I think that people really should get experience in both a lab or at a company because I feel that that is the best barometer for deciding whether or not they should go into academia vs industry. Seeing as I have no experience in industry I don’t feel comfortable stating anything other than the obvious pros/cons that have been previously said. Personally I only have experience in academia from working in a lab. Many people above have said that industry is a “9-5′ job while academia is “all day, everyday”, which is true in some ways. There is a lot less initial job security when it comes to academia at some points because your research is funded by grants. These grants, run by organizations such as NIH, DoD, and NSF have many applicants. All who then have to compete among each other by having a better proposal. All this in order to get hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars. In academia, the metric in which you are measured is how many papers and patents is your lab pushing through. You may also have to teach classes, all while dealing with the department politics of who favors who and how to toe the line between departmental “cliques”. Yes, you may have graduate students but they are by no means consistently reliable. They’re, for the most part, looking to you for guidance on how to enter academia. They may be competent or may require you to hold their hands, so to speak. It may also require a lot of travel to various conferences and talks in which you have to present data that you’ve attained through researching. In academia, some researchers also have to conceptualize and build their setups using the grant money, such as for data collection from large numbers of people. These setups may require certain amounts of space, which may be limited depending on what university campus you work at. There are FDA concerns and ethics boards and certifications that you have to go through depending on if you want to run a new study, experiment on people, etc. There’s a lot that goes behind the scenes that people don’t realize.