Do academics look down on applicants who leave academia and try to go back?

Question

For example, if I do a postdoc and then leave for a year and then decide I want to go back to academia, is it possible, or will researchers look at my file, say, "Oh, a year not in academia," and throw my application away? My experience in grad school is that academics are very social-status oriented and consider any non-academic job as "low-status." My own adviser once said, "I don't know why anyone would go into industry." I know grad students who wouldn't tell their advisor that they were considering non-academic jobs, because they were worried their advisor wouldn't take them seriously. Should I do whatever I can to stick to a very linear career path?

Edit: I'm in pure math but this question applies to all fields.

Answer 1

No, it's not looked down on. It rarely happens, but that is because switching from a nonacademic job to an academic job is usually a poor economic choice.

Answer 2

The difficulty is that academic positions are determined by your recent work. If you have left pure math academia then unless you have been publishing pure math papers on the side then you don't have any recent work to merit a new appointment.

Answer 3

In general, my impression is that people overplay the idea that non-academic jobs carry some sort of stain to professors. Professors do like the idea of their ex-students staying in academia, but much more for practical reasons (continued collaborations, etc.) than because a student going into industry is seen as a failure of some sort.

It is objectively hard to switch from a non-academic into most academic roles. However, the reasons for this are similarly practical rather than ideological:

• If you have not published during your stint in industry, your CV may have "fallen behind".
• You may lack current references, or, more generally, connections in academia.
• Your salary expectations may not match up with academic realities.
• You may lack up-to-date "hive knowledge", e.g., how to write a good research or teaching statement, what to emphasize (and what to downplay) during interviews, or how to interpret a specific job posting, making it harder to write a strong application.

None of this is going to be a huge problem after only one year in industry, but taken together these factors make a return to academia increasingly unlikely the longer somebody stays in industry. You quickly reach a point where trading whatever career you have in industry for what you can realistically still get in academia is simply not attractive.

Answer 4

Since the question applies across all fields...

There are many areas of engineering where the "state of the art" in academia is a long way behind industry. Industry has the context to make practical use of the technology, and where required, the resources to carry out the experimental work needed to push the boundaries.

Aviation is the obvious example here. If you're interested in any aspect of how to design a plane then academia is the place you learn how to do the basics, perhaps at most with a PhD, before you join Boeing, Airbus or wherever and start working with up-to-date technology. Staying in academia is a recipe for stagnation.

Speaking personally too, I currently work in nanopositioning. (FYI, a major application is focusing mechanisms, some for microscopes and some for particle accelerators. Also near-atomic resolution surface scanning.) We see a lot of academic papers stating as "fact" that nanopositioning systems can only be used for closed-loop positioning (reading back a position measurement and driving the actuator until it gets to where it wants to be) at speeds of up to 1-2% of the system bandwidth, and they get all excited about getting their speed up to 5% or maybe even 10% (usually with horrible effects on accuracy as a trade off). In fact the leaders in the field in industry have routinely been achieving 10% since the 1990s, and we're pushing 40% today. One of our current areas of interest is a feature of piezoelectric actuators which as far as we can tell hasn't even been spotted by academia yet, because academia focuses on slow movement or static positions, and this behaviour only happens when you're hammering it at high speed.

Answer 5

I know of quite a few examples of people who went into industry for several years after their Ph.D. in pure maths or after one or several postdocs, found the experience soul-crushing (albeit well paid), and successfully returned to academia, usually with renewed enthusiasm and ambition.

It is, however, not easy! These people are forced to compete with those who have been churning out papers in the meantime, learning new mathematics, developing new collaborations... Those who successfully return are usually quite brilliant.

Answer 6

I personally laid witness to my phd supervisor trashing another professor for going to a public sector/government position and then returning to the university faculty.

My phd supervisor is a small, petty person that would trash anyone at anytime for any reason (never to their face, of course). This is not specific to academia. Some people are just that way.

The best way for you to mitigate the worst in humanity --in any industry-- is to worry about your research/value first and foremost and hope that you are surrounding yourself with the people that are right for you. Personally, I would make exactly zero apologies for pursuing my own interest, but I dont fit in well in academia either :)

Your example of a postdoc-away-for-a-year would be much less subjected to your concerns, as this is generally a transitional period and not an established faculty member. Established academics would definitely encounter this more so than a recent postdoc.

edit: Heres the real question. Is your time away going to result in more funding or less? that is what actually matters.

Answer 7

This is a story from the US, Electrical Engineering PhD. It can happen. I applied for a professorship after several years in 'industry' and I had to justify going to industry in the first place. At the time I graduated there were about 800 applicants per tenure-track opening, so I couldn't get one. [800 may be a bit high of a count, but there were dozens of applicants per job]. I went into industry to earn a living. To a certain extent, such industrial experience is 'valued', but they also want to know that a person wants to be in academia. This can be a hard circle to square. In my case, I wound up going back to industry and similar organizational work.

Answer 8

Some of the best math in recent times was done by Mandelbrot on fractals while working in industry.

So this roughly corresponds to my current mission and trajectory:

• Academia has a bloated job market that underappreciates the talent
• Industry has a weakness in long-term thinking

Solution: Leave academia for industry to make both better

Answer 9

Some academics look down on other academics who look down on applicants who leave academia and try to go back.

First, looking down on someone, even for unrelated reasons, is not academic in itself, as it distorts the meritocracy. Looking down on someone for leaving academia could be seen as someone leaving the meritocracy. But that means coming back means entering this meritocracy again. It is about the actions, not the person.

In this situation there is a very real reason to actually look up to the person, because he has experience outside academia.
That is of value almost by definition.

The best case is real world experience of the application of related science.

I have seen that as natural cause for genuine admiration.

Independent of that, the person demonstrates strong long term interest in the topic.

There is one problem in relation to hierarchy between scientists. Like with any other occupation to, you need some time to get up to speed, for many reasons.
That is obvious to your peers, and expected. Technically speaking, your level of competence dropped, and you in a meritocracy.

So, in the end, academics may indeed look down to the person. But for different reasons in a different way you may have worried about.