I Quit My Job to Focus on My Studies
Last week was my last day at work. By “work,” I mean my job as a software engineer at the data-security startup where I’ve been working for the last two and a half years.
As you can probably guess from the title, I quit my job to focus on my studies. I started a master’s degree in computational linguistics this year, and I've been juggling both work and university.
Working and studying simultaneously has its advantages—the first one is obvious: money. While academic life has its perks, financial gain isn’t usually one of them. Working while studying allowed me to make a living, plain and simple.
But there are other benefits, too—like advancing my career as a software engineer, working on interesting problems, interacting with customers, and having the routine of going to the office and spending time with colleagues who are also my friends.
I really enjoyed my time at work. I learned a lot, met many new people, and made some great friends. The people there are amazing, the challenges are super-interesting, and I genuinely liked what I was doing.
So, why did I leave?
There are two reasons, both tied to the same goal: a career in research.
The first reason is positive—my excitement for research has grown during my bachelor’s degree and throughout the first year of my master’s. The projects I've worked on at the university aren’t the typical ones I did at work—they're different kinds of challenges.
Instead of solving a problem to provide value to a customer, I’m trying to solve a problem to uncover something about the human mind, which might not even have a solution. These are open questions for a reason—some people spend decades on the same problem without finding an answer. It’s a more frustrating type of problem, but it excites me. So naturally, I want to explore this career path, whether that means becoming a professor in academia or a researcher in the industry.
The second reason is negative - with all this excitement, I still don’t know if research is the right path for me. So, if I’m unsure, why quit everything to pursue it?
Well, there’s enough evidence that I like it (see the first reason), and I want to use the remaining year of my master’s to see if it’s what I really want to do. By the end of my master’s, I hope to know more about research and whether it’s the career I want to pursue. What I didn’t want was to be unsure because I hadn’t invested enough time in it, since I was also working in parallel.
So, I quit my job, and now I’m diving headfirst into the rabbit hole of academic research. Whatever it brings, I’m ready.