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Showing posts from January, 2023

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