March 29, 2018: Thoughts on Leaving Academia

Hello again imaginary blog readers.

I regret that it has been a while since I posted anything here. It has been a long time since I wrote anything, period, for that matter. Regrettable to be sure, because to become a better writer is far from disjoint with practicing. Moreover, aside from trying to improve my writing skills (which have severely plummeted into non-existence since the endless essays of undergrad), I started this blog to try to keep track of what I'm up to, what I'm thinking, and sharing in case it so happens to help anyone else out there. Doubtful that it will, but in any of my decisions or actions, I consult I wide variety of media and good 'ole fashion people before ever even forming an opinion on something.

That of course brings me to the meat of this post, which is that I have decided to leave graduate school after the Master's degree rather than complete a PhD. I got an industry offer that is right in line with the types of problems I want to work on in the software world that have a high degree of real impact. Maybe in a future post or series of posts, I'll relate the details of how I approached searching for and preparing for a software engineer job. TBD

Okay, for real this time, thoughts on leaving academia...

It was a long, arduous decision to leave the graduate program, especially since I am in such an esteemed one with amazing colleagues and a fantastic research group. I really cannot emphasize enough how great the people were that I interact with on a daily basis in the physics department at Berkeley. They are truly wonderful, both in an academic and personal kindness sense. Alas, here's a thought-dump of some of the reasons I'm leaving:

• The job outlook for professorships in physics scares me. In all honesty, 90% of why I went to grad school was to leave the professorship option on the table. However, since joining, I've realized two things. 1) Just how low the odds are for ever getting a professorship in the first place (not only from raw data but from horror stories of >500 applications being submitted per tenure-track opening). 2) Just how long it would take to get there (many do multiple post-docs and wind up in their low to mid thirties before even landing associate professor positions, which is far enough from tenured as it is).
• I'm more interested in the data science and software engineering aspects of physics research than in the physics itself. During the five years I've been doing research in experimental physics labs, I've slowly drifted towards enjoying the process of writing code and building up simulations or data analysis pipelines more than I have sitting down with pen and paper to spit out some canonical physicist back-of-the-envelope calculations or derivations.
• I want to have the possibility of traveling and settling down (yes I know those are not interesting juxtaposed) before I'm gray. Well first off, I have a gray patch already, so the gray part doesn't really mean 60s here :) This is largely related to my first bullet above but as per the two-body problem, being in academia doesn't lend itself well to settling down before tenure or a reasonable hope of it is achieved. And somewhat on a different note, I don't exactly come from money and have quite a bit of student debt, so when everyone in existence tells me that as a mid-20s person, I should be saving as much as possible and also somehow travelling the world while I'm young, I used to get a little depressed knowing I would still be in the red in my thirties with no savings and little travel (if I went the academia route). Also if you don't believe me that everyone gives those same two bits of advice, go ask someone nearby what advice they would give to a mid-20s kid.

To be clear, I think there a lot of incredible benefits to staying in a PhD. To name a few, you get to be a Dr. I mean, how cool is that? Right?! Also, you get access to these black-box jobs as I call them, where they just want someone with a quantitative PhD and then all the sudden here's a $400,000 starting salary. I don't really follow, but hey, all the more to the ones who stick out the PhD. In all honesty though, it does mean a lot to go through with a PhD; it shows you have a real passion for your field and a commitment to see it through. I thought I had that passion for physics, but turns out physics was just my gateway to a new passion.

Okay, I'll go ahead and cut myself off there for now. I'm sure some future posts about 4 months from now will cover some more angles of my thoughts as well. Just kidding, hopefully I'll be back in 3 months ;)

Until next time, imaginary blog readers.