lot of data analysis jobs.
  • As a researcher with a background in media design, I felt that UX research would be a great fit for me as well, so I applied to quite a lot of UX research positions. However, I realized that this is not such a great fit because I’m more of a quantitative, rather than a qualitative researcher.
  • Many people in my life have told me that I’m very organized and that I would make a great project manager. Well, I tried that as well, but to be honest, after I did a course on PRINCE2 project management, I started losing interest in that. Too much talking for me, and not enough doing.
  • As someone who has written an dissertation with very thorough methodology sections, I thought that perhaps I’d be a good technical writer. I even had a promising interview, but after a while the response to my applications in this field became worse and worse, so I focused on other things.
  • Finally, the field that’s perhaps the best fit for me is that of Computational Linguistics – a very broad field though, containing subfields such as natural language processing, automatic speech recognition and conversational AI. This is also where I am now.

Finally, the question of WHERE is also something that kept me occupied, and my brain ping-ponged back and forth between wanting to stay, wanting to go, but mostly not knowing where to go from here.

sankey chart of job search 3

I mainly focused on the city where I live, since obviously that would be the easiest, most convenient, and least life-altering option. However, I also considered Berlin quite a bit, since there are a lot of really interesting companies there. And as already mentioned above, I even applied to several jobs in the US, albeit most of them were internships. There were also quite a lot of pretty random places, as well as quite a lot of jobs that are 100% remote. Especially in IT, remote has become a really great option, and makes searching for a job much easier.

My job is also mostly remote, and I’m glad that I don’t really have to worry about moving for now. My office is about an hour and a half by fast train from here, and generally I don’t need to go there, but every once in a while I probably will. I think it’s great that I can work where ever I want, as this is more or less how I’ve been working for the past couple of years and it adds a lot of life quality.

To summarize, after challenging a year-long job search, I finally landed a really promising position. Despite my PhD and diverse skillset, I faced a lot of rejection and being deemed both over- and underqualified. However, I persevered by applying for jobs at all levels, in several different fields, and with a somewhat varied focus on locations. I appreciate my new, mostly remote job for the flexibility and opportunity it provides and I hope it will be an awesome experience.