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On Leaving Academia

cs.unm.edu

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Re: On Leaving Academia

#21

Post by anusinha »

carterschonwald wrote: post #2

This article articulates a whole slew of issues that I'm sure many hners with experience wrt graduate school or beyond have observed and / or experienced first hand. All I can say is this, jumping into industry, and spending my time on engineering and research of my own that'd be too risky for academia, and that would not have a clear payoff value for a big co R&D lab, its the sexiest, best, most exciting and amazing…

> spending my time on engineering and research of my own..

In some fields, this is very easy. It's easy to buy a bunch of cluster time on Amazon EC2 or something and run lots of machine learning/other research applications. This is awesome and is one of the great things moving the field forwards.

It is much more difficult in the physical and life sciences where starting out costs are extreme. Many great ideas do not become reality because of how expensive starting a company in those fields are and how difficult it is to raise money in those fields. Lots of VCs are cutting funding in these areas because of the comparatively high risk and pharmaceuticals are slashing R&D budgets in order to pick up smaller companies and secure rights to compounds, etc. Funding is very difficult in these fields and the framework of academia is sometimes the only reasonable way to carry out original research.

Re: On Leaving Academia

#22

Post by mbreese »

angersock wrote: post #17
jackpirate wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two enormous successes of academia are mapping the human genome and finding the higgs boson. Both were hugely speculative the time the projects were undertaken. If there's something comparable coming out of industry, I don't know about it.

i mean all weve accomplished is connecting over a billion people and letting you see the person you want to talk to in real time on a device smaller than a hotpocket yeah i guess industry isnt really accomplishing much these days (How are your examples actually useful?)

And most of that was driven by academic research 10-50 years ago. The fear is that we aren't currently funding the academic research that will drive technology in the next 20-50 years.

Re: On Leaving Academia

#23

Post by _delirium »

Lewisham wrote: post #15
pnathan wrote: post #13

Okay, so there are issues with academia. How do those get solved? The obvious answer is "more funding", but there's also cultural shifts, wherein academia is excorcised for not doing "Real World Work". Is part of the solution to drive upward from K to PhD, focusing on critical thinking and humanities, educating more than training ? I don't know.

Okay, so there are issues with academia. How do those get solved? They don't. As far as I can tell, all the problems, bar those that stem directly from funding, have always been there. That's the nature of the institution. What changed, for CS at least, is that Google provides much of what is attractive to academia, but has all the funding that is required to make the other roadblocks go away. Google is not like Xero…

I dunno about the "never did" part. Google is doing some interesting stuff, but I don't think they're yet up to the peak of academia, like the amount of individual researcher freedom combined with innovation going on in the heyday of the MIT AI Lab. Even grad students were doing totally independent never-been-done research projects! Mere staff members like Richard Stallman had influential active side projects, too.

Google does seem like a great place if you're a senior enough researcher, though. People like Peter Norvig, Ken Thompson, and likely the author of this linked article, seem to get basically 100% freedom to work on whatever they want, with minimal management or job requirements, which is pretty much the ideal position to be in as a researcher. I suspect not all Google employees get Ken-Thompson-level freedom from having a boss, though.

Re: On Leaving Academia

#24

Post by Cd00d »

alatkins wrote: post #16
Cd00d wrote: post #6

As a physics PhD with two postdocs, this highlights almost perfectly my decision to leave for industry. When I defended the plan was to become faculty, but my first postdoc made it clear to me that goal was never going to make me happy, or allow for a balanced life. I would add to the list one other important factor: getting papers accepted at desirable journals feels less like success for me now than it did when I w…

I also found the post-PhD transition to industry a challenge. I highly recommend Jane Chin's 'PhD [alternative] Career Clinic' [1] for getting a handle on the perspectives of employers to PhDs, and ideas on how to avoid falling victim to some of the common stereotypes. Good luck! [1] http://www.amazon.com/alternative-Career-Clinic-Jane-Ph-D/dp...

Thank you for that - looks like a great resource.

