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I think the biggest difference between academia and industry stress is that stress in academia is so personal. Your entire career is building up your own person
by bkandel 7y ago
I think the biggest difference between academia and industry stress is that stress in academia is so personal. Your entire career is building up your own personal brand of research, which has to be novel, interesting, reliable, etc. If something goes wrong, like you don't get a grant or you find that you made a mistake or a paper gets rejected, you can't blame your company's leadership for poor decisions, so it's a much more personal reflection on your abilities as a researcher. The rejections are also typically much more often along the lines of "this was a bad idea, I don't know why you spent the past two years doing this" and less like "could you fix your code formatting to match our style guide." And because nearly everyone who does a Ph.D. does it out of their love for the field, feeling like a failure at philosophy is much more personal than introducing a bug or whatever into your code.