Leaving academia for a startup
Finishing up two years of MPhil degree, what’s next?
Two years in Academia was great.
In Summer 2016, I decided to start a new life as a postgraduate research student in the area of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning. My primary goal was to become a person who can understand the field (able to read and understand academic papers to a certain degree) and can produce some valid research work (able to fully follow and complete a research cycle). After I had finally finished defending my Master of Philosophy (MPhil) and receive a pass, I feel confident enough to say that I know much more about the field than most people do.
I can imagine myself in academia, continuing being a Ph.D. candidate, becoming a research intern in one of those larger corporate labs in the US or China, and publishing more papers at conferences. These are the glorious moments. It gives a good comparatively advantage for chasing fame and fancy names on my career. I might even feel like solving bigger problems in the field that everyone wants to contribute.
Inevitable downsides are, of course, advisor-student conflicts, low salary, social detachment, and many other mental consequences caused from prior reasons that most Ph.D. candidates suffer. However, in this post, I do not want to talk about…
