On Leaving Academia « Ars Experientia
I saw this blog post being passed around Twitter this afternoon by the likes of David Beazley and Greg Wilson and the timing was perfect for post I was thinking about writing.
One of the things I noticed last week at SciPy was how many smart people have left academia or were weighing the benefits of leaving. I found out a friend of mine, who just got tenure at the age of 39, makes a only few hundred dollars more a year than I do as a 27 year-old analyst. He said he basically has to talk himself into staying in academia every summer.
There are of course unhappy people in the private sector. And there are many smart people still going into academia. But most of the current and aspiring academics I know or have had a chance to talk to do not paint a pretty picture of the journey to academia, or the what happens when you get there. It seems to me that even in the last 5 years since I finished undergrad the game has changed.
What I am personally seeing is a lot of very smart and motivated people look around and change their minds. And as Terran Lane points on in his blog post, this is a very disturbing trend.