Aerospace has always been something that’s interested me, and I had a passion for it at one point, but after taking some really cool classes in security and software engineering I decided on a different path. I chose to do this specific research experience and it was good reconnecting with a past passion.

Nothing I write here is likely going to be more informational than the actual presentation slide deck my research partner and I put together so I’m going to outline some of my thoughts on research vs industry instead.

The slide deck and link to the paper I will provide below:

Paper: <https://www.mdpi.com/2504-446X/8/2/57>

Presentation: <https://davidhuangresumebucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/Low_Cost_ML_for_Drone_Swarm-1.pdf>

My Thoughts

• Research unlike industry seems much more hands off. You kind of get assigned a task from a higher up (professor or graduate student) and you just need to get the task done. It’s kind of nice that it cuts down a little bit meeting overhead.

• There’s much more independent decision making and tasking flexibility. In industry, you kind of are constrained to a specific framework and language. In my role as a solutions architect and also at Lockheed and the University of Florida, there was already a large codebase written in a language I needed to learn and build off of. Although this is still true to an extent in academia, research feels almost more like you’re programming side projects to explore ideas. Both can be kind of fun.

• The community in research feels a little bit more closeknit. I think this is both a pro and con, but doing research is kind of an “always more work to do” field. This means you naturally have some more closer relationships with colleagues.