Now with a job lined up, the goal was to get myself into a mental state where I’d be excited about work again. To make this possible, I set aside a few months of break between finishing my PhD and starting work to try and figure things out. I ended up devoting about half of this time to spending time with various friends. However, for the other half I wanted to try and find a way to do a mental reset of sorts. The whole job search and dissertation writing process is largely an exercise in selling yourself and trying to convince yourself and others that what you do is important. You give a lot of talks, answer a lot of questions, and do a lot of packaging to make yourself look as exciting as possible to companies that might want to hire you and faculty who are evaluating your dissertation. While of course this process had its highlights, and ultimately led to some good outcomes, I found it exceedingly tiring. It forced me to take myself too seriously, and try to craft unifying stories around projects when no such themes necessarily existed. My goal was to do fun work that kept me intellectually stimulated. I wasn’t particularly bothered about whether all of this work tied together in some grand way. The process of selling myself to this extent made me lose motivation even further, because in painstakingly packaging everything I did I started to lose sight of what I actually enjoyed about my work in the first place.

I’ve often found that spending time in nature helps me get a better perspective on things. It’s hard to take anything too seriously when you are looking up at a gigantic sky of stars or a never ending ocean. You just feel so tiny by comparison that you quickly realize nothing you are worried about really matters all that much. Conversely, I’ve found climbing mountains similarly relaxing. As I go up, my surroundings start to look smaller and smaller, until a giant truck on the highway just starts to look like a tiny ant scurrying along the road. It does literally change the way you look at things: anything that looks big and imposing just becomes an insignificant blip in the background. This prompted a 1 month, (mostly) solo trip to Hawaii to try and clear my mind. My goal was to plan things out as little as possible, to just show up and see what I’d make of everyday. It would be kind of like my very first research forays again: no real plan, just exploration, with no pressure to accomplish any concrete goal or tie things into some big agenda.

With this in mind, I booked some flights, a few random Airbnb’s, rented some cars, landed in Kona, and trusted that I would find good ways to entertain myself.

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.

In many ways, the job search process after a PhD can be even more stressful than after undergrad. Most people do a PhD because they are genuinely interested in something, or at least interested enough to dedicate 4-7 years diving deep into one specific aspect of it. After this process though, you’ve typically dove so deep into some obscure topic that it is pretty easy to lose sight of what’s going on more broadly. There are many ways to mitigate this of course: you can talk to people researching in other fields, you can engage with industry via internships, etc…but it’s still a classic occupational hazard. The result often is that once you start thinking about finishing, you realize that your skillset is so specific that there are only a few things you can do with it. There is also sometimes a bit more pressure both financially and egotistically. You’ve spent so much time in school now that you really do need some cash to keep yourself afloat. You also feel like having expended so much effort on your education, you gotta have a shiny job to show for it.

A PhD is ultimately a course of training for you to become an independent researcher. As a result, it is often framed as a gateway to academic positions, such as post-docs, professorships, and so on. However, training as a researcher does help you in a number of other ways. Any research project begins with convincing people why it generally matters. Ultimately, you gotta convince your advisor it’s worth their time to support, your collaborators to help you, and funding sources to throw money at you. Then you need to build an understanding of how other people have thought about similar problems before and convince yourself and others that you have something new to contribute. Finally, once you’ve gone off and done your thing, you need to convince the broader community that you’ve done something worthwhile: What have you done that previous researchers didn’t? What does this enable more broadly in the future? What are the key things you learned that others can take away for other similar work? Beyond the various technical skills that you of course build up when doing research, I’m convinced that this training in communication and persuasion is of potentially even greater value as it translates well into almost anything you might want to do in the future. Even in industry, starting new projects within a company or even starting a new company from scratch will require you to ask very similar questions and convince people to believe in both your initial vision and your attempts to bring that vision to reality.

The first thing to decide was whether I wanted to go the academic route and apply for postdoc/faculty positions or go to industry. Honestly, academia seemed pretty appealing at first. Life as an academic appeared to be some combination of generating and working on research ideas yourself, training younger researchers to build upon and extend your ideas and grow into researchers themselves, communicating fundamental ideas about your field to a broader audience by teaching classes, and fundraising to maintain your ability to do your research and hire students to help get things done. In many ways, life as a young professor sounded like having a small startup company within a larger entity (the university) since you have the license to mostly work on whatever you want, but the onus is still on you to make sure you have the funds to keep yourself afloat. Continuing to think like a researcher and mentoring/teaching younger researchers was appealing, but the constant pressure to acquire funding and the possibility of continuing to disconnect from practical problems did concern me. Different people will of course navigate these tradeoffs differently, but for me this made industry the more appealing route.

