It has been many years since I’ve written a post in this blog. You could say I experienced some setbacks in my PhD career that I didn’t feel proud of and lost the desire to write and post about it. Now that I have graduated, have more time on my hands, and have the freedom and responsibility to mold the career ahead of me, I feel that it might be valuable to make updates to my personal website.
This blog serves to journal my experiences which might hopefully be of benefit to the reader and allow them to better get to know me, but it is at the very least something for me to look back on. I suppose I could write updates on social media, but I don’t exactly like the idea of spamming posts onto other people’s feeds which they are not genuinely interested in or writing out of an urgency to get views and engagement.
About 7 years ago, which was around the time I had recently graduated from UCLA and was looking for employment, I wrote a blog post about my experiences at the LA Tech Fair. Now, I am on a similar boat - I’ve recently graduated again with a PhD and am looking for employment, to build a career / business. Quite like my experience after I finished my bachelors, finding a job has been very difficult, much to my disappointment after being told by many people that I ought to have a lot of opportunity for me given that I’ve completed a PhD. It could very well just be the nature of the job search and that a science degree is not all that relevant to the job market unless you are choosing to pursue a career in research - and for PhD graduates, a career closely related to your thesis topic. It could also be an unfavorable job market, as evidenced by the recent mass layoffs in the tech sector.
Rather than continuing straight down a research and academic career, I wanted to broaden my horizon, consider working in industry, and explore an area I had been curious about called entrepreneurship. Quite frankly, I wanted a break for my mind from thinking about ultraintense laser physics research all the time, and from writing manuscripts and the tedious editing and publishing process. This brings us to the topic of this blog post, which is about my experiences at several memorable conferences / events related to my career development.
SPIE Photonics West and AR | VR | MR Conference 2023
In February of 2023, during the final semester of my PhD tenure, I decided to attend Photonics West as suggested by an Amplitude Laser employee who had met with me virtually to help me with my dissertation. It was a real eye opening experience. For one, I was able to meet in person some of the people behind companies like Edmund Optics, Hamamatsu, and Andor Technologies and can associate these companies with more than just their websites and sales and customer support interactions. I was able to learn about unfamiliar companies and how they have applied optics to various purposes like constructing railroads and military weapons calibration. It was also interesting to hear the stories about certain companies, like how Point Grey, the original manufacturer of the Blackfly and Chameleon cameras used in my research, was bought by Teledyne FLIR, and some of the original members of Point Grey had spun off a new company called Lucid Vision, which now has GenICam cameras offered on Edmund Optics alongside FLIR, Basler, Allied Vision, and others. The funnest part of the conference was attending the AR/VR/MR expo that ran alongside the Photonics West conference, where I got to demo various XR headsets and a fascinating neural-sensing controller made by Wearable Devices Ltd.
Traveling to this conference was also an opportunity to explore San Francisco. During my last day there, I rented an electric bike and rode from the city center over the Golden Gate bridge to Sausalito, and from there took a ferry back to the city. It was a marvelous experience. Even though the city is experiencing decay and homelessness that I saw for myself on top of its reputation, San Francisco is still a beautiful place. I reflected on how there exists this place in the world that carries this culture of tech entrepreneurship that defines the city’s identity, the same way Las Vegas is by its casinos or New York by Wall Street. Except unlike gambling or stock investing, I find tech entrepreneurship to be the most admirable of the three industries.
This conference would also be, for the first time, one that I would attend for myself and not because I was obligated to as part of my research responsibilities. The caveat would be that I would pay for the travel and lodging myself, instead of having the University reimburse these costs, which would have required justification specifically for how it benefits the University. As a result of being free of these burdens, I was able to thoroughly enjoy my time at this conference.
DC Startup Week 2023
During the Summer of 2023, I attended the DC Startup Week, which was my first direct exposure to the startup community. I attended as a job seeker looking for an opportunity to use my experience, particularly from my PhD, in a technical field in the ballpark of engineering, optics, electronics, or robotics with an interest in a product development role. The majority of the attendees I met during this event tended to be software developers. There was also a trend in these startups having goals related to social service such as helping underserved communities gain access to tech or using tech - namely social media products - to create communities or serve people in some way. The most “technical” of the startups I encountered, in my opinion, would be the one about new and more efficient methods of lithium extraction, presented by a Chemical Engineering PhD student from the University of Maryland.
One of the more interesting programs I learned about were the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) programs where the US government will provide funding to businesses that can develop solutions to problems posed by various government institutions. This provides an avenue for small businesses to work on new useful ideas that would not otherwise be profitable without such support. To me, this sounded like academic research, except the research and development is conducted in a small business context rather than a university. Perhaps my PhD background can be applicable to entrepreneurship after all. However, looking at some of the SBIR postings - for example, the US Army is looking for MEDEVAC solutions by drone - these are not easy problems nor are they directly connected to my background.
Perhaps my best networking experience I have had to date was at DC Startup Week.