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Why did you leave academia?

I am an academic who is considering leaving academia and would like to hear others' perspectives on the pros/cons of leaving.
14 Answers
Waleed Kadous
Waleed Kadous, Australian Muslim Software Engineer
I had always planned on working in academia, but six years and two postdocs after completing my PhD, I got the opportunity to move to Google.

I mention this because where you are going to outside of academia matters a lot. Everyone's situation is different, but this story might be helpful.

This was a complex decision for me, but if I had to bring it down to three things that made me move.

Impact

The average number of citations for a paper is about 0.2. My publication record was a bit better than that (total of 500+ citations -- http://scholar.google.com/citati...), but even so, that means maybe 2,000 people have read and been directly impacted by my work. Even if you take every student I have taught and mentored, it's perhaps 3,000 students. Some of them I even had a material impact on their lives, perhaps 2 or 3 per cent of that, but still.

At Google, by comparison, things I have worked on are -- without exaggeration -- used by tens of millions of people daily. And it makes their lives a little better, one more little obstacle removed between them and their goals. That's a great feeling.

Resources

Getting the resources to do research or build things are very different. In the academic world, you have to apply to grant committees, a highly politicized and random process in my experience.

At Google, you have two options: join a team who do stuff you think is cool, or build a demo, show it to people and get them on board with it and build a team. Either approach gives you greater control over your future.

Real world

In some parts of the academic world, actually building working things is seen as a necessary evil or a distraction. You only build the stuff you need to get your research published. After that's done, generally, work on the product ceases.

This always made me sad. I wanted the things I built to be used for some time.

At Google, you definitely have to face the challenges of the real world, but you also get the pleasure of really engaging in the world.

Things I miss

Time freedom: In the academic world, there was a bit more time to explore ideas, to go off on tangents. You want to spend 3 hours in the campus cafe just to brainstorm ideas? Sure -- no problem. There's less of that in the corporate world. The corporate world is more focused, which has its own blessings, but sometimes you do miss that casualness of time.

Mentoring as a way of life: In a sense, mentoring is the raison d'etre of the academic world -- whether through teaching or supervising. The best mentors I had were at University. It's definitely present in the corporate world (and especially at Google), but it's not as systematically ingrained as in academe, and the continual mobility makes long-term mentorship a rarer thing.
Vipul Naik
Vipul Naik, http://vipulnaik.com
I decided around the late middle of my fifth year of graduate school (math Ph.D. at the University of Chicago) that I would complete my Ph.D. but not stay in academia beyond that. I am currently scheduled to get my Ph.D. degree this December (Autumn 2013) at which point I'll be done with academia (though I do plan to eventually submit a condensed form of my Ph.D. thesis for publication, possibly with slightly stronger versions of the results, but that's essentially it).

My reasons for leaving:

  1. Not much of a peer network: It so happened that the area of research I chose, group theory, is an area where not too many other people are interested. There were only a couple other graduate students working in related areas, and none working in pure group theory. The few others working in related areas had graduated by the time I reached my fifth year of graduate school Although this wasn't a direct factor in my decision to leave, I believe that if I had chosen a more mainstream area of mathematics, there would have been more people urging me to stay on in academia and in general a support and peer network geared towards pushing me to stay in academia. I knew at the time of choosing the area of research (back when I began graduate school) that very few people pursue this area of research, and I was also vaguely aware that the absence of a peer network can have other effects, but I was quite passionate about group theory at the time (and I still really enjoy it). I don't regret any of this, because I think that in hindsight my particular combination of skills and interests is not well-suited to academia for the long term, and yet I think that graduate school was a fairly good choice for me at the time I began it, and I've learned a lot there, even if not in the conventional manner that one learns a lot from graduate school.
  2. Absence of substantial research results: Around middle to late fifth year, I didn't have any research results worth publishing. I had a lot of very small results, and a few big results conjectured that I didn't have proofs of. But there wasn't much in the sweet spot that's needed for a publication. I had two options: (a) decide not to stay in academia, and do the bare minimum needed for a good thesis, rather than try to get the publication level needed for a post-doctoral position, or (b) put in a full-fledged effort trying to get publishable stuff, with a < 50% chance of success, and with very little time or preparation for a potential future non-academic career. I talked to a few friends and chose option (a). My thesis ended up being more substantive than I had envisaged, but it took me a fair amount of time to write it up, and I would have needed even more time if I wanted to also apply to further academic jobs.
  3. Relatively low impact: My particular area within academia was particularly out-of-fashion: group theory. But even the more in-fashion areas of mathematics didn't have sufficient real-world impact. When I was younger, I hadn't given impact much thought, and I hadn't thought much about potential non-academic careers that could draw on my skills and interests and have higher impact. I was now becoming more aware of these possibilities, and academia seemed, by comparison, to be relatively less attractive. I should add that I feel that I did have a reasonable level of impact on the world in my years of graduate school (relative to other people of my age and experience level), but almost none of that impact was related with the actual research that led to my thesis and the kind of research in general that's closely linked to publication. And I believed that the impact I could have staying in academia would diverge steadily over time from the impact I could have outside academia.
  4. Emphasis of academia on a particular brand of original research: Although I do enjoy the academic style of thinking, asking questions, and continually refining one's insight, the way in which I pursue these goals is quite different from the way that academia's measurement systems generally capture. During graduate school, one of my main projects was a group theory wiki titled Groupprops, which now has somewhere between 1.8 million and 6 million pageviews (depending on whether you trust Google Analytics or MediaWiki's internal measurement). I really enjoyed the kind of thinking that's needed to create such pages and improve them incrementally. But this type of work doesn't get any formal recognition in academia. Nor does it help directly with the type of research that leads to publication, though it did help me somewhat with the research work that ultimately became my thesis.
  5. Absence of importance in academia to teaching: I found that people around me were not as interested in teaching, and the many subtleties involved, as I was. Teaching would be an important source both of impact and job satisfaction for me in academia, and the relative lack of focus on it made academia correspondingly less attractive to me (though I do know that there exist teaching colleges that in principle focus more on teaching, I don't have strong evidence that these actually reward good teaching in meaningful ways).
  6. Cultural misfit in academia: I wouldn't really say this was causal to my quitting academia, but it did cement my decision. I had a diverse range of intellectual interests most of which were not shared my the majority of students around me, and by extension, would not be shared by my colleagues if I stayed on in academia. Although I did have some good friends in academia, I wasn't really part of the social circles of people in academia. Partly this is because I'm not sociable in general. Around the time I decided to quit academia, I began forming friendships with people over the Internet that I found much more fun and intellectually engaging than what I'd found in math academia, and who shared many of the interests I had. Although my discovery of these friends happened after I had already decided not to stay on, the fact that I was able to find such friends certainly helped rule out the potential concern that I would not be able to find intellectually stimulating environments outside the rarefied walls of academia. Note that I'm not making an absolute comparison here, just making a comparison specific to the types of things I am interested in.
PS: I've written (in collaboration with others) some articles about academia, that people who've reached to the bottom of this answer might find interesting:

