I’m in the middle of my PhD in materials science and engineering but a lot of what I do is spin physics applied to materials. I’m also working a great industry internship at the moment too.

The talk of going full time has started to come up which is exciting. The full-time equivalent of the job would be continuing build upon the foundation I am currently building in my internship. It would be a cool job too, but I could only see myself doing this for the short term. I’d take this job to force my shitty advisors hand to push myself out and graduate from this degree program.

However, one of my industry contacts and I had a chat about career paths. He mentioned if I wanted to get more into spin physics and quantum computing side of the industry instead of the materials/ tooling side, that he had a contact at MIT that he’d be more than willing to reach out too.

From my understanding, Post Doc experiences are quite short at no more than a year or two (tops 3). After that ends, I’d have to look for a job which is a pain. The industry job I might have an offer for, I couldn’t see myself doing more than 3 years either. However, the location and pay would be killer and it would get my foot in the door somewhere. This would come at the expense that I likely couldn’t advance to what I would want to do industry.

What do I do? If I only had one choice, this would be a little of a no brainer for me, but I’m not sure what would be best in the long term.