Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

On Leaving Academia

cs.unm.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 86 posts

Re: On Leaving Academia

#41

Post by sthatipamala »

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?)

Sibling commenter explained it fine, but to elaborate... your example relies on the existence of wireless networks, LCD technology, assorted networking protocols, cryptography (for secure logins, etc), and video compression algorithms. All of those have been advanced in some part by academic research.

Re: On Leaving Academia

#42

Post by kghose »

I've never been in industry, but to me there are similarities between running a lab and running a business.

First you have to convince some one (a funding agency, an investor) that your idea is interesting and will work.

Then you have to manage yourself, other people and other resources to work your plan.

Then you have to show off your results.

The real world is not strictly a meritocracy, not even a good approximation. What people (reviewers, customers - the market) likes is often not very tightly coupled to the technical merits of the work.

Based on your past success funding agencies (angel investors) will be more or less willing to fund your next venture.

In the end, industry involves a whole lot more money, but academia gives you a different kind of satisfaction, but in both I think it is what you make of it, how you manage your time, how much stress you take and what kind of work life balance you make.

Re: On Leaving Academia

#43

Post by alexanderh »

Just wanted to say good read. Props for being from UNM. I am an Albuquerque resident, and my father taught Calculus @ UNM. Nice to see a fellow new mexican on Hacker News. Sometimes I feel very disconnected from the heartbeat of the technology scene being out here in the desert :\

Re: On Leaving Academia

#44

Post by Cd00d »

carterschonwald wrote: post #29
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 ?

Neither. I'm an experimentalist. It appears to me at this point that if I were computational or a simulationist, the transition would be a bit easier.

Some of my difficulty comes from the fact that I'm limiting my search to the greater NYC area. If finance was something I was willing to do, there would be more opportunities for my background.

Re: On Leaving Academia

#45

Post by scarmig »

mbreese wrote: post #20
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.

The human genome sequencing didn't really get going until they had to start competing with Celera. In the end, the HGP ended up adopting the same techniques to keep up. So, that probably isn't the best example to use. The LHC on the other hand is one example of what the original post was worried about - the trend towards more consolidation, towards funding bigger projects (with fewer people), at the expense of many s…

The Higgs boson also wasn't super risky an undertaking. It was expected, and the project was a multi-billion dollar affair that was likely to come up with something. A somewhat ungenerous view is that it was just glorified taxonomy.

When you think about the sums involved, we could have done a whole lot of smaller, riskier projects, which may or may not have panned out but had a great deal more potential. Which I guess is your point.

Re: On Leaving Academia

#46

Post by Simucal »

A dream of mine has been that I'd move into academia and teach Computer Science in the latter half of my career. I know that I enjoy teaching and I'd love to be able to devote the remainder of my time to researching topics that interest me in my field. This may be impractical for a lot of reasons, but it has been my dream none the less.

So, when I read posts like this it leaves me somewhat disheartened. The reason it is so disheartening is that I agree with the author on many of his points.

The commoditization of education in particular hit home for me. It seems obvious that online programs like Coursera and Udacity are the future. Traditionally, if you had a world-class professor you were left with the fact that his impact as a teacher wouldn't scale. But now he can teach a million students not just a few hundred a semester. Why settle for a B level professor at some non-top 10 CS program when you can learn from the people who wrote the seminal textbooks on the subject you are learning?

The feeling I'm left with is akin to the feeling I have with the digitization of books. Again, the benefits make the rational part of my brain see that it is the future. But I can't help feel like some part of the experience is lost in the process.

Is there going to even be a place for me in 20 years when I'm looking to teach Computer Science at a state school?

Re: On Leaving Academia

#47

Post by bishnu »

Simucal wrote: post #46

A dream of mine has been that I'd move into academia and teach Computer Science in the latter half of my career. I know that I enjoy teaching and I'd love to be able to devote the remainder of my time to researching topics that interest me in my field. This may be impractical for a lot of reasons, but it has been my dream none the less. So, when I read posts like this it leaves me somewhat disheartened. The reason it…

This just means you can't lecture. One thing the digital, scalable lecture isn't going to take away is the importance of one-on-one instruction. In fact it may exacerbate it.

To me this is the future of teaching for most teachers - whereas currently they may spend ~10% of their time one-on-one with students, in a future model I can see that figure climbing to 80-90% percent as students struggle with their homework after watching their Coursera/Udacity lectures.

Not sure how you'll feel about that but personally I always found individual instruction to be the most challenging and rewarding part of teaching :)

Re: On Leaving Academia

#48

Post by alextp »

jackpirate wrote: post #3
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…

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…

Regarding finding the higgs boson, regardless of whether you agree that it's what they're actually doing, the main people actually building the first quantum computer are D-Wave, a private company.
Post reply on HN