
On Leaving Academia - Liu
http://cs.unm.edu/~terran/academic_blog/?p=113
======
carterschonwald
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 decision i've ever made.

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 & high
impact area I'm working on right now as a grad student or jr faculty, but as
my own wee company, I can!

:-) (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)

~~~
jackpirate
_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 research that is too risky for industry. For example: finding the
higgs boson. I don't see any examples of industry doing research that is "too
risky for the university."

~~~
aswanson
_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".

Academia is more concerned with the volume of publications rather than impact
and unique ideas. There are tremendous disincentives in the system for
innovation.

~~~
amirmc
_"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 to make a contribution to the field and get a PhD. Several students I've
known have followed 'promising' lines of work (after disregarding advice to
contrary) and ended up with nothing.

~~~
carterschonwald
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)

------
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?

~~~
bishnu
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 :)

~~~
glesica
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.

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Cd00d
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 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.

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.

~~~
alatkins
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...](http://www.amazon.com/alternative-Career-Clinic-Jane-
Ph-D/dp/0975507214)

~~~
pyoung
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.

------
arturadib
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).

In doing so I came up with a (super-scientific!) "professional satisfaction
formula":

[http://blog.arturadib.com/the-formula-for-professional-
satis...](http://blog.arturadib.com/the-formula-for-professional-satisfaction)

------
SuitAndThai
The claims under "Mass Production of Education" are a little misguided:

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.

2\. I have no idea where he pulls his "winners win" suspicion.

    
    
       > why wouldn’t every student choose a Stanford or MIT education over, say, UNM?
    

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.

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.

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.

~~~
takluyver
All three of his points seem reasonable to me. If people can take online
courses in place of traditional university courses, it's no great leap of
imagination that a handful of professors will teach many thousands of
students. That's not necessarily a bad thing for the students, but many
universities would be left with no teaching role - which could be a reason not
to stay in academia.

The personal connection in education is more complicated. It is certainly
important, and I don't think the Khan academy is a good counterexample (they
apparently have plans for personal mentoring, but the focus seems to be the
videos). I could imagine a model where an online course by a distinguished
professor is combined with face time with a local mentor, but it would still
be a narrower experience than going to a bricks-and-mortar university.

None of that is to say that online education is a bad idea - I think the
advantages outweigh the downsides, and it looks like the author does too. But
we shouldn't ignore the downsides, and the time to think about mitigating them
is now.

------
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.

------
pnathan
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.

~~~
Lewisham
_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 Xerox PARC or MERL or Microsoft
Research or other industry research labs. It's a company that's built upon
_being_ a research lab. I can believe the hey-days of Sun and SGI were
probably similar.

The easiest way I describe working at Google to my grad friends is "It's a
giant grad lab, except grads are also the ones running it, and they're
billionaires." Academia can't compete with that, and it never did. The open
question is not how to fix academia (as it never will be), but whether the
Google model is sustainable. For as long as the Google model does exist, you
will always see a net loss of professors to industry, rather than the other
way around.

~~~
_delirium
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.

~~~
carterschonwald
Hehe, this is where is gets interesting. There's a huge number of small to mid
sized companies which give you huge creative latitude for projects. Perhaps
the most famous one is Valve (read their handbook, it's amazing!)

I'm actually hoping to replicate some of those ideas of both the good bits of
academe plus the modalities in aforementioned handbook as I start to pull
people into my org, Wellposed. (because what's more exciting than working with
fun nice interesting intelligent folks who do amazing work plus being paid
insanely well? )

~~~
_delirium
It's an interesting model that I do hope catches on. My impression is that
it's not currently widespread, but maybe I'm missing all the interesting
action. Afaict, in the game industry (which I'm pretty familiar with, being an
AI researcher in academia focusing on game design / game mechanics), the more
common model is a very highly managed EA-style one. And among smaller firms,
creative freedom in _design_ is more common, but technical research isn't that
common, because they don't have the resources/budget/interest. The only
smallish game company I've seen produce actual published research is
LittleTextPeople (some years ago, there was also Zoesis, but it's now
defunct).

Perhaps it's better in other fields?

~~~
carterschonwald
who cares how other people do their biz, its how i'm structuring my (not game
focused) operation to the full extent that I can :)

(and because there are no outside investors, it is so to the full extent that
fiat authority can make there be no org chart :) )

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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 :\

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joe_bloggs
"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"

Loved this quote!

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

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MyNewAccount99
someone from university of new mexico actually got into Google?

i haven't even heard of that school

