Women of Science

Dare to Discov-HER

Jaime Hibbard: Scientific Problem-Solving in the Corporate World

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A scientist excels at nothing more than solving problems. But this skill isn’t useful only for growing cells or formulating chemical reactions in a lab. Problem-solving and critical thinking sit in high demand across the professional landscape. This is especially true in the field of consulting. 

Broadly, consultants provide advice and feedback on complex problems to a wide variety of companies, but some jobs call for a bit more technical specialization. We sat down with Dr. Jaime Hibbard to learn more about what the world of consulting looks like for a scientist. 

What drew you to science in the first place and sent you down the STEM PhD path?

I think science might be in my genetics. I am a third-generation PhD, actually. My grandpa was an ornithologist and my dad was an entomologist. Then I got my PhD in molecular biology, so we just got smaller and smaller. 

My decision came down to a moment in high school. I thought I wanted to do journalism, but I was taking high school chemistry around the same time that I realized that I didn’t like writing. The joke was on me—it turns out you have to write a lot in graduate school. And everyone hated high school chemistry because the teacher was terrible. But I found the subject so inherently fascinating, it didn’t matter to me that it wasn’t taught in the most thrilling way. So at that moment, I thought fine, I have to do the science thing like my parents. 

Because of my background—my dad with a PhD and my mom with her Masters—I had this perception at the time that if I was going to do an undergraduate degree in something biology-adjacent, there wasn’t much of anything you could do without going on to a PhD program. I don’t think that’s totally accurate anymore. But at the time, I went into undergrad with the plan of getting a degree in molecular biology, doing research on the side, and then getting my PhD.

What did your research experience look like, from undergrad through graduate school?

In my senior year of undergrad, I was working in a neuroscience lab run by a husband-wife duo. The wife did single-molecule biophysics work and her husband did connectomics, brain mapping, and activity mapping. I really enjoyed my experience in their lab, but I realized that I didn’t want to do neuroscience research for my PhD. I’d also done genetics research earlier on in undergrad and before college, and I didn’t really want to do plant science either. So I contemplated taking a year off to figure out what area of research I wanted to focus on. 

But my undergrad PIs kind of peer-pressured me into applying to at least a few graduate programs. I interviewed at UT Austin and liked the program and the people I met. They seemed to be enjoying life, which was important to me. It was also a rotation-based program with a lot of different topics under the same umbrella, so I could rotate in a few different labs and figure out what I wanted to do from there. It was not the most strategically planned progression, but it worked out.

Rotations are great for that reason! They let you try different things before committing. Speaking of, how did you learn about consulting as a career option?

The other big component of my hesitation about going to grad school was that I realized at the end of undergrad that I had spent my entire time just working toward going to grad school. I knew abstractly what it was like to be a professor, but as I got closer to the application process, I asked myself, what do I want? Do I want to be a professor? And if the answer was no, then what else was I going to do with the PhD? 

I came to the realization that I wasn’t sure I wanted the academic route. You know, for my undergraduate PIs, their whole life was the lab and that wasn’t what I wanted. But I do love science, and I love learning, so a PhD was a great opportunity regardless. I started thinking about what other opportunities are available to someone with a PhD. 

Consulting was something I stumbled upon. An alum from my program gave a presentation that caught my interest. I also read blogs written by people who went from PhDs to other things, and I thought consulting was an interesting option. Through graduate school, I started digging more into it and taking business classes on the side. I also joined a program called Texas Venture Labs that paired me with a startup, and I really enjoyed that experience. 

The whole time, though, I still wasn’t sure I wanted to leave academia. There are a lot of elements of academia that I like. It wasn’t until my fourth and the beginning of the fifth year of my PhD that I finally decided that while I would love to be a professor, I did not want to go through the six years of a postdoc to get there. I knew I was probably trying to go into consulting, but I was considering other things at the intersection of business and science as well. 

For anyone interested in going into consulting from an academic background, what are some important considerations for bridging the gap between the two areas?

First, I think it’s important to consider why you don’t want to go into academia. And what is it about consulting that seems appealing to you? Are there things you can do to test it out? Like, do I enjoy the business classes? 

If not, you probably shouldn’t go into consulting. I think that the sooner you start thinking about those things, the more time you have to try out different things and figure out what feels right, the better. 

