There are many benefits that an individual will receive if he/she decides to pursue a career in academia. One such benefit would be having more control over your own schedule. If you’re a professor, you can choose your own hours for working in the department and when you want to take a vacation/ There is more time flexibility for professors as they are not required to work on a strict schedule so you feel like you’re self employed. In academia, you will receive acknowledgement for all of your personal work and contributions (e.g. writing books, making new discoveries, create new devices). After a certain period of time, a professor can receive tenure with a university, which is essentially job security. Unless the person makes a serious mistake, he/she will have a job permanently at the university.
For an individual who wishes to work in industry, there are certain advantages that will come from doing so. The first advantage is that there is potential to be promoted into a higher field when working for a private company. If you have an excellent record of achievement at your workplace, you can potentially get promoted to a much higher position in the company. Typically, an individual working in industry will make more money (x2) than someone who works in academia. For someone who wishes to work with others, industry is a great choice because you often participate in team projects. This will help you improve as a person because you can learn from your peers and working with a team is an essential skill to have. Moreover, there are more job opportunities available in industry than in academia, so there is a higher chance that someone will get hired since there are more jobs available. This allows the person to have more flexibility in choosing which location to work in. In other words, more jobs means more places that you can move into.

There are both pros and cons of industry and academia. Industry has more opportunities in terms of growth and experience employees are paid more in industries whereas in academia the employees have less chance of the growth opportunities. There is more recognition in industry in terms of the work whereas compared to the academia there is less recognition. Industries are more structured and organized. There is less chances for being flexible in industries whereas in academia there is flexibility in terms of the working hours. Industry employees work in team so there is help from the higher authorities whereas in academia the employees work individually. Working in industries is more time constraint whereas in academia there is not much time constraint, so it becomes challenging for the employees working in the industries. I think I would prefer working in industry to gain more experience more knowledge.

Thank You!

The arguments that I would present to someone in favor of working in academia would be what everyone has stated, which are flexibility in their schedules, work independently, traveling, and good benefits. Academia are free to do anything they want in their own pace because they are not working under anyone. They do not have a specific time set. They can decide when they want to take their vacation or just travel to witness new medical discovery while in the process making connections with other scientist. People that work in academia get credit for new discoveries and receive good benefits like insurance and retirement. The arguments that I would present to someone in favor of working in industry would be the higher pay which is far more you will be receiving at academia job. The benefit in working in industries is teamwork, you be able working and connecting with other individuals on a project. Industries have more job opportunity and promotion unlike academia.

For my experience, I will start with that in academia because that defines basically all of my past work experience. As you may get to know me in the post of my self-introduction. I used to work as an intern for 2 and half years to apply what I learned in the medical textbooks. I would say that is a shockingly destructive experience for my confidence in the past few years of accumulating all those heavy load of knowledge and turns out I may just behave like an idiot in almost everything that from ordering proper screening tests to making diagnosis. But thanks to my supervisor attending physician who has been very considerate and tells me that actually I was doing just fine and being clumsy is basically what everyone has gone through in their medical career. People who cannot take the existence of this period may start to question their love for this career and turn into academic field of clinical medicine, and those who get through the obstacles of self-doubt manage to stay in the frontier of clinical field (I should not say industrial, right?) and they finally survive the internship to residency. So my point is for no matter which field to step in, it always takes passion to make you qualified for the job. All I can say is at least in medical career, the academia is never inferior than the industry, it's always personal decision to define their perfect job and pursue what they really want in the first place.

Working in Academia and Industry are two very distinct settings and should be highly considered before going into either of fields. These two types of work settings really depends on an individuals interests and temperament.

Academia's main priority is research. If one is interested in doing research and working long-term and possibly teaching, academia is for them. Like many students have mentioned, your time is very flexible. You are not restricted to an 8 hour shift. You can go beyond that or shorten it. In addition, working in academia you are at the forefront of knowledge and discoveries, which can be a very rewarding aspect of the job.

However, one must consider the pay, as it does not pay as much as working in a company since it is based off the funding the company or research facility gets. Additionally, the benefits are not as good as benefits from the industry. Another negative to working in Academia is that you can be working on a research project for an extended period of time before there is a discovery. Therefore, one must have a lot of patience and must love their research.

On the contrary, working in the industry is substantially different. Working in this type of business requires a fast-paced environment where one must work quickly and get deadlines done. This ultimately creates a different environment, a fast-paced one, whereas working in academia has a more relaxed vibe to it. It is primarily business oriented, which pays more than working in academia. In addition, job positions are very versatile as a biomedical engineer working in industry as compared to Academia such as a CAD operator, development engineer, research scientist, data manager, and many more.

One negative to working in the industry, from prior experience, is the stress and pressure one may feel when working on projects. If you do not meet the deadlines, it can become quite stressful when there are other deadlines approaching.

From those that have had experience in working in both academia and the industry, which setting do you feel causes you more stress?

I agree with the arguments you have presented. But you have to remember that when it comes to academia it may not be as time flexible as you believe. A profession in academia can be becoming a professor and with that you have to be at school at certain hours. Being a professor also comes with the advantage of having tenure, basically amazing job security. You also have three months off but you might spend your time doing research. In industry you don't have the flexibility of taking off for three months to do research or just have time off.

It seems that the two different paths would attract people who are of different mind sets.

The argument that attracts me to academia is being on the cutting edge of new knowledge. Being the first person to discover something and to be able to publish it under my name is something that sounds quite nice to me. But I have spent some time working in an academic research lab. Whilst the actual conducting of the research was incredibly captivating to me, what came after was quite the opposite. The slow pace of the whole "industry" of academia is unappealing to me as a whole, and I have found that applicable research is much more interesting to me. So the arguments for academia can be summarized, at least in my head as more stable.

