MvM 1: So You’re Going to Graduate

I finished my PhD (in Human-Centered Computing at Georgia Tech) in the spring of 2014 — nearly two years ago. Before I completely bury that trauma, I’m going to figure out how and why I went from academia to my first industry job as a user experience researcher at Kaiser Permanente. I’m also going to try to figure out if I made the right choice. Welcome to Blog 1.

Academia or Industry?

When a PhD student realizes (admits?) that they will in fact graduate, they finally dare to plan life after candidacy. For most and for me, this comes down to a binary question: Industry or Academia?

Grad school gives you the training-wheels academic experience. Running experiments, publishing papers, writing grants, teaching courses, advising students… I had a pretty good idea what life in academia would look like. The positives were compelling: working with a tight-knit lab, turning out a really good paper, advising an excited student group. But did they outweigh negatives like grant-hunting, grading work from a massive course and a crushing workload?

Looming over everything was academia’s intensely competitive landscape. There are vastly more PhDs than slots at R1 institutions. For every shooting star student who flew straight into a tenure track job I saw two dozen peers on their second post-doc. It takes a top-flight post doc to actually build an R1 resume and if we’re being honest, my grad school record was uneven. A complete commitment (and years of post docs) would be my only hazy chance at ever landing an R1 position.

Compared to all this, industry felt like the safe choice. Following up on introductions from my advisors, I had done internships at Sun Labs and Google as a grad student. I worked with brilliant professionals on exciting projects. Industry wouldn’t require an additional apprenticeship and in the right spot I could even continue to publish. It seemed as simple as finding a company with an interesting product to work on. The primary risk I saw was choosing industry was likely to be a permanent choice, since industry to academia transitions are as rare as they are difficult. A rational assessment pointed towards industry, but still I was torn between the two choices.

The Verdict

Openly or implicitly, industry is often socialized as ‘settling’ in academia. Faculty highly value students who go on to become faculty themselves, a sort of self-validating feedback loop. This is not an indictment of my program or my fantastic advisor, it is simply the life of a PhD student, at least in the field of Human-Computer Interaction. I felt my peers couldn’t respect me, and I certainly couldn’t respect myself, if I didn’t pursue a faculty position. I interalized and built up this opinon in myself until I neared the end of my grad career.

My opinion began to change when I got to know more academics who had gone the industry route. I met my external committee member (Merrie Morris from Microsoft Research). Peers I respected began to graduate and head to industry. Their jobs were interesting, prestigious and well-paying. It certainly didn’t look like settling. As I began to recognize and let go of my bias, instead of resignation I was filled with relief. I realized I had dreaded the prospect of searching for a post-doc… and I had also dreaded the prospect of landing a post doc! That sort of mentality would never lead me to an R1 position.

Was the path too difficult? Was the reward too uncertain or too mixed? In the end there was no single deciding factor. I made the right choice for me: industry.

Next Episode

In my next blog, I’ll describe my job search and impressions from my first year in industry.