Put Another Dataset In: Ep. 2 My Decision to Transition to Industry - A Graduate Student’s Perspective

I am a little nervous to share this, but I think it’s important to provide the perspective of someone who is currently trying to transition from academia to industry rather than someone who has already done so. I hope it may resonate with those in the same situation as me, or perhaps help those who are debating transitioning. Perhaps it will help those who are in academia understand why the academic route has lost its appeal to many early career scientists such as myself.

As I stated in Episode 1, I have had my eye on the MSL role for about 3 years. Ever since starting my PhD work, my favorite part has always been presenting. This doesn’t mean I don’t or didn’t get nervous- I still get nervous every time, but once I start speaking and that feeling subsides, there is something deeply compelling about showcasing not only the research I am proud of but also the carefully crafted slides I made to make the data more palpable; it feels like an art.

So when I learned that there is a job- a good job- that pays you a livable salary (not the 20-30K academia will have you believe is livable) to collaborate and communicate science in a way that is understandable to a general audience, allowing you to travel, meet new people, make connections and just talk science, I was all in!

I and many others crave this jump from academia to industry for several reasons, a few of which I’ll outline under two categories, one being “Running Away from Academia” and the other, “Running Towards Industry”.

Let’s start with academia:

Running Away from Academia:

·????????The culture of academia is not designed to benefit patients

This is probably the biggest reason I have decided to pursue a position outside of academia: I don’t believe academia was designed with patients in mind. Anytime I have given or have gone to an academic talk, the presenter almost always starts with the problem/therapeutic area- substance use disorder, cancer, cardiovascular disease, etc. For example, “Substance use disorder is a big problem in the US and here is my research about how we can solve it.” However, once I understood how academia really works, it is hard to believe this is the true motivation behind the research. Maybe somewhere deep down it is, but overall, it isn’t possible. In academia, PI’s (principal investigator) rely on grants to fund their research, and to get those grants, they have to publish papers. To publish those papers, you need money to do the research, so you need grants! Therefore, this becomes a vicious cycle that looks like this:

Where in this cycle is “Help patients”??

So many conversations regarding project planning in academia have been something like, “Will this be enough to support a grant?” or “Will this be a good enough story to get into a high impact journal?” Again, where are the patients in this equation? When will the question be, “Does this bring us closer to curing this disease?” or “Will this impact patient lives?” Academia is not patient-focused and often times ends up being a platform used by academicians to flex instead. “My paper got into Nature,” “My grant brought in $2.5 million,” “I have published over 200 peer-reviewed publications.”

The goal is to get papers to get funding, repeat. That’s it.

·????????The structure of academia is inherently flawed

I am a first-generation college graduate; my parents did not go to college and actually discouraged me from going (a story for another time) so I had no idea what to expect and what the trajectory was for an individual with a PhD, but I learned pretty quickly that in academia it basically (and I mean basically, I know I’m leaving out steps) looks something like this…

However, this structure is inherently flawed and ends up looking a lot more like a pyramid scheme when you stop and think about the number or tenure-track positions that are actually available in academia:

Not only are there not enough positions available for new PhDs, but this structure fosters a toxic relationship between student and PI. For a student, their goal is to gain an education and graduate. For a postdoc, their goal may be to get their own funding so they themselves can pursue a PI position. However, the PI’s best interest is to hold on to the most productive grad students and postdocs for as long as they can to support their research to what? – get more papers to get more funding. Academia intentionally pits these roles against each other in what can become a very toxic environment.

To go one step further, it is in the PI’s interest to hold onto the most productive students and postdocs. Sadly, I have witnessed several instances in which the most productive individuals are made to add yet one more dataset, one more paper, one more project, before they were allowed to graduate/move on, while those who are less productive get pushed through the process faster. Once again, this creates an environment where co-workers are at odds with one another. There are no raises or promotions, no way to reward good behavior, but there is certainly a way to speed up the process of graduation which can cause resentment between those in the bottom tier.

It is crazy to think that this type of environment would somehow motivate early career scientist to select the academic route. Academia fosters competition and unrealistic expectations.

I could keep going, but let’s go ahead and switch gears to talk about the allure of industry.

Running Towards Industry:

·????????The options for career growth far outweigh that of academia

Let’s circle back to the figure below:

While over-simplified, this is the basic career path in academia. You can stop a little short of PI or go a little further, but overall my point is that the options are pretty simple and clear-cut. You will join that never-ending cycle of writing grants to write papers, slowly and steadily moving away from the actual science and getting closer and closer to the politics.

However, I had the pleasure of attending several talks from UF graduates who have broken out of the academic path and stepped into the world of industry. By attending these talks, I learned that the career paths in industry looked more like this:

I was absolutely baffled! The options in industry seem endless! If you like doing research, do research! If you want to engage with clinicians, do that! If you want to work on technology used in research, or medical devices, or you want to work with government policy overseeing drug regulations, or maybe you fancy project management, you can do that! If you get bored and need a change of pace, you can do that! You can move within your company, either laterally or perhaps up, or you can find a company that may challenge you more. There are options! You don’t have to be pigeonholed into one type of research, you don’t have to fight for your own funding and face whether or not you can continue to support the workers in your lab. You can focus on the science and making lives better for the population without competing with your peers and putting your goals at odds with your superior.

·????????The structure of industry relies on celebrating the successes of others

As I mentioned before, academia is flawed because it thrives off of a structure that pits what is best for one person or group against another. Letting a graduate student graduate or a postdoc start their own lab leaves a PI one man down. Additionally, the successes of one lab can be seen as competition for another. Competition for papers published, for grants submitted, for funding brought into the university. As one PI put it “We are all taught to clap like trained seals,” while behind the curtain it looks a lot like a scene out of Mean Girls.

Although I am not yet in industry, I have spoken to several who have transitioned, and one common theme is the idea of teamwork. For example, MSLs rely on the work of researchers in order to present up-to-date information about a drug going through clinical trials. Sales reps can depend on MSLs having developed effective and meaningful relationships with KOLs to move a product forward once it has been approved. Companies rely on sale reps for revenue, and all the while each of these components can look at patient statistics to see how their hard work played a part in improving patient lives. The team celebrates one another in their successes because when one succeeds, the others do too. The goal of improving patient lives in industry remains the target, and that is a mission I can get behind.

Too many good intentioned people, including students, have come into academia hoping to change it for the best, but the beast is too far gone. Academia is systemically broken, and if you haven’t read the Nature article “Has the ‘great resignation’ hit Academia?” (doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-01512-6) it’s worth the read.

For these reasons I am sprinting away from academia. On to greener pastures!