Research and Enterprise
co-written with Vesna Cuplov
What is Research?
Public laboratory / private laboratory / R&D center / Innovation center
I spent 3 years in a laboratory doing my PhD, creating Venus atmospheric composition models, considering other planet chemistry and hoping that it would lead to extraterrestrial life. Through my internships and my PhD I nearly spent 4 years in academic research.
Once I had my PhD in my pocket I started looking for a job in a company, which sector and size did not matter … yet. I wanted to discover this world of “R&D” which I thought would be similar to working in a laboratory with numerous projects and deadlines.
“ Total disillusion.
I spent countless hours in interviews where I was told the same things “a PhD? It’s like an internship, right ?“ ; “we can hire you as a master student without experience” ; “we don’t know how to validate your PhD” ; “You haven’t understood the profile, we don’t want a PhD” ; “we prefer to tell the clients that you are an engineer because they do not know what a PhD is” ; “you are a doctor why did you leave medicine practice?” It was hard to believe that some recruiters who did not know the academic degrees would judge your competencies and abilities for their R&D job.
First job found after lowering all the goals and downgraded my pride. “R&D engineer in scientific computing” hard to believe that making web HMIs was scientific computing … sigh
Second job, Data Scientist, integration of an R&D center, I was hopefully reaching the world of research that I enjoyed so much. What is a Data Scientist for you? I was performing statistical studies, applying machine learning techniques, and my boss would claim his understanding of the job as “you do AI because you give rules to the machine and It does the job” or “if I give you an excel file, you simply upload it in your computer and It gives me the result right now ?” I became a magician but research was a dream diluted in disillusions.
“We do not know how to motivate you” (Like here) this sentence is very interesting because by itself it demonstrates the dichotomy between research in business and academic research.. As an administrative and financial director had pointed me out “the problem with you, doctors is that you do not have the right image of the research, research is to deliver a result” rather funny in fact, while in academic research even a no result is a result.
I regularly discuss with a friend Data Scientist who works with me — PhD in particle physics and many years of academic research — when she sees me in trouble with our data fields contents character normalization (sigh) she tells me “and meanwhile, at CERN, they happily discover a new particle!”. We laugh, but we must admit that we are far from what we were doing years back.
Real Data Scientists, those who like to explore the scientific literature, the latest technological advances, new models and new methods are affiliated with research organizations or private laboratories in which research is well and truly present.
In R&D centers it’s like reinforcement learning, you learn to acquire the appropriate level to perform well then you lose intelligence, you apply the same methods to customer requests without being able to have a very long-term vision.
Where did we get lost? To have such a dichotomy on the definition not of a word but of the concept. Research should be about connecting passionate people who can collaborate together, invent, develop solutions to the cutting edge of contemporary science. It should not only focus on deliverables and profits. Then you can call your group R&D!
My PhD supervisor told me several times “we do research not for money” I didn’t understand at that time, because I answered “after so many year of hard studies you have to be paid”. What I did not understand is this simple fact : We do research for fun, for pleasure, it’s not a job, it’s a passion, passion does not need money, passion is a dream that we share. The money is the intellectual reward we get when solving something new.
