Throughout the summer, Skandalaris Center Summer Internship Program participants will be writing guest blog posts about their internship experience. Following is one such post. 

Jumping out of the Ivory Tower: An Academic’s Dive Into Industry

By Eric Failes (4th year graduate student in Psychology & Brain Sciences)

Ever since I took my first psych class in eleventh grade (we don’t do the freshman/sophomore/junior/senior thing in Canada), I knew what my career plan was: get my bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. in Psychology, then have an illustrious career as a professor at an R1 research institution. The first two of those boxes have been checked off and the third will follow in the next year or so, but I have come to realize over the past four years of graduate school that I may never check off – or even want to check off – that final box.

Life as an academic is not as glamorous as I had once thought. When I first set out on this path, I believed that academia was a world where you could set your own hours, working from the office or at home to tackle the questions that really interest you. What I have discovered as a graduate student is that while the hours spent in the office may be more flexible than in other careers, the work hours overflow into all hours of the day. And hours when you are not working are often filled with a nagging sense of guilt – why am I watching Netflix when I could be finishing off that manuscript?

The problem is that I really do love my research. I love asking those tough questions and finding new ways to answer them. But I want to be able to enjoy my life outside of work too. Surely these two things do not need to be mutually exclusive.

I had never even considered work in industry until a more senior graduate student in my lab did a summer internship as a User Experience (UX) researcher at Google last summer. She loved it! She came back describing a world that seemed to fit with my dream: tackling new questions every day, collecting and analyzing data, then leaving it all behind when the clock struck 5. I decided to test the water outside the ivory tower for myself.

This summer, I have been working as an intern at GiftAMeal, a startup that donates money to a local food bank whenever someone takes a picture at a partner restaurant using their app. While this internship has not been as pertinent to the skills I have developed as an experimental psychologist as was my lab mate’s internship at Google, I have enjoyed getting to – as GiftAMeal CEO Andrew Glantz would say – wear many hats. Yes, I have designed and helped to interpret results from user surveys, but I have also made sales calls, gone to pitch meetings, helped to design marketing materials, built pages for GiftAMeal’s website, and helped to plan the pathway for the future of the company.

There are many things that I have enjoyed about working in industry. First, as alluded to earlier, the hours are great! While many of the college-age interns I have spoken to this summer have felt caged by the 9 to 5 (or in my case, 5:30) slog, I haven’t felt so free in years! There is something immensely satisfying about closing your laptop at 5:30, saying “I’ll finish this tomorrow,” then not thinking about that project until the laptop opens again the next morning, guilt-free. Second, there is a consistent sense of accomplishment in industry that is few and far between in academia. Whereas taking an academic research project from idea to publication may take years, I have felt like something real was accomplished almost every day of my internship. Finally (there are more good things, but for the sake of brevity I will stick to three here), there are so many options in the world of industry! Thousands of companies from startups to tech titans are offering jobs that I could apply for with the skills I have learned in college and graduate school, each with interesting questions that need answering. The opportunities seem endless, and surely there is something out there for me.

There are still a few weeks left in my internship, but so far, I am sold on industry. I may not want to wear all the hats I have tried on this summer, but I have really enjoyed the opportunity to learn new things in a new setting. And if there is just one thing that I take away from my internship and from interacting with the CEOs of other startups this summer, it is that career paths are rarely straight. I think I see a bend in the road ahead.

Left to Right: Doug Davison, Brian Strobach, Andrew Glantz, Gillian Laming, Eric Failes, Jimmy Rao, Jacob Mohrmann, and Claire Warhover volunteering at Operation Food Search