Help with a sticky situation

[samman1994]

Hello everyone,

So I've come across a... sticky situation that I don't quite know how to handle and was hoping for some feedback and help.

Backstory:

So approximately 2 months ago, I got a job at a small pharma/Biotech company. In the interview, I told them I was looking for something long term and was not applying to any PhD programs for the following year (no one would hire me otherwise if I told them I was planning on leaving within the year). In the meantime, I was actually applying to various PhD programs for the fall of next year (2018). In my eyes, if I got into a PhD program, great then I'm good to go and will leave my job for it (yes burning a bridge, but a bridge worth burning in my opinion for following my dream of getting my PhD). If not, no harm no foul, no one knows and I"ll have a safe job I can fall back on and reapply next year. This was my original plan. 

The problem:

 In the company, we have 4 different groups working on different projects. In my group, there is only me and one other Research Associate (outside my boss). So far things have been great, they've already told me they want to keep me after my 90 days, and they've told me they like my work so much they want me to be directly involved in all their meetings regarding the clients drugs I am working on. I was also just informed my boss likes my work so much, he wants to promote me to a Research Scientist instead of Research Associate by summer of next year. 

So whats the problem? A guilty conscience. I just found out a week ago my co-worker was leaving summer of next year. Following my original plan, I am leaving summer of next year for my PhD program as well (looking to leave early June). I have a great relationship with my boss, and we discuss all our projects, plans, gossip, etc. He was informing me that following my co-worker leaving me, he wants to take me on as his partner (i.e. this follows the RS promotion I discussed earlier) so that we can start to grow our group together and train all the new people we'd be hiring then. 

At this point, he's planning everything around the idea of me staying. If I don't tell him anything and leave in early June, then both me and my co-worker will be leaving at once, leaving him alone with no one to work with  (until they hire some new people). And....I feel really bad about doing this. I really like the guy, and I don't want to throw him under like that, and he seems like a really trustworthy person. The problem is, I don't want to tell him I'm planning on leaving next summer, but this would mean 1) I lied during my interview and 2) I'm still in my 3-month and don't want them to fire me over this (or rather tell me at my 3-month point they don't want me anymore). 

My idea is: After my 3-month, I confide in my boss (and my boss only) that I am planning on leaving early June for my PhD program. This way I don't get fired, and he also knows 6 months in advance and can plan accordingly for the departure of both me and my co-worker. However, I also am afraid this may ruin the great relationship we have now (he might get upset and pissed off and they may not be able to fire me, but he could still make my life a living hell, especially if he doesn't keep it secret and everyone finds out I lied).  So I don't exactly know what to do. On one hand, I could stay quiet, do my job, and leave for my program when the time comes and screw my boss over. But I'd feel really bad for him (and don't like lying to his face everyday when he tells me all the plans he has for me), and I already feel bad and this scenario is months away. On the other hand, I could inform him, and hopefully everything goes fine and dandy, he's cool with it and understands why I did what I had to do, and can plan accordingly for the future. No bridges burned, no one got screwed over, everyones happy. Orrrr it could the complete opposite and I tell him and then I get screwed over hard, everyone finds out, and my boss holds a grudge against me and fucks with me till I leave. 

So..... any ideas? Should I tell him after my 3-month? Should I not tell and say who cares? Thank you ahead of time!

NOTE: One final thing to state is, I have already received an acceptance letter from one school. So I already am for sure going for my PhD program. My 3-month is in February, so by that time I should hear back from the other schools and have a pretty good idea of where I am going. So I will be quitting my job regardless, the question is only a matter of whether I should include my boss in my plans or not. 

Edited December 16, 2017 by samman1994

[Eigen]

I mean, you decided to lie in your interview and screw the company over already....

So yeah, I'd say there's a pretty good chance your boss will be upset when you tell them. People don't like to be lied to, especially when they feel like you did it purposefully. 

If you hadn't originally intended to apply, but then decided to you could tell them gracefully but given the timeline you've been setting yourself up to leave since you started. 

It may well blow back on you when you tell them or down the road, and you need to be prepared for that.

Here's my question: are you sure you want to give up what you have for grad school? You want to go back into industry long term, if I recall, and this is a bridge that may make doing so harder if you burn it. 

Its hard to find good jobs in this industry even with a PhD, and I'm not sure it's wise to leave a good job with an eminent promotion to go to grad school. 

[TwirlingBlades]

Blatantly lying during your interview so you could get the best of both worlds is pretty bad, I'm not going to lie...

At this point, I would tell him. You made your decision and leaving him out to dry would ruin your relationship even more than telling him now, and if he gets mad, he gets mad. Honestly, he's the one that's losing out.