Academia as a career option
Culture of academia
Social value of academia

I've also described my graduate school experience in more detail here:

Graduate experience
I've decided to leave academia after graduate school because I've accomplished what I really wanted to accomplish in academia, and I'm ready to try something new. Or, to paraphrase Dr. Seuss, my mountain is waiting, and it's time to get on my way.

Over the course of my time in graduate school, I've learned a lot about myself and developed a better understanding of what I want in life. And part of this was realizing that proving more theorems isn't all that important to me.

To do the question justice, I have to explain that grad school has been a wild ride for me. A little more than a year ago, I was on the verge of giving up. I was five and a half years into my degree program without any significant results. I'd dived into question after question, and nothing went anywhere. Some projects flopped in quite spectacular fashion. My morale dropped further with each failure, and by this point, thinking about research had become an exercise in futility. I'd wake up every morning consumed by a sense of hopelessness, and to a significant extent this would set the tone for the rest of the day. I stayed in grad school not because I believed things would work out, but because I couldn't quite bring myself to seriously pursue other work.

I managed to escape that slump last spring. Even knowing how things played out, though, when I look back at my life fourteen months ago, none of that despair seems misplaced. On the contrary, it seems a reasonable reaction to everything that had happened up to that point. It would have been delusional for me to expect things to work out as they did.

I can't think of anything else I've experienced that matches the feeling of accomplishment that came with escaping that jam. It induced an emotional high which -- all these months later -- shows little sign of abating. Life still has its ups and downs, but the lows are infrequent and tempered by a confidence that things will be just fine. I've been through much worse, after all.

Experiencing these sharply contrasting emotional extremes has given me occasion to think carefully about why I chose to do the things that I did and why I'd felt the way I'd felt at different times. It made me think about what I really cared about in life and how I might make better decisions going forward.

One of my biggest mistakes, I realized, was tying my self-image to academic achievement. Going back even as far as elementary school, I had always done well in school. People who worked in schools told me that I was good at school and encouraged me to continue going to school. Valuing their praise, I followed their advice, staying in school and giving it everything I had.

But when I got to grad school, people stopped telling me that I was good at what I was doing, and for good reason: I wasn't doing anything very well. Over time, this became a big problem for me. On some level, I always believed that I could leave grad school without a degree and have a successful career outside of mathematics, perhaps one that was even more enjoyable than what I'd have in academia. But I remained deeply uncomfortable with the idea of leaving without a degree largely because it had become important to me to be seen as an academic achiever. As my academic situation became more dire, I felt increasingly hopeless, not because a dream was slipping away, but because I felt a need to appear to be something that I no longer was.

My journey to the brink and back taught me that I could find happiness--and even social acceptance--outside of academic achievement. I learned that activities like calling my grandmother every week or improvising cacophonous operas in front of crowds of strangers could bring me great satisfaction and connect me with others in ways that being an "achiever" had never done. Even the thrill of finding a second life--which on some superficial level stemmed from an academic accomplishment--was really the product of something deeper that was not uniquely academic, namely doing something that had once seemed impossible. From this viewpoint, the promise of further academic achievement (in the form of jobs, theorems, and papers) was not much of a motivator at all.

