Industry or Academia?

Recent Math PhD Zhan Jiang (UM PhD 2021) wrote to share his personal experience with “the Job Market” as well as some practical advice and resources that eventually landed him a job at Google. Like pretty much every technical employee at Google, his title will begin as “Software Engineer,” but you should contact him, as well as any number of our alumni at Google, to see what he actually winds up doing. Zhan worked with Mel Hochster: here’s Zhan’s UM webpage and his LinkedIn page.

While many of the things Zhan tried in his job search were frustrating, eventually he discovered that there is a huge network of Math PhDs, including many alumni from our own department, who are eager to hire Math PhDs, especially those from Michigan (Go Blue!). He’s listed below the resources that really helped, including Erdos Institute, which will offer you professional support through the process at no cost to you, as long as you are a Michigan PhD or MLB student or alum (as long as UM Math remains a member) and LinkedIn (please connect with me as soon as you join and also join our Michigan Math PhD group). —Karen

Industry or Academia?

by Zhan Jiang (UM Math PhD 2021)

Industry or academia? Most of us probably have thought about this question sometime during the whole Ph.D. journey. I initially thought I would stay in academia and continue to study math for the rest of my life. However, my thoughts started to change after attending several talks in the “Invitation to Industry” series. I saw a different possibility and would like to at least give it a try.

My Story

My first experience with industry started with the process of searching for an internship in fall 2019. I learned that the internship experience is beneficial when searching for a full-time job (e.g., Mark’s experience). It also gives you a chance to see how life looks like in the industry. Therefore, I actively applied for internships: I went to the Career Center and asked for help with revising my resume. I went to the Career Fair and introduced myself to every company. I emailed some friends and asked for referrals. After doing this for almost a semester, I received a few interviews. However, I had no luck in getting an internship. At that moment, I was really discouraged and thought that I was probably not a good fit for any industry position and that I should just focus on academia.

With the mindset that I should focus on academia, I spent most of the fall 2020 semester applying for postdocs and advancing my research. Meanwhile, I still tried to gain more industry experience by attending the Data Science Bootcamp held by the Erdös Institute, by participating in Macaulay2 workshops, and by taking Machine Learning courses from the EECS department.

I still remember that it was Feb 2021 when I started to feel stressed. That was when I learned that most of my friends had a postdoc offer while I had none. I realized that I had to do something if I did not want to end up unemployed. The situation was even more difficult for an international student like me – we can only stay unemployed for at most three months after the start of the OPT. Still, I was terrified of searching for industry jobs given the unsuccessful experience with internships. I thought I did everything I could, and I prepared pretty well for internship searching, but I still failed, and I had no idea why. Job hunting is not like taking an exam where you know exactly what you did wrong and why you didn’t get an A, as there was no feedback but only rejections.

I actually felt very depressed during that period. I thought I must have done something wrong, but I didn’t know what it was and how I could improve it. I realized that I should reach out to people and ask for advice. I am an introvert, so this was really hard for me. However, I would rather force myself to talk to others than being trapped inside that despairing circumstance. Therefore, I started to message and email people, including but not limited to, my friends, my past classmates, people I used to talk with, and people I might know but never had a conversation with. I forced myself to speak with at least one person every day. It turned out that everyone I reached out to was really nice. They gave advice on my resume, shared their experience with me, encouraged me, and even introduced their friend who they thought could help me. I talked with more people during that two months than I ever spoke with in the past year.

As a result of all those conservations, I had about seven different versions of my resume. I got referrals to more than twenty companies and interviews from more than ten of them. Most of the people I talked with were also willing to help me do mock interviews. I practiced with about seven mock interviews before any actual interview. After two months’ work, I got offers from five companies.

Even with all the encouragements from my girlfriend and the people I talked with, the actual process was still painful. Looking back, I have no idea how I survived those past two months. Waking up every day, I felt that I wouldn’t get any offer. Every week receiving no new interviews, I felt that I didn’t do well somewhere. Before each interview, I was so nervous that my brain could not function at all. I want to tell everyone searching for jobs, “the process is always stressful, but don’t get defeated. Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.[1]”

Useful Tips

Looking back, I learned a lot from both my failures and successes. Here are some tips that I’d like to share with you:

  • Never discourage yourself. You will get rejections from most of the companies you apply to. This is common, and it does not mean that you are not good enough. There are reasons that are out of your control. For example, the pandemic hit the market, and companies are not hiring as many people as they used to. Also, if you are looking for an internship, keep in mind that there are fewer internship positions than full-time jobs, so it might get easier when you search for a full-time position.
  • Never give up. Even when I was actively applying for postdocs, I still participated in those boot camps and workshops. It turns out that these experiences opened a lot of possibilities for me. Some interviewers even told me explicitly that they liked my project on Macaulay2 during the workshop.
  • Don’t be shy! Talk with others. People are always willing to share his/her experience with you. Sometimes, starting a conversation is not as hard as you might expect. Simply ask them for general advice on job hunting. You will have more questions to ask as the conversation goes on.
  • Spend more time on your resume. First of all, please be aware of the differences between a CV and a resume. A CV is intended to be a record of your experience and usually consists of several pages. A resume, on the other hand, is a highlight of only those experiences related to the job you are applying for and is usually only one page in length. Make sure that your resume is not a CV. Be open to suggestions to your resume, but also keep in mind that you do not need to take every suggestion. I literally received two contradictory pieces of advice from different people, and my final resume is different from both.
  • Do mock interviews. Get as much practice as possible. You never know which mock interview will save you during an actual interview. I had the experience that the solutions to some of the mock interview questions become part of my answer to real interview problems.

Resources

Some general resources that might be helpful for job hunting

For people who are searching for software engineering jobs, the resources below are beneficial:

  • LeetCode
  • Cracking the Coding Interview: 189 Programming Questions and Solutions by Gayle Laakmann McDowell
  • Grokking the System Design Interview by Design Gurus
  • Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann (also known as DDIA)

For people who are searching for quantitative researcher jobs, the following two books could be helpful:

  • A Practical Guide To Quantitative Finance Interviews by Xinfeng Zhou
  • Quant Job Interview: Questions and Answers by Andrew Downes, Mark S. Joshi, and Nick Denson

References:

[1]. “Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.” is a quote from John Lennon.

By Karen E Smith

Professor of Mathematics Associate Chair for Gradate Studies