Be transparent with your PhD advisor

Here are some hard but helpful conversation topics that I discussed with The Grad Advisor about aiming for an industry role after graduation. Hopefully this helps you and your advisor prepare accordingly, too!

You can also read about the harder conversations that I had with myself when deciding to transition out of academia in this post.

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Note: The following advice is for PhD students from research fields who do not traditionally do summer internships. For example, it’s standard for e.g., HCI students to do an internship almost every summer.

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Discuss when to do internships during the PhD

Just as people say that job-hunting is a full time job, so too are internship applications. Talk with your advisor about devoting certain days of the week during the fall¹ or devoting a full 2 weeks in a single sprint to apply to internships.

Applying to & doing internships will take time away from research that your advisor might expect you to do, unless you both agree that an internship is your research priority.

You have 4 (summer) opportunities to do an internship during a 5-year PhD program:

• summer after your 1st year - don’t apply for an internship too soon, because otherwise you’ll be seen as a PhD applicant with no proven research program or expertise
• summer after your 2nd year - you might be focusing on your qualifying exams here
• summer after your 3rd year - likely the ideal target
• summer after your 4th year - another ideal target for landing a full-time offer for after you graduate

How it worked for me:

• summer after my 4th year - I completed my 1st Adobe Research internship in 2023
• spring of my 5th year - there was extra funding to work with an Adobe Firefly team in 2024
• summer after my 5th year - I completed my 2nd Adobe Research internship while also completing my Adobe Firefly internship in 2024

There are a couple important personal things to note: I pushed off graduation by a quarter (to Fall 2024) so that I could take on the second Adobe Research internship that had been offered to me after my first internship. It was a very difficult choice for me. Unexpectedly, this made it possible for the Adobe Firefly team to offer me an internship also. My first full-time industry job out of academia is now with that Adobe Firefly team.

Adapt your research program

Likely, when you first started grad school, your advisor was originally training you to one day become tenure-track faculty with a full research lab & program. If that is not your dream today, talk with your advisor about how you can adapt your research to fit your industry dream job.

Talk about what you value the most in your research & want to learn during your remaining years of grad school.

For me, I wanted to (1) learn new technical skills; and (2) collaborate more, in order to learn cross-functional collaboration skills. During my PhD, I published less first author publications, but I got to collaborate on more diverse projects and therefore, published more second author papers. I also learned more skills and methods but probably at the sacrifice of deeply exploring singular research questions.

Important note: Some grad students are also able to use the research from their internships as a part of their dissertation. This is ideal to plan out with your advisor.

Strategize about funding

If you land a summer internship, this frees up money for other students in the lab for summer research funding, conference registrations, etc. Some companies with strong research organizations (i.e., who directly recruit from academic labs) can gift grants to your advisor.

Ask for networking connections

Your advisor definitely has industry connections! Most people in the world are not faculty, so it is highly likely that they know someone who can connect you to someone else.²

If they advised a student or postdoc who is now in industry, ask them for an intro over email. I have networked with former grad students who are still eternally grateful to their advisors even a decade later. Your advisor’s intro email will carry weight when they see it in their inbox. Moreover, if your lab’s research or methods speciality is relevant to any industry researchers, this carries even more weight. In my experience, almost immediate referral-level weight.³

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Finishing the PhD knowing you’re going to leave academia

Define realistic milestones with your advisor for finishing your dissertation work, as well as non-dissertation work. Most academic postdocs will continue working on and publishing work that they started in grad school. If you move into industry, it’s highly likely you won’t have the time.

If you do want to continue working on your projects, be very clear with yourself and your advisor about how you’ll navigate things if your bandwidth changes and you need to step away from that work. Have candid conversations about authorship.

Finishing can mean many different things: full peer-reviewed journal publication, conference publication, full drafted manuscript, finished Experiment #2 with a well-documented github repo, passing along your work to a peer, etc.

As you approach your dissertation defense date and/or develop a clearer idea of your next industry chapter, be as honest with yourself as you can about what is realistic to what you can finish. It is kinder for both yourself and your advisor to not make optimistic promises.

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Considerations for PhD advisors

• Funding — If your student does a internship, this frees up research funding that you can distribute to other lab needs. Additional considerations:
  • If their internship research is also a PhD dissertation project, negotiate with their internship manager who is responsible for covering funding like participant payment, equipment, etc.
  • If they publish at a conference, the company will likely be able to fund the student’s travel to that conference.
• Industry grants — Some companies with strong research organizations (i.e., who directly recruit from academic labs) can provide grants to your lab.
• Publication planning for post-graduation — Very likely your student will not have time to work on a paper once they are in industry. (Or maybe they do if they continue to collaborate through their industry research role!) But if you know this in advance, you can discuss:
  • which other students may take on this work to ensure that the paper draft becomes a successful publication (recommendation: have a candid conversation about authorship and who will be the corresponding author)
  • what is a realistic milestone for the paper before graduation, e.g., full journal publication? conference publication? complete Latex draft and well-documented github repo?
• Longterm research program — Oftentimes, grad advisors will step away from a research topic so that a former grad student (now postdoc or assistant professor) can grow into their own research program. You don’t need to do this if your student goes into industry.
• Lab collaborations & culture — There are more jobs in industry. In academia, students from the same lab may be competing with each other if they enter the job market at the same time. In this context, it is better for students aiming for academia to distinguish their research program. However, if students are aiming at industry, there is not as dire a need to have differing research programs or methodologies. In this context, it can make sense for students to collaborate together on projects, potentially enabling to the ability to tackle bigger problems, generate larger datasets, and lead larger undergrad/grad teams.

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