There is no catch.

We worked on a business model for 2 years to make our services free for PhDs. We’ve designed, tested, and proved that our model works!

Most graduate- and postdoc-serving Career and Professional Development offices are small operations who get institutional funding to serve specific populations exclusively. Some universities don’t have dedicated career education units and add career advising to the mentorship responsibilities of professors and staff in academic departments. There are major flaws with these models. First, there is not enough bandwidth for most offices to provide the service adequately and evenly to their students and trainees. Second, programming coming from these models very rarely involves design, delivery and evaluation inputs from the private sector organizations that will eventually hire the bulk of PhDs and Postdocs.

Our programming model is funded by deeper pockets with more immediate motivations and can serve many universities simultaneously. We can serve 40 or 400, and aspire to serve thousands of PhDs. Because our programming is designed and delivered by career development professionals with participating businesses, PhD members experience and understand actual private sector recruiting and hiring practices. We go even deeper through experiential programming to provide trainees a preview of what career transition and work outside of academia will look like. Our programming facilitates a deep understanding of not only roles and functions but also cultures and work styles, all of which lead to better and more confident career decision making.

Over 650, from more than 11 different countries around the world!

We provide career development training and exploration opportunities, focused on non-tenure track careers.

Andrew Cusick has been an accredited career development facilitator for several decades with seven years working with PhD students at the University of Wisconsin’s Office of Postdoctoral Studies. He collaborates actively with colleagues in the Graduate Career Consortium and the National Postdoc Association.

Our group came together in March of 2020 at the very beginning of the pandemic, when the world needed its greatest scientists the most. The common sentiment for our group was that we could not just sit around waiting for our labs to reopen. Like the families making masks at home, we wondered if we could use our training to respond to the massive crisis. We called our group the Bias to Action group and began ideating ways to help using techniques from design thinking.

Collectively, we realized PhDs, writ large, lacked the career development skills needed to find ways to join organizations working on applied problems. We decided that we would be doing a great service to the world (and ourselves) if we empowered PhDs to think differently about applying their talents to problems outside of their labs. A career development organization founded by postdocs designed to serve postdocs was born. Three years later, we bridge the gap between an underutilized work force of PhD’s, and the organizations working on significant social problems like COVID-19 who need them.

Prophound was founded by five people with complementary skills, sharing a well defined purpose. We all want to make the world a better place by helping PhDs apply their rare training and ability to serious problems affecting our planet.

Among us, we have emotionally intelligent and data-driven career development programming and decades of career counseling experience for PhD populations. On the business and technology side, we have proven private sector experience that comes from working at or with startups, Big Three consulting firms, and in-university employer relations units.

Most importantly, we know from lived experience what it’s like to be trained in academia and use that training to be impactful in the problems we believe need to be solved. Read more about us here!

ProPhounD is not seeking grant funding or payment from academic institutions. Instead, we are fostering a client / consultant relationship with businesses who have funding to secure PhD level talent from the world’s research institutions. Our founders come from academia. We realized quickly that we have to learn a new language if we want access to the corporate resources to fund essential career services. By incorporating, we are walking the same walk that many PhDs will have to walk as they transition from academic training to early career professionals.

Reach out to us here! We want to help everyone in the best way possible. If we’re missing a service or something that would be helpful, then we’d absolutely love to hear about it!

If you’re facing a career emergency and need to find a new source of income ASAP, please reach out to Andrew Cusick for an emergency meeting.