In Japanese, one calls the act of finishing school and getting a job “entering society” or, even better (worse?), becoming a “society-person”.
(Clearly, Japanese culture considers that prior to that you were just a burden to society. I will not go down that rabbit hole now).
I started my first job in February 2017, after finishing my masters; this means that I would have completed my 5-year society-person anniversary February this year (2022), had I not left for a period of around 9 months to try (and not succeed at) PhD life. Because of that, it makes sense to say that such anniversary was postponed to November 2022, ie. in a few weeks.
Using that as a basic excuse, I decided to take some time to reflect on what happened over the past 5 years, and, in particular, on the professional side. I had all sorts of crises related to mental health, self-doubt and impostor syndrome over these years, but somehow managed to go from a heavy wannabe academic with no real skills to someone who can navigate corporate life relatively well, but still feels like an outsider from time to time.
Maybe this self-reflection can come in handy to someone who struggles with things like:
Coming from an academic background and feeling like they won’t / don’t belong in industry;
Not having enough work experience but too much academic experience for the jobs they are considering;
Not knowing exactly what they want to do, and feel like they will feel bored / overwhelmed / useless working in industry;
Feeling disappointed at themselves for having to “sell their soul” (as we, clueless Physics students, used to say) to industry in order to make money.
Not knowing what to learn and focus in order to thrive in a non-academic environment.
I’d like to think that these concerns stem from lack of understanding of what is out there. I want to give my two cents here.
To give some context, between 2010 and 2016, I was a Physics student.
I started out in a Bachelor’s at the University of São Paulo, and went to the Ecole Polytechnique in France for a double-degree, again in Physics (although my diploma says Engineering - the French higher education system is just complex). After that, I went to Canada for a 1-year master’s in Theoretical Physics, at the Perimeter Institute at the University of Waterloo.
Over all that time, I felt an increasingly annoying itch saying “academia is not for you”. It was the reason I went to Canada to take a master’s degree and not a doctorate: I felt like I couldn’t commit to a 4+ year program in an area I wasn’t sure I wanted to work with in the future.
And, indeed, it turned out to be true; by the end of my year in Canada, I was sure I wanted to go do something else.
As a side note, before jumping in on more specific discussions, this is a simplified timeline of the past few years.
I worked in 4 types of companies: a consulting firm, a full-remote startup, a financial institution and a credit bureau, in 4 different positions: management consultant, data scientist, quant, and manager.
Feb 2017 ~ July 2018: management consultant at big consulting firm;
Aug 2018 ~ Apr 2020: data scientist at aforementioned big consulting firm. Also moved to Japan in Jan 2020, right before the pandemic started;
Jun 2020 ~ Aug 2020: no formal job. Freelancing to pay the bills;
Sep 2020 ~ Feb 2021: oficially enrolled in a PhD in Tokyo, part-time managing a remote team of analysts on an EdTech;
Mar 2021 ~ Jun 2021: moved back to Brazil and started work in as a quantitative analyst on derivatives trading at a big bank / brokerage firm; left after a few months due to complete mismatch and thorough unhappiness;
Jul 2021 ~ onwards: started leading the data science teams at the Experian DataLabs, first in the new agribusiness branch and then back to the “core” Lab.
I find it funny how colleagues and friends alike often used the phrase “real-world” to refer to the whatever was outside research. It was as if we lived in a parallel universe where rules were different and we could somehow get an outside-in view of where common people lived.
Well, following the metaphor: let’s talk about what we don’t know about the real world, until we must.
Not all academia is equal, but I think most physicists would agree that, historically, theoretical physics has been an area suffering from severe real-world-phobia.
The view that academia is the appex of human endeavor, while industry is a place that people go to make money and sell their souls, was one one imbued in me over years of undergraduate study, both from colleagues and professors.
And it is not a Brazil-centric view - I’ve heard the exact same opinion from fellow Physics students all around the world.
I remember two conversations: one with a German colleague, and another with one from Pakistan. Four things they said really left an impression on me:
“I don’t want to spend my days at a company doing boring things for money” “I want to keep on working on topics that I find interesting” “Guys in companies won’t really get me” “I don’t really care about money”
I could write an essay about my view on these opinions, but will try to keep the discussion not too long.
There is no such clear-cut dichotomy of “academic = fun, non-academic = not fun”. Firstly because not all jobs are the same: you might be miserable in a bad company or in a bad research lab (as many students are indeed).
Rather, assuming you are in academia and like your research, ask yourself: what are the components of your job that make it interesting?
a. Working on a topic you are passionate about? b. Constant learning? c. Mentorship from more experienced people (researchers)? d. Flexible work hours? e. Teaching avid young learners (and also learning in the process)?
The (perhaps shocking) reality is that these elements are not unique to academia.
Finding a job where you will fulfill all these criteria is obviously hard. When I first started as a consultant, items (b) and (c) were all there, and (e) too to a lesser degree; but I often felt like I wanted to be learning other topics beyond the ones I naturally had access to at work. I vividly remember wanting to learn more about statistics, whereas the project I was in required me to learn about trains (more on this later). I also wasn’t passionate about the work itself, and work hours were rough.
Was it all bad? Not at all: exposure to topics I originally didn’t care or know about eventually made me see that I actually liked business and data analysis more than my previous prejudices had ever allowed me to realize. I also learned, by painful trial and error, how to better manage my time, making the most of the long work hours.
In that environment, I slowly but gradually came to realize data science was a topic I enjoyed a lot and that, as a physicist, I could learn relatively faster than most. Suddently, the amount of (a) in my around increased, and as I learned and taught colleagues, I started getting some of that pleasure from (e).
Can work still be boring and make you miserable? Of course. But that really depends on what drives you, what gets you going. For me, it was a good balance between quantitative aspects (modeling, analysis) and qualitative aspects (presenting to stakeholders, managing individuals, building nice pitches). I am an odd one at it; most physicists-turned-data-scientist friends of mine really enjoy the heavy quantitative part only, whereas my consultant friends (many of which are ex-engineering graduates) rather steer away from any maths. I really felt this during my short-lived PhD and quant finance attempts, when my work got almost 100% quantitative. I was miserable at both, because without the constant human interaction I just could not feel joy from the otherwise extremely interesting topics I was studying.
I decided to quit for many reasons, but mainly due to work-life balance issues and not agreeing on how our projects were sold and staffed.
Once, in 2015, I was walking through the financial district in downtown Singapore. It was close to lunch time, but the skyscrapers were so numerous and tightly packed that sunshine actually didn’t reach the ground where I was walking.
I saw guys, all in suits, hastly leaving the buildings for what was probably lunchtime rush. Myself, I was wearing an old pair of jeans and a T-shirt my grandma had given me for some Christmas past. I had come to Singapore for an ad-lib “graduation” trip with my last scholarship batch from France. All the money I had in the world, at that point in time, were about 200 euros.
I remember thinking following comment brimming with self-pity and a weird kind of arrogance:
“I wish I had normal people interests. I wish that, at 17, I had decided that making money was the important thing, so that I had gone into Finance or Economics or something instead of Physics. Then, maybe, I’d be in a world surrounded by these tall buildings instead of worrying whether my 200 remaining euros will cut it”
I felt different from other people based on interests.
I had been too much of a romantic when deciding my future career to really think about money or financial prospects.
I had
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