On Leaving Academia

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.<p>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&#38;D lab, its the sexiest, best, most exciting and amazing decision i've ever made.<p>If my current endeavors pan out, I will actually be able to say I've created software (and an associated business, WellPosed Ltd) that makes innovation on our wee planet happen faster. I'd not be able to attack the high risk &#38; high impact area I'm working on right now as a grad student or jr faculty, but as my own wee company, I can!<p>:-) (anyone who's intrigued regarding building better shovels for the data mining gold rush, whether as a user or maker, shoot me a line at first name at wellposed dot com, subject: awesome shovels)

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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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?

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.<p>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 was younger. The 14th edit of a paper just feels like pointless tedium and is time not spent making or testing something. And once you get a faculty appointment all the hands on time vanishes, and you're more of a professional writer/editor. I still need to be working with my hands.<p>That said, I'm finding it somewhat more difficult than I expected to transition to industry. I find that a lot of companies don't understand that graduate school and postdoc level research are not like college. I am also frequently treated with skepticism (from the CEO level to HR) that I really want to leave academia after developing such a strong academic CV. There still seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about the differences in environment from both sides.

I've tried to rationalize my own jump out of academia a while ago, which I did after passing my mid-term tenure review (I'm currently with Mozilla, happily pushing the boundaries of the web).<p>In doing so I came up with a (super-scientific!) "professional satisfaction formula":<p><a href="http://blog.arturadib.com/the-formula-for-professional-satisfaction" rel="nofollow">http://blog.arturadib.com/the-formula-for-professional-satis...</a>

The claims under "Mass Production of Education" are a little misguided:<p>1. Online education is not mass produced as he claims; the costs for every video that is downloaded to watch video lecture is incredibly small. Popping up tutorials on YouTube with ads is profitable and sustainable, and that's really all you need for someone who can dedicate themselves to learning more about a topic.<p>2. I have no idea where he pulls his "winners win" suspicion.<p><pre><code> &#62; why wouldn’t every student choose a Stanford or MIT education over, say, UNM? </code></pre> If we have an open model of education, people would have the freedom of spending a minimal amount of time to look through a plethora of lectures and figure out what they like the best. In the end, you'll hear the best lecturers echoed from students who watched them. I'm making many assumptions here, and I don't want you to forgive me for making them. But we can't overlook the assumptions that the author is making either, and there are a lot of them.<p>3. Supposedly, online education kills a personal connection: an argument that has been made many times. Maybe I should point to a popular counter-example: Khan Academy. A very small group of people who manage to supplement the education of an incredible amount of people who want the extra help. They do it for free. They are happy with the results. And the people they do it for are very happy with the results. The argument he's making sounds like there's something to be yearned, but I don't buy it.<p>Were it not for this section and his rant on the "Funding Climate" (I really don't want to argue about politics here), I would not have thought this to be the rambling of an angry, old man. He may have some valid points, but it's hard not to see this as a giant middle finger to his previous employer as well as venting now that he's at his new job.

I've never been in industry, but to me there are similarities between running a lab and running a business.<p>First you have to convince some one (a funding agency, an investor) that your idea is interesting and will work.<p>Then you have to manage yourself, other people and other resources to work your plan.<p>Then you have to show off your results.<p>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.<p>Based on your past success funding agencies (angel investors) will be more or less willing to fund your next venture.<p>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.

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

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 :\

"We’re being paid partly in cool. If you take away the cool parts of the job, you might as well go make more money elsewhere"<p>Loved this quote!

I'd like to start a better kind of school and work there.

someone from university of new mexico actually got into Google?<p>i haven't even heard of that school