You're More Than a Brain: Four Questions About Leaving Academia, Answered
Speakers): Mark Bajus
In this talk, I'll answer the four most common questions that graduate students ask me: Why did I decide to leave academia? Why did I decide to become a technology marketer of all things? How did I broach the topic of leaving academia with my adviser? (Teaser: the title of my talk is something my adviser said to me.) And which transferable skills do I use on a regular basis?
Dr. Mark Bajus's path to technology marketing has been anything but conventional. For example, even though Mark hasn't studied biology since high school, he is currently the Director of Marketing for Clear Labs, a startup that uses next-generation DNA sequencing for food safety and quality assurance. Prior to that, he was the Director of Marketing Communications for the semiconductor company SiTime. (Spoiler alert: Mark's dissertation on twentieth-century Spanish poetry had nothing to do with analog circuit design, phase jitter, or differential output types.) In a previous life, he co-edited Dreams of Waking: An Anthology of Iberian Lyric Poetry, 1400-1700 (U of Chicago P).