Industry Job Search Retrospective | Kevin Feng
Earlier this year, I went on the industry job market as a graduating human-computer interaction (HCI) PhD student. There are now quite a few blog posts from AI PhD students about their own industry job hunting experiences, which I highly recommend (examples 1, 2, 3). They’re well-written and great resources, but as someone who didn’t focus on “conventional AI research”1 1. By this, I mean that AI was not my home academic community: my main conferences were not NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, etc. in my PhD, I would’ve appreciated more perspectives from those in a similar boat. This post is for those in AI-adjacent fields, like HCI, going up for industry research positions (research/applied scientists) in tech companies and frontier labs in this AI summer. For context, I did my PhD at the University of Washington, specializing in HCI systems research. I published mainly at HCI conferences (e.g., CHI, CSCW, DIS). I also started attending and presenting at NeurIPS workshops starting 2023, but