FAANG PhD with top-conference papers asks how to return to academia
malakulmout347 · reddit · 2026-11-05
A FAANG engineer with a PhD from a mid-tier school asks for advice on returning to academia. Their research focused on LLM efficiency and RL (meta-learning, bandits), self-directed beyond their advisor's scope, so they lack grant-writing experience and a focused research agenda—key for tenure-track roles. They published at the top-3 ML venues (ICML/ICLR/NeurIPS) and top-3 NLP venues (ACL/EMNLP/NAACL), but the work was scattered, leading them to industry first. They want to know how to build a profile and whether a top-150 US tenure-track position is realistic.
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