Exploring Science Policy Careers
Advice on exploring federal science policy jobs, written for philosophers of science and STS scholars (but applicable more broadly)
Across every federal agency, there are a range of jobs that are often referred to as ‘science policy.’ People who work science policy have many different job titles and backgrounds, but they generally are involved in prioritizing, formulating, and implementing science and engineering activities. There are rich conceptual and practical issues in how every government agency performs its work, and philosophers of science and science, technology and society (STS) scholars can - and should – play an important role in improving how policy gets done.
Getting permanent jobs in U.S. science policy can be hard. There are a lot of debates about the official entryway to getting hired into government: “Is it time to kill USAjobs.gov?” Many who do get hired as official civil servants–who are official employees of the US government–often have a circuitous career path, working as interns, fellows, or support contractors, building up their resume so that it can match with keywords that get used by USAjobs.
The below topics discuss a range of points that can make it more manageable to enter into federal service.
Key Fellowships to enter into science policy
Getting your foot in the door through a fellowship can be the easiest way to launch a science policy career. Kelly Singel curated a fantastic list of science policy fellowships: the list is so long that it can be difficult to know where to start.
For philosophers of science and STS scholars, the following three fellowships are likely the most important fellowships to pursue.
Presidential Management Fellowship (PMF)
Application cycle ~every October.US citizens only. Open to both Master’s and PhD degrees, starting in the final year of their grad degree and up to two years after.
Open to all degree disciplines. This means philosophers/STS scholars are on an even footing with every other degree field. See “Consider the Presidential Management Fellowship” for comments on the program from a philosopher PMF, Shane Wilkins.
The application takes a few hours to complete an online exam. The program accepts about 5% of applicants a year.
Unlike other fellowships, PMF hires you as a civil servant, and can effectively be a permanent job. (This is a huge plus, in contrast to other fellowships!) While you’re technically on probation, most agencies want to keep you permanently.
There doesn’t seem to be any special advice about applying to PMF: carefully follow OPM’s website and the guidelines for applying (such as having expected graduation date listed on your transcript), and attend some of their webinars.
If you become a PMF finalist, you become eligible for agencies to hire you. There can be a large amount of strategic advice on how to get a final position, and this is usually the best time to reach out to former PMFs to get advice on placement. Being entrepreneurial helps, and by reaching out to people in government, you can create fun and unexpected opportunities.
AAAS S&T Policy Fellowship
1-2 year Executive branch fellowships run through the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). AAAS also administers some Congressional fellowships that last 1 year in partnership with professional scientific societies. Every year there are usually around 110-160 new Executive branch fellows across roughly 20 agencies and 40-50 new Legislative branch fellows who work as staffers in the offices of members or committees.
AAAS’s goal is not focused solely on post-fellowship job placement. They aim to A) increase dialog about science and evidence-based policy making in government; and B) develop the next generation of science policy leaders by exposing them to government. Some societies fund fellows with the explicit goal of increasing the amount of science discussion inside of government, even though they maintain no contact with the fellows once hired. Also, AAAS values when fellows return to academia or industry with the knowledge they get in government.
AAAS typically hires fellows as ‘support contractors’. While some AAAS fellows are hired as civil servants, they are part of the excepted service and there is not a clear path for them to become permanent.
The AAAS fellowship has hired philosophers/STS scholars in the past, including Dan Hicks, Steve Elliott and Stuart Gluck in the Executive branch. Notably, all three had previous experience with data science and institutional analyses. Wendy Parker held a fellowship in the Congressional branch.
You must have your PhD before applying in the December application window and be a dues paying member of AAAS
For the Executive branch, the review process is three stages: 1) review by AAAS staff of applicant’s submitted documents to select semifinalists; 2) interviews by AAAS panels of semi-finalists to select finalists; 3) interviews by agency offices of overlapping subsets of finalists. After the finalist interviews, there is a matching process of ranked preferences for finalists and agency offices.
Applicant pools are large, and AAAS reviewers shoulder significant cognitive burdens in stages (1) and (2) to sort through the information and agree in panels about potentially good candidates. In those stages, reviewers seem to be looking for applicants who clearly frame themselves and their work in disciplinary (rather than cross-disciplinary) categories. To lessen the cognitive load, philosophers of science could be wise to foreground in their applications their scientific credentials and contributions, including scientific degrees and disciplinary identities (e.g. ‘I am an evolutionary theorist’ rather than ‘I am a philosopher of biology’; or ‘I work on understanding how we know about climate change’ vs ‘I am a philosopher of climate models’).
Mirzayan S&T Policy Fellowship at the National Academies of Science, Technology and Medicine (NASEM)
Semester long, usually a cohort of 25. Takes current and recent grad students. Open to international/non-US citizens.
A host organization at NASEM has to want to take you on as a fellow, and some level of pre-coordination prior to applying is needed. If your professional network has collaborators who’ve worked on academies studies, use them to find out if the NASEM staff members they worked with might be willing to talk with you.
