After working as a postdoc for four years, I recently left academia and enjoy my new life working in the industry. As my current role does not require a Ph.D. degree, I sometimes feel regretful about not starting my industry career earlier. Looking back on my decision of getting a Ph.D. in physics, I used to be passionate about doing scientific research and imagined myself working as a physicist in a research institute like my former employer LLNL. I decided to leave academia because I was tired of the uncertainties in both research itself and personal finance as a postdoc, especially after my son was born. After watching an inspiring interview with Prof. George A. Constantinides posted by Shilicon (老石) on YouTube, I feel resonated with one of the sentences by George. He said that getting a Ph.D. is a rare chance that you can have a certain block of time in your life where you can focus on a specific research field and dig deeply into it without worrying too much about other things.
After seeing Ashley Ruba's twitter post about salaries in the academia vs industry, I would like to share my experience of switching career after 4 years of postdocs. When I was young, I used to dream about being a scientist like the professors I met in the class and famous physicists I knew on the books. I was fortunate enough that I was able to get into Duke Physics, where I started my dream and had been a physicist for about 9 years until last September, when I switched to work in the industry at an age of 34. Many facets of the academia convinced me to switch my career. My PhD life at Duke (~ 5 years) My research experience at Duke University was actually a great journey that I really enjoyed doing research and learned the experimentalists' mindset from my advisor Prof. Finkelstein. To be honest, my learning curve of being a low temperature physicist is actually quite long. With my undergraduate degree in electrical engineering, I had minimal knowledge in physics prior to