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orthonormal comments on Grad Student Advice Repository - Less Wrong
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Comments (55)
Try out a industry job one summer to see if you'd like it or not. (Do this early on in grad school: it's usually easier then, and you won't have to worry about summer funding!) This gives you the context you need to decide whether to stay in academia or leave it, instead of going round wondering how green the grass really would be for you on the other side.
Background: did a PhD in math, did a 3-year postdoc, then decided to join a startup instead of take a tenure-track job or another postdoc (and yes, I had opportunities for the latter options). Relevant: I only noticed I had a career crisis while a postdoc, and fortunately was able to work at a startup for the summer between years 2 and 3 (math postdocs are academic-year-only jobs) to help me make this decision. But in retrospect, I should have tried out something non-academic many years ago.
How did you go about getting an industry job? I am in a similar position (well, mid-PhD) and have felt increasingly interested in leaving academia, but I'm not really sure how to taskify doing so. I can see where I might apply for jobs but it's not clear to me how to look for summer jobs, specifically. Should I just go on job websites and search for "summer," or some similar tactic?
Personal connections are the easiest way, whether it's a startup or a bigger company. Anyone who personally knows you as a smart and reasonably sane person can pass along your application on the inside track, even if they know nothing of your domain-specific expertise.
Other than that, I don't know; personal connections were enough for my job-seeking process.
This is what I see as one of the major weaknesses of doing a PhD in math, I don't find myself able to network with many people in industry. I do know some people from undergrad though so maybe I will look into that.
Like I said, they don't need to know your domain expertise to know you're capable and sane. My personal connections were people I'd met through Less Wrong meetups, board game nights, and swing dancing in the Bay Area.
My university has an active online jobs board, and I've seen a lot of positions posted as summer internships for graduate students. If yours has similar career resources, you could try that, or try talking to the career office personally about it.
My university has a similar thing, but I see very few positions posted as internships for graduate students. Partly this is because the online jobs board is really poorly designed.
I've been "planning" to talk to the career center about this sort of thing for a while. It would be nice to have some kind of external impetus for this...