### Into the Astro Industry with Matthew Stevenson

Today I'll be talking to Matthew Stevenson, a former astronomy graduate student at Caltech. Matthew defended his PhD thesis last summer and will be receiving his degree this June. He now works for Synaptics, as discussed below. While at Caltech he worked on the C-Band All-Sky Survey (C-BASS) which is mapping the entire polarized sky at 5 GHz. He also worked on anomalous microwave emission in the Galaxy's ISM.

Where do you currently work and what do you do?

I work for Synaptics. We are a leading company in capacitive-touch interface products for computers, smartphones, and tablets. My job title is "Senior Algorithm Architect," and my job is to develop next-generation algorithms and circuits for our chips to improve our performance. This requires coming up with new inventions, evaluating their efficacy, and writing specifications for their implementation.

What does your typical day entail?

My work has a great deal of variety, which is really nice. I am typically working on 2 or 3 projects, each of which may require some theoretical work (analytical, numerical, or both), some experimental work, and a substantial amount of documentation. I may spend one day working entirely on an analytical model for a project, the next constructing a numerical model in Matlab, and then the day after that testing the model on my experimental set-up.

When and how did you decide to leave the academic career track and get a job in industry?

I decided to leave academia during the final year of my PhD. I had applied for a number of post-docs, as well as several jobs in industry. I received two offers: one for a post-doc and one for my current position. My decision was largely based on two factors: work-life balance and salary.

On the subject of work-life balance, many in academia will be familiar with the notion that young scientists are expected to work at least 50 hours per week, increasing to 80 hours a week during crunch time (ie, proposal deadlines, observing runs, etc). Some jobs in industry do require similar commitments, but mine does not. I typically work 40 hours per week, and I have only had to bring work home a handful of times in the 10 months since I started.

During my graduate studies, I often took part in good-natured commiseration on how underpaid we were, especially considering our long working hours and technical skills. As it turns out, the disparity is not only real, it is shockingly large. The difference in compensation between an industry position and a post-doc can be in the range of 2-3x. People often choose careers in academia for the love the science and tend to give less attention to money. For myself, however, such a large difference has a real impact on the quality of life for my family and myself.

Are you happy with your decision?

I am very happy with my decision. I find my job to be absorbing and fulfilling in ways that I didn't expect. I am genuinely having fun as I work to solve the problems I am given. It is immensely satisfying that I have a job that I enjoy, which has great work-life balance, and which compensates me fairly for the expertise that I've developed.

In my current job, I am most pleased with how interesting, challenging, and satisfying the work is. Although I knew that the work would require technical expertise, I did not expect the extent to which I would enjoy it. My main concern with leaving academia was that I would end up in a job that I didn't enjoy as much. The fact that I do enjoy this work so much really leaves me with no regrets on my decision.

What's one aspect that you're less than pleased with?

It is a shame that I'm no longer involved on the forefront of science. Although my current work involves developing novel algorithms and circuits, it doesn't really replace the wonder of scientific discovery. Fortunately, my scientific background does allow me to follow new scientific discoveries as they're announced, both in the popular press and in the open-access literature. Even when I was in academia, a great deal of my scientific wonder came vicariously through attending colloquia and reading papers, so this isn't actually that large of a change.

Do you have any advice to offer graduate students considering a move from academia to industry? What do you know now that you wish you knew in grad school?

I would encourage all graduate students to at least consider careers in industry. Students should attend their schools' career fairs and take a look at what's out there. There may well be great opportunities that they're simply unaware of, and it really doesn't hurt to look.

Many students wonder how their expertise on some detail of the interstellar medium (for example) will be useful in industry. The answer is that, actually, it probably won't be. What will be useful is their expertise in applying the scientific method, in solving complex problems, in programming, in instrumentation, in technical communication, in technical reading, and in a myriad of other skills. Success in graduate school requires a great number of valuable skills which are in high demand in industry.

A big challenge in finding good jobs in industry is overcoming this misconception that one's only value is in one's scientific results. Students must not only overcome this in themselves, but also in recruiters. Unfortunately, recruiters will often not see the valuable technical skills that a science PhD requires. Therefore, students must be prepared to make their skills clear.

