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.
For excellent researchers who do not want to teach, and whose research interest aligns with industry, you can work in research organizations in the industry as well, e.g., Microsoft Research, Google Research, etc. Microsoft research is relatively independent of other Microsoft organizations while scientists in Google Research work closely with engineers. You can choose based on your preference.
3. Decide.
I don’t want to struggle through the assistant professor period in the academia, and I was not able to get an opportunity in Microsoft Research or Google Research. I am working as a data scientist in an engineering organization in Microsoft, and it is better than I expected. I am still doing research to some extent, but I don’t have the pressure to publish. I have access to research papers from IEEE for example, and learning resources such as LinkedIn Learning and O’Reilly.
Thank you for reading and good luck on your career!