Are you sure a PhD is worth giving up this job? It seems like it's going well and you are being promoted, in a sense. 

[samman1994]

In regards to lying, it came across to a point where I had to. No one wanted to hire me given my timeline (leaving for PhD program next year), and I needed the money. Yes, I disliked lying, and still don't like it, but I needed the money and the job, but also was planning on pursuing my PhD. 

In regards to whether or not I should pursue my PhD despite having something good going for me now. Throughout my job search, every job I found that I wanted to liked required a PhD. Yes I may have something great now, but if this job doesn't work out, or if I leave for more pay, then I'm screwed. I can get another job easy enough, but the pay will be low, and I'll go back down to an associate or at best a research scientist. With a PhD, I will have a lot more doors open for me, both regarding higher pay, and easier to get a job (especially those that I like). 

Also, even though I'm being promoted, since this is a small company, I won't be able to get any further than the promotion really. Theoretically, with that promotion, I've already hit the glass ceiling for this company. Yes I could leave for another company, but you'd have the issues I stated above. 

Finally, yes I do want to be in industry long term. 

[khigh]

What's going to happen when you get your PhD and the companies you apply for find out that you screwed over someone in the field? How apt are new companies to hire a researcher that blatantly lied? Aren't there ethics issues in the sciences where lying really doesn't look good?

[samman1994]

5 minutes ago, khigh said:

What's going to happen when you get your PhD and the companies you apply for find out that you screwed over someone in the field? How apt are new companies to hire a researcher that blatantly lied? Aren't there ethics issues in the sciences where lying really doesn't look good?

Yes lying is generally frowned upon in all fields, especially science. If you can't trust the scientist, you can't trust anything they produce or do, hence making them useless. Again, I don't say lying is good or should be done, but it was something I had to do to get some money and get a job. The company won't be hurt from one employee nor my lie, if anything the only person here who will really suffer will be my own boss (which is the person I am feeling bad about in the first place). 

[lemma]

Would you consider deferring the PhD and doing another year at the small company? Having industry experience apparently helps a lot when trying to enter industry post a PhD. The few months you have at this point would be considered negligible. I'm in a different industry, but when I was changing jobs, headhunters usually expected 2+ years before they were willing to work with you. Spending another year working in industry before your PhD might be better for your overall goals, and might mitigate this somewhat. 

[samman1994]

I have considered that option. I am still awaiting to see which school accepts me before I make that decision. From my understanding, you can get accepted into a program, and defer for a year without having to apply again (you basically are in, you just don't start until the next year). My only concern would be the school not accepting it (I don't have an amazing application, so I'm not that special to wait for), and that would make me look bad to the school.

[Hope.for.the.best]

2 hours ago, samman1994 said:

I have considered that option. I am still awaiting to see which school accepts me before I make that decision. From my understanding, you can get accepted into a program, and defer for a year without having to apply again (you basically are in, you just don't start until the next year). My only concern would be the school not accepting it (I don't have an amazing application, so I'm not that special to wait for), and that would make me look bad to the school.

First of all, I do not encourage lying, but unfortunately it happened. Given your circumstances, you pretty much can only choose between quitting and deferring. If you are to quit, telling your boss after the probation period is wise. I would suggest that you thank your boss for giving you the opportunity to work in the team, and that after exploring the industry in these months, you realise that what you want to do requires a PhD. So you are leaving to start your PhD. You would need to "justify" to him that you changed your mind since starting the job. No matter how well you are expressing yourself, given the short timeline, your boss must suspect that you were lying. You could only do your best to make the outcome better. It is just unimpressive to admit that you lied to your boss to get a job while waiting to do your PhD. 

[TakeruK]

You need to face the consequences of your lie. I understand why you did it and perhaps I would have chose to do the same in your shoes! But whether or not you had a good reason to lie, you still need to accept the consequences. Good reasons don't justify lying or make it okay to lie, it just means that when you made the decision to lie, you decided that the benefits of lying outweighed the consequences. But you can't escape the consequences.

There's unlikely to be an "easy" way out of this. In terms of your ethical and professional choices, you will have to choose between telling your boss and accepting whatever comes of that or deferring your grad school start date.

What happens at your 90 day probation mark? You make it sound like they can't easily fire you after that but unless you have some sort of contract that says otherwise, they definitely can fire you even after probation is up. I think you are in California right, and California is an at-will employment state, which means they can fire you at any time for any reason. Also, lying in your interview is definitely a justifiable reason to fire you. Generally, if your position is protected by a contract after 90 days, then there are likely to be consequences for you if you terminate your contract early.

