Alberto Pepe edited goodbye academia.tex  about 10 years ago

Commit id: 462eee6684fa818357d1013c6bafa92db525a5b8

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Leaving academia is trending (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]}) and, \href{http://anothersb.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/goodbye-academia.html?m=1}{[3]}). And,  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 is fairly typical. I spent the last twelve years doing research, pretty much since college. 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: BS.C. 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. While leaving a postdoc at a top institution was a hard and risky decision to make, with so many PhDs and postdocs leaving academia today, I certainly don't feel alone. But, \textbf{how common or rare is it to leave academia?} Last week I attended the \href{http://together.scienceonline.com/}{ScienceOnline conference} and in a session called \textit{Alternative careers in science}, \href{https://twitter.com/easternblot}{Eva Amsen} discussed the infographic below.