Seeking an ‘exit plan’ for leaving academia amid coronavirus worries
nature.com
nature.com
Honestly, just drain the system as much as you can.
He isn’t the only one either. A Princeton professor who wrote a paper about protests is facing protests (https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Protesting-of-a-Protes...). Now a large number of professors at Princeton, mostly from the humanities, signed a petition asking for an end to academic freedom and a committee to review every publication for “racist” content. The students who signed onto a letter defending academic freedom are now being cyber bullied (https://www.thecollegefix.com/princeton-students-cyberbullie...).
Now crazed and radicalized students at Harvard are trying to cancel Steven Pinker. Yes, that Steven Pinker (https://www.thecollegefix.com/far-left-scholar-activists-att...).
The entire higher education system in America has been turned into a propaganda machine that radicalizes young minds and is hostile to any ideas they don’t agree with. It is dangerous for society and completely incongruent with fundamental academic principles. We need to defund it all and start over with a much more decentralized system.
I have had _very_ different experiences outside academia, depending on factors like the peers within the team, type of business, company size, city, culture/country, etc.
In all of these, I found places that were a lot worse and depressing and places a lot more interesting and motivating when comparing to academia. There literally is a whole world out there, perhaps you just haven't found the right place for you yet?
To get back to the topic at hand: industry can have rooms with stimulating conversations. Academia can have rooms devoid of interesting conversations. I’d put my money on the organization that focuses on intellectual discovery to be the one that garners more interesting discussions on average than the organization that is driven by profit.*
* Academia is still certainly sick with money and corruption problems at all levels right now.
If you happen to be in Europe, showing up to one of these talks from "industry" gives you an immediate inflated status because of how EU funding works (if I was ranting I would claim how broken it is). Every grant-seeker is searching for "industrial partners" to put on their grant's "consortium". Some universities are even okay with assigning 100% of the IP rights to the "industrial partner" in the case of e.g. a student thesis project.