I started by thinking about my own personal constraints and what I expected the constraints of potential employers to look like. I began by thinking about what I wanted to work on and what skills I had developed that I believed might set me apart from other candidates. I then started to think about what sort of industries would allow me to work on what I wanted and what specific types of companies within those industries I expected might value my skills the most. In my case, I knew that I wanted to work at the intersection of machine learning and robotics, and I had specifically developed skills in how machine learning could be used to allow robots to learn various tasks while still acting safely in the world. 

This made me zero-in on industries where safety critical robotics was important such as self-driving and robotic manufacturing/assembly. Then, I started to think about which companies within these industries would actually find my skills most useful. I concluded that these were either large industrial robotics research labs which had the freedom to explore how various ideas in machine learning could be used for future robotic applications or startup companies working on challenging enough problems that using new ideas in machine learning would be vital to making their products work at all. Fortunately, I was in a position where the work in my PhD was relatively applied, so it was somewhat easier to think about how my interests and skills might connect to what was going on in industry.

I started by sending emails to various industry contacts I had developed both during research work and through friendships in undergrad and grad school. The interviews started coming along, and soon enough I had a few offers to think about from both industrial research labs and startups. I had still put off trying to figure out which of these options to pursue, and I ended up narrowing down my decision to two companies: an autonomous vehicle startup and a larger industrial research lab. As has been a theme in many of my life decisions, the reason I was excited by these specific companies was primarily the people. All of the places I was considering had work that I knew I would find interesting, but these two companies seemed like places where I was pretty sure I would enjoy interacting with and working with my colleagues. The startup role would allow me to use many ideas from my research and still give me a lot of freedom to explore various ideas, but the focus would shift away from publication and towards getting a car on the road. The industry research lab would allow me to continue a very similar life as I had as a PhD student, but with of course the extra freedom that comes from having more money. I talked to a bunch of people: my friends, my labmates, my potential coworkers, a few randos I met at coffee shops, but ultimately I ended up flipping a coin, going with the startup, and justifying my decision to myself later. I figured it’ll be a nice change of pace, and you don’t work anywhere forever.