Graduate school and industry (not versus)

It has been almost a year now that I have defended my PhD and joined a team at a biotech company instead of further pursuing academic positions. I had time to calm down, recharge, and get acclimated to a new-ish life. Some reflection about these two different worlds is due. Here we go. Things I like about biotech:

• Everything has a very practical value. If it is faster -- do it, if it is more accurate -- do it, if it represents actual biology better -- do it.
• We survey customer needs and design products in such a way that they benefit most customers. It makes sense -- such an approach should bring more money (duh), but it also has the potential to improve diagnosis/treatments for more people. And that's great.
• We can run many wet lab experiments to test an idea. It is amazing to know that your approach does work on real data.
• I went to more conferences and workshops this year than any year before this, and now we are starting collaborations with some people I only admired from afar before.
• Almost everyone I work with is either a PhD, or has tremendous breadth of knowledge in biology, chemistry, or physics, and I can ask them questions!
• I already had a promotion -- and didn't have to wait 5 years for it.
• Good pay (although we still can not afford a house, haha).

Things that could be better:

• My commute
• Sometimes I feel like an outsider when I get excited about computational methods (just for the methods' sake, you know!). But everyone loves that I can parse a *.docx file to extract some sentences and I know how to set up a quick webservice to expand ambiguous bases, so that compensates.
• Designing to customer needs. The customers do not always know what is possible and what may solve their (unobvious) needs. Solution to this -- being creative and investing in research instead of always retroactively following customer needs.

Now on to graduate school, the praise and criticisms in equal measure. First, things I liked about graduate school:

• Interesting, driven, self-starting people all around you -- and you get to work with them!
• Publishing. Publishing is having your efforts recognized and valued, your argument proven solid and if it gets cited -- hell, you've made a contribution to science! It feels almost like achieving immortal glory in battle and becoming the stuff of the legends.
• Having more time to study obscure comp sci literature and methods.
• Exploring ideas that may not be immediately practical, but are so out of the box! And then realizing that they actually have cool practical applications.
• Giving talks (see publishing)
• Teaching -- a huge time sink, but makes you finally learn the dynamic programming for RNA folding and makes you feel super-smart and important when undergraduates ask you questions about your research.
• Blending of disciplines, lots of talks & lectures across departments, and cool volunteer opportunities (like SCS4All or TechNights).
• Having a decent gym very close to the office.

And then things that could be better:

• There were too few girls, and now I do not have quite as many female friends as I have male friends.
• Worrying about your work being scooped.
• Constant turnover -- people graduate all the time, and your friends (or you), people you love working with, eventually move away
• Because publication is a unit of success and it is easier to fund a new project that to request funding to support an old one, projects are often abandoned after their publication.

My 5 cents.