For those who aren’t familiar, can you talk a little bit about the services you provide as a consultant?

I work for a strategy consulting firm, which means that clients hire us to help them make strategic business decisions. This could include things like acquiring other companies or launching a new product line. Or, if it’s a pharmaceutical or biotech company with technology that could potentially be used in a few different therapeutic areas, we can help them decide which disease or area they should target. 

The questions we get are usually somewhat abstract questions that companies either don’t know how to answer themselves or don’t have the resources to answer themselves. So they hire someone like us to provide an unbiased outside perspective. It depends on the project. 

What does your day-to-day look like?

Common day-to-day activities for me include things like primary and secondary research. So for primary research, talking to customers and understanding what they like about products, offerings they don’t like, and what their unmet needs are. Then for secondary research, either googling or looking at online databases to assess what the competitive landscape looks like and what other options exist today. 

For example, if I’m developing early-detection diagnostic technologies, insurance companies are probably only going to pay to reimburse a test if there is an actionable insight that can be made. It doesn’t help to have early detection of disease with no available therapeutics. On the other hand, it helps to have early detection of cancer because you can start treating it sooner. So, a good example of secondary research we might do is to investigate the current pipeline of drugs and where they exist in different therapeutic areas. 

A third bucket of activities we do is actual data crunching. That means Excel analysis and looking at revenue potentials or other market sizing activities to understand if we’re comparing two different opportunities, which represents a larger market? That could provide us with one data point to support choosing one opportunity over another. 

The fourth big thing we do is take all that research and analysis and compile it into slides that help communicate our answer to the client so they can digest it and take actionable insights from it. It’s a collaborative effort throughout the process and an ongoing conversation with the client. You want to make sure that they understand where you’re going and that it’s in line with the preliminary hypotheses they might have. That usually involves weekly check-ins toward a final deliverable.

How many people do you work with on your team or on a specific project? Are you the only biology PhD in the room, or is there a diversity of expertise? 

Let me start with a little context on the consulting industry as a whole. There are lots of different types of consulting. Strategy consulting falls under the management consulting category, with companies like BCG and McKinsey being some of the more famous examples. But there’s also accounting consulting, which is totally unrelated and less suited for a life sciences PhD. The same is true with legal consulting. 

Within strategy consulting, there are firms that specialize in questions within the life sciences, while other firms are totally generalists. I think the firm I work at sits nicely between the two. We are a generalist firm, so we serve clients across all industries, but we have a strong healthcare presence, specifically within the life sciences. 

That was appealing to me because if I went to a totally generalist firm, I could have been staffed out for any project. I could have been working with a hotel chain, or a food manufacturer, or companies that weren’t as interesting to me. At my firm, we get to answer all kinds of questions more relevant to my life science expertise. When I was interviewing, I felt like everyone was a little nerdy in a great way where they got really excited about new technologies and how they could drive drug development forward. 

All this to say that teams coming from different firms look different. Because of what my firm does, our teams have more PhD-trained scientists on them than I think would be common at a different generalist firm. 

I’m now a consultant, which is like a team lead. On my team right now, I have two life science specialists, who are PhDs a little bit earlier in their careers than I am, and an associate coming straight from undergrad. This project is interesting because above me, we have two managers where normally you’d only have one. One of them has an MBA background and the other has a PhD.

And do you normally focus on one big project at a time?

Yes, so projects span different lengths of time. The shortest project I’ve ever been on was seven days. That was rough; normally the shortest would be like three weeks. My current project is just kicking off this week, and it’s going to be a twelve-week project. 

Are there any experiences or skills from academia that translate particularly well to consulting?

I think that there are a lot of skills that PhDs sometimes don’t even realize they have that have really benefited me in my current role. One of those skills is the ability to structure a project and take the initiative to move it forward with unclear directions. 

You know, as a PhD student having issues with your thesis project, depending on who your advisor is—mine was very hands-off—you have to figure everything out for yourself. And the ability to do that becomes an advantage. 

Another piece of helpful PhD training is the ability to communicate complex information in different ways. As a graduate student, you have to be able to communicate at lab meetings, where the participants are also experts in whatever topic you’re presenting. But then you also need to communicate with someone with a similar background who is a non-expert. And you also have to be able to communicate whatever you’re working on to your family, or a whole different level of expertise. That ability to take a step back and ask who you’re communicating this information to is so translatable. 

