Neurons to Net Zero. A Complete Step-by-Step Career Reinvention Journey
Watch the full interview with Bec McIntosh and Rosina on Career Jam
When the pressure of an academic career path became unsustainable, Dr. Rosina Giordano made a choice that many academics consider but few have the courage to pursue, she walked away from the traditional path and designed a new direction.
Dr. Rosina Giordano's journey from bioengineering PhD to sustainability advocate wasn't a straight line—it was a winding path marked by curiosity, academic pressure, burnout, and ultimately, a conscious choice to align her career with her values. For scientists and academics contemplating their own transitions, her story offers both validation and a roadmap.
The Seeds of Scientific Curiosity
Early Influences Shape a Career Path
Rosina's path into science began in childhood, shaped by experiences that sparked her natural curiosity about how the world works. These early influences planted seeds that would eventually grow into a career in bioengineering, though not without significant detours and challenges along the way.
Like many scientists, her initial attraction to the field came from a genuine desire to understand complex systems and solve problems. "I was feeling that I wanted to keep learning," she recalls—a sentiment that would both propel her forward and, eventually, help her recognize when her environment no longer supported that growth.
Taking the First Big Leap
Rosina's first major career leap came when she moved to France for university on a scholarship. This wasn't just a geographical move—it was a fundamental shift in her life trajectory, requiring her to adapt to a new culture, language, and academic system.
This early experience with significant change would prove valuable later in her career. The ability to embrace uncertainty and adapt to new environments became skills she would draw on repeatedly, particularly when navigating her eventual transition out of traditional academia.
The Reality of Academic Life
Navigating Difficult Supervisory Relationships
Rosina's academic journey included challenges that many graduate students and early-career researchers will recognize: difficult relationships with supervisors and the constant pressure that comes with research environments.
These supervisory challenges aren't just interpersonal issues—they fundamentally impact career trajectories, research quality, and personal wellbeing. For Rosina, navigating these relationships required developing resilience and learning to advocate for herself in hierarchical academic structures that don't always welcome such advocacy.
The Relentless Pressure to Publish
Perhaps the most significant challenge Rosina faced was the pervasive pressure to publish—the "publish or perish" culture that dominates academic research. This pressure affects everything from research design to career progression, often prioritising quantity and impact factors over meaningful scientific contribution.
The constant drive to produce publishable results, secure funding, and maintain visibility in competitive fields creates an environment where burnout isn't just possible—it's almost inevitable for many researchers. Rosina experienced this firsthand, and it would become the catalyst for her most significant career transition.
Recognising the Breaking Point
Despite achieving what many would consider success—earning a PhD in bioengineering, conducting research, and working toward academic goals it was Rosina’s colleague that saw the first signs of burnout. Rosina.
Burnout in research careers often looks like high achievement on the outside while feeling hollow on the inside. You're meeting external markers of success—publications, presentations, funding—but losing connection with why you started in the first place. Rosina’s friends first noticed this disconnect and raised it with her but that was not enough for her to recognise the signs.
The Importance of Finding Balance
Burnout taught Rosina a crucial lesson: finding balance between personal life and career isn't a luxury—it's essential for sustainability and wellbeing. The academic culture that often celebrates overwork and sacrifice as badges of honour creates unsustainable conditions that ultimately diminish both the quality of research and researchers' quality of life.
This realisation didn't come easily. For high achievers in competitive fields, acknowledging that you can't or shouldn't maintain the pace often feels like admitting defeat. But Rosina came to understand that true success includes maintaining your health, relationships, and sense of purpose—not just your publication record.
Making the Transition
Reflecting on Personal Values
When Rosina began seriously considering a career transition, she returned to a fundamental question: what are my values, and does my current path align with them?
This values-based reflection is critical for anyone contemplating a major career change. It's easy to stay on a path because of sunk costs—the years invested in education, the expertise developed, the expectations of others. But staying on a misaligned path only compounds those costs with additional years of dissatisfaction.