Some of the NASEM groups that might be most interesting to a philsci/STS scholar would be the Committee on Science, Technology and the Law, the COSEPUP policy group, and the NAE program on CESER.
The ‘Support Contractor’ route
Civil servants often work with support contractors as they perform their government work. Support contractors work for private firms (such as Deloitte, Booz Allen Hamilton, and many more) that are contracted by the federal government to perform work. Some contractors perform very focused and specialized work, such as database maintenance, that it makes sense to outsource away from civil servant staff.
However, sometimes support contractors perform work that is science policy in scope. Due to headcount limits placed on agencies about how many civil servants can be hired, there are many support contractors who do rich science policy jobs, performing the same work as civil servants. However, support contractors lack the same job protections that civil servants have, and can be fired at will.
It’s easier to enter government through the fellowships above, but pursuing a support contractor job is perhaps the most common path for people to enter into civil service. Often, when an agency is eventually able to hire a civil servant, they often hire from the support contracting pool.
Beyond the major support contractors noted above, many federal agencies employ smaller companies that you may never have heard of. These support contractors sometimes hire for jobs out of the list of resumes that have been submitted to their personal websites, and never actually post a job. When you’re searching for a job, it can be good to load your resume into a range of potentially relevant support contracting companies. Once someone seeks to hire you, it’s vital to do due diligence to learn about the culture of the company (are they constantly trying to get the government to give them more money?) as well as their relationship with the civil servant that manages them (are they treated as peers? Are they micro-managed and criticized frequently?).
Informational Interviews
If you’re looking to explore an area of government service, start reaching out to people in that industry for informational interviews. People love to help. Try talking to a mix of people whom are early in their career, versus more established. You can also frame an interview request as being whether someone from their office would be interested in talking to you.
When you do informational interviews, it can be good to ask about a range of topics:
Be curious about how an agency works.
Is an agency a mission agency? An R&D agency?
What’s the balance of authority between political appointees and civil servants?
What parts of an agency make policy decisions?
Ask about career paths
How did this person get started in their career?
Are there planned future USAjobs.gov postings?
What support contracting companies are typically used to do policy work at a given federal agency?
Are there other people that they think you’d enjoy talking to?
Keep emails brief!! In reaching out to people, make a request to chat, state why your work leads you to want to speak to someone, and then include a very brief (2-3 sentence) bio of yourself, perhaps including a linkedin or a link to your webpage.
Cultural Comments on Engaging with Practitioners
Realize that many people in government may never have heard of philosophy of science or STS. They don’t necessarily need to understand it - they just need to know that you are thoughtful and can be a good worker. Most might view your work as a subset of ‘science policy’ writ large, and describing your work as doing conceptual or social science research to inform science policy can be a helpful framing.
Helping to translate across groups and frame conceptual problems is vital. The policy staff at Agency Headquarters offices often have to react quickly to new problems, bringing in staff from a variety of offices, many of whom only understand their own small piece of the problem. Philosophers of science and STS scholars can have a great skillsets to help in translating and making key distinctions. However, be mindful that you’ve earned some trust before you go too deep in framing these issues. You may need a few years in some offices to learn the existing culture and history, before you’re seen as the voice people want to hear framing an issue . But other offices often thrive on short-term staff, and you may be called upon to lead and formulate complex problems right at the start of your career. It really depends.
There’s also a tough transition on figuring out the right balance between critique vs collaboration. Speaking truth to power matters, but sharp critiques in public discussions can make it difficult for civil servants to want to trust and collaborate with you. But on the flip side, you can also run a risk of being too accepting of an unjustified status quo. The STS scholar Shobita Parthasarathy has a great reflection on epistemic trespassing, that explores tensions between influence and harsh but honest critique. Changing the culture of civil servants — and thus really reforming science policy — can take decades, and change may be best implementable when external critics are complemented by civil servant policy entrepreneurs, who quietly try to change things from the inside. Once you’re inside the government, you can be a bridge between outside critics and people inside the agency, helping both sides understand the constraints and the fundamental issues. There are many thoughtful civil servants inside government who would want to embrace a more thoughtful vision of science policy, but they can be so over-burdened and time constrained that they cannot help lead deeper cultural change themselves.
Being seen as helping the mission of your agency is critical to helping grow your career. You succeed as long as you work in alignment with the expectations of your supervisor, and a good supervisor wants to help grow your strengths and interests. If you want to push values- or other philosophy of science/STS laden work in your career, it helps if you’ve excelled in doing other more traditional work. A good career goal can be to have a range of work-tasks that vary from traditional policy tasks to more reflective science policy work. If your can get your office to fund studies, either with internal teams or external grants, that you can supervise, you can shape and influence important research with only a fraction of your time. More importantly, because you’d be inside the agency, you can widely share and advocate for the importance of the results, helping to inform other policy processes and decisions that happen at an agency.
Following some of the news resources on the Resources page here can be helpful to learn the context of what’s going on inside federal agencies.