The Problems with Navigating the Real World

There are two quotes that I find myself returning to again and again as I navigate graduate school and life. The first being from one of my favorite books:

It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to. – Bilbo Baggins

— J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

To an extent, I’ve certainly embodied this quote in my career, however, in a way looking back it all makes sense the destination I have arrived at. By high school I new I wanted to go into some sort of engineering as I was always interested in practical applications of math and science. Meanwhile I was also interested in computers and programming. Initially I got into it through wanting to build websites to make some money on the side. That proved a lot harder than I thought, but I did love programming and the teacher, so I ended up taking several more classes.

I ended up going to college for mechanical engineering and bounced around a bit in my career. Eventually, I took a moment of reflection and realized that robotics was the thing that combined my interests in moving mechanical systems and programming. After finishing up my Master’s I ended up working at a lab that worked on navigation algorithms for submarines. Again, not exactly what I had in mind when I started my master’s for robotics, but in retrospect - as the kid on the field trip that always had the map - it too made sense and just clicks when looking back.

A bit more relevant to my current situation is this one, on memoirs of graduate school being written by:

…either successful professors or research scientists who pontificate stately advice or bitter Ph.D. graduates/dropouts who have been traumatized by their experiences, adopting a melodramatic, disillusioned, self-loathing tone of “ahhh my world was a living hell, what did I do with my life?!?

— Philip Guo, The Ph.D. Grind

Similar to Dr. Guo’s account, I’d like this to be a real time memoir, and if you’ll allow me to get a little ahead of myself, a deep/hard tech version of the Startup podcast that documents the founding of Gimlet Media.

So, what do you want to do with your degree?

Most PhD students get asked this question at least once a semester, if not more, often by well meaning families members seeking to connect with their loved ones despite barely understanding what it is they do. The other of course is by perspective students seeking reassurance that their idea to pursue a PhD is not in vain.

The typical answer to this is to go into academia, and follow the well trodden path of PhD, to post-doc, maybe second post-doc, to tenure track assistant professor at a research university. This is noble enough, and I don’t want to disparage the traditional path as frankly, a PhD is supposed to be a training ground for the next generation of researchers and professors. It also more than likely the path that the advisors of a given PhD student took, and so the only path they can give any advice on. If you tread slightly off the path you might find yourself at a national or otherwise government-sponsored research lab, still doing largely the same thing, but without the pressure of teaching.

There are however several things wrong with this path. I won’t go into too much detail here as you can find any number of articles on the problems with academia, but two particular problems have been hard felt by me. First and foremost is the utterly miserable pay for graduate assistant-ships. To put things in perspective, my first real engineering job I took in 2016 I was getting paid $61,000 a year. Most STEM PhD students are getting paid somewhere around $30,000, maybe 40k for more prestigious universities.

Admittedly, this is meant to be for “part time” work, but this is a far too outdated notion. Research Assistants are working full time on their research, in many cases are expected to work overtime, under the supervision of their advisor. The project they are working on for their advisor typically forms their dissertation, and many grants explicitly require funding to go towards graduate students. To say that a given PhD research assistant stipend is for 20 hours worth of work assisting their advisor’s lab, and that the other 20 hours a week are meant to be filled with their own original unrelated work is preposterous. This is further exacerbated by the fact that many assistant-ship contract prohibit additional outside employment.

The second problem is the lack of job options. The academic job market is notoriously bad, and requires one to be willing to move around the country, if not the world, to where a position might be. Then the odds of even landing a tenure track position are slim to none. This is not to say that there are not many people who do land these positions, but it is a long and arduous process that can take years, if not decades, and requires one to be hellbent on following the path. This can force one to put off many life decisions, such as starting a family, due to the lack of having a stable job. To a certain extent the non-academic lab route can be a bit better, but it is still a long and arduous process.

A third, and less talked about alternative is the “industry” route. In my opinion this is not to be confused with the often conflated non-academic government or other such non-profit research lab route that is often lumped into the industry bucket by academics. Specifically I’m talking about the R&D departments of large private sector corporations. There is quite a lot of research coming from private sector business, you need only look to the amount of peer reviewed machine learning and artificial intelligence papers coming out of Google, Facebook, and Amazon, et cetera. While typically paying more with fewer responsibilities, these jobs are not without the same constraints and hurdles as a prestigious tenure track position: a PhD with strongly supported peer reviewed research (achieved after having slogged through a post-doc or two) and a willingness to move around the country to where the jobs are. While maybe a slightly sweeter juice than the tenure-track route, it still requires basically the same squeeze.

Square peg, round hole

So what’s the deal you might be asking? Why all the complaining? You might be glaring at me through your screen saying, James, you yourself have just laid out three very compelling paths for a Ph.D. graduate, particularly one in STEM. Why are you complaining? Do the work and you will be rewarded.

To a certain extent, the problem is I’ve already gotten a taste of the outside world and, for a start, have very little tolerance for the pay of graduate assistants. I’ll leave it at that.

Second, the greater problem is that these paths all require you to fit into the same mold. The same path, the same expectations, the same work. Even with the best of advisors and committee members, there is still this dichotomy of graduate school that expects a full time effort, but does not appropriately pay for it. This can only be discounted so much by the notion of academic freedom and the general flexibility of the schedule. One cannot eat intellectual freedom, nor pay their mortgage with a flexible work schedule.

