Industry experience will often hinder you, because it is a signal (a reliable signal in most situations) that you are not up-to-date with the cutting edge of research; and that your academic skills have atrophied.
Expect to work much harder in the time up to application, and at interview, in get...
So, let's take someone recently entering academia after lots of industrial experience. No PhD, but now supervising PhD students, lecturing, researching. A PhD might be handy for the career, but doing one the usual way isn't an option, for various uninteresting reasons.
I'd expect your institution to be willing to provide some support for getting a PhD from somewhere, since usually places like to brag about the percentage of PhD's on staff
Yes, I don't think I'd hit a brick wall in proposing it, as long as the supervising institution were reputable.
Are you a mathematician? Hope I wasn't far off with my comment about it being particularly hard to return from industry to academia for mathematicians.
Yeah, I am a mathematician. I'm not really sure it's harder to enter math late than anything else, but the stereotype certainly exists, even within math
I knew by the age of 30, 6 years out of academia, that if I ever returned, it wouldn't be to maths. Very few of us are the mathematician we were in our early 20s...
I wonder how much of that is really age, as opposed to absence from the field. Most of the older mathematicians I know are jaw-droppingly smart, in large part because they seem to have seen so much that they know something which is appropriate for everything.
Though I suppose that might mean that being away from math for years is all the more costly
Yeah, there's certainly a double-cost: my skills got rusty very quickly, and I lost track of where the bleeding-edge of research was.
There is a lot to be said for the pattern-recognition and wealth of experience that age brings: I'm (oddly) reassured to learn from you that this applies to maths as it does to other subjects.
and it would have been a few more if, back around 2008-9, I'd switched to crime-science and crime-mapping - something I had a look around in, read lots, went to a conference, and then chose a different path
I'm finding this whole process very nostalgic... I'm posting all the questions I would have asked if this site would have existed when I was doing my PhD
I'm still trying to consider the best way to phrase the "my advisor just quit the university, now what?" question
I was trying to figure out why you were asking questions about how to handle grad school while your profile says you already have a PhD. That makes a lot more sense now.
I was going to post some questions about my wife's experiences in computatoinal chemistry graduate school as well, but I figured that would be too confusing
The Ivory Tower
The Ivory Tower