Beyond the Lab: my decision to leave academia and thrive in the industry – part 1
The beginning …
On Friday 21st of July 2017, I had the pleasure to receive an email with a letter coming from McGill university stated “I am very pleased to tell you that the Department of Chemistry has recommended that you be accepted in the PhD program starting January 2018” !!! After almost a year applying to various universities across Canada and the UK, I had the pride and joy of being accepted in one the most prestigious universities in Canada ! I was so excited and happy that I started to imagine my plan on how I would achieve my goal of becoming a Professor at the university: which goals should I achieve during my PhD, in which US prestigious university would I go for my postdoc (Harvard, Stanford, else ?). Anyways, a year later, in August 2018, after having asked for a deferral to start my program in September 2018, I took off to Montreal to start that very awesome adventure that just started …
The first couple of months …
In my PhD program, the supervisor had to be chosen once you got accepted. Every PhD candidate had until the end of September (if I recall well) to choose his supervisor. As I was very passionate about quantum mechanics applied to chemistry (the area is known as computational chemistry), I didn’t have much of a choice as there was only one professor in the Chemistry department doing research in that area. Therefore, I met him, I did enjoy our conversation and the subject he talked to me about. That was it, I finally found my PhD supervisor! I was so excited to start my research subject! This project was about making numerical simulations on computers using quantum mechanics-based algorithms to help transform carbon dioxide into hydrocarbons (hydrocarbons are chemicals used in the fossil fuels industries to get petroleum, natural gas, and coal).
The first 4 months were very busy as I had to teach first-year undergrads, as well as taking physics and computer science classes, and working on my research project. At that moment, despite the passion I had for my subject, I didn’t get along with my supervisor. Neither’s fault, sometimes stars don’t align… I decided to chat with other professors from the Chemistry department until I found another one who was very nice, very professional, and had lots of students who were going to Harvard, Yale, and MIT after they pursued their PhD in his lab. I decided to move. Early January 2019 marked a new start for me with this new supervisor!
The new project was drastically different as it was about biophysics. Indeed, I had to study the physical and chemical properties of fluorophores using super-resolved fluorescence microscopy (2014 Chemistry Nobel Prize). There is no need to deep dive into this complex wording, let’s continue our story…
The beginning of the end …
See you in the next article !