Something Meaningful

Re:Something Meaningful by asr2bd on Monday May 06, 2013 @12:44PM (#5663265)

Is there any significant trend of people leaving academia for the tech world? I spent 4 years grinding away on cancer drug development. Between the billions of dollars it takes to commercialize such drugs and the single digit percentage that actually advance from human trials to clinical use, I wondered if the work I was doing was not going to be put to good use.

More importantly, I didn't feel like I was learning every day. Much of the work is absurdly repetitive.

I started learning how to build web applications and found it more mentally rewarding... but what are the ramifications of that for research? It's incredibly important but not seen as very exciting these days.

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Re:Something Meaningful by alemhnan on Monday May 06, 2013 @01:25PM (#5663514)

Hey asr2bd, Alessandro here from CoffeeStrap. I think that research in the field of web application & Co could, and should, be done way more than today. The whole architecture of the web is incredibly complex and we are using tools that could be improved a ton. Now I am rushing to catch a flight, if you want to share some thoughts on that give me a shot: alessandro at coffeestrap dot com

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Re:Something Meaningful by mahesh_rm on Monday May 06, 2013 @01:14PM (#5663438)

These are our same questions. We don't have an unitary answer to this. I personally think things will drastically change in academia within 10 to 20 years from now. Probably for the better, but we can't know yet. Let's be optimistic, as always! :-)

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