For Rosina, this reflection revealed a growing passion for sustainability and a desire to contribute to solutions for environmental challenges. This wasn't completely disconnected from her scientific background—in fact, her bioengineering expertise would prove valuable in her new direction—but it required reimagining how she could apply her skills.
Embracing Change as Natural Career Development
One of Rosina's key insights is that change is a natural part of career development and should be embraced rather than resisted. Too often, we view career changes—particularly those that diverge from our educational background—as failures or wasted investments.
But skills, knowledge, and experiences transfer in unexpected ways. Rosina's scientific training, her experience navigating academic structures, her resilience developed through challenging supervisory relationships—all of these became assets in her transition to sustainability advocacy.
The key is reframing how you think about career progression. It's not a ladder where you must keep climbing in one direction. It's more like a river that flows and changes course, carrying you to new places while building on everything that came before.
Practical Strategies for Career Transition
Network, Network, Network
When asked what advice she'd give to others considering career transitions, Rosina's response is immediate and emphatic: "Network, network, network."
This might seem obvious, but the type of networking required for career transition is different from networking within your field. You need to:
Build bridges beyond your discipline: Connect with people in the fields or industries you're interested in moving toward. These connections provide insights into what skills are valued, what opportunities exist, and what the day-to-day reality looks like.
Be genuine about your transition: Rather than trying to appear as if you've always been interested in your new direction, be honest about your journey and what you're looking for. Authenticity resonates, and people are often willing to help someone on a genuine journey of change.
Offer value: Even when you're the one seeking help or opportunities, think about what you can offer. Your scientific training, analytical skills, or unique perspective might be exactly what someone in a different field needs.
Stay connected to former colleagues: The academic and scientific community you're leaving isn't something to burn bridges with. These connections may prove valuable in unexpected ways as you build a career that bridges multiple worlds.
Learning from Past Experiences
Rosina emphasises the importance of learning from past experiences to guide future decisions. Every challenge in her academic career—the difficult supervisory relationships, the publishing pressures, the eventual burnout—provided lessons that informed her transition.
When considering new opportunities, she could now ask: Does this environment support the balance I need? Are the pressures sustainable? Does this align with my values? These weren't questions she knew to ask earlier in her career, but experience taught her what to look for and what to avoid.
This learning process isn't always comfortable. It requires honest reflection on what didn't work and why, rather than just moving forward and hoping things will be different. But this reflection is what allows you to make intentional choices rather than reactive ones.
Seeking Help and Support
"It's okay to seek help and support during challenging times," Rosina reminds us—a message particularly important in fields like academia where self-sufficiency is often prized above collaboration and vulnerability is sometimes seen as weakness.
Career transitions are inherently challenging and uncertain. Trying to navigate them alone makes an already difficult process unnecessarily harder. Support might come from:
Career coaches or counselors: Professionals who can help you identify transferable skills, explore options, and develop strategies for your transition.
Mentors outside your field: People who have successfully made similar transitions or who work in areas you're interested in exploring.
Peer support groups: Others who are also navigating career transitions and can share experiences, resources, and encouragement.
Mental health professionals: Particularly if burnout or other challenges have taken a significant toll on your wellbeing.
There's no prize for making the journey harder than it needs to be. Accepting help is a sign of wisdom, not weakness.
Lessons for Academics and Scientists Considering Change
Recognise the Signs Before Burnout Becomes Crisis
Rosina's experience highlights the importance of recognising warning signs before burnout becomes a full crisis. If you're noticing:
Persistent exhaustion that doesn't improve with rest
Cynicism about work that you once found meaningful
Declining performance despite increased effort
Physical symptoms of stress
Loss of satisfaction in achievements
Dread about going to work
These aren't signs that you need to work harder or develop more resilience. They're signals that something fundamental needs to change.
Your PhD Isn't a Life Sentence
One of the most liberating realisations for academics considering transitions is that your PhD or research background isn't a life sentence to academia. The skills you've developed—critical thinking, problem-solving, project management, communication, specialised expertise—are valuable in countless contexts. Sometimes the system conditions people to think there is only one way forward.
