University is an exciting time with many things that demand our attention. Because of this, many students don’t devote any time to their exit plan, but rather focus only on academics and research. This leaves students well-prepared to become academics, but not necessarily prepared to transition to industry. They may have vague aspirations of entering a particular business sector, but few students put effort into learning skills that are directly relevant to where they want to work.
In this article (and at an upcoming workshop at SPIE Photonics West 2025), I’d like to share some personal experiences and advice on how you can “begin with the end in mind,” to copy a phrase from the well-known book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey. If you begin undergrad or grad school with a plan to head to industry, you can tailor your experience to graduate more confident and prepared to hit the ground running out of the lab.
More PhDs than ever are headed directly to industry, true not just for optics but across the academic spectrum. Within optics, about two-thirds of us consider ourselves to be engineers according to the 2023 SPIE salary survey. As a PhD student at the University of Arizona James C. Wyant College of Optical Sciences, I wanted to best prepare myself to be an engineer out in industry, and for technical leadership as well. I used independent study credits to help teach the engineering capstone course at the U of A. Over my five-year PhD, I helped mentor 30 teams of 5-6 undergraduate engineers design projects from requirements to completed hardware. I also treated my last research project in my graduate studies as an engineer would, writing requirements for myself, creating drawings, and writing detailed design documentation on the hardware. Doing so helped me fully articulate what I was trying to accomplish, both for myself and my advisor, and set clear success criteria for myself. These experiences made it easy for me to sell my technical experience beyond just my academic efforts to potential employers, and they helped me land a great job I still enjoy.
This isn’t to say I knew everything I needed to know when I left school to become a professional! One of the things I didn’t appreciate as a student was the value of my time, and subsequently the value of analysis automation and scripting. As a student, your time is very inexpensive, and depending on the budget in your lab, it could be worth it to spend a week thinking over a $1,000 purchase, for example. This is certainly not the case now in industry! A few years after graduating, I realized that more experienced engineers don’t just have more experience, they’ve also learned ways to make decisions more quickly through existing detailed spreadsheets or analysis scripts so that they can adapt to new problems rapidly. I wish I’d taken time as a student to learn how to interface common programming languages with the analysis programs we use as optical engineers, because I had to pick this up quickly as a professional to keep up with my task load. We’re in a brave new world of automation with the onset of all these AI-enabled tools, so now is a great time to start learning how to be more efficient with your time.
In the interactive workshop at Photonics West, we’ll chat through these topics and more (read: tips on networking!) to help you prepare an exit plan out of your studies into industry, whether you’re an undergrad or PhD student. The workshop is offered twice, on 28 and 29 January, to make it available to as many students as possible, and is free to technical attendees. I hope to see you there!
Benjamin Cromey is a principal optical engineer at BAE Systems Inc., where he works on major NASA missions such as the Roman Space Telescope.
