Alberto Pepe edited goodbye academia.tex  about 10 years ago

Commit id: 01e46d48e529e1b0e728bc5c2f66ac8d036d9c78

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It seems like more More  and more scholars are leaving their academic posts (see \href{http://blog.devicerandom.org/2011/02/18/getting-a-life/}{[1]} \href{http://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2013/10/26/big-data-brain-drain/}{[2]} \href{http://anothersb.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/goodbye-academia.html?m=1}{[3]}). As it turns out, it's not possible to fully leave academia \href{https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7336927}{unless you write a detailed blog post about it}. So, here's mine. I resigned from my postdoctoral position at Harvard two months ago. My academic career was fairly typical. I spent the last twelve years doing research. I worked at CERN for a few years, then pursued a Ph.D. at UCLA and a 3-year Postdoc at Harvard. During my Ph.D. and Postdoc I did not even apply to a single tenure-track job. Why? My research background is very (maybe, way too) interdisciplinary: B.Sc. in Astronomy, M.Sc. in Computer Science, at CERN I did Data Science (basically working in Tim Berners-Lee former group), my Ph.D. is in Information Science, and my Postdoc in Astrophysics. Who the hell is going to hire me? While many praise academic interdisciplinarity as an asset, at the end of the day \textbf{to get tenured you need to be able to teach core classes in one discipline}. So, I decided to leave.