In the debate of academia vs industry, I have been fortunate enough to say that I have had experience in both. Personally, my experience in academia lasted a total of just over two years and I really enjoyed the relaxed schedule and friendly atmosphere. However, after 2 years the project I was working on was scrapped because the lead professor wanted to peruse a different direction to better allocate limited resources. Luckily, by that time I had moved on to grad school because I would have been pretty disappointed (personally) to see all my hard work disregarded in front of me. My industrial experience from both pharma and a medical device company was significantly more fast paced, goal, and deadline oriented. I immediately saw my work and efforts advance my team closer towards the overall goal and deadline so there was more imminent satisfaction.

As akshayakirithy stated above, if you are the type of person (like myself) that likes to see the project they work on advance and immediately see impact of their work, then industry is most likely more suited for you. In my case, I both take great pride in my successes and painfully learn from my failures so I would not be well suited long term for an academic setting where failure are more common. However if a more patient and understanding individual wants to work in academia, they would enjoy a more flexible schedule and benefit from being able to direct their studies more towards their interest and not restrained to those ideas most profitable or with the greatest chance of success.