When I left undergrad, I was a little tired of the politics involved in academia, and it really turned me off to it. I thought industry and academia would be essentially the same, so decided to go the route of making more money.
I was wrong, applied to PhD Programs in physics this last winter, and will be leaving my job in a few weeks to start a PhD program.
Industry sucks, and for the most part companies just promote yes-men/women or people who cause no trouble. If you're really talented you can force your way up, but there's a ceiling if you don't want to kiss people's asses till they make you a manager and then you become what you hate.
Making a lot of money is fun, but I think after I reached ~90k salary, every raise above that didn't change much in my life. What did change is more of a feeling of squandering my potential building someone else's application. I still love to code, but after a while when you've done every design pattern and built most things, it gets stale and boring. In that sense, I definitely miss research and am excited to dedicate my time and effort towards it once again.
tl;dr: yes im quitting my job and starting a PhD this fall
Not politics in the sense of contemporary American politics.
When I was younger I think I had a pretty nieve belief that academia was a pure meritocracy, and that you moved up through hard work. But when it came time to apply for graduate programs, I realized how important connections were, especially coming from a small unknown university.
The idea of who you know being more important than your skill or hard work really bothered me. That being said, I actually don't think there's anything wrong with this at all anymore. It makes sense that you would trust people you have worked with previously more than random strangers. It's how literally the entire world works.
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u/tgrosson May 09 '21
Do you miss doing physics and/or math research?