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related but unrelated: does anyone have experience going back for a PhD/transitioning into academia after years in industry? I can't find many people who've don

• plafl 4y ago
  I'm trying to do a PhD part time while working although I don't plan to go to academia, now or in the future. For me it's a way of focusing on some topic related to my work: I'm a machine learning engineer and I'm doing the PhD in AI/optimization. I have spent just a year on it so success is still far away. I know people however that went back to academia but they had some previous experience for example as teaching assistants.
• j_french 4y ago
  I've drifted in and out of academia since my undergrad (in physics). Started out at hardware design in industry, went back to do PhD in space science, later on ended up working as software engineer in industry, now teach software development at a technical university.
• runeblaze 4y ago
  It is a complex topic, and imo the people who have done it have high variance in their outcomes. For example some brought their industry perspective back into academic research and did well, and some just feel very ill-adjusted to academic research (I just cannot get over the fact that performance critical code gets written in often buggy Python in my area) and get homesick. I think some parts of CS academia just does not care about the software engineering (robustness, speed, etc.), and these can be tough to adjust to, so it varies by area too. Disclaimer: never been in industry, but knows several people (PhD students, professors) who were in industry once