One thing I have heard on more than one occasion from industry folks that have PhDs is that they feel like they’ve gotten dumber since entering industry. This is a reflection I had at more than one point in my industry career and something I can offer some sage wisdom about. This is just my experience, so I’m hoping it will be useful.
Big industry is built for one singular purpose: make money. While they might say that they have altruistic behaviors, I’ve been in many an upper management meeting and money is the most commonly discussed topic. This is why the EPA or FDA have to step in – while I believe that corporations might sometimes be too regulated, it’s because they have to be. They can’t be trusted when their sole motivation is money. Again, I’ve been there and the other nice stuff are byproducts of the profit-motive. This brings about my first point: your company is only interested in your science if you can turn it into a profit. And once you show some interesting science they will want to squeeze all the money from your inventions that they can. Because of this, you begin to overly focus on one small thing and you aren’t picking up other knowledge. What I did about this was switch groups. If you find that you’re not challenged intellectually then move.
In academia there are seminars all the time in all kinds of random topics. Down the hall from you there were people in a variety of fields that are usually down with chatting science. Likewise, you’re free to talk as much science as you want to. In industry I didn’t really have that much freedom to talk about what I was working on. It was usually secret (again, because of money) and most people were really out to do their best to climb that ladder and cash in. So I had to play it close to the vest, which meant a lack of scholarly feedback. The feedback was market-driven. Now, I did have a crazy research budget and I trusted in my own abilities, but without my peers to give me scientific feedback I could see having the feeling of getting dumber. I set up key collaborations to get this level of interaction. In this case I learned a lot, but after five years of doing this, I still felt like I wasn’t learning enough and that’s what I dipped.
Do you remember just reading paper after paper to get the handle of something? Just absorbing the information like a sponge. I never had time for that in industry. I would read a publication here or there to get a general idea of something I was trying to understand, but then I had to apply it immediately. If you want to learn new stuff, then talk to you old PI and see if you can become a journal reviewer. This will force you to read and stay involved in the community.
Ultimately, I think it doesn’t come down to getting dumber, but just not learning as much. The academic environment was built for scholarly activity so it makes sense that the greatest acquisition of information happens here. But there are skills that I had to learn in industry like what doctors actually want to use (I’m in the medical field) and how to build tangible things. My professors would all teach me how to build stuff, but there really is nothing like ‘real-life’ experience. Honestly, if we had faculty from industry that taught us industry-related things then I probably wouldn’t have learned as much from industry and left sooner. That being said, I loved my time there, but I’m incredibly happy that I left. And if you feel like you’re not intellectually challenged then find something else or just be happy being overpaid in industry to not learn.
academic infiltration 