PhD vs Industry: My experience switching after 3 years in academia

After three years as a postdoc, I moved to an industrial battery startup. The biggest change was timeline pressure: in academia we optimize for novelty, while in industry we optimize for decisions under uncertainty. I still run DFT and surrogate models, but now success means reducing experimental iteration cycles, not adding one more figure to a paper.

Compensation and work-life balance improved for me, but I miss mentoring students and longer exploratory projects. If you are considering the switch, ask teams how they validate models experimentally and who owns failed predictions. The answer reveals whether data science is strategic or just a service function.