I'm nowhere near as smart as Colin but I'll also share here a little personal story which relates to the topic.
I was also a very high achieving student in high school and university and was similarly all set for a career in academia (also studying mathematics). In my final year however, I had a full-time position doing research with CSIRO, which is a leading research organisation in Australia. I did some interesting work there - applying neural nets for classifying micro-seismic events around mine sites, and won some awards for my research. If I had wanted to, I could have stayed on and continued down that path. But I didn't.
What ultimately pushed me away was everyone I bumped in to in academia was so unhappy. There was constant bickering and frustration around getting funding (a common sentiment in the division I worked in was that you had pander to big mining/oil companies and propose research topics with clear financial gain for them). It was not a happy place to be, and at the end of my time there I jumped head first in to a software job instead.
Tangentially, this I think is also why I'm more open to hearing ideas from organisations like Numenta, and seeing research done outside of academia by folks like Stephen Wolfram. I think increasingly much of the most novel interesting research will be done outside of traditional academia.
+1 to pandering in mining/oil. The field really felt like a fraternity (House SPE), where ideas only moved as fast as the old guard felt like it. I also felt like a necessary skill as an academic in the field was vetting ideas early for clear financial gain.
Drake meme:
1. NN's for classifying micro-seismic events a la Oklahoma
2. Coming up with something new to blast shale with
Not sure if the vibe is different elsewhere, but my department was similarly unhappy. At the very least, I'm glad that the experience gave me a taste of shoddy research enough to hate it and develop my own preferences.
I like your anecdote because it very clearly shows how nuanced and unique to each individual experiences with academia and the industry at large are.
I find it particularly interesting that you mentioned you decision being influenced by how unhappy people in academia seemed. Also, how frustrating it could be to secure funding.
I find that interesting because, you can easily find people outside of academia making the same argument.
I assume your experience in the industry is better than academia was (considering your account) but I also wonder how much of that was brought up by your prominent success in college. In my own anecdotal experience, that sort of experience, knowledge, and access can lead you to opportunities that are not representative of the majority of cases.
I don't think your last point is a good thing. It sounds like the problem with Academia is the source and requirements of the funding, rather than the work itself.
I'd much rather academia had ample enough funding where people could work on what they wanted and what they felt was useful without the need to appeal to large businesses or metaphorically knife-fight for grants.
> I'd much rather academia had ample enough funding where people could work on what they wanted and what they felt was useful without the need to appeal to large businesses or metaphorically knife-fight for grants.
That can only ever be a temporary state of affairs unless you deliberately keep the population of researchers small. Competition for scarce resources exists except in high growth domains and growth does not stay high forever. Realistically an even larger majority of PhDs than nowadays would get expelled to industry and other places academics don’t care about like unemployment.
I'll add my anecdata to this. The lab I got my Masters in was, well, saddening. So were all the other labs. My SO has a higher degree in another field from another location. My SO's lab was ok, well maybe okay-ish, but all the other labs were similarly saddening.
I remember one student who just couldn't laugh. Sure a chuckle here and there, but not real laughter. When we'd go grab lunch with a prospective new student, he's warn them off academia altogether. Such lunch meetings weren't all that uncommon with people in other labs.
Maybe our experiences were unique and rare, but they felt more common than not.
I was also a very high achieving student in high school and university and was similarly all set for a career in academia (also studying mathematics). In my final year however, I had a full-time position doing research with CSIRO, which is a leading research organisation in Australia. I did some interesting work there - applying neural nets for classifying micro-seismic events around mine sites, and won some awards for my research. If I had wanted to, I could have stayed on and continued down that path. But I didn't.
What ultimately pushed me away was everyone I bumped in to in academia was so unhappy. There was constant bickering and frustration around getting funding (a common sentiment in the division I worked in was that you had pander to big mining/oil companies and propose research topics with clear financial gain for them). It was not a happy place to be, and at the end of my time there I jumped head first in to a software job instead.
I later found time to still do mathematics on my own, and have written about that journey and shared it previously on HN: https://www.neilwithdata.com/mathematics-self-learner and have had some other little successes in my life that make me feel like I made the right choice: https://www.neilwithdata.com/how-i-built-bbsmart
Tangentially, this I think is also why I'm more open to hearing ideas from organisations like Numenta, and seeing research done outside of academia by folks like Stephen Wolfram. I think increasingly much of the most novel interesting research will be done outside of traditional academia.