If you do get a new contract at the 90 day mark, I think the best professional and ethical thing to do is to tell your boss at whatever meeting you have with them at the 90 day mark. You say this is February so by then, you might already know where you want to go. You might be able to smooth things over by saying that you didn't intend to apply when you interviewed for this job, but if you accept any further work at the 90 day mark, that would be very unethical and unprofessional. 

I think at the 90 day mark is a good time to tell your boss your plans. Maybe you can suggest your ideal plan of trying to defer grad school for one year. Feb. is still early enough to transition your work to someone else by the time you leave. But be prepared for them to choose to not extend your contract and be fired right there. 

Or, you can keep quiet about grad school entirely and try your best to get a deferral from your top choice school. If you are unable to get a deferral at your top choice, maybe you can get one from another school, or just reapply next year (if you get several offers this year then you are likely to get in again next year). You can tell the school you decided you wanted to work another year in industry before going into grad school. Then, you can tell your boss next fall when you are reapplying and everything will be on the level again.

Note: If you are interested in a career in industry, perhaps finding a grad program that allows or encourages summer internships outside of the university would be a good idea! If you do this, you will definitely want to not burn bridges and get a good reference letter etc. 

[noogakl81]

I would absolutely recommend deferring for a year.

If you choose to leave your position after only a year and go to graduate school when you told them in the interview that you were not going to do this, this will negatively impact your career prospects in the future in the following ways:

1. Full-time career positions that only last one year or less do not look good on a resume. In the future, potential employers might wonder if you are only applying for their position because you couldn't get the position you want and will dump them as soon as the position you want with another company becomes available.

2. You will have a terrible reference from your first job. They can tell any potential employers in the future that first, you lied about your career plans in the interview and second, you bailed on the team when they really needed you to stick around. All of this after it had been communicated to you that you were in line for a promotion after one year! Any potential employer that finds these things out is not going to hire you.

In future interviews, I would recommend not talking about specific details of your future career plans if you think this will adversely affect your chances of getting the job. You can still talk about the type of work you want to be doing in a particular field, without mentioning that you want to go and get a PhD or take a mother position.

If they communicate things to you something to the effect of that they only want to hire people who want to stick around for a long time, ask them to sign you to a five year contract with no probationary period and guaranteed 10 percent raises each year. They will scoff at this, but you can discuss the reality is that in many states, they can fire you whenever they want to and you can leave whenever you want to. You know too little about what it will be like to work at the particular company, and they don't know what it will be like for you to work with them to make long terms plans.

[camth]

So I've been doing some research on this topic, cause it may soon impact me, and I have heard different things. The first is that contract and temp jobs don't really count in the whole quitting before a year and second that even in jobs that do a lot of places say you get one freebie, then there are a bunch of negative opinions towards it. I know a lot of people who have left jobs in under three months when they got a position they really want and have just neglected to put the job they left on their resume. You'd just have to weigh the trade-off of being able to claim those eight or so months of experience against the fact that you might get a bad reference from your first boss. Crazy thought is your job close to any school you applied to, so that there's some way you can semi-finish the year out while actually in school, like on the weekends or something.

Personally, I think the best move is to either defer if you don't have to go to PhD right now; or explain the situation probably completely honestly and hope your boss understands. Though you could always say something like you had no intentions to apply when you first got the job but you were sent a fee waiver from the school and decided to apply on a whim and ended up actually being accepted and have now decided to go. I know last year Notre Dame sent me a fee waiver to their grad school last minute so I just decided to say why not and send off an application so there is precedence. Honesty is probably the best policy though because once you start lying the whole thing can just blow up in your face.

[ANerdHasNoName]

I might be encountering a similar situation... My internship is ending soon and if I attend grad school, I'd attend next Fall which means I have a good 6-7 months of free time. Since there's a higher chance I'm attending a Masters program - astronomical fees! - I need to earn as much as possible (my parents can pay for it but I don't want to rely on them completely). My parents as well as some colleagues in my current company have advised me to go for a full time job and then when its time to leave for grad school, just resign, giving reasonable notice, of course. The logic is that if I say I am leaving after 6-7 months, people won't hire me.

I suppose I could go for shorter contracts like a research assistant of some sort but in my country I could easily earn twice that amount as a software developer.

To me, getting a full time job and later resigning seems like the logical thing to do but like @samman1994, I'd feel rather guilty. Since I ultimately want to immigrate, it wouldn't matter much to me if I burnt this bridge (I'd rather burn this bridge than to defer grad school). I'd just feel bad for leaving.

