Main paragraph: I grew increasingly disillusioned with academia. It seemed that many STEM undergraduates would rush into PhD programs out of sheer inertia, wit

Main paragraph: I grew increasingly disillusioned with academia. It seemed that many STEM undergraduates would rush into PhD programs out of sheer inertia, without exploration of other options, and spend five, six years of their prime youth down the rabbit hole of academic research. This resulted in frequent burnouts. Many PhD graduates turned, in the end, to industry after acquiring a distaste for academia in grad school. Those who continued in academia were met with fierce competition for limited amounts of tenure-track positions, and must go through several rounds of postdoctoral research stints before being accepted for a faculty position, if they were accepted at all.