Working in concert: Academia and Industry.

As a computer science graduate student, I’ll often get questions from undergrads asking whether they should go into academia or industry. I’ll often tell them to try both as I firmly believe that having experience in formal research and real-world application can make you a stronger engineer, teacher, lawyer, or whatever field you’re working in. I’ve come to believe what I’ve said to be so true because of a video I recently watched called “Ask Hank Anything” featuring Brennan Lee Mulligan.

In it, Hank Green answers a question on whether he believes if academia and industry are becoming further divided to the point of being framed oppositionally. Undergraduates often make a choice to find a full-time job or go into research by continuing further education. While either one is a good choice, I find it so important to have experience in both and to not undermine the value of the other.

Since going into the field of formal research typically comes after finishing your undergrad, many students discount research since working at a company or some entity is typically more attractive in pay and status. As a result, many miss the opportunity to observe the importance of academia.

Before I pursued a Masters, this was the exact mindset I had, I found graduate work to be useless, a “back-up plan”. I believed I could earn just as much as any student with an advanced degree (which I still believe is true). However, since gaining internship experience in a startup, an S&P500 corporation, a government entity, and pursuing a masters while reading many papers, I’ve started to see how these two areas should work harmoniously, along with how they are set up as one or the other.

In college classes, have you ever wondered where the content on the professor’s slides originated? All of it started as a research question, a draft written for a journal or conference. Academia plays the role of expanding humanity’s pool of knowledge and it gets passed down generation to generation, in digestable formats like slides, such that students who come after us may achieve greater discoveries. While the knowledge gets passed down from academia, we want to use these discoveries to help the common person in their day to day life such that their quality of life improves, this is where industry is needed. They are the builders who spread the word and create goods and services such that the discoveries researchers make aren’t wasted.

It’s a simple system that most people can understand and should be obvious, but it seems less so today. As industry and academia are further divided, their pace of work start to diverge, research works slowly on a yearly timeline; it’s methodical and requires heavy peer review. Industry moves rapidly, new features need to be shipped bi-weekly like an scrum sprint.

If you are an undergrad student praying for school to be over, be open to reading research papers when completing a task at your future job; and if you’re a hardcore PhD/Postdoc, don’t let your brilliant mind go to waste and apply it in a way that directly impacts the everyday person.

While the theory in research is critical in doing things right, and the practice from industry maximizes global impact. Theory without practice is a hobby, and practice without theory is risky. As Hank Green says it best, they should work in concert.

References

Hank Green, Hannah West, Caitlin Hofmester, Seth Radley (2026) What Animal Should I Avoid Punching? | Brennan Lee Mulligan Asks Hank Anything. Complexly. Available at: https://youtu.be/1lY7Y6iJ1jk?t=575.