I think I’ve figured out why I never get just one contact from a recruiter in a given day anymore. There must be a schedule that recruiting firms and/or HR departments operate under.

I received two today: one was from Bloomberg, the other from a company that appears to do VPN and network cryptography.

It would be so easy to just leave academia! Industry has received me so warmly (some of the recent offers have six figure starting salaries), while all academia has done is make demands of me… demands for ever greater effort with ever diminishing rewards. I can’t even pursue my academic interests within my field, much less the wide spectrum of interests I have overall. Ironically, several companies have promised me precisely the sort of training I can’t attain in an academic institution. If I want to truly do research, though, I need to see this through to the end. Once I graduate, I’ll be free!

I think it’s time to get back to seriously working on my dissertation. So long as I worked on it alone without someone else’s inefficiencies constraining me, I made very good progress… but waiting for a review of the first draft shattered my momentum.