# 9 What metric made me stop thinking about academia and focus on a career in industry

Dec 11

Hello everyone,

Welcome to my website and my 9th blog post.

In this blog, I will share a method I used to evaluate my chances of becoming a PI in academia. The method is based on my research field and my productivity. It helped me focus my energy on alternate careers and you can use it too to strategize your career plan.

My last blog was appreciated by many: How over-confidence can positively affect your career (blog).

However, a lot of my friends asked me - What made me stop all efforts for a career in academia and focus completely on industry?

This is an important question. Until you are clear about your chances of succeeding in academia, it is difficult to focus on industry. So here is how I evaluated my chances…

In my postdoctoral research lab, one of my colleagues, also an Indian (let’s call him Mr. X) was planning to return to India and start his lab. He is an applied physicist, using his knowledge of material science to understand tissue dynamics in development. He aimed to publish papers in Nature / Cell / Science (NCS) and was of the opinion that if he did not have 2-3 papers published in these journals, it is difficult to get a faculty position in India.

Academia-To-Industry-Transition-Aritra-Misra — **Ten Simple Rules to becoming a principal investigator**

by John S. Tregoning
(*paper*)

When he recently visited India recently, I helped him connect with a few research institutes in India, where he presented his work and spoke with the professors about faculty positions.

These institutes were IISER Tirupati and IIT Madras.

There he understood that the selection procedure for a faculty position is slightly different for different candidates.

He was told that, since there are many people working in biology, for generic biology researchers (like me) (cell biology / signaling / genetics / developmental biology, etc.) the requirements are 2-3 NCS papers to identify them as good researchers with good publication capacity.

But for a multi-disciplinary scientist like Mr. X, who was applying material science to tissue biology, the institutes will look for quality concepts, a good number of publications, technically challenging experimental designs and will be ok if he did not have NCS papers. This is because people know that it is not easy to generate high throughput data in multi-disciplinary research, not easy to generate quantitative analyses at high precision, also difficult to translate theoretical material science to experimental design.

So depending on the category of research, the selection process will be different. Even multi-disciplinary scientists with no NCS papers will be more in demand than generic biologists with 2-3 NCS papers. However, everyone needs to have 3-4 papers from PhD and postdoc combined.

Thus, competition for generic scientists (like me) is a lot more, the total number of scientist positions around the world is less, and I also did not possess a high-level multi-disciplinary research publication.

I had 1 first author paper from PhD. I was expecting another one by the time my postdoc got over. I was also expecting another 2 papers from my postdoc. But didn’t know the level of multi-disciplinarity I will be able to achieve.

On the other hand, a career development workshop at the University of Copenhagen had shown me that my communication skill, project management skill, liaising ability, and biotech business development knowledge will be in demand in the biotech industry.

Since my personal and professional skills had more capabilities to provide a job, compared to my academic track record, I decided to shift to industry.