Why I Left Academia (Career In Academia or Industry)
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Why I Left Academia (Career In Academia or Industry) |
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This Video Uploaded At 12-07-2020 22:30:47 |
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▶Why I left academia and quit academic research.
There are a lot of conversations going on today about academia. Many question whether they should go into it and there are a lot of people leaving academia and talking about it. There’s so much conversation around this topic that there’s actually a term for it, called “quit lit”. So here’s my contribution as someone who left after spending 7 years as a postdoc and research scientist faculty after grad school.
First, I just want to point out that anytime you're in a field that has a large number of competitors compared to the number of job openings, you’ll have a difficult time being valuable. And this is not supposed to be specific to academia, but just a general message about life. There's no way that they can really fully appreciate you if they know that you're easily replaceable.
And we are in a situation where there's tons of educated people and tons of PhDs and college graduates who are trying to fill up these limited roles. As a result, the scrutiny in which you will be evaluated is higher than ever. They can ask if you check off ALL the major boxes, like “do you have a previous grant?” Do you have a paper in a big journal? Do you have a bunch of papers? Can you collaborate with people? Are you known for something?
These are all things institutions can require of you because if they don't find someone who satisfies these criteria they can keep looking and likely find someone who can.
Second, academia is sluggish to follow changes in society. And in general, the area of politics is sluggish and bureaucratic systems are very sluggish. Academia is slow to adapt compared to business because business is actually incentivized to be innovative and create while academia is incentivized not to change. This is because those who have reached the higher positions in the hierarchy of the institution are incentivized to keep the criteria in which they are evaluated in place.
If we've always been evaluating people by the number of publications or their ability to bring in grant money, then the people who are successful based on these metrics want to keep them in place. For example, we currently incentive publishing a large number of papers and publishing in high quality journals. Iif someone came along and said let’s instead incentivize based on how reproducible the research is, or producing research that is more collaborative, or research based on publicly available data, then those who were successful using the older criteria would fight against the new criteria. If a different form of values began to enter the picture then there would be some resistance based on those who succeeded based on the older set of values.
In terms of academia being sluggish to change, the journal system and review process is a big contributing factor. Many findings take at least six months to publish, but this process can sometimes take up to a year or two. In our modern social media connected era, where we can communicate ideas instantly, this delay is ridiculous. Academia needs to adapt to this sort of rapid communication of ideas asap to remain relevant.
Now, many scientists are open discussing these issues about academia on social media platforms like Twitter, and I can only imagine that this deflates many folks in academia. I’d love to nerd out on scientific findings on twitter but the majority of academia twitter consists of people airing their grievances and talking about issues like reproducibility and the arbitrariness of the p-value and so on. And I just had this realization that if I stayed in academia I’d be sitting there as an old man listening to people STILL HAVING THESE VERY SAME CONVERSATIONS.
Finally, I realized that the academic setting was not the best way to impact the world. Ironically, when you get a deeper knowledge of human behavior you can see that the academic structure is quite artificial, it’s a so-called “bubble” as they say. You can have a bigger influence on society through art and literature and business and so on. I would argue that those who are dealing with people in the real world actually understand more about human behavior than the academics who study it. They apply it in situations where real-world behavior is on the line and they are able to make a greater impact on culture and society.
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