Now that I was pretty set on industry, the second thing to decide was what I wanted out of an industry job. At a high-level, at least in computer science, jobs in industry tend to come in one of two flavors. There are industry research jobs, where the primary mandate is to continue to publish original research. These are primarily available in larger companies that have the funds and freedom to explore many directions that may not pan out in the hopes that some of the research they fund will be relevant to future products. Another core motivation is simply improving brand recognition: Google improves its appeal by generating top tier research or hiring well known researchers, even if their work doesn’t ultimately contribute directly to Google’s products. The bulk of available jobs were of the second flavor: applied work focused on building a product. These jobs are often also quite appealing to researchers, since many products these days are of sufficient complexity that they require application and development of fundamentally new ideas to make them work. Industry research jobs felt like the perfect middle ground between academia and these traditional product focused roles: you can get (almost) the same freedom as academia to work on whatever you want, significantly higher pay, and none of the stress of acquiring tenure or the funds to continue your work. Still, I was also hoping for somewhat of a change. I continued to be concerned that my work had no immediate value, and I was not sure whether industrial research work would be sufficiently motivating if my main job would be continuing to publish papers that may only have a longer term impact. I never resolved this uncertainty before my job search began, and just ended up punting on this issue to see whether talking to people in various companies directly would help me figure it out.

Last September it became clear that it was time to think about wrapping up my PhD and start thinking about what life might look like after it. As an undergrad, people are often faced with a lot of doubts and uncertainty when they are approaching the end, but it is usually quite clear when the end is near. However, as a PhD student, the end comes about more as a mutual agreement between you and your advisor that (1) you have done enough to graduate and (2) that you actually want to graduate. After all, a PhD is really a personal journey that varies wildly across disciplines, schools, and individuals so the end (as well as the start and everything in between) is largely what you make of it. This makes for a strange tradeoff. To some extent you do have more flexibility about when you finish than in undergrad, but at the same time you can be pushed out earlier or later than you’d like due to factors out of your control.

Once I realized I’d finally be leaving school, some mild existential dread started to set in. After undergrad, although I’d explored some options in industry through internships, I had never seriously considered leaving school. In undergrad, my goal was mainly just to learn as much random stuff as possible, and I found engaging with research the ideal way to do so. With the help of a number of very supportive research mentors and collaborators, I was fortunate to get to play with a range of problems in areas such as biomedical signal processing, earthquake detection, and power systems optimization. Comparing this freedom with the more rigid lifestyle I associated with 9-5 jobs, I figured that continuing with the research lifestyle would be a good source of entertainment. I didn’t really know what I wanted to work on, and my decision making process wasn’t particularly nuanced: I liked school, I liked learning things, and I liked the freedom academic exploration allowed. I am aware that I am fortunate to have grown up in circumstances that permitted such an attitude: if I had to immediately support members of my family or climb out of poverty, this type of thinking would likely have been impossible.

When I started my PhD, I found that while life as a researcher does give you a lot of freedom to explore, a PhD isn’t just about learning completely random things. Ultimately, the goal is to develop a research agenda and expertise in a specific topic. For some, this search is a function of trying a large number of things and finally converging on something that they find inspiring. While this approach sounds compelling as it makes research life feel like a quest for personal discovery, for me it was somewhat of the opposite. Coming out of undergrad, I was honestly quite easily excited by pretty much everything, so once I found an area with enough room for innovation and some friendly people to work with, I was hooked. What I worked on didn’t matter to me as much as the feeling that I could try a bunch of things, explore my curiosity, and talk about these ideas with other like-minded people.

Once I got settled in, life as a PhD student was mostly just as unstructured as I was hoping for. It had its ups and downs, but I did enjoy the relative freedom to let my mind wander and set my own schedule. It was not without stress, but for a while it was also quite comfortable. As a researcher you do have similar challenges as with any other job: a pressure to work hard, the pressure to communicate and advocate for your work, and the stress associated with overcoming your own self doubts and insecurities. At the same time, your work does tend to have a liberating feeling of irrelevance. Generally, you aren’t performing open heart surgery or deploying systems that are going to immediately be in the hands of millions of people, so there isn’t as much short-term concern about the impact of your work.

I enjoyed this for a while, but eventually I found that this liberating feeling also led to a strange sort of burn out. I could usually communicate what the point of my work was academically, but started to lose motivation because I lost sight of how this work tied into the real world outside of academia. Once this burnout hit its peak, luckily I was also at the point where there was a general agreement that I had done enough work to finish up my PhD.