And then the technical knowledge also helps me understand the kinds of products that my clients are developing. I also have that ability to research efficiently and become an expert on something quickly. All of those things are skills that I built during my PhD.

When you first jumped from academia to consulting, were there any big adjustments you had to make? Any struggles you had in the beginning?

Yes, but it actually wasn’t what I thought it would be at all. I thought I would feel overwhelmed by the business element, but that’s not that hard. You can learn about revenue, and profit, and how to interpret a financial statement pretty quickly, and I was comfortable with that much sooner than I expected. 

I think two things were hard for me.

The first and possibly more universal thing is getting comfortable with uncertainty and with not being the expert in the room. The timeline on which we are expected to come to an answer is much, much shorter than the 6 years of a PhD. Therefore, there isn’t enough time to delve as thoroughly into materials and to become as knowledgeable as you would like. Instead, you have to get comfortable with ambiguity and incomplete information. You have to develop the skill of understanding what level of rigor is needed to come to an answer and having less rigor than you might be used to coming from a PhD background. That’s something I see almost universally with every PhD, and I know it’s something I struggled with. 

The second thing that is really hard for me is just working in a group all the time. I got used to being really independent during graduate school. I had one collaborative project, which was with my friend, and we checked in with each other maybe once or twice a week. My time was mostly spent in a lab, pipetting and occasionally chatting with other lab members. But I wasn’t reliant on them, and they weren’t relying on me. I got to set my own schedule.

Coming into consulting where you’re working with a team all day and little schedule flexibility was a little draining. It still is a little draining, even though I’ve gotten better about it.

Is there any advice that you wish you had either as you started consulting or earlier in your career?

When I was in grad school, I just wanted to know what I was going to be doing next. I flip-flopped back and forth. It was either like, yes I’m going into consulting, or yes I’m staying in academia. I just wanted to know what path I was on and what steps were involved in that path. 

Now, I realize that career paths are not linear. I know I’m not unique in having that perspective, but I don’t think I realized it at the time. You just have to focus on what you’re actually interested in. What are you good at and what do you enjoy doing? What are things you want to learn in your next step?

That perspective of looking at each next step as a learning experience is one that would have served me better in grad school.

We think a lot about diversity and women in STEM, but I’m sure there are parallels for women in business. You’ve experienced both. Do you have any experiences you would like to share with other women interested in consulting as a career path? 

It’s interesting: I think I naturally have a few personality traits that our society would consider more masculine that, for better or worse, are also traits that get rewarded in academic and business environments. And there has to be a balance between accepting that this is what people look for when envisioning success versus pushing back against it and staying true to yourself. 

In grad school, I had a dear friend who was slightly more soft-spoken than me, and I felt that her perspective wasn’t valued as much as it should have been in our lab. In contrast, I felt very comfortable loudly advocating my opinion and I got rewarded for that. 

There’s a whole discussion that could be had around that contrast, but the advice that I would give to women would be to project confidence, even if you don’t have it, and to believe in yourself. Advocate strongly for yourself whenever possible. 

Data supports that a man is more likely than a woman to apply for a job when he doesn’t have the right qualifications. Apply. Put yourself out there; you never know when it might work out. 

What is your favorite or the most fulfilling part of your job right now?

I really like mentoring my team. As team lead, it’s fun to think about the project and how best to get it done. Like, who on my team is best suited for each of the different parts? And how do I help them learn if it involves something new?

I’ve really grown in the short time that I’ve been here. And the ability to pass that along to someone else feels so fulfilling to me. 

As always, we like to wrap things up with a fun question: is there anything you’d like to share about your life outside work?

I love hiking, and that’s part of what’s so great about the Bay Area. I was asked to speak at this career day at a conference in Germany this summer. So I went and did a light hike through the Dolomites too. It was six nights where you hike between little huts in the mountains of Italy. And that was just incredible.

I really like activities that keep me active because I feel like it’s easier to maintain balance in life if I’m staying connected with my body. I like yoga and there are some fitness classes that I enjoy as well. 

And I’ve started painting! I’m terrible at it, but it’s fun.

Jaime Hibbard: Scientific Problem-Solving in the Corporate World