Leaving Academia!
I resigned today. Quit my job. After several years I have decided to leave the University and head to the private sector. Before I leave, I want to remember the wisdom of Dr Ray Stantz:
“Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn’t have to produce anything! You’ve never been out of college! You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve *worked* in the private sector. They expect *results*.”
While at the University I have had the pleasure of working with some of the finest minds around. I have collected real-time coastal data at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. I have built distributed data grids for the Biomedical Informatics Research Network. I have worked on the Storage Resource Broker at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. I have architected data repositories and web applications for the Network for Earthquake Engineering and Simulation.
There is a culture within those ivory towers that I will miss. A spirit of intellectual pursuit that is a part of my very being. I am at heart an engineer as well as an academic. I am uncertain of what awaits me, but curiosity killed this cat.
I began a job search within the last couple of weeks. The initial response was tremendous! Since I completely missed the .COM era I was unprepared for the barrage of offers and interviews. In the past, I was lucky to get one interview. This time around I had a half dozen offers. I ended up creating a decision matrix with weighted discriminators to help me determine the best position.
In the end, I have accepted a fantastic opportunity with Qualcomm. I will be working with the MediaFLO group architecting the IT infrastructure, business intelligence, and data warehouse. Of course, as Ray Stantz reminds us: “they expect results”!