Goodbye Academia

There are several alternatives to the current funding giants, and I think they'll offer superior returns. If they do, NIH and others will change.

My favorite example:

Janelia Farm - I believe they expect 50% of their projects to fail.

A Janelia recruitment excerpt is illustrative (and you don't have to have done a post-doc even to lead a lab):

"We invite applications from biochemists, biologists, chemists, computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians, neurobiologists and physicists who are passionate in their pursuit of important problems in basic scientific and technical research.

All laboratories are internally funded without extramural grants. Scientists at Janelia have no formal teaching duties and minimal administrative responsibilities. Janelia labs are small groups of postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and technicians tackling challenging research problems that are expected to have transformative impact. Group leaders are expected to engage in the direct conduct of research in a highly interactive and collaborative environment."

It's not the only way - and I doubt Janelia thinks it should be - but this style could be good for science in general. Even if funding levels return, I think they should probably return in a different form. Janelia might offer a blueprint for that.

http://www.janelia.org/

>I know many colleagues who got into academia and were able to find plenty of funding.

If I parse correctly that you're in academia, you should really make more effort to understand potential sources of bias.

They got into academia because they were able to find plenty of funding. This does not imply that people who offer hard work and talent will typically find funding.

> Do you want to be the guy who refused to supervise the daughter of the nth most important person in your field?

I never witnessed literal nepotism where family relations were involved. But, this definitely does happen when it comes to academic "family"- a famous advisor's "son" or "daughter" usually has a significant edge.

I made lemonade from the lemons: came out of an MIT postdoc with a Science paper, the academic track didn't pan out (2 application cycles) but I saw that there was a need for a great online organic chemistry resource, so I started building one. 4 years in, it's self-supporting, and I have many of the advantages of an instructor with very little of the red tape I'd be experiencing if I were teaching in academia. Miss the research sometimes, but I'm sure someone would accept me as a visiting researcher for a year if I ever wanted to get back into it.

tldr; I get a lot of satisfaction/happiness[0] from being taught by good teachers and talking to people doing research in CS and that's why I got back to academia. Not sure what will happen after this.

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I first entered industry as a software engineer after my Master's from a good university in the US. I felt the job to be very structured. By `structured` I mean - goals were well defined; best practices of SE were applied; at times there was confusion of what exactly the requirement meant but we all had it sorted since meetings with managers and product managers were regular. Research there meant to dive into existing code and/or ask experienced developers around. After having spent ~10 months, I decided to apply for a PhD program. The reason I gave to a lot of my friends at the time of leaving industry was, `I didn't have enough meat to chew`. IMO the company's structure hampered my ability to learn deeper concepts of Math-CS, and made me lethargic (probably due to the compensation). Of course, had I stayed there long enough, I could have probably defined the structure, but at that time I thought there were more interesting things to study.

I was fortunate to get accepted for a PhD program. Having an average Math background, I struggled in my first year studying mathematical models behind CS, for instance queuing theory. Everyone around me had a better intuition to such things and I felt really awkward. I survived the first semester, and in the second managed to handle more than a course.

I am currently in my second year. Most of my classes are theory based and not at all intuitive to me. However, I spend hours to understand the proofs. There are some amazing theoretical work which goes in developing algorithms[1] and concepts like these this keeps me going. Of the some I understand, I feel excited. Of the ones I don't, I hope to get my head around them some day. I meet people who are great researchers. Class projects are a great way to sow seeds of research ideas and challenging since I have to compete, in some cases, with a few classmates who have a lot more knowledge in the subject. With all classes till now, I am able to do mediocre research which aligns with the research grant given to my advisor. However, in the future, I hope to do much concrete research. My advisor knows that my current focus is on courses and he's fine with me investing more time in them as opposed to research.

Till now, all this has been challenging, and exciting. I don't know whether I'll end up in the steady state[2] of research as OP pointed out or may be I am already there :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philomathean_Society

[1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/mmds.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady_state