When I graduated from college as a fresh-eyed mechanical engineer, I was under the impression that incredible new technologies—from morphing aerial vehicles to self-driving cars—came out of academic labs. So many press releases are of the form: ‘Researchers at XYZ university announce that they have built the first <cool thing>’. I didn’t even consider startups as, in 2010, tech was almost synonymous with software. (Check out the list of YC companies from before 2011 filtered by non-software things - it’s brief.) To some extent I was also avoiding what I didn’t want to do: all the work in ‘industry’ seemed to be approximately ‘make a box to these specifications’. So, wanting to do a bit more than build better boxes, I applied to grad school.

My PhD work focused on building an electromagnetic ‘tractor beam’ that would enable a robot to crawl around the outside of a space station or satellite.1 Cool, right? Academia is absolutely the place to suggest new technologies. In fact, if something is too similar to something that someone else has already done (i.e. insufficiently novel) people will look at it askance. On top of the demands for novelty, many academics feel intense pressure to publish as frequently as they can, especially in top journals. I managed to avoid that particular trap because I quickly realized that I had no desire to stay in academia.