If we haven’t met yet, hi there! If we have, it’s nice to connect with you here. Even before I graduated from my PhD in 2025, mentoring others has been the most tangible form of career meaning and emotional fulfillment to me. And of course, I stand on the shoulders of everyone who has mentored me.
My main goal for these “bites” is:
To provide actionable advice for those looking to transition from academia to industry
This means that I am prioritizing actionable advice over full-length articles (or even full sentences! Gosh, I love bullet points. & ampersands). Each bite will be the length that it takes for me to convey that bit of advice. Some will be leaner or meatier than others.
This means that I may be wrong! I strongly do not believe in “best practices”. Certainly there are very bad practices. But 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 before picking which makes the most sense to leverage. These advice bites are a collection of strategies that I’ve learned over the years but may not work for you or your specific context. And that’s ok! (I love learning new strategies, so reach out if you have different tools and ways of thinking about these topics. I would be eager to learn.)
This means that I do not use AI to write, edit, or brainstorm these bites. GenAI models amalgamate strategies into solid average advice. This is good as a starting place if you’re brand new to some topics. But you can get advice like that online elsewhere. My goal is to share MY personal strategies. Then you can learn other strategies from other people that you talk to. And then selectively applying these different strategies that you’ve learned depending on your specific context at hand.
(So, please forgive any writing mistakes! Also I adore em dashes for visual emphasis — but I promise that’s just a me thing.)
Also, I hope this means that my writing isn’t too dry! There’s plenty of heartwarming, funny, and more eloquently written advice that is very easy to find online. My goal, however, is to share actionable advice. That’ll likely be at expense of memes & jokes, which I’ve sadly never been good at anyways. But hop on a virtual coffee chat with me, and I am more happy to talk through the emotional aspects of these topics. It’s hard out there. But I hope these advice bites can help move you forward at least one step in the direction of your dream job.
Tip for this series: There’s no particular recommended order in which you need to read these bites. But you can get the tl;dr by starting with the “About Me in 2026: Table of Contents”.
Bio
I’m an Applied Scientist at Adobe. My PhD is in Experimental Psychology where I studied how people make pictures. Now I study how GenAI models make pictures. Feel free to check out my personal website to learn more about my academic background and current research.
AI was not used to write, edit, or brainstorm this post. All mistakes and em dashes are my own.