By: Sujata Banerjee, VMware

 

“Expect the unexpected and learn to love it – it all works out in the end” is the best advice I would give to my younger self. I have been lucky to have a career focused on computing and networking research. While I started my career in academia and achieved tenure and promotion to the associate professor position, I soon moved to industrial research labs where I have spent the bulk of my career. This career move was not planned from the start – and neither was the move across the country with a 7-week-old newborn! 

Any career transition, including the one I made from academia to industry, is not without its challenges. Although I was still focused on research when I joined industry, it was not obvious to me immediately how I would excel and add value. As a faculty member, I had the academic freedom to build my own research agenda and work on any challenging research problem that I was interested in and able to attract funding for. I had loved teaching and, for a while after my move, I continually thought about returning to academia.   

I had to address the new challenge of working within a business environment, which is much different than the academic setting I was in before. As researchers, we strive to do the most cutting-edge relevant work on important problems, and we know how to work on the technical risks. However, translating the benefits of the research results into tangible products and services requires other skills, like strategic thinking from a customer standpoint, understanding the technology landscape and the evolving market, and developing effective partnerships with business units. Plus, with any futuristic transformative work that takes years, a good bit of luck is needed to get the timing right. Several of these factors are not in our control, including business and industry shifts that are not always easy to predict. In addition, research projects often have to make assumptions about the future environment that may or may not pan out.  For instance,  clean slate solutions developed for greenfield datacenter networks proved to be much harder than expected to apply to hybrid enterprise network environments with legacy equipment and required us to invent novel incremental deployment strategies. 

While in the midst of this unpredictability, I had to keep moving forward, learn to manage risk, and continually adapt to change. Through this process, I learned to love the – sometimes unexpected – journey and appreciate the lessons from it even if the original planned outcomes were not what I started with. 

There is immense learning and growth from experiencing failure, and if you are playing the long game, as we do in research, these experiences can ultimately lead up to bigger successes that we had not envisioned. Plus, it’s important to always remember – things do work out in the end.