4 ms·

I'm curious what you plan to do after finishing your PhD? Have you considered doing/working at a startup? I assume post-doc is off the table since you are not i

• arjunnarayan 13y ago
  I'm not 100% sure. For now I'm concentrating on finishing a serious PhD (my plan is not to quit academia with a pity-PhD consisting of no serious publications). I'm working on a couple projects leading up to publication, and that doesn't leave much time for strategic planning :) But for future plans I would very much like to work on some large scale projects building out large scale infrastructure. I don't have much experience writing production code for large scale distributed systems --- my research has, by necessity, concentrated on prototypes and theoretical innovations. I would be very excited to join a group that rolls out cutting edge systems, such as what Matt Welsh, or Jeff Dean, or Eric Brewer are doing at Google. I'm not sure a consumer focused startup would offer such an opportunity (although I'm willing to be convinced).
  • throwaway1979 13y ago
    Here is some unsolicited advise from an old timer. As a backup, do one of your internships in a dev shop. It can be Google, Amazon, Facebook, whatever. The key thing is ... it has to be non-research. It is far easier to do this kind of exploration as a student than later. Best of luck with your PhD and beyond!
  • mtdewcmu 13y ago
    "...a pity-PhD consisting of no serious publications" ... right... that would probably be the worst of all worlds, considering that the piece of paper doesn't offer any guarantees, so hanging around just to get the diploma would be risky.