Some ideas are worth spreading. With that thought in mind, in 1984, Marry Marks and Richard Saul Wurman found TED Conferences LLC. Now, in 2020, TED is going through a little revolution. Can we give TEDx talks in virtual reality? It turns out that yes – we can!
The space of online resources for PhDs thinking of transitioning to industry is massive! This blog post lists courses, blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels, content platforms, and online communities dedicated to helping PhDs in the job market.
In the darkest times during graduate school, when I was completely out of energy and I saw no light in the tunnel, I used to think to myself, “Hey, don’t worry. It’s not that bad of a job. It could have been much worse — you could have been a YouTuber.” But, the irony will prevail.
Have you ever wondered why whenever two of your friends argue, you immediately get that itchy feeling that this will end up badly for you in one way or another? Or why, once you have just one conflict in a group of people, it starts propagating across the group like a virus? There is a forgotten theory in psychology that explains all this.
Interviewing people with interesting (and difficult!) career paths and rare professions, yields interesting conclusions. Namely, these people they tend to share one interesting characteristic: from a very early age, they know what role towards other people they would prefer to play.
I was always wondering why some people are so lucky in life – they are neither geniuses nor work that hard, yet always find themselves in the right place at the right moment, gather the right people around them, embark on the best projects or get the best jobs. Now I think I know.
It’s been a long road up to this point, since I left my parents’ place at the age of 18. But, when I look back at the past 15 years, I some some patterns clearly, coming over over again. First of all, I see that there is only one asset which has been systematically accumulating over these 15 years. It was not money, which you can easily lose in the nearest bubble. It was not knowledge, which can become useless once you change the discipline or profession. It was actually people.
…about entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs. In this time I was attending quite a few conferences in industry, I was informally involved in some projects, and I made many entrepreneurial friends. And, I was observing. As for a researcher who spent her whole youth solving integral equations, this is quite a new and exotic experience. I am on the learning curve now, in this fascinating new world. Hereby, I would like to list a few stereotypes I had about entrepreneurs, and how I feel about these stereotypes right now.
At some point I realised that the decision on whether or not to stay in academia – or in other words, whether to do research or focus on commercial projects instead – is not the real choice I need to make right now. In fact, the real choice is: how much am I willing to risk? Let me explain.
The year of 2009 was groundbreaking, for at least two separate reasons. Firstly, on January 3rd of 2009, the genesis block of bitcoin was mined. Secondly, on October 12th of 2009, Elinor Claire “Lin” Ostrom has became the first woman awarded with a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons”. The clue of this work is a phenomenon known in economy as the tragedy of commons. This phenomenon occurs when a group shares a resource, but at the same time, every individual acts on their own behalf, which is often against the common interest of the community. Can we spot the tragedy of commons in academia?
