If, after my undergraduate degree, I had followed the majority of my Engineering colleagues into industry I would be earning quite a bit more than my current Research Associate salary. If I had gone into banking or consultancy, I could be earning twice as much. In this post I will outline the main advantages I see to a career in Engineering academia that go some way to offsetting these opportunity costs.

One might think that working in academia gives a unique opportunity to solve vitally important and challenging problems using cutting-edge technology. In fact, this description does not apply to every university research project; more often the problems an Engineer will solve in an industrial setting are more relevant to the wider world. The Research and Development departments of some large companies are better-funded than the most prestigious university labs, and correspondingly have access to the best facilities.

Therefore, I do not claim that academia has a monopoly on interesting problems to solve, or the best tools and methods to bring to bear on such problems. There is too much variation from place to place. Instead, I describe below four plus points that I see as particular to academia.

Variety

I enjoy the breadth of how I spend my working hours. To put it another way, operating in a small team leaves less room for specialisation and I am involved in all aspects of every stage of the research process.

A project starts with picking useful research questions, and making a long-term plan for how to answer them. Reading and understanding the existing literature is a pre-requisite for this. Then I will design and organise manufacture of experimental apparatus, or set up numerical simulations, deploying the practical experience I gathered during my PhD. Processing these results and considering the fluid dynamics involved will illuminate further lines of enquiry. Presenting findings visually using plots and illustrations, writing up a paper, and giving a conference talk all exercise my communication skills.

It gives me great satisfaction to see a project through from start to finish. In industry, some of the tasks I have described may be assigned to other people, or not business-critical and hence a low priority and neglected entirely.

Teaching is another facet of my activity. Apart from a desire to give back to the system which gave me an excellent education, teaching has concrete benefits for my main work. Maintaining an instinctive grasp of the basics makes reasoning quicker. Supervising yields fresh new perspectives from every student.

Attending conferences and seminars is a good example of a productive use of time, which is encouraged and recognised as important in academia, but may be a hard sell with managers in certain company cultures.

Freedom

Here I will consider two senses of ‘freedom’: freedom to pursue research interests without outside influence, and freedom to organise one’s time. I think the latter is actually a bigger personal benefit, and the purest form of academic freedom is not critical to a fulfilling academic Engineering career.

In academia, one will have at least some scope to negotiate the research topic to work on — more so than in industry — and this is a good thing. However, absolute academic freedom is not realistic. For impactful work some funding is needed. If you are unable to convince anyone to give you money for your excellent new idea, then perhaps you should reconsider. Conversely, if an engineering company approaches your lab with funding for a particular project, there is a good chance that you have an opportunity to solve a useful problem that will (at the very least) improve their bottom line. Even if the main part of the work is not academically novel, there will be sidelines and offshoots that are.

From the previous section, we see that an academic has many competing demands on their time. The sensible way to deal with this is not micromanagement from above, but instead to just let them get on with things as they see fit. I want to be held accountable according to the merit of the research I produce, not the number of hours I spend in the office.

The overhead of a typical corporate management structure is significant. Producing frequent progress updates for your superior takes time that could be spent doing useful work. If projects are self-contained one or two person jobs, then one principal investigator can run many of them, and academia does not need a tree of managers.

Self-determination

In the realm of academia, success or failure is largely under your own control. There will be some setbacks. After all, if we always knew the correct answers then it would not be research. Or, we may be disadvantaged by petty political battles between or even within research groups. However there exists a strong correlation between ability and effort on the one hand, and esteem from our peers on the other.

Given the rather limited extent of human knowledge, there are always fruitful extensions and diversions of an ongoing research project. Given the freedoms I have discussed, an academic is able to pick up and develop their own ideas as the opportunities arise. Indeed, having some slack in the schedule allows us to claw back some more academic freedom!

Contrast this with an industry position, where there is often narrow scope for going the extra mile, and side projects may be viewed as stealing company time. At best, completing our work to a good standard will earn kudos with our manager and colleagues, which eventually converts to a pay rise or promotion. At worst, we will have more responsibilities piled on us with no increase in renumeration. In both cases, the outcome is mediated by our manager, who may or may not be on our side.

In academia, I think that working in small teams, and the tradition of writing or presenting findings in our own voice (rather than that of our employer) makes it easier to ascribe credit where credit is due.

A lasting record

Publications in reputable journals are the primary metric for ranking prospective candidates for academic jobs, and the perverse incentives this situation creates are well-documented. My view of publications is a bit more idealistic: they are a permanent and lasting record of your own small contribution to the Engineering community’s knowledge base.

I have found and read useful papers going back to the 1950s. The authors’ impact has extended into the future long after their careers have ended, because their work is preserved in an open-literature journal and attributed to them by name. It would be nice if seventy years from now scholars are still reading my papers and building their own contribution on top of mine.

In industry, the longevity of contributions is not assured. If you do good work, your colleagues will know, but the institutional memory will soon forget after you retire. With commercial pressures incentivising new products rather than long-term maintenance, your clever designs will be soon superseded. Many companies do not even last seventy years, whereas sufficiently clever insights into fluid mechanics can be timeless.

Summary

I have itemised four special advantages I see to an academic career: variety, freedom, self-determination, and the lasting record of your contributions. Underlying the first three of these traits is the tradition of working in small teams. Completing a PhD is a singleton enterprise, for example, so I was involved in every aspect of the research, organised my own time, and worked hard to finish a thesis I was happy to put my name to. Only time will tell if my career has any long-term impact, but the journal publication system at least facilitates the possibility that others can build on my work far into the future.