Pros & Cons of an Industrial Ph.D. Program

From 2013 till 2016 I’ve done an industrial Ph.D. at Unister GmbH in Leipzig in cooperation with Chemnitz University of Technology. This means that I worked in Unister’s R&D department, which at that time developed a novel semantic search engine, and wrote my thesis about the part I contributed to the project. A few days ago—in an old notebook—I found a list of blog posts I wanted to write with the entry “Pros & Cons of an Industrial Ph.D. Program” not yet crossed out. I remember that I added this idea to the list after talking to Jürgen Cito, a Ph.D. student at the University of Zurich, at the 2014 International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE). After chatting about the topic for a bit, Jürgen said something like “The pros and cons of an industrial Ph.D. program would really make a good blog post”. So here it is, in terms of an infographic made with Adioma, which I wanted to play around with for a pretty long time now.

I have to note that the con “less contact to your professor” wasn’t too bad for me because my second advisor Dr. Andreas Both, who was the Head of R&D at Unister, attached great importance to good and quality scientific work and publishing scientific results. This, however, isn’t something you can expect at any company. Overall, I list one more pro than cons because I had a really good experience with my industrial Ph.D. program and would definitely do it again!