On Leaving Academia

http://cs.unm.edu/~terran/academic_blog/?p=113

by Liu • 14 years ago

154 84 14 years ago

cs.unm.edu

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)

jackpirate3• 14 years ago

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."

madhadron• 14 years ago

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.

mrj• 14 years ago

Business is perfectly willing to fund 10 ideas if one success will produce an outsized profit. Academia is not so kind.

mfitzerald• 14 years ago

With business, if you don't innovate, you die. University research is usually grant-driven. Grants are the result of filling in the right answers and telling a committee what they'd like to hear. There's much more urgency to be constantly innovating in business.

Homunculiheaded2• 14 years ago

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 avoiding anything that might not pan out.

Just as important is funding, even a small lab with a few computers and one or two grad students needs funding. And in CS that largely means DARPA or a handful of other government agencies. If your particular research interest involves eventually killing someone, you'll do fantastic. There are of course other sources of funding but they typically have much smaller wallets, especially the further you go on the 'for the good of humanity' scale.

I've seen countless times were grad students are doing something really interesting, but because it's not going to help anyone get tenure and not going to bring in any funding, these students are strongly encourage to 'get back on track'.

mechanical_fish• 14 years ago

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

aswanson• 14 years ago

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.

mturmon3• 14 years ago

The hunt for the Higgs boson is going on at CERN, which is not a university. It's more along the lines of a national lab.

jlarocco• 14 years ago

I think that's covered in the essay, actually.

He claims universities are increasingly judging professors by their ability to get funding. And, due to budget cuts, funding is only going to areas likely to pay off. "Too risky for academia" would be too far off the beaten path to get funding.

That said, I don't know if it's true or not.

alextp• 14 years ago

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.

anusinha• 14 years ago

> 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.

Cd00d5• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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...

Cd00d5• 14 years ago

Thank you for that - looks like a great resource.

pyoung• 14 years ago

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.

carterschonwald9• 14 years ago

Were you doing computational or theoretical or a combo thereof ?

Cd00d5• 14 years ago

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.

pnathan• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

_delirium6• 14 years ago

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.

thronemonkey• 14 years ago

Keep in mind that academic science includes fields other than CS ;)

_delirium6• 14 years ago

I'm not sure it's more funding, as much as the way it's doled out. The idea with the way funding has shifted was indeed (in part) to make academia more "real-world" and competitive. Instead of a university getting a big block grant from the NSF, or researchers getting unrestricted funding directly from their university's budget, as used to be common, individual researchers apply for competitive 3-year grants to fund an individual project. In addition, researchers are increasingly expected to fund their students and student expenses (e.g. travel), whereas a larger percentage of that used to be funded by universities. Some of that (particularly at state universities) is outright decreases in funding for research, but some of it is just a change in how it's administered.

The idea, which was plausible, is that projects can then be judged on their merits, instead of one big slush fund that who knows what comes out of. But the unintended, if not unforeseeable side effect is that it adds a huge amount of extra overhead, and incentives to target only "fundable", aka "sellable" research. With NSF funding rates for projects currently running at 5-10% of proposals, and typical large research universities expecting you to have 1-3 of these 3-year grants going at any given time, you need to be submitting 10+ grant proposals a year! And ideally also working your networks to see if you can attract some corporate funding. That's a huge amount of overhead, and it also sucks a lot of the appeal from academia, since rather than the university setting giving you freedom, you're in some sense closer to an independent firm that has to bring in its own funding, constantly chasing the next round of financing lest your lab implode and students go hungry.

There are likely people who will thrive in that environment, but I think it's increasingly going to be people who are skilled at research management and sales. The #1 job is attracting external financing, and the #2 job is heading up a successful mini enterprise with that financing, ensuring the lab is operating well. This is becoming pretty close to explicit. One university I've been at now sends around an internal newsletter ranking faculty by number of dollars brought in so far this year! If that's what you're going to be judged on, why even be in academia?

zeroonetwothree• 14 years ago

I wouldn't say it's unforseeable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

arethuza• 14 years ago

When I worked in academic research (NB a long time ago) I worked on pretty large EU funded projects (30 to 40 people, 7 or 8 organisations in multiple countries) and they were a nightmare due to the amount of "management" that comes with projects spending millions or tens of millions.

My feeling was that taking the money (even less money as you wouldn't have the manager/bean-counter overhead) and splitting it amongst a large number of small projects would have been far more productive in terms of actual research output.

xtracto2• 14 years ago

I just commented this in reply to another person but I feel you will understand it more.

I was just part of an FP7 EU project in which 11 organisations of 7 different countries participated... and gosh, the admin burden of that is horrible. I got to be a work package leader and unfortunately it means you can't really do a lot of R&D. The amount of forms you have to fill , all the Brussels reporting is amazing. Added to that, I think the whole "publish or perish" attitude of academia just is not for me. So what if I only publish one paper from the project? yeah, everybody things I am a loser and that my participation was not successful (yeah, nobody says that but...). It feels as if research is just done with the objective of publishing papers... not only that, but colleagues actually say it "but you know, we have to see how are we going to translate this research into publications".

On the other hand, I also worked in a smaller 3 year EPSRC project with 3 Universities and 3 industry partners. It "felt" better, although the 3 industry partners did not really care (each meeting they sent someone new because the other person was either out or doing something else, so the new guy didn't know anything about the project and was just in the meeting to fill in). In this project, at least each academic partner was doing whatever they wanted and just presented their work, and a the end of the project, something "practical" came out of it.

SuitAndThai• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

arturadib• 14 years ago

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...

kghose• 14 years ago

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.

alexanderh• 14 years ago

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 :\

Simucal• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

lifebeyondfife• 14 years ago

I don't remember the lectures I gave, or the students who fell asleep in my first few tutorials... but I do remember the students who asked me about concepts they didn't fully understand and how great it felt when I could see the idea click in their head.

More of that kind of teaching could be a great thing.

jerf2• 14 years ago

"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.

dspeyer• 14 years ago

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.

ctl• 14 years ago

I think it's an overstatement to say that online programs are the future of education. Coursera and Udacity are not selling the same thing that universities are selling, at all, and I find it hard to imagine them affecting higher education substantially.

What do people gain from spending four years in college? Many of them learn something, but most of the value is in the degree, which serves as a signal of competence in the workforce and is a requirement for most jobs. Online programs probably won't provide the same kind of signaling in the foreseeable future. Moreover even students who are primarily interested in learning are unlikely to get as much out of online programs as they do out of college; the rewards structure of college drives many students to work much harder than they would on their own, and (without the signaling reward) online programs can't reproduce that motivation.

Lectures are a very small part of the value proposition that universities make, and of course their functionality is already mostly duplicated by textbooks. Indeed, I'm not entirely sure why American universities primarily teach their students with lectures right now (versus books, video, Socratic method, etc.). I'd guess that the answer is some combination of tradition, students having a fundamental psychological preference for live teaching, and society in general preferring to believe that colleges are selling "education" rather than signaling, motivation, and lifestyle. In particular, I don't at all believe that the dominance of live lecture is driven primarily by a lack of good video materials. And availability of good video materials is the only thing that I see Coursera and Udacity really changing.

So: I'm not sure if there will still be state school professorships in 20 years, but I wouldn't bet against it.

(Note: for the record, I'm a fan of Coursera and Udacity. I also enjoy universities as they are today, though I wouldn't be heartbroken if they changed dramatically.)

MyNewAccount99• 14 years ago

someone from university of new mexico actually got into Google?

i haven't even heard of that school

joe_bloggs• 14 years ago

"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!

guscost• 14 years ago

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

On Leaving Academia

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