To those who have experienced this - what did you do during that awkward gap between undergrad and grad school?

[samman1994]

16 hours ago, ANerdHasNoName said:

I might be encountering a similar situation... My internship is ending soon and if I attend grad school, I'd attend next Fall which means I have a good 6-7 months of free time. Since there's a higher chance I'm attending a Masters program - astronomical fees! - I need to earn as much as possible (my parents can pay for it but I don't want to rely on them completely). My parents as well as some colleagues in my current company have advised me to go for a full time job and then when its time to leave for grad school, just resign, giving reasonable notice, of course. The logic is that if I say I am leaving after 6-7 months, people won't hire me.

I suppose I could go for shorter contracts like a research assistant of some sort but in my country I could easily earn twice that amount as a software developer.

To me, getting a full time job and later resigning seems like the logical thing to do but like @samman1994, I'd feel rather guilty. Since I ultimately want to immigrate, it wouldn't matter much to me if I burnt this bridge (I'd rather burn this bridge than to defer grad school). I'd just feel bad for leaving.

To those who have experienced this - what did you do during that awkward gap between undergrad and grad school?

This is the exact same boat I was in. No one did want to hire me for only a few months, and with no prior experience, the contract jobs didn't want to waste time training me either. It is as I stated, a sticky situation. In reality, you will end up screwing the company, and that is something you will have to consider, and something I did. As stated prior, my main issue is guilt. I knew full well when I applied I lied to them, and full well that I was planning on leaving. I was just wondering whether I should come clean or not (so as to prepare them for my leave). 

As the you can see from this thread, the general consensus was not to leave at all, and do whatever I can to defer. However, if you aren't going to leave it on your resume, then I guess it doesn't really matter. For me, since this will be my only industry experience before grad school, it will be a very important part of my resume after grad school (i.e. it would be veeery beneficial to me to keep it). 

[noogakl81]

35 minutes ago, samman1994 said:

This is the exact same boat I was in. No one did want to hire me for only a few months, and with no prior experience, the contract jobs didn't want to waste time training me either. It is as I stated, a sticky situation. In reality, you will end up screwing the company, and that is something you will have to consider, and something I did. As stated prior, my main issue is guilt. I knew full well when I applied I lied to them, and full well that I was planning on leaving. I was just wondering whether I should come clean or not (so as to prepare them for my leave). 

As the you can see from this thread, the general consensus was not to leave at all, and do whatever I can to defer. However, if you aren't going to leave it on your resume, then I guess it doesn't really matter. For me, since this will be my only industry experience before grad school, it will be a very important part of my resume after grad school (i.e. it would be veeery beneficial to me to keep it). 

samman1994 and ANerdHasNoName, why are your personal deadlines for graduate school so firm? Is this some sort of immigration thing, where if you wait too long, you will no longer be eligible to apply for grad schools in the United States?

From a career perspective, it would make more sense to spend more than a year at a position, so that when you leave for grad school, you will have more accomplishments on your CV, good references from the company, a larger professional network, and hopefully more money in your bank account to pay for your schooling if your schooling is not paid for.

Both of you make it sound as though you have no other choice but to lie in your job applications because you must start graduate school the following year. Unless there is something I'm missing, and please inform me if this is the case, that doesn't seem to be true in either of your situations.

[Hamb]

I'd like to back up the recommendation from @TakeruK. If your biggest concern is actually your guilty conscience (as you've stated is the biggest factor) you tell them before the 3 month period is over. Inform them that you know you messed up, and that you deeply regret your mistake. Inform them that you'll help train or prepare any replacement and that it's been one of the biggest mistakes you've made in your professional life and express your sincere regret. If they decide to fire you, then your conscious should have little to no problem with it.

If you take the alternative route of not saying anything until after the 3 month period, then just be prepared for that bridge to be burned forever. It may be necessary given your financial status and possibility of finding another job to hold out until you start your Ph.D. program, but obviously accept that you'll have put them in a bad position.

To me, it's a matter of weighing how guilty your conscience actually is versus the financial requirements of staying on until June when you'll leave. In my opinion, waiting until after the 30 day period and then telling them is still just extending the lie until you lock them in to a point where it's apparently harder for them to get rid of you, which is also a scumbag move. Additionally, I'm not sure where you're from so look into this, but lying during your hiring process is often times grounds for terminating a contract. If you've signed a detailed contract, look into it because most decent companies protect themselves with clauses that include topics such as this. That's why it's not all that rare to hear about professionals 5-10 years into their career being fired when it turns out they lied about their degree despite an otherwise acceptable performance.