Academia or Industry? My Two Cents
First congratulations for having these options! You have worked hard in the Ph.D. program and finally you earned the option to stay in the academia. Now what? Will you like it? It is a challenging question and people have different answers about it. I graduated about two years ago and I would like to share how I make the decision.
- Ask myself what I really want.
The ideal case is to have what I am passionate about as my job but I found it unrealistic. I don’t even know what I love most, and I believe I’m not alone. So my goal is to have a reasonably high hourly rate but I can still try everything I haven’t got the chance to try in the past, the so-called work life balance.
2. Compare.
If I started from a professor, I would work hard through the assistant professor period, which is super challenging and there is a chance that I would fail and start over. It sounds very risky unless being a professor is your dream job.
In the U.S. industry it is usually your choice whether to work longer than regular hours. So there is kind of a guaranteed hourly rate. It is easier to switch jobs if you don’t like the current one (than in academia). But there is no tenure in industry so there are chances you were laid off. You have to work as you are told to do which can be boring. And it is hard to switch back to academia especially when you have worked for a long time in industry.
