Hi! To contrast with my previous About Me in 2016 post, I wanted to write a brief description on where I am today (11.05.26) and to consolidate links as an informal table of contents about my trajectory into industry. But there’s no particular recommended order in which you should read these bites.

It was hard to decide1 and even harder to actually make the leap from academia to industry, but ultimately it’s been the right choice for me.23 It’s now been just over a two years since I graduated from my PhD in Experimental Psychology from UCSD. Back then, I studied how people make pictures. Now I study how GenAI models make pictures.

I did 3 industry internships during grad school.456 These internships were definitely landed through networking7891011 and (I also hope) through some strategies that I leaned into for tailoring my resume1213, interviewing1415, and some other things161718192021. In fact, all my jobs ever have come through networking. My last internship led to a job offer22 for a full-time Applied Scientist role on my current team. I took a brief personal sabbatical after defending my dissertation to backpack the John Muir Trail and urban backpack South East Asia and then returned to the States right before starting my job.

I’ve now been at Adobe for a year and some change. The learning curve was very steep (and non-linear), but I adopted a phased learning approach that conceptually helped me constrain what and how much to be learning at a given time.23 (I made this personal approach up after I got overwhelmed in my first couple months. I think it works? but a few more iterations will be good data.) I’ve also had a lot of incredible industry mentors that have helped guide my career.24

Now that I’m full-time, I often interview candidates25 and sometimes mentor contractors & interns.26 I do my best to take on networking chats with grad students looking to transition into industry27 but my limited bandwidth is the main reason that I started this substack.

I’m still learning a lot. Like I mentioned in my README, I might be wrong in some or many ways. I strongly do not believe in “best practices”. Rather, I believe that success comes from selectively applying different strategies depending on context. To do this, it’s critical to know what some different strategies are in the possibility space—and this substack is meant to be one set of those strategies that you now know about and can try out as you’d like. I love learning new strategies, so reach out if you have different tools and ways to think about these topics. I am eager to keep learning.

Fin.

As of 11.05.26, I’m not planning to add more posts to this series. I may edit my writing if I begin to disagree with myself (which is likely to happen one day), but I’ll use cross outs (like this) so that it’s clear what I’ve amended in my current strategies and thinking. I suppose if I end up deciding to add more posts in the future, I’ll edit this post, too.

Many thanks to the friends like The Extroverted Friend, The Canadian Friend, The Undergrad Mentees, and others who I’ve learned from immensely and who graciously let me anonymize their professional trajectories into industry roles as well. Many thanks to The Grad Advisor and numerous internship research mentors. And many thanks to the colleagues on my team, like The Teammate, who have provided very excellent & very patient feedback on my career in industry so far.

Feel free to check out my personal website to learn more about my background and current research.

AI was not used to write, edit, or brainstorm this post. All mistakes and em dashes are my own.

  1. Stay in academia if it’s your dream ↩
  2. Be transparent with your PhD advisor ↩
  3. Academia and industry aren’t that different ↩
  4. Applying to industry internships during the PhD ↩
  5. Doing industry internships during your PhD ↩
  6. What if you can’t do an internship? ↩
  7. Networking for introverts ↩
  8. Networking misconceptions ↩
  9. Writing networking emails: The basic formula ↩
  10. See How I landed my first internship (through networking) in Applying to industry internships during the PhD ↩
  11. It’s all about luck, but there are ways to make yourself luckier ↩
  12. Resumes should be human-readable ↩
  13. Resume, LinkedIn, and the personal website. You need all 3. ↩
  14. Always ask questions at the end of an interview ↩
  15. External recruiters & recruiter calls ↩
  16. Only academics call it “industry”, but to everyone else it’s just called “work” ↩
  17. Referrals: Helpful but (likely) not a deal-breaker ↩
  18. Random job hunting tips ↩
  19. Some public speaking resources ↩
  20. Slidesmithing in industry & academia ↩
  21. You can mostly ignore job descriptions ↩
  22. Negotiating the job offer ↩
  23. The first 365 days of your first job in industry ↩
  24. Mentors in industry ↩
  25. On the other side #2: What I look for when interviewing grad students ↩
  26. On the other side #3: What I look for when converting contractors to full-time ↩
  27. On the other side #1: How I choose who I have networking chats with ↩