Finally, I wish that when I was a grad student I had known just how great the opportunities in industry are. Many grad students have their hearts set on a dream job in academia. This can lead to great deal of anxiety, stress, and general unhappiness. If I had known that I could fall back on such great opportunities in industry, I think I could have relaxed in grad school and enjoyed it a lot more. Science is a lot of fun, and grad students should really try to enjoy every minute of it.

cosmicray said…
Thanks for a great perspective on life outside of academia!

I would pile on to your point about students (and postdocs) often thinking that their greatest credential (or what they should market themselves on outside astronomy) is scientific results.

Really, as you said, scientific results will be irrelevant outside of astronomy, unless you developed some groundbreaking image processing technique that can be used in computer vision, for example.

What people will positively respond to (and what you should be proud to talk about) is that you have been a self-directed, problem-solving, knowledge-generating researcher for 4+ years, who is able to rigorously analyze problems and contribute analytical horsepower to a team working on challenging problems. Any professional astronomer will have had technical writing experience, coding knowledge, project management skills, grant application success, and team coordination capabilities. That combination is not that common, and you should make the most of it.

Sometimes, it's actually refreshing to have your background appreciated for those aspects rather than just the scientific discoveries you made along the way using those skills.

### On the Height of J.J. Barea

Dallas Mavericks point guard J.J. Barea standing between two very tall people (from: Picassa user photoasisphoto).

Congrats to the Dallas Mavericks, who beat the Miami Heat tonight in game six to win the NBA championship.

Okay, with that out of the way, just how tall is the busy-footed Maverick point guard J.J. Barea? He's listed as 6-foot on NBA.com, but no one, not even the sports casters, believes that he can possibly be that tall. He looks like a super-fast Hobbit out there. But could that just be relative scaling, with him standing next to a bunch of extremely tall people? People on Yahoo! Answers think so---I know because I've been Google searching "J.J. Barea Height" for the past 15 minutes.

So I decided to find a photo and settle the issue once and for all.

I then used the basketball as my metric. Wikipedia states that an NBA basketball is 29.5 inches in circumfe…

### The Force is strong with this one...

Last night we were reviewing multiplication tables with Owen. The family fired off doublets of numbers and Owen confidently multiplied away. In the middle of the review Owen stopped and said, "I noticed something. 2 times 2 is 4. If you subtract 1 it's 3. That's equal to taking 2 and adding 1, and then taking 2 and subtracting 1, and multiplying. So 1 times 3 is 2 times 2 minus 1."

I have to admit, that I didn't quite get it at first. I asked him to repeat with another number and he did with six: "6 times 6 is 36. 36 minus 1 is 35. That's the same as 6-1 times 6+1, which is 35."

Ummmmm....wait. Huh? Lemme see...oh. OH! WOW! Owen figured out

x^2 - 1 = (x - 1) (x +1)

So $6 \times 8 = 7 \times 7 - 1 = (7-1) (7+1) = 48$. That's actually pretty handy!

You can see it in the image above. Look at the elements perpendicular to the diagonal. There's 48 bracketing 49, 35 bracketing 36, etc... After a bit more thought we…

### The Long Con

Hiding in Plain Sight

ESPN has a series of sports documentaries called 30 For 30. One of my favorites is called Broke which is about how professional athletes often make tens of millions of dollars in their careers yet retire with nothing. One of the major "leaks" turns out to be con artists, who lure athletes into elaborate real estate schemes or business ventures. This naturally raises the question: In a tightly-knit social structure that is a sports team, how can con artists operate so effectively and extensively? The answer is quite simple: very few people taken in by con artists ever tell anyone what happened. Thus, con artists can operate out in the open with little fear of consequences because they are shielded by the collective silence of their victims.
I can empathize with this. I've lost money in two different con schemes. One was when I was in college, and I received a phone call that I had won an all-expenses-paid trip to the Bahamas. All I needed to do was p…