Reflecting on 1 year in Academia

And why I ended up there

About 7 years ago, I wrote a blog post about the differences between types of design jobs, which I heard from others was helpful to them in deciding on industry vs academia, and what types of roles they might consider in each. I thought it was due time for a revised version of that post, now focused more on life in academia, given that, at the time I wrote the design jobs post, I was in the middle of spending ~8 years post-PhD largely in industry settings (2 big tech companies: Autodesk and Apple, 1 startup, and ~1.5 years as a visiting research professor abroad). Now I’m on the flip side of that coin, having made it through one year as an assistant professor at a liberal arts institution!

Context

I have a background in product design, having studied it as a mechanical engineering (MIT BS ‘09, Stanford MS ‘11) and interaction design (MIT PhD in Media Arts and Sciences ‘16) student. When I graduated from the Media Lab, I considered both academic and industry jobs, ultimately deciding to take a job in SF as a lead UX designer at Autodesk, where I worked for almost 2 years. Then I took a job at a startup in NYC (this is when I wrote the aforementioned job post). I got very burnt out at that startup and decided I didn’t want to work in industry anymore so had planned to transition back into academia as a professor. I became a visiting researcher at University of Tokyo during this time, starting right before the COVID pandemic in Jan 2020 and ended up staying in Japan for 1.5 years. I hadn’t expected to take an industry job upon returning from Japan, but a very relevant opportunity came up at Apple and I ended up becoming a research scientist in AIML there for 3 years. I was the first research scientist hired in an education-leaning R&D group, but it dissolved within ~1.5 years of me being there as my boss decided he himself wanted to return to academia. That was my sign to do the same. I will say that I was given an enormous amount of freedom at Apple that I was very thankful for, even after the group I originally joined dissolved. I think this came with being a research scientist and not, say, a research engineer, because I could pitch projects and work on the things I cared about for the most part.

As far as academic jobs go, I always had a sense that I would prefer the freedom of academia compared to industry, but I also cared a lot about building products people would want to use and could use (because companies have enough money to pay for infrastructure, developers, designers, etc. that sustain those products). So I have no regrets about being in industry so long. That being said, it made it really hard for me to transition back into academia because I wasn’t publishing during the first ~3 years I was working in product and not in research (and most academic search committees really primarily care about your publication track record). So I would advise if you have any inkling as a PhD grad that you want to go back into academic, taking a research scientist role (as I eventually did at Apple) will make that much much easier.

I actually applied to academic jobs 4 times, with each year involving just a couple relevant openings because I always knew I could fall back on my industry positions. In that way, I was always shocked to hear that really competitive candidates apply for 20+ jobs because of how hard the market is. First, I applied when I was finishing my PhD at the Media Lab and received a tenure track offer to join the design department at University of Minnesota. However, I didn’t know anyone in that part of the country and found the role at Autodesk to be even more fitting (it was leading UX for electronics prototyping for Eagle and TinkerCAD), so decided to take that opportunity instead. Then, while I was at Autodesk, I applied for and received an offer from the University of Toronto iSchool for a tenure-track teaching position. Upon reflecting on the differences between teaching and research positions, though, I realized that I really wanted to do research and that a teaching load of 6 courses per year would not give me the bandwidth to pursue research projects, so I declined their offer. (I really wanted to join that department and applied several times afterward for tenure-track positions but was unfortunately never offered round 1 interviews, so there must be a very big difference between hiring considerations for teaching vs research faculty). Then when I was at University of Tokyo, I was applying for faculty positions and received an offer from the University of Waterloo to join their Stratford School of Business and Interaction Design. Because this happened during the pandemic, though, the interviews were fully remote and they couldn’t offer a pre-visit before I had to make a decision because of the safety risks around COVID. I wasn’t prepared to move to Canada with so little information. That’s when I learned of the start of the Apple learning group and decided to pursue that instead.

Finally, in my last academic job cycle (which happened after I had already been at Apple for 2 years), my main focus was that I really wanted to return to NYC, so I prioritized schools there. I had asked Apple if I could transfer to their NYC office but was basically told no, so I knew if that was important to me, I couldn’t stay at Apple. This is also quite different than most academic job searches, where people end up moving to where the job opening is because the opportunities are so rare and hard to get.

Up to that point, I had never applied to a liberal arts college but saw an opening at Barnard, the women’s college at Columbia University and decided to apply; I had been following Barnard for some time (even back to when they first opened their makerspace). I was so happy to receive an offer from them and decided to take it, though I had a competing offer from an art school in the UK; making a decision between them was a bit harder than I expected, but the draw of NYC and the financial resources to start my own lab were big deciding factors (the UK system is very different since there’s no such thing as a startup grant — can you tell you more about this if you’d like, but probably out of scope for this post).

Why Academia

First, the reason why I liked industry is that I liked being a designer for the most part – I like sweating a lot of design details and thinking about holistic user experiences. However, I do not like creating pixel-perfect mockups and being pigeonholed into a non-technical designer role, which often ended up being the case when companies have very separate design and engineering roles. This was especially bad at the startup, where I was originally hired as a design engineer, but then they tried to scale and hired a design director I didn’t align with (they had a graphic design background and didn’t know what to make of hybrid design engineers). One challenge I kept running into is I never wanted my boss’s job when I was working as a product designer, which made imagining a job progression hard for me in industry.

