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Alberto Pepe edited goodbye academia.tex
about 10 years ago
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I resigned from my postdoctoral position at Harvard two months ago. My academic career is fairly typical. I love doing research and 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. 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
ScienceOnline Annual Conference \href{http://together.scienceonline.com/}{ScienceOnline conference} and
\href{}{Eva Amsen} discussed the infographic below in a session called
"Alternative careers in science". The graphic shows that over half of PhD graduates in science leave academia right away, with only 3.5\% eventually pursuing a research or teaching career in academia. While the graphic seems to be based on recent post-PhD science \textit{Alternative careers in
science} \href{https://twitter.com/easternblot}{Eva Amsen} discussed the
UK (it's not entirely clear), it is probably generalizable to other countries. What I find surprising is that so little PhDs actually stay in academia. infographic below.