As a very non-traditional graduate student, having a family, mortgage, prior industry career, and having worked full time for most of the duration of my graduate studies, and having been the primary income on top of it all. I simply cannot fit into this mold. As such, to a lesser or greater extent, my time and ability to put in the effort to achieve these lofty results via my Ph.D. are limited if not completely out of reach, less my caffeine intake be increased to the point of being a health hazard.

However, there is an alternative. There is a path that is even less traveled, that is also demanding, but also rewarding. A path that is not without its own challenges, but one that is more in line with my interests and abilities and within my capacity to meet. This path is the world of entrepreneurship, specifically in the realm of deep tech and hard tech startups.

The Path Less Traveled

One my core memories as a young child was from second grade in Ms. Western’s class at Plymouth Elementary. Towards the end of the school year we had a “Business Day.” I forget the exact specifics of the assignment, but the general idea was to come up with a product or service, and then sell it to the class using some classroom currency that we had earned throughout the year. I can’t even remember what I did, but I do remember the day and how it captivated my interest.

To add to this, my family has a long history of entrepreneurship and I personally have been able to witness the positive impact that doing so has on a family and community. My mother specifically started her business because she didn’t want to compromise between her career and her family. She ran her graphic design and marketing business out of our house for most of my childhood and I don’t remember her ever missing a school event, game, or doctor’s appointment.

Both of my grandfathers ran businesses to a lesser or greater extent. My maternal grandfather was a serial entrepreneur, starting several businesses, the first of which was a business plan he put together as part of his MBA for his then employer (who later passed on the idea and allowed him to run with it). My paternal grandfather was a successful and well known oncologist that left a prestigious hospital position to start his own private practice. All seemed better for the experience.

Now midway through my thirties, I’ve been finding myself grappling with these two sides of myself. The one that wants to be the nerdy scientist and researcher, buried deep in circuit boards in a lab, and the other that wants to do something meaningful in the real world, that wants control over their life and is tired of having a boss.

I find myself wanting to be both.

Not just another app

While less traveled, this is still a path that has worn its way into the ground. It might take some finding, but its there. The problem, is that the path branches off from and is occasionally frequented by people from the Silicon Valley startup world of the 2000’s and 2010’s.

This is the world of apps, of venture capital, of “disruption” and “growth hacking.” This is the world of the “unicorn” startup, where the goal is to get as big as possible as fast as possible, and then sell out to a larger company. This is the world of “growth at all costs,” where the goal is to get as many users as possible, regardless of whether or not they are actually using the product or if it even works. This is the world that if not actively hostile towards higher education, is indifferent and dismissive of it.

Frankly, this is the world of low hanging fruit. Not to say that these things weren’t useful, but by and large this technology and business boom was about turning something analog into something digital, and then combining it with something else. Facetiously, I think a good deal of business models from the late 90’s and 2000’s can simply be summed up as “(insert analog technology or process here)… but on the internet!”

“What if you could buy books… but on the internet?!” And then Amazon.

“What if you could listen to music… but on the internet?!” And then Napster, iTunes, Spotify, etc.

“What if you could talk to your friends… but on the internet?!” And then Facebook, Skype, AIM, etc.

“What if you could find a business… but on the internet?!” And then Yelp, Google Maps, (the original) X.com, etc.

“What if I could send money to my friends… but on the internet?!” And then Venmo, PayPal, etc.

This isn’t to disparage any of these companies. Dropping barriers to adoption and making things easier to use are valuable innovations. There is a lot to be learned there. Frankly the lean startup methodology does work.

But it is not Google Search. Yes I know neither Brin nor Page finished their PhDs, but the fundamental research that underpins Google Search was done by them and their advisors, and they were both PhD students at Stanford at the time. I think the point stands.

Even more interestingly, this lean methodology comes from the world of manufacturing and lean production. When paired with the insight that the biggest, most long lasting, most transformative businesses are the ones that are built on top of a fundamental research breakthrough, it becomes clear to me that the path to success is not just about getting big fast, but about building something that is fundamentally new and different. Preferably one based at least partially in hardware, and one that has a real world application of a transformative scientific breakthrough.

Why I-Corps

This is the methodology of the NSF I-Corps program. The National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program is designed to help researchers and entrepreneurs develop their ideas into viable businesses. The program provides funding, mentorship, and resources to help teams validate their business models and develop their products.

I-Corps shares this philosophy that I have, that successful transformative businesses can (and should) be built out of cutting edge research. That Ph.D can have their nerdy cake and eat it too, like the control freaks they are.

So I’m taking my shot at this, because if it works, there won’t be anybody else out there to tell me no. There won’t be any recruiters trying to get me to move across the country for a new job. I won’t have to bounce between universities as a post doc. I won’t have to worry about getting tenure.

To borrow a passing phrase from Bono regarding their live cover of the Beatles classic Helter Skelter as part of U2’s Rattle and Hum tour, the lean methodology was stolen from the hard tech world.

I’m stealing it back.

This post is part of my ongoing series documenting the transition from research to real-world product through the NSF I-Corps program. Follow along as I attempt to build a business — or find out if I crash along the way.