By the time that I finished the 2nd year of my PhD including my qualifying exams, I had worked in 6 different labs across UCSD, Harvard, MIT, UChicago, and NYU. I started grad school ready to fall in love with academia, but also to pivot if that didn’t happen. And it didn’t happen.
Perhaps that’s because 6 months into starting my PhD program in 2019, Covid-19 shut down campus, and I spent the next 1.5 years remote. But again, I felt like I had enough personal data from experiences in all my different labs, that I was 100% sure that I wanted to do an industry internship.
And after my first internship in 2023, I was 100% sure that I wanted to fully transition into industry.
I consider myself lucky that The Grad Advisor also strongly believes that research stands on the pillars of both academia and industry. I still believe this now that I am conducting research in industry. There are surprising similarities1 and differences. A main difference that I’ll note is a common contrast: depth (industry is more shallow to answer research questions on shorter timelines) vs. breadth (industry enables me to explore a significantly wider array of research questions). But I still consider myself to be conducting research.
There are many obvious, negative reasons to leave academia (low funding, lack of jobs, classic two-body problem, constant risk of burnout, etc.) and many non-obvious, completely neutral reasons.
I’ll focus on the completely neutral reasons that come down to personal preference, but are The Dream Job for my friends who are still in academia:
#1 The mentorship
Explicit mentorship
I love mentoring others and also receiving mentorship. Academia is an explicit institution for this. In fact, it’s one of our most successful social constructs as humans that we’ve honed across centuries.
Even before I graduated from my PhD in 2024, 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 mentored me.
But I think that I am a more effective mentor when I can opt in and opt out of mentoring others. When I shared this thought, this is probably the moment when The Grad Advisor realized that I was not grappling with a temporary loss of faith in academia, but that I was truly understanding the weight of what it means to be an advisor whose full-time role is to mentor others into successful researchers.
In my industry job today, I mentor PhD interns & contractors to the best of my ability. But I get to choose when I have the mental & emotional capacity to take them on.
Implicit management
Currently, I am an IC (individual contributor). That means the success of my career does not rely on the success of anyone that I am mentoring. I think that I am a more impactful mentor because of this.
Being an advisor is also being a manager, because you need your students to have successful research programs and produce publications. I do not want to be a manager. And even if I decide to become a manager one day, I can always revert to being an IC again without major consequences.
#2 The stability
Job security
The goal of academic tenure is working the same job for the rest of your life. I hate job-hunting as much as the next person, but I hope to work at least 2-3 more jobs in life to explore new companies, tools, and positions.
Community
Same logic applies. I would be thrilled to explore meaningfully contributing to many different communities, including those outside academic & scientific communities.
Also I loved going to conferences during those 3 days of everything that was amazing about academia, but I couldn’t justify the 362 days in which I often felt burnt out.
Geographic location
An aspect of the dream tenureship job is sitting in the same office, next to the same faculty down the department hallway for 3-4 decades. For someone who is existentially very antsy, this “stability” feels claustrophobic to me.
When I described this hallway setup to a friend (who is now faculty), she practically sighed with relief. For her, this was calming and the ultimate achievement of being able to finally rest from academic job-hunting and finally get to the science questions.
Moreover, being able to choose the city and state that I live in is also critical to my personal happiness and well-being. Even if I settled down longterm in a single location, I’d like to chose that location and also have the choice to move if I wanted to. That is often difficult for academic roles.
#3 Owning a research program
Authorship
I’m building my own research program in my current role, but it looks different. The work is faster and therefore, scrappier in a way that wouldn’t pass scientific muster. Also I wouldn’t call it my “own” research program. Timelines move too quickly in industry to not lean on others. I am often the lead on a project because I know how to bring in others who have the expertise needed. Cross-functional collaboration is much more equal than the work hierarchy that authorship order implies.
I’ve never cared about first authorship. This fits my style well.
Publications
After my internships, I realized that I felt as much accomplishment writing up my results into a readout document or slide deck as publishing a paper. (Also, in my company, readouts and slide decks are often cited and are stored within the equivalent of a literature hub.) Seeing how my work directly impacts model development or changes a team’s mental framework about a model is tangible and fulfilling to me.
I do miss academia. But I think that I miss being in my labs more than being a grad student or academia itself. I’m still forming my thoughts on this and may revise this post later.
AI was not used to write, edit, or brainstorm this post. All mistakes and em dashes are my own.