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What are the benefits of getting a Ph.D.? A perspective from a Ph.D. physicist now working in the chip industry

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. 
Recent posts

My Academia Exit - From a Physicist to an RF Engineer

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

I just have my personal website published!

Building a personal website is something I really wanted to do a long while ago. It can help me reflect on what I am lack and also advertise the research projects I have done and that I am currently working on. It was the right time to stay at home and work on my personal website during the pandemic while conducting experiments was not possible. I personally do not like drag and drop type of website builder, so I decided to use Github pages and Jekyll to host my personal website on Github. It is a good practice for git and coding with HTML/CSS/JavaScript. I also hope to use this blogger to share some of my random thoughts about physics, life, and anything about the universe. Link to my personal website: https://mingweii.github.io

L. D. Landau

Today, I came across Landau's Wikipedia page and the biography of Landau written by Dr. Lifshitz in Volume 1 of Course of Theoretical Physics "Mechanics". His diverse knowledge in theoretical physics and research attitude really impress me a lot. His name indeed appears in many physics textbooks, but what astonished me the most is that he learned about the latest research results from seminars instead of reading papers, and he always by himself worked out the novel research results that interested him instead of following the authors' reasonings.

An interesting discussion on the journal club of CMP: about the discovery of chiral Majorana zero modes in QAHI by K. Wang and S.C. Zhang

After the publication of this paper , about the signature of chiral Majorana zero modes in the quantum anomalous Hall insulator, Prof. Jason Alicea wrote a commentary on  Journal Club for Condensed Matter Physics . However, Prof. Beenakker wrote another commentary to oppose this experiment, in which he cited two theoretical articles showing that the e 2 /2h does not need the presence of chiral Majorana modes. This argument is actually just recently confirmed by  a recent experiment . It is always fun to read the discussions between physicists. Science evolves through them.