A ‘Rebel’ Without a Ph.D
Really good read. Would love to hear some stories from other HN folks who have "escaped" from or "rebelled" against academia but are still pursuing academic interests...<p>Me personally, after deciding not to pursue a Masters degree in Bioinformatics, I realized that working in IT is also a (more lucrative but just as empty) sham. I've been focusing my time for the past year on learning new computational modeling on side projects, such as 1) contributing to QuantLib, open-source finance library with new option volatility surface curves, 2) parsing through PLoS Computational Biology papers and feeding any supplementary data from authors/research group to visualizations/statistics libraries and open lab notebooks wiki's; and verifying whether their assertions are truly statistically significant.<p>As the author noted, it is very hard to do the real research in academia unless you have a union-card of PhD. However working in industry even R&D, unless you have a PhD or are very lucky gets you most of the suckered into "technician" and mundane CRUD work. Not to mention the financial realities of having a family and setting down later in life vs. the idealistic dream of monastic academic research when you're younger.<p>What have you guys done to balance the two? Do you work on side projects while collecting the paycheck? Or do you work in R&D division or a research institute that allows you to take on novel research work? Or do you finance your research on your own or solicit grants/funding from other people (like David E. Shaw, Kickstarter or a "Hackerspace" that survives on membership fees)?