The Big Picture

There are many levels at which this discussion can take place. At the most abstract level, “searching” for a job can induce one to ask “what do I really want / derive satisfaction from in life?” On the other end, we can purely talk about the wage opportunity cost and treat it like an optimization problem with the objective being early retirement.

I want to talk about it at the level between these two extremes, and give some account of the experience in this moment in time for posterity.

The Case for Academia

Off the bat, I want to point out that if you feel being called by anything, you should do it. As Max Weber would put it, “calling” is something one can “have”, but not “know” in the sense of knowing trivia. So if you have it already, you should weigh it sufficiently - even if there could seem to be material gains by leaving the field, think about what you want to do after you “made enough money”. What, if not the “calling”, do you attend to once your material problems are solved. But what if I don’t know if what I’m feeling is “calling” or not?

It is also common (i.e. a large part of me) to have a more explainable, less axiomatic driver. For example, academics in universities invariably involve teaching, and teaching students could be a large driver behind career choice. Alternatively, one could view the expansion of one’s ability and knowledge as an experience valuable in itself, similar to why sightseeing or exploring new food is self-evidently fun.

Finally, there are more material reasons such as task and time freedom (albeit lower pay, others may argue). Although, it does not seem the tenure-track faculties have much time to explore things sometimes, and are constantly under various forms of stress, for a long while, probably at least 10 years after PhD.

As you may have noticed, the more concrete our motivation is, the more you might want to raise the “but opportunity cost?” question. Let’s address that now.

The Case for Not Academia

Luckily, nothing can distract you from your calling, unless your immediate material condition is unsustainable, which is unlikely in the US academia at the moment, no matter where you are.

However, when one is driven by more explainable reasons, one can also start asking about the trade off. Most of the aspects you enjoy in academia, can reasonably be found in industry as well. For example, many jobs can give you a sense of being useful/helpful to others, and many jobs will eventually involve you mentoring and guiding juniors. But what about research? Although may be less common by %, there are plenty of jobs with research nature in industry - if you accept that you won’t be doing the exact same subfield.

Here I need to add an interlude, which need to be expanded into a full post later. The question is what is research, or for me, what is physics? It’s obvious physics research is not the physics problems you did for pedagogy, it’s also not the plots you made. In fact, physics is the process of figuring out and solve problems until you get somewhere with new physics knowledge, there’s not a single thing you do every day that’s clearly physics or not physics research.

What I’m trying to say is, if you ONLY want to do a certain type of work for a single subfield, that may be closer to a “calling”. I personally find many subfields in physics have the kind of question and opportunity I’m excited for, and thinking back, I enjoy the most of talking to other PhDs about ideas, and testing our wild ideas, making it work. I also enjoy being the go-to person for computing related questions in our office, I don’t think these are unobtainable outside of academia.

Finally, if you weigh money and stability by a lot, the opportunity cost of academia may be significant. I’d like to repeat that, money is not that important because metric like “retiring early” is meaningless if you won’t find better things to do once saved up.

What if you can find similarly exciting things to do in industry? Well, postdocs move every few years until they find a tenure-track position somewhere. This means that by the time you’re 30+, you will be looking to move in O(year) and likely without significant saving. Speaking of saving, while freedom and the flexibility of academic positions are nice, my cohort are likely going to have an opportunity cost of O(few $10k) a year during postdoc, and widen further during AP and tenure. All in all, making 1/2 to 1/3 in academia seems to be common enough.

Path Dependency

There’s one more factor to consider, which is that academia positions are heavily path-dependent - you will almost not be able to return to them once you step into the industry. To be fair, some industry jobs are also path dependent, especially if you can enter the “new grad” market from a good school - doesn’t matter if it’s your undergrad or Master’s or PhD or even postdoc. There is a somewhat worrying trend that, postdocs are not viewed as more competitive than PhDs in the job market, on average. I am told it used to be the case you could view industry jobs as a fall back - you will always find experience-proportional jobs whenever you leave academia. Make that what you want, it’s very hard to forecast the job market.

My Job Search

I didn’t go through all the above points when I looked for job. I was driven by more superficial reasons: 1) I want to do an internship in Chicago 2) I want to have some experience in industry before deciding what to do after PhD. And I had some additional, semi-explainable reasons. For one, I want to work within something like a PhD-cohort, doing things involving research (here meaning, new ideas, new ways, prototyping things etc.) and computing. At the same time, being a min-max-minded person, I thought I’d try something far from physics. The internship ended up being research in finance, I suppose it is taking advantage of Chicago’s specialties. Another heuristics I used (also always liked using) is going for things that are scarce - although scarcity doesn’t imply good, it’s usually beneficial to have a unique experience/perspective. The last two reasons make data science positions lower in priority for me, since I felt I had a sense of what they are from research, and I was looking for something more different.

As for the search process itself, I would say I was lucky to get an offer out of less than 100 applications. It also seemed to be the case that the job supply in general tech was still low, and I actually had no interview from more traditional tech positions (e.g. data science).