Re: On Leaving Academia

#25

Post by _delirium »

aswanson wrote: post #18
jackpirate wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

research of my own that'd be too risky for academia I don't get this. The whole point of university research is that it is too risky (or benefits will be too far in the future) to make it profitable for companies to pursue. I don't see how anything could be too risky for the university, but not too risky for a business. Edit: I'm not saying universities are perfect. I'm just saying that they still manage to do resear…

I don't get this. The whole point of university research is that it is too risky (or benefits will be too far in the future) to make it profitable for companies to pursue. I don't see how anything could be too risky for the university, but not too risky for a business. I get it. I recall specifically posing a promising, if not clear-cut, research topic to my grad school advisor and his response "that's high risk". Ac…

You can blame citation-counting and h-indexes for a decent amount of that latter part. If administrators who don't know enough about an area to individually judge the quality of someone's record are mainly using citations and h-index as proxies for quality, then the job of a junior researcher becomes to maximize those two numbers. There are various strategies for doing so, but one of the higher-probability ones is to churn out a lot of papers, and also to make them relatively similar to what other people in the field are already doing (so they'll cite them as related work in their next paper).

Re: On Leaving Academia

#26

Post by angersock »

mbreese wrote: post #22
angersock wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i mean all weve accomplished is connecting over a billion people and letting you see the person you want to talk to in real time on a device smaller than a hotpocket yeah i guess industry isnt really accomplishing much these days (How are your examples actually useful?)

And most of that was driven by academic research 10-50 years ago. The fear is that we aren't currently funding the academic research that will drive technology in the next 20-50 years.

If you take that timeframe, fair point.

Re: On Leaving Academia

#27

Post by pyoung »

alatkins wrote: post #16
Cd00d wrote: post #6

As a physics PhD with two postdocs, this highlights almost perfectly my decision to leave for industry. When I defended the plan was to become faculty, but my first postdoc made it clear to me that goal was never going to make me happy, or allow for a balanced life. I would add to the list one other important factor: getting papers accepted at desirable journals feels less like success for me now than it did when I w…

I also found the post-PhD transition to industry a challenge. I highly recommend Jane Chin's 'PhD [alternative] Career Clinic' [1] for getting a handle on the perspectives of employers to PhDs, and ideas on how to avoid falling victim to some of the common stereotypes. Good luck! [1] http://www.amazon.com/alternative-Career-Clinic-Jane-Ph-D/dp...

I was talking to an HR guy from a mid-tier web company who said they were pretty adverse to hiring PhD's without proven industry experience. It sounds like they were burned a couple of times by people who couldn't make the transition.

Re: On Leaving Academia

#28

Post by carterschonwald »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #12
jackpirate wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

research of my own that'd be too risky for academia I don't get this. The whole point of university research is that it is too risky (or benefits will be too far in the future) to make it profitable for companies to pursue. I don't see how anything could be too risky for the university, but not too risky for a business. Edit: I'm not saying universities are perfect. I'm just saying that they still manage to do resear…

I believe the quote refers specifically to the speaker's research, not all the research on earth.

Yup

Re: On Leaving Academia

#29

Post by carterschonwald »

Cd00d wrote: post #6

As a physics PhD with two postdocs, this highlights almost perfectly my decision to leave for industry. When I defended the plan was to become faculty, but my first postdoc made it clear to me that goal was never going to make me happy, or allow for a balanced life. I would add to the list one other important factor: getting papers accepted at desirable journals feels less like success for me now than it did when I w…

Were you doing computational or theoretical or a combo thereof ?

Re: On Leaving Academia

#30

Post by mturmon »

jackpirate wrote: post #7
madhadron wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the point, but the reality of job, training, and funding structures today is that almost no one in academia can do anything that is not an incremental step on the research who has already managed to become politically established.

Right, but that's pretty much true of industry as well. I just don't see any examples of major scientific breakthroughs coming from industry that aren't equally coming from universities.

But, returning to the particular case of the OP:

His essay seemed to say that the cautious incrementalism and turf-buildout that succeeds well with NSF (where most of the funding for academic ML research comes from), turned out to be less exciting than riding upon the Google juggernaut.

It's hard to argue with that. The applicability of ML technology has attracted companies with deep pockets, and really changed the landscape of research.

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