Academia vs Industry: Pros & Cons

  • Thread starter Thread starter gravenewworld
  • Start date Start date
  • Tags Tags
    Academia Industry
AI Thread Summary
The discussion highlights the significant inefficiencies in academic research compared to industry practices. Participants express frustration over the slow pace of academic experiments, which can take months to complete due to bureaucratic hurdles and extensive training requirements for using instruments. The emphasis is on the perceived lack of practical application for the detailed knowledge taught in academia, with many researchers feeling that they only need basic analysis to determine the presence of compounds. The contrast is stark, as industry professionals report being able to produce and test 50-80 new molecules monthly, while academia often views proposals for similar output as unrealistic. This raises questions about the viability of academic research for fast-paced projects and the reasons for the slower progress in academic settings.
gravenewworld
Messages
1,128
Reaction score
27
This question gets asked quiet often in school so what's the deal?

Academia is extremely slow. I have no idea why. Experiments that I would do in industry that would take only 3 days, take over a month to complete in academia. It's simply ludicrous the amount of red tape and administrative crap you have to cut through just to use an instrument in academia. Sorry, I don't give a crap about the intricacies of how NMR works and I don't need a 3 day work shop on how to run and interpret a mass spec sample. 99% of the time if you aren't an expert in those fields you will never need to know the knowledge that they teach. The only analysis I need done is to tell me whether or not my stuff is in my flask, that's it, period.

They look at you like you are crazy if you propose to make 3 or more new molecules a month to test. Meanwhile in industry I was already making 50-80 new molecules per month to test, from start to finish.
 
Physics news on Phys.org
Are you exaggerating? Why would anyone hand off a research project to academia if things were slower by a factor of ten there?
 
Hey, I am Andreas from Germany. I am currently 35 years old and I want to relearn math and physics. This is not one of these regular questions when it comes to this matter. So... I am very realistic about it. I know that there are severe contraints when it comes to selfstudy compared to a regular school and/or university (structure, peers, teachers, learning groups, tests, access to papers and so on) . I will never get a job in this field and I will never be taken serious by "real"...
Yesterday, 9/5/2025, when I was surfing, I found an article The Schwarzschild solution contains three problems, which can be easily solved - Journal of King Saud University - Science ABUNDANCE ESTIMATION IN AN ARID ENVIRONMENT https://jksus.org/the-schwarzschild-solution-contains-three-problems-which-can-be-easily-solved/ that has the derivation of a line element as a corrected version of the Schwarzschild solution to Einstein’s field equation. This article's date received is 2022-11-15...

Similar threads

Back
Top