Leaving academia, at least for now

Posted 2025-09-09

I need to apologize for the delay since my last update here. I got distracted by conducting a study, trying to wrap up my thesis, and then applying for jobs. My thesis is not yet submitted, my supervisor has taken a good while to review my last chapter, but it hopefully will be soon. In the meantime, I accepted a job doing human-computer interaction research in industry, and I have some feelings about reaching this crossroads that I'll try to express here while trying to fight off sleep.

Why I became a graduate student

Unlike many graduate students, I never dreamed of being a professor. When I was finishing my undergraduate degree in computer engineering, I was depressed by the state of my field. The impression I had was that the jobs and money were not in actually trying to improve peoples' lives in any meaningful way, but in manufacturing widgets that would weasel their way into the daily life of as many people as possible. By making a product feel indispensible, clever developers (and they do have so much more in common with property developers than engineers) can sell ads, sell incremental updates, or best of all collect a monthly subscription.

I wanted no part of this, and instead found a research assistant position developing software in a music technology lab. As I was realizing that the university environment created a space where it was seemingly possible to work on niche problems faced by real people, I also took a class on human-computer interaction that greatly expanded my vision of what computer science or software engineering could be. Because of these two experiences, I became a graduate student hoping to find a way to stay as a research assistant on projects I felt would have a positive impact on people.

What changed

With a few years of hindsight, I realize that what I saw of the university as a place where work in the public interest can occur is really quite exceptional, at least in an engineering department. Research funding is awarded to projects by government entities or the private sector. It is impossible to escape the need to justify one's work on the basis of economic productivity. Even projects focused on creating assistive technologies need to be framed as allowing some group of disabled people to become more effective producers or consumers of goods, or as inevitably leading to a commercial product with some return on investment. There is less of this pressure to get returns than in a company, but it still exists.

I have also realized that it is nearly impossible to have a career in research simply trying to solve problems people face. Peer review prioritizes above all else novel empirical results and powerful methods. It is an uphill battle to publish work that primarily aims to develop a practical solution to a problem. It is a nearly impossible battle if relatively few people are impacted by the problem and if they are unwilling to spend a good deal of money for your solution. I still enjoy learning about theoretical findings, but it just does not personally motivate me in away that I could build a career off of.

Finally, there is the paperwork. To be a research professional of any kind in a university, you must publish or perish. Funding is rarely guaranteed and never present for very long, so you must constantly apply for new grants and search out new partnerships if you want to get anything done. I don't think anyone actually enjoys this part of the job, and will not dwell on it any longer.

What I hoped to do

Unfortunately, I enjoy doing my kind of resesearch/problem solving and I love teaching others how to become better researchers and professionals. The title for a job that combines these two tasks and gives you halfway decent health benefits is "professor." So even just a few months ago, my hope was to do a postdoc, get a lecturing position, and hopefully be able to snag a tenure-track professor job somewhere vaguely near my loved ones.

I started applying for teaching jobs, and got nothing. I don't officially have a PhD, only ever was a teaching assistant, and have no close connections to department chairs that could lead to an offer of employment.

I tried to write out my propsal for a research plan and realized that I did not have the connections to more skilled resesarchers or communities of people who would actually use what I built to get meaningful results out of my work. Even worse, I could only think of research from the narrow perspective of my PhD. Even if I could get funding for my ideas, they were not particularly exciting to me.

Going to industry

Instead, I applied to two industry research positions on a whim, and ended up getting an offer for one. My hope when doing this was to break out of my rut and become exposed to new people, new problems, and new methods. Essentially, the same benefits one would hopefully get from a postdoc, except with better pay and less pressure to publish. At the same time, I could take on my own personal projects, continue to look for a job teaching in the evening, and see if any of my ideas may one day lead to research back in a university.

I can't shake the feeling, however, that I am betraying the me of a few years ago, disillusioned with computer engineering and wanting to do something meaningful. From where I am standing right now, though, it seems like I may have as good a chance of that going into the private sector and working on side projects as I would committing myself to the academic rat race.

It's good to have the mental space to be back here, and I'm sure I will write an update on this in the coming months.