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On Leaving Academia

cs.unm.edu

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Re: On Leaving Academia

#51

Post by carterschonwald »

Cd00d wrote: post #44
carterschonwald wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, I'm based in NYC, let's grab coffee some time later this week or the next? I'd be interested in hearing what you're looking for etc. (and who knows, maybe someone I know is looking for you and doesn't know it!)

Point being shoot me an email! (also include some random phrase in the email and in a reply to this message so I know it's you!)

Re: On Leaving Academia

#52

Post by gcr »

alextp wrote: post #48
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…

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.

citation please? First, what does quantum computers have to do with finding the higgs boson? Second, is D-wave not standing on the shoulders of decades of academic research in designing their computer?

Re: On Leaving Academia

#53

Post by jerf »

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…

"But I can't help feel like some part of the experience is lost in the process."

Some of the experience is lost in the process. We need not really dance around or wonder about that, it is. But what will be gained will be greater than what is lost, or we'd go back to the old ways, which we won't.

A mass-produced medium-class bed isn't a magnificent hand-carved bed adorned with various and sundry Greek gods and goddesses. But the former scales, and the latter doesn't, and sitting and wringing hands about the experience lost when your bed isn't gloriously hand-carved is missing the point of the mass-produced bed quite badly.

"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?"

A place? Quite likely. But probably not standing in front of a class giving a monologue, because in 20 years the whole "give a monologue to 50 people barely paying attention, hand out assignments to be done one week later, trickle out feedback about performance two week after that" model will be considered laughably quaint, and our grandchildren will ask us why on Earth we ever expected anyone to be educated with such a terrible model. It may not be a state school, either.

A moment of silence for some of the old nuances may be called for, but what is coming is a tidal wave, not a couple incremental advances. It won't be entirely 100% positive, but effectively nobody will be seriously advocating going back to the old ways in 20 years.

Re: On Leaving Academia

#54

Post by carterschonwald »

amirmc wrote: post #37
aswanson wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"There are tremendous disincentives in the system for innovation" I feel that's overstating it but even if not, is it worse than industry? I've found academia to be very accepting of different viewpoints and depending on the field, experimentation is encouraged. In my viewpoint, if an advisor in academia calls something 'high-risk' it's within the context of the overall work. For example, in grad school, the aim is t…

There's that issue too, and very true. (though what I'm currently up to is a project I started after I left my program)

Re: On Leaving Academia

#55

Post by Homunculiheaded »

tikhonj wrote: post #38
Homunculiheaded wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That should be the case but it is not primarily for 2 rather related reasons: tenure & funding. Everything you do as university research is towards the aim of getting publications to progress either you or your adviser towards tenure. The problem is that things that don't work are not usually publishable. This leads to 'fluffing' up results (read enough academic papers and you'll find some hilarity there) and avoidin…

Don't some of the large software and hardware companies also support research at universities? I think that some of the research labs at my university get supported heavily by companies like Google, Microsoft, Intel and Qualcomm. However, I don't really know the specifics.

They definitely do, I didn't mean to imply that DARPA is the only source of funding. Usually for most universities you can look at Large Company X, that operates locally and find them contributing to any department that does the kind of work they need. For example I believe Microsoft heavily funds the CS department at the University of Washington.

Of course this doesn't get you out of the trap of having to do research in the area of interest to whatever large company is funding you. You can do research that isn't indirectly getting people killed ;) but it usually has to be pretty clearly aligned with the business interests of companies funding the research

Re: On Leaving Academia

#56

Post by glesica »

bishnu wrote: post #47
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 af…

Agreed. I have done a bit of teaching and I would gladly turn the monologue over to someone else and spend my time working individually or in small groups with students on projects or helping them gain a deeper understanding of the material.

Re: On Leaving Academia

#57

Post by dspeyer »

jerf wrote: post #53
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…

"But I can't help feel like some part of the experience is lost in the process." Some of the experience is lost in the process. We need not really dance around or wonder about that, it is. But what will be gained will be greater than what is lost, or we'd go back to the old ways, which we won't. A mass-produced medium-class bed isn't a magnificent hand-carved bed adorned with various and sundry Greek gods and goddess…

Rather than await a moment of silence, perhaps now is the time to carefully see what can be preserved. Somewhere in possibility-space is a model in which great minds teach in only the ways that they are well-suited to. Giving the same monologue year after year will likely die, but the teaching time that frees up could be used for some sort of mentorships or discussions or teaching of subtleties.

The first step is to characterize exactly what is lost moving from a traditional model to a Khan-academy-like model. Then to determine how to focus on those things. Then to experiment.

Re: On Leaving Academia

#58

Post by pmb »

me2i81 wrote: post #11
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.

You can like Celera or hate it, but you can't just pretend that it didn't exist...

It was, however, founded by a guy who left the human genome project and took his hard-won expertise elsewhere.

Re: On Leaving Academia

#59

Post by tikhonj »

Homunculiheaded wrote: post #55
tikhonj wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't some of the large software and hardware companies also support research at universities? I think that some of the research labs at my university get supported heavily by companies like Google, Microsoft, Intel and Qualcomm. However, I don't really know the specifics.

They definitely do, I didn't mean to imply that DARPA is the only source of funding. Usually for most universities you can look at Large Company X, that operates locally and find them contributing to any department that does the kind of work they need. For example I believe Microsoft heavily funds the CS department at the University of Washington. Of course this doesn't get you out of the trap of having to do researc…

Heh, I guess being in the Bay Area really helps with getting a really wide range of companies to sponsor research :P. Looking through some of the bigger research labs, it seems most big companies represented at some point.

I was just curious because my impression is that CS is rather well funded, especially for having far lower expenses than anybody else in college of engineering.

Re: On Leaving Academia

#60

Post by yen223 »

scarmig wrote: post #45
mbreese wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gues…

Could the smaller projects have the expertise and resources to discover something like the Higgs-Boson?

Centralization of resources is not necessarily a bad thing.

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