Quote

I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable.

— Benoit Mandelbrot

Sentiment: NEGATIVE

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✓Similar Perspectives

I had been interested in science from when I was very young, but after a disastrous summer lab experience in which every experiment I tried failed, I decided on graduating from college that I was not cut out to be a scientist.

— Martin Chalfie

I just wasn't academic. I wanted to be in the real world.

— John Caudwell

Too many years away from academia renders you pretty incompetent at research and teaching. So I had to go back.

— Raghuram Rajan

I wasn't tempted to go into academia for a second.

— Frances O'Connor

I ended up being a businessman unwittingly. I wanted to be an academic; I wanted to be like Einstein.

— Mo Ibrahim

While I was at community college, I studied industrial design because I thought maybe I'd be an automotive designer - I grew up in Detroit - and I also studied, geology because I was interested in science, a little bit.

— Andrew J. Feustel

Just after graduation in 1966, like many of my contemporaries, I applied for research training at the National Institutes of Health. Perhaps because his wife was a poet, Ira Pastan agreed to take me into his laboratory, despite my lack of scientific credentials.

— Harold E. Varmus

I went to Carnegie Mellon and was an electrical engineer, but electrical engineering wasn't right for me.

— David M. Kelley

✗Opposing Perspectives

By that time I was hooked on a career in academic research instead of one in the pharmaceutical industry that I had originally considered in deciding to get a PhD.

— Paul Berg

After my health suffered due to the stress of running my second company, I had to switch careers. But I still didn't want to go back to the corporate world. So I became an academic.

— Vivek Wadhwa