Research vs Industry Resume? Differences in Application?
So I've spent the last three years building myself up to have a fantastic resume for coding in industry. You know, side projects, internships as a software engineer, with a wide breadth of experience in many languages, but still depth in Android/Mobile development. I know how to play the industry game.
However, I've been interning for two years now with lots of side projects and industry has gotten boring. It might just be a phase or my position but I wanted to entertain the thought of pursuing my PhD and/or go for a research position in the next 5 years. If it matters, I think I would want to work on Managed Runtime Environment. I've been reading some papers on the topic and the whole field interests me.
My question is, how is the research and/or academia process different? From resume, to statement of purpose (which I see as a cover letter but much more serious), and including the interviews and the whole process! How do I get into it? Do I just apply for positions in research labs? Do I pursue a masters to connect with researching professors? How do I apply to national labs? What makes me look good for those positions? Specifically, what looks good to a PhD program, a research lab, etc?
What do you guys think?
Posted Feb 24, 2015, 7:33 AM UTC
Having done some research work before: a lot of people apply for PhD programs thinking they'll get more of the well-contained, well-defined tasks they got all through school or at least some reasonably well-planned requirements for an end product and then cannot get things done in the less regimented research workflow. Applicants who have already seen and participated in the research process are much less risky to bring in.
Showing you can stick with a project for a long time: someone who flits around doing lots of different things will not finish. A dissertation might be built out of several separate papers, but even then, they're expected to follow some unifying theme (like all working to address the same fundamental problem).
Having a strong background in your chosen field: everyone needs to be brought up to speed to some degree, but if you're playing catch-up on CS fundamentals, you're in for a rough time. You should also have some background related to your specialization (e.g., you probably aren't prepared for a PhD in compiler optimization without having worked on some compiler internals before).
Having a good idea of what you want to work on: while it's rare for incoming students to choose appropriately-sized open problems completely on their own, if you've spent years of your career being frustrated that there's no good way to do X, you're probably coming in with a better understanding of the state of the art than most students have, not to mention a strong motivation to keep looking for solutions to that problem.
Having research interests that match some of their faculty: professors aren't going to want to spend years advising someone on a project they're not interested in. If you're sending a PhD application, you should be able to say who you want to work with there and why. If this doesn't appear in your application, you just look like another flake who hasn't done his homework.
Thank you for such a thorough response. I've read through it a couple of times and I really appreciate the time you've taken to provide this information.