That leads me to my arguments for industry. If you are like me and like that the landscape around you is changing constantly then the industry work is better. I have been working in industry as a co-op for a little over 3 months now, and whilst that is a limited scope of what industry is like, I feel like I can understand a small portion of how industry functions. But the main difference is the focus. Academia is focused on discovery where as industry is focused on money. The whole environment is different from my experience. Industry is so much faster because every company want to bring the next big thing to market.

The main difference I have seen between the two is the speed of the industry, so if you are someone who prefers a more slower paced more job "safe" environment then academia is for you. If you want something that is fast where you will be quickly rewarded for good hard work then industry is definitely better.

But at the end of it all we all need to make money to survive so what you like may fall by the wayside in the face of needing money. But that begs the question, is it worth it?

I do agree with most of you on the pros and cons for academic vs industrial. Also, it was very clearly stated in the presentation. However, I think which one will have an argument based on their personal preference. SO, If you like academic more than industrial you can see a lot of good argument to support and vice versa. For me, I do like the pace of industrial and working on the actual project to make things happen. Also, I believe there is a link between both of them. Working on the industrial side also required the academic understanding of the actual theory. it is a more competitive field but also it has a higher pay and all other benefits that you guys talked about it. Also, as mentioned you have more room to grow in industrial and more position and it is a business-oriented. in the bigger picture, I always see that I can own one company one day which mean that all that I learn in my career path can be utilized later. I feel that there is no limit in industrial or in another word, you can do much more of development and growth than in the academic field.

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.

I have had the opportunity to work in the industry as well as academia. I worked as a research assistant under a PhD student for a year. A lot of times, working in academia can mean repetitive work. This is true especially in research. I spent the past year doing the same thing every day in the lab. Research takes a lot of patience in order to reach your end goal. You must be truly interested in what you are researching. In industry, it may get repetitive as well but your day to day can vary much more than in research. Also, you have more of an opportunity to pick up or get involved in other projects.

I think it depends first on the person mindest whether it is academic or industry. However, being a scientist researcher in the industry may have many advantages over being a researcher in academia, not only income-wise but also in lifestyle and scientific outcome-wise. As a graduate researcher, I can tell that being in a lab, working all day behind the same bench with the same people may be boring and not as much performing as working in an office with many other people who are working in the same area, moving between different places and talking to different people in the company. The other main argument that is worth noting is the lower income for a scientist in academia compared to an R&D in industry.

A Life Sciences Salary Survey affirmed that scientists in the US, Canada, and Europe who worked in the industry made around 30% higher than those in academia per the the-scientist website. Another disadvantage of working in academia is that in most research cases the work may be open-ended, and may not be completed in a due date, while in the industry a scientist may be required to submit results in a particular date, despite the pressure caused by that.

Undeniably we can say that industry has a demand that is sometimes unreasonable wither it be time given for a project, the quantity of something to be mass produced. With industry “cut corners” tends to be at the expense of quality. The demand placed on academia is not unreasonable but rather the opposite. In academia, the demand placed on someone is not unreasonable but like a long extended vacation, one is on. When it comes to compensation academia tends to be cheap with paying their highly educated colleagues. Whereas with industry the pay is what makes worth doing the job in some respect. I have heard from various Ph.D. students the salary they make and it goes with the relaxed pace of the job for sure, however, we have minds willingly to be cutting edge information out there which companies had acquired at some point in time.

The closest I've come to working in academia was at the NJIT CHEN building for about 2 years, where I simply assisted PhD students in their research. Now this position was not a career by any means, but it did provide a sense of pursuing a path in an academic environment. The main advantages would be the flexibility of one's personal schedule that essentially allows one to make their own hours. For example, I would work only on the 3 days of the week that I had classes rather than be obligated to come in at consistent hours. This can save on time commuting to campus, which is beneficial since a lot of analytical work can be done from home. One of the top professions in academia, as mentioned in lecture, is becoming a teacher/professor, which does require one to attend the class' meeting times but is more high-paying than other academia careers and is still less of a time-commitment than a 40-hour work week. Another benefit of academia is the possibility of making a breakthrough discovery and being one of the first to say you were present when it happened. Unfortunately, since being credited in academic research is unlikely, it may draw aspirants away from the field.

I have been working in biotech industry full-time for over two years at both large and small companies and can say that I personally prefer working in industry over academia due to personal preference. The higher pay is without a doubt, one of the prime benefits of industry, and from my experience, your job security is stable as long as you maintain a proper work ethic (being on-time, being respective to all coworkers, providing your full undivided attention, not making mistakes/errors, etc). Being punctual with attendance is taken more seriously in industry of course, but that requirement applies even on days that the company is not running production of any sort (meaning you get paid for essentially doing nothing, whereas you can work yourself into a coma in academia and not see anything close to a similar payoff).

I think the pursuit of either Academia or Industry ultimately depends on individual personality. For people who like being surrounded in a social content and aren't mortified by deadlines, Industry might be a good choice for them. However, other people, myself included, who enjoy teaching, conducting experimental investigations and discovering new things, might find that Academia might be the right fit for them. However, the pay is quite deceiving in Academia. I know some people working in Industry with a master degree and years of experience who make essentially more than some individual with Ph.D. in Academia. I think if the ultimate goal is money-driven, then Industry far outweighs Academia. However, if in quest of knowledge or simply of the flexible lifestyle, Academia might be the way to go.