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Is industry right for you?

Before you plan anything, find out whether you would actually like the work. Here is how to test it cheaply, while you are still in the program.

5 min read · By Marc Sleiman

Many students do not really know what kind of work suits them until they are exposed to it. The path you start on is often not the one you end on. Interests change, the market changes, and a summer in a company or a conversation with the right person can change your mind. That is why preparing for both paths is never wasted: whichever way you go, you are better prepared for it. Yet most students default to “I will go on the academic market” because that is the path their department knows how to support. Academia is a real option, and so is industry, but each one is its own game with its own rules. You cannot make a good choice between two games when you have only ever played one of them.

This page is not about convincing you to leave academia. It is about collecting enough real information, early enough, that whichever way you go, you chose it.

What actually changes when you move to industry

The day-to-day differences are more practical than philosophical. You will work with people who are not economists and do not care about your identification strategy unless it changes the answer. You will present to audiences who want a recommendation, not a literature review. You will usually have a manager, structured hours and recurring meetings. In many teams, code is shared and reviewed: a colleague reads and checks your code before it is used in a product or a report. That can take some adjustment if you have only written code for your own research, whether in Stata, R or Python.

The rewards are practical too. Your work gets used, often within weeks rather than years, and you see your recommendations put into practice and their impact on the business quickly. Pay is typically higher than an assistant professor’s salary, and in many firms the path to more responsibility is faster and more visible than tenure. In return, industry expects you to perform: you deliver on the organization’s priorities, on its timeline, and you are evaluated on results.

Academia offers a different kind of life, with real advantages of its own. You have intellectual autonomy to choose the questions you work on. You have much more control over your schedule. Your days are full of intellectual stimulation, from colleagues, seminars and students. Breaks between terms give you long stretches of time away from teaching, and tenure brings a level of job security that few industry roles can match. Neither path is better in general. They are different ways of living, and the right one depends on what you value most.

Three myths, and what is actually true

“Industry is all deadlines and pressure”

Sometimes. Economic consulting tied to litigation runs on court deadlines and can be intense. Some teams in large tech firms, on the other hand, move slowly and have fewer hard deadlines than a job-market season. The pace depends on the sector and the team far more than on the word “industry.”

“Industry is all teamwork; academia lets you work alone”

Not quite. Academic research can be highly collaborative, and your first industry role may involve a lot of quiet individual analysis. What changes is not how much you collaborate but who you collaborate with: product managers, engineers, lawyers, finance teams and executives instead of co-authors.

“In industry you never choose your own work”

At first, mostly true. Your early projects are assigned. But as you build a track record of delivering, you earn the right to propose projects and to say no to some. The freedom is earned through reputation inside the firm, which is not so different from how it works in a department.

Experience also widens your options. Industry is very diverse, and each role you hold opens new ones: new teams, new sectors, new kinds of problems and new career moves that were not available to you as a new graduate.

Still, be honest with yourself about one thing. However much freedom you earn in industry, it rarely reaches the intellectual autonomy of academia, where you decide for yourself what meaningful work is and spend your time on it. If that autonomy matters most to you, academia is the career that maximizes it.

How to test it while you are still in the program

You do not need to guess. There are two cheap, reliable ways to find out whether you would like industry work, and you can start both this semester.

1. Talk to people who do the job

Find five to ten people with economics PhDs who work outside academia, and ask each one for fifteen minutes to hear about their work. Ask what a normal week looks like, what surprised them, what they miss about academia and what they do not miss at all. These conversations double as networking, and they cost you nothing but a few polite messages. The LinkedIn page shows exactly how to find these people and what to write.

2. Spend a summer doing it

An internship is the best test there is. A summer is a real investment, but it gives you three things at once: honest data on whether you enjoy the work, applied experience to put on your resume, and people inside a company who have seen you deliver. If you have at least one full summer before your market year, use it. The timeline shows which summer is the best window.

When you are in an internship or in those conversations, pay attention to specific things rather than a general feeling. Do you like explaining your work to people outside your field? Do you get energy or frustration from having your code reviewed? Do structured hours feel like a relief or a cage? Do you care more about a result being elegant or about it being used? Your answers to those questions matter more than any article about “industry culture.”

A note on keeping both doors open

You do not have to decide in Year 2. Many of the things that make you a strong industry candidate, like clear communication, applied experience and a polished job-market paper, also help you on the academic market. The goal is to arrive at Year 5 with a real choice, not to arrive with one option because you never built the other.