Rosina's transition to sustainability advocacy drew on her scientific background while allowing her to apply it in new ways. Your expertise doesn't trap you—it equips you for diverse opportunities if you're willing to see them.
Values Alignment Matters More Than You Think
Career satisfaction isn't just about interesting work or good compensation. The alignment between your personal values and your work environment matters enormously for long-term sustainability and fulfillment.
If you value collaboration but work in a cutthroat competitive environment, or you value work-life balance but operate in a culture that celebrates overwork, that misalignment will eventually take its toll—no matter how interesting the research or prestigious the institution.
Change Doesn't Mean Failure
Perhaps most importantly, Rosina's story challenges the narrative that changing careers—particularly leaving academia after investing years in research training—represents failure.
Change is a natural part of career development. People grow, priorities shift, new opportunities emerge, and paths that once made sense may no longer serve you. Recognizing this and making intentional changes is success, not failure. What would be failure is staying on a path that's making you miserable because you're afraid of what others will think.
Creating Your Own Transition Path
Start With Honest Assessment
Before making any major moves, take time for honest self-assessment:
What aspects of my current work energize me? What drains me?
Which skills do I most enjoy using? Which am I ready to leave behind?
What values are non-negotiable in my next career phase?
What does success look like for me, beyond external markers?
What am I willing to sacrifice, and what am I not?
Explore Before Committing
You don't have to make dramatic changes overnight. Rosina's transition involved exploration and learning:
Have informational interviews with people in fields you're considering
Take on side projects or volunteer work in new areas
Attend conferences or events outside your traditional field
Experiment with ways to apply your skills in different contexts
This exploration helps you make informed decisions rather than leaping blindly into something that might not be right for you.
Build a Bridge, Not a Cliff
Where possible, build a bridge from your current career to your next one rather than creating a cliff you have to jump off. This might mean:
Developing new skills while still employed in your current role
Building a network in your new field before leaving the old one
Creating opportunities for hybrid work that combines your backgrounds
Maintaining financial stability while exploring new directions
Not everyone has the luxury of a gradual transition, but where possible, reducing the risk and uncertainty makes the journey more sustainable.
The Sustainability Connection
Rosina's particular transition—from bioengineering research to sustainability advocacy—represents more than just a career change. It reflects a broader shift in how scientists and researchers are thinking about the application of their work.
Many academics and scientists are asking: How can my expertise contribute to urgent challenges like climate change, environmental degradation, and sustainability? This question is driving transitions from pure research to applied work, from academia to industry or nonprofit sectors, and from narrow specialization to interdisciplinary collaboration.
If you're considering a similar transition, you're part of a larger movement of researchers seeking to align their work with purpose and impact. Your scientific training is needed in these spaces—you just need to find the right application for it.
Moving Forward With Purpose
Dr. Rosina Giordano's journey from bioengineering PhD to sustainability advocate illustrates that career transitions, while challenging, can lead to greater alignment between your work and your values. Her experience with burnout, while difficult, ultimately pushed her toward work that feels more meaningful and sustainable.
For academics and scientists considering their own transitions, her story offers several key takeaways:
Listen to the signals: Burnout, dissatisfaction, and misalignment aren't weaknesses to overcome—they're information to act on.
Your skills transfer: The expertise you've developed in research applies in more contexts than you might imagine.
Network strategically: Building connections outside your field opens doors you didn't know existed.
Values matter: Long-term career satisfaction requires alignment between what you do and what you believe in.
Change is natural: Career evolution isn't failure—it's growth.
Support is essential: You don't have to navigate transitions alone, and seeking help is wise, not weak.
As Rosina's journey demonstrates, the path from where you are to where you want to be might not be straight, but with reflection, support, and willingness to embrace change, it is navigable. Your next chapter is waiting—you just need the courage to turn the page.