Decoupling my self-image from academic achievement gave me a chance to attempt to make a rational decision about what to do with my life. I'm not one of those "rationalists" who assigns a dollar value to everything, but I still think it can be useful to consider the pros and cons of different choices.

And truthfully, I haven't felt much reason to try to stay in academia. In some broad sense, I know what pursuing an academic career might bring. It's not all that appealing to me, and I'm ready to try something new.

To be clear, I've always liked math and considered it aesthetically pleasing. Having spent some time exploring the frontiers of math, I've seen that math research can be satisfying. But math research isn't so uniquely satisfying to me that I want it to be the only career I ever know.

Part of this is that I'm not the best fit for pure mathematics. I've always cared a bit too much about real-world problems to be content devoting myself to the development of abstract theory. While I believe in the long-term utility of such pursuits, the long lag time can make it hard for me to motivate myself.

The other major factor that led to my decision was that I wanted to have more say over where I'd live. Grad school, for the most part, has been a lonely time for me. This is in large part because I've been quite shy and don't find much enjoyment in popular social activities like drinking and partying. While I have improved significantly on the former point, I'm still slow to make good friends. The idea of having to move repeatedly until securing a tenure-track job, starting a new social life each time, is not appealing to me. Nor am I attracted to the idea of trying to build a social life from scratch in a remote college town.

I'm leaving academia because I'm not sold on an academic career and because I know that I need more than a career in life. I doubt that an academic career is the best career for me, and I am particularly unconvinced that the academic path is so far superior as to justify the sacrifices in the other areas of my life. Throw in the fact that I could give up quite a lot to do a postdoc or two, only to never get a tenure-track position, and I can't see any way that it makes sense for me to stay in academia.

I still have only a hazy picture of what life after graduate school will bring, and I'm apprehensive about the whole job search thing. Certainly, post-graduation unemployment isn't something I'm looking forward to. Even so, I'm feeling restless in academia and eager to move on to new challenges. My mountain is waiting, and it's time to get on my way.
There are certainly pros and cons of being an academic, but the experience will be drastically different depending on what and where your appointment is now. I left academia after completing the Ph.D. and two postdoctoral positions, all three at large public research universities. I’ve been housed in a department of psychology, an interdisciplinary research center focused on the learning sciences, and a school of education, so my experience is probably most applicable to those in similar fields.
 
I suppose my strongest suggestion is to evaluate what your priorities are in your career, and then to consider how well those align with what makes you most content in your life overall. Leaving academia tends to be more than just a career change, but an overall lifestyle change, and it’s generally considered a one-shot deal – once you’re out, you’re out.
 
I knew quite early on that the process of obtaining and keeping a tenure-track faculty position was probably not the best fit for me, so I have never gone through that particular type of job search. But here are some things that strongly influenced me when deciding to leave academia behind.
 
Geography
 
It’s commonly accepted that academics do not get to choose where they live. If you value location above prestigiousness of institution, working at a research university versus a teaching college, etc., OR you have personal/family/other reasons you strongly prefer or need to be in a particular metropolitan area, then academia may not be right for you. 
 
The Realities of Scholarship
 
I absolutely love my field of study. I think about questions within my domains of expertise all of the time. But being a productive scholar in this area is a totally different ballgame. If you do not want to spend most of your time dealing with grant deadlines, manuscript revisions, committee meetings, etc., in order to actually do the work that you care about doing, then academia may not be right for you.
 
That whole work/life balance thing
 
Academics can be very flexible with their schedules, but typically they work all of the time. This can be great because you should love what you do so much that you think about it all of the time. But it’s certainly not a 40 hour/week job. If you really want to be able to “turn off” after 5 pm on weekdays and during weekends on a regular basis, then academia may not be right for you.
 
Why I left
 
All of the reasons above, to varying degrees. I actually left to join an early stage Silicon Valley startup in mobile gaming. But that is a whole different story. :)
Jeremy Miles
Jeremy Miles, Ex-Professor of quantitative methods in social sciences
I kind of left academia, but I moved to a non-profit research organization, which is pretty like academia.  (We even have a graduate school, although there are about 100 students, and approaching 200 professors (plus another 1000 or so researchers). At the same time, I moved country (from the UK to the US), so it was more than leaving academia.  I was a very similar age to Paul Denlinger - 38.

Why?  Well, it was an adventure - an opportunity to move from England to Southern California. The pay was higher, the weather was better.  My kids (twins) were 4, so it was possible in a way that it wouldn't have been when they were older.

I'm a quantitative psychologist - that's not really a role that exists in the UK - people don't know what it is. I was considered to be a statistician a lot of the time. In the US, it's understood what I do, so my role is more interesting.

I still publish articles, and more articles, in better journals, than in the past - so I thought it would be relatively straightforward to jump back into academia (in the UK).

Cons of leaving? It's definitely harder work. I didn't find teaching especially hard, but teaching justified my existence. Everything else was icing (frosting) on the cake. Here's there's no teaching, there's only frosting. Sometimes a diet of frosting gets a little overwhelming. There's less job security, of course, but you knew that.
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