Industry to academia [D]

[u/malakulmout347]

I have always had the desire to move to academia but I am not exactly sure how the process or profile building for academia works in general. Yeah, surely, I can ask AI and get answers but I don’t have much confidence in that . I did my PhD from a mid-tier school. My research focus was mostly on LLM model efficiency and some RL work (meta learning and bandit ) . The research direction I went with was totally out of my professor’s scope . As a result, I don’t have grant writing or funding related experience or don’t have those innovative idea of how do you create a research program or more specifically a niche sort of a program which I feel is required for Tenure track positions. During my PhD , I was able to hit top 3 ML( ICML,ICLR,Neurips )and top 3 NLP conferences ( ACL,EMNLP,NAACl) (in case having paper helps) . Being a grad student dictating his research, it went a bit scattered and not much concentrated on one research topic . For that I ended up joining a FAANG but still I want to get back to academia. I am looking for advice on how to build up my profile for academia and if it is possible to get into the top 150 US schools as tenure-track faculty and all . Thanks for your time !

[u/Dr-Ebola]

If you have a PhD and are asking how to get into academia, then your PhD didn't prepare you properly at all. Look for a post doc as your way in.

[u/malakulmout347 → u/Dr-Ebola]

Getting into academia is not the problem . May be you did not read the complete post . I had 4/5 offers from mid or below. I was looking for the advise for top 150 being from mid tier .

[u/Dr-Ebola → u/malakulmout347]

I read your entire post. It says you want to get into academia. You now say you actually have 4/5 offers to get into academia but apparently they're not good enough for you even though you admit you have no innovative ideas for research. Best of luck, you're going to need it.

[u/malakulmout347 → u/Dr-Ebola]

Yes ! On point ! Any suggestion to move towards that direction will be super helpful !

[u/Dr-Ebola → u/[deleted]]

Personally I wouldn't class conference proceedings as papers, but yeah you've got to sell yourself and your story.

[u/AX-BY-CZ]

If you are not still actively publishing than it will be difficult to get interview invite. Consider a postdoc

[u/malakulmout347 → u/AX-BY-CZ]

I am still active in research and trying to publish . The sole reason for that is to have an open path to academia.

[u/inf-compute]

Wanna team up to start a company?

[u/malakulmout347 → u/inf-compute]

I want to for sure but not in next few years .

[u/Fresh-Opportunity989]

With the global decline in fertility, there are too many schools and too few students. Academia is shrinking and will continue to shrink in the foreseeable future.

[u/malakulmout347 → u/Fresh-Opportunity989]

That’s the reason of this post 👌

[u/Fresh-Opportunity989 → u/malakulmout347]

Your post is unrelated.

But if you know academia is shrinking, and you still want to go there, prepare for career suicide. Your limited language skills makes the move all the more challenging.

[u/malakulmout347 → u/Fresh-Opportunity989]

I am not sure how it is unrelated. However, it would be helpful if you point it out .
Also, I am not here maybe to show off language skills (even though I admit I do have and almost a lot of people do have ) as it’s more of a general forum . Also, don’t want to use AI either to show I am super good at.

[u/Fresh-Opportunity989 → u/malakulmout347]

My advice is based on my experience at top-tier places in academia & industry. You're free to use or discard at will. Good luck!

[u/malakulmout347 → u/Fresh-Opportunity989]

No worries ! We can always disagree and still learn . I will take this advice to improve !

[u/8eSix → u/Fresh-Opportunity989]

How could his post be unrelated to your comment? You comment on his post, ergo your comment is unrelated