The Not So Smart Guy

Why I am Leaving Academia

So why is it that I am leaving academia? Well the answer is a little complicated and it first requires me to fully work through why I wanted to be an academic in the first place. The reason I wanted to join academia is because I had all sorts of ideas and naive research goals in mind of varying levels of benefits to society that are all for the most part of little to no economical benefit. The only place where such ideas can be fleshed out, developed and executed is the world of academia under the umbrella of academic freedom. So I wanted to become a professor gain the superpower of academic freedom and use it to do one of two things (but hopefully both) 1) further our understanding of the cosmos specifically with regards to the nature of gravity (dark matter and dark energy included) and/or 2) increase the accessibility, inclusivity and democratisation of space. To do this I found one of the few people and labs in the world that are perfectly aligned with these goals, the group builds low cost balloon-borne spacecrafts with public IP and uses them to do cosmology experiments. Not only did I get accepted in this group I was thriving and had a very clear path ahead to the professorship I always dreamed of woot woot! So why the **** am I leaving???

What got me to start thinking about leaving

Well it turns out that academia is a little more complex than that, to see what I mean we need to look at universities through the lens of for-profit companies (even though they are not). If we assume that the university has the fiduciary duty to maximise the funds that it acquires this means that the university has to maximise the rate of successful grant applications above all else (especially since they get to keep a cut) so this means that the best working model is to promote up the people who are best at research since their name will carry the most weight and they are also more likely to have more good ideas worth funding and. In a weird seemingly nonsense move by promoting them you make them essentially quit doing research they are good at and focus full time on a task they are not interested in and might not be good at ... writing grant applications. This leaves their free labour grad students asthe ones that have to produce the actual product which in this case is research (this is like a depressing pyramid scheme were even the ones at the top are not happy). Realising this dampened my excitement to be an academic for a few reasons (1) it kind of sucks being that free labour grad student since the way the infrastructure is set up it results in you constantly feeling like you are being taken advantage off since there is no positive feedback system in place (e.g. promotions, raises, pension.. etc) which has left me a little bit jaded. (2) This is the big reason which is that I love research but hate grant application writing which means that once I get to the final position I am trying to get to I would have to shift towards a “day to day” modus operandi that I do not enjoy. This is a big deal for me since when I sat down to figure out what I prioritise in my career path and the second most important thing was enjoyment of day to day operation. This set of realisations was actually very illuminating as it finally helped me understand why it is most professors I interact with happen to report relatively high levels of job dissatisfaction/burn out often framed using language like “I wish I could be a postdoc forever” or “I wish there was tenured research staff positions”. I mean of course they are unhappy. They spend all their time doing something they are not trained in and are possibly not good at as a result of them being really good at the thing they love… That being said these realisations only got me to start thinking about leaving but I still powered through since the end goal of being an academic still fulfilled my career top priority which is philosophical and moral satisfaction with the big picture I am contributing to.  

Adding insult to injury

The next thing that made me start to lean away a little bit from academia is actually rather personal, and it is the designated foreign national list. Basically people born in certain countries (my place of birth Egypt happens to be one of them) face a tremendous amount of restrictions when it comes to being in the field of aerospace. This means that for reasons out of my control at least in the near future while the aerospace industry is still dominated by government entities, my ability to contribute to the field will be highly limited. This was highlighted to me by the fact that for the NASA balloon launch I was supposed to be involved in (to launch a payload I built with my own hands and know like the back of my hand) I was not allowed to be there unsupervised. This out of my control restriction made it clear to me that if I wanted to be maximally impactful I would have to pivot my career a little bit, adding some further dampening on my academic excitement.

What made me take a second look

I got to a point where I was aware of all these setbacks but I was still mostly pursuing the academic path. One could say I went from 100% sure to 80% sure that I wanted to be an academic and continued pursuing the dream of “Shaaban's Lab for Low Cost Space Instrumentation”. But then some events occured that knocked me out of the natural progression and gave me the opportunity to take a second look at my future. Specifically a combination of COVID shutdowns and cancer resulted in my adviser going MIA for ~2 years. For weird reasons beyond the scope of this post this somehow left me in a leadership position within the group essentially forcibly emulating the role of a professor for ~1 year. This highlighted something very important to me, going into grad school my assumption was the following: I will love being a professor but am likely not good enough to make it to the end and that's ok. Being in grad school and especially covering for my adviser while he was gone made me realise that the exact opposite of my assumption happened namely: I am pretty good at this and a professorship is relatively within reach but I absolutely hate the role. So now I had hands-on experience confirming what I feared, which is that if I became a professor I would end up like the majority of professors I know, jaded and dissatisfied.

What made me pull the trigger 

At this point I had decided that academia is not for me but for some reason despite that my actions were still not reflecting this shift. I guess it was a combination of moral obligation towards the people I work with, as well as, personal stubbornness to finish what I started. It was not until my adviser completely lost control and verbally attacked me for simply pointing out a flaw in his thinking thad I decided to leave. This attack caused the man who I respected more than anyone else to shrink in my eyes. It had become very clear to me that he was aware of the fact that he was slowly fading into obscurity (which is a fairly natural part of being an ageing academic) and was refusing to let go, he became obsessed with his legacy and ego to a fault. Given how similar I am to my adviser I basically got a glimpse at my own future… I did not like what I saw. Combine that with the fact that I no longer respected him due to the verbal attack (and I obviously can't work with someone I do not respect) the cherry on top had been served I was now ready to pull the trigger on my academia exit.

So what next?

I do not know! I am taking it one step at a time and to be honest I am very anxious and scared about the future. I want to non-trivially contribute to either aerospace or AI. But it is not entirely clear to me what is the best avenue to do so. More specifically I am now in this weird position where I am highly qualified for something I don't want to do and not qualified enough for the things I want to be doing so there will need to be a lot of learning over the next few years and some leaps of faith. There will have to be some combination of me settling for things I don't enjoy as well as people/industries/hiring managers taking a risk on me based mostly on potential and not on any substantiated experience. That being said I am pretty excited for the next chapter of my life!