Sunday, December 3, 2017

Why would be industry be VS academia

Even though I have been using the term industry vs academia in my daily life before blogging, lately I started thinking that I may be overlooking at something. Seriously, why would be industry be against academia? If there was no success in academia once upon a time (maybe it wasn't called academia or research and it was just essential for life) there would be no technology. Even today, almost every single successful research invention is converted into an industry business.

I graduated from my masters degree exactly a year ago and because of unexpected situations I went to an industry job. Not only I got the job because I had research experience, also the skills from academia helped me successfully complete my day to day tasks which most of the time included finding 1 sentence of information in a 500+ page codes.

For sometime now I am looking how the PhD hiring process is going in Europe. Speaking for civil engineering, I am very disappointed to see there are almost no fully-paid positions. This makes me think of 3 things:

1. Do we know everything we need to know?

I am not a professor or an expert but I can speak about a few very important gaps in civil engineering. In 21st century we should be putting more effort into development of technology than being satisfied with what we have.

2. Do we have too many PhDs that are unemployed?

PhDs who graduated sometime between 2000-2006 have good academic positions. Assuming someone gets their PhD at 30, this scholar might work in same institute for almost 30 years until retirement. So what is seriously happening to all PhDs that are graduating now?

3. Why does industry companies think PhDs are expensive?

This also includes the idea that PhDs are overqualified for industry jobs. Ofcourse someone straight out from bachelors will be a lot cheaper to hire if you are only looking into industry experience. However, a candidate with masters and PhD has developed many skills overtime that most of the industry worker will not be able to develop in 5-6 years.

So I am sitting here, having an industry job with the dream of getting into a PhD and applying all I know into civil industry.

Let me know what you think of such situation? Is it worth going to research based degrees? Or shall we just be satisfied with what we have?



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