My main interest overall in product was working on software design tools that are focused on helping people design and create, specifically young people. However, I quickly found many of those educational efforts tend to be the first to get deprioritized, because ultimately many of the companies I worked for didn’t have education as their primary market. So I realized if I wanted to pursue work around software design tools for learners, I needed to lead my own group, on my own terms, which is what made academia appealing. Finally, I definitely felt some imposter syndrome in industry when I first joined because I thought I had so much to learn from other people (both in terms of design craft and project management, etc) – but over time, I became more confident in my own abilities and realized most people in charge don’t really know what they’re doing more than I do (no offense, haha). That gave me more confidence in starting my own lab.

Liberal Arts vs R1

I actually never applied to a liberal arts college before getting the offer from Barnard, so I had very little context about the differences between liberal arts and R1. On the surface, liberal arts colleges are about well-rounded undergraduate curricula, so you teach undergrads only and have a higher teaching load (2:2 rather than 1:1 for R1). In my experience, this is not just merely twice as much teaching compared to R1 because the nature of the classes are fundamentally different – undergrad classes typically require much more direct instruction than grad seminars (where you can, for example, assign readings and focus on discussions). So I’ve definitely spent a lot of time teaching and tailoring existing curricular material to how I personally would like to teach it. This past year, I taught a class on creative hardware applications (COMS 3930 - here’s the course website, enrollment = 25), and a data science class (BC1016 - here’s the course website, enrollment ~90). They were very different classes and I learned a lot from each – for example, the second class involved managing 4 amazing TAs.

Going into the academic job market this time around, I really wanted to prioritize institutions with amazing students. That’s because at MIT, I worked with >20 undergraduate researchers, and TBH they were better at prototyping that most full-time engineers I worked with in industry. That’s because research is fundamentally very different than product, and you need people who are flexible and scrappy, which being a software engineer in industry doesn’t necessarily teach you how to do. I am really lucky that Barnard students are excellent and very smart. I felt that it was better for me to have access to amazing undergrads than to end up in an R1 institution with grad students that might not be as competitive and would make it hard to attract and work with top tier students. Also because of Barnard’s relationship with Columbia, I can take Columbia undergrad and master’s students. (I have to raise funding to work with PhD students…story for another time).

Reflections on the first year

I knew becoming a professor and starting off the first year would be hard, but it was even harder than I expected – not because I wasn’t well supported, but because you have to do everything: teach, start up your lab, start recruiting students, apply for grants, grade, etc. I had never experienced so much context switching in my life. And there are so many emails!!

That being said, one thing that made a huge difference for me was finding great external collaborators at R1 institutions. They have been critical sounding boards for new research ideas and were especially helpful as I began maternity leave (also a story for another time – I got pregnant in Oct of my first semester so this first year is both a story of my experience going through pregnancy and also learning to become a professor).

Work life balance is just different in academia. I worked hard to give myself one day a week off (usually Saturday) but essentially worked 6/7 days a week throughout the academic year. (In my industry jobs, I usually detached from work over the weekends). However, I’m for the most part very excited about the research I’m getting to lead, so I enjoy working on it and it feels more self-imposed and motivated. Basically, running a research lab is like running a mini startup, and I love it so far.

The thing I feared the most was not getting to design anymore, which is something a lot of professors tell me (their students do the work and their role is centered around managing projects). But I find being at an undergrad institution, you need to support students learning to implement stuff, so I did a lot of that through directly modeling what that looks like (how to build a feature, create a PR, review PRs, etc). So I actually get to write code and build stuff still! (Though it’s still hard to find time for, for sure.)

I know people always talk about how rewarding mentoring students is, but I really felt that manifested in ways I hadn’t anticipated during this first year. One example is working with research students on a project in which they clearly became lifelong friends. That is an amazing process to see happen in front of you as you all work towards a shared goal.

The biggest challenge for me at the moment is that I really, really want to take a PhD student but the funding landscape is terrible with all the cuts to NSF and other public infrastructure, and it’s very complicated bureaucratically with the way Columbia and Barnard operate much more independently than I had anticipated. This past application cycle, I had about 60 PhD applicants without having explicitly advertised that I could take students, and it was so hard to have to turn all of them down. So if anyone is interested in collaboration on funding, let me know!!

I think the last thing I’ll say here is that I’m glad I worked in industry for a while because it gave me a financial safety net to be able to enjoy my time in NYC while not stressing over finances of living in such an expensive city. The pay cut was significant (I make less than half what I did as a research scientist at Apple), but the job is incredibly rewarding and I feel so lucky to have the amount of agency I do. At the end of the day, no one takes a faculty position in CS for the money (you easily make much more in industry) - it’s about loving the environment and how much flexibility you have with your time!

That’s it for now! Let me know if you have any questions / thoughts in the comments (:

My research lab dinner – love my students!