PhD Career Exploration Spotlight: Xian Wang 

Hosted by Amazon – AWS Security

This summer, we will be featuring blog posts written by PhD students who participated in Career Services’ Career Exploration Initiative (CEI), a program that helps doctoral candidates explore their career interests through networking opportunities with advanced degree professionals. Click here to learn more about CEI.

My mentor was Dr. Michael McDougall from the Amazon AWS Security team. During the CEI program, we met once a week, and this steady, regular contact let us dig into topics over time rather than just touching on them briefly. Our conversations covered a lot of ground. We talked about my own research, as well as where it might be applied in industry and how useful it actually is. Drawing on his experience as an industry practitioner, Michael often helped me assess whether my research direction was addressing real industry problems, or whether it was just “academically interesting.” We also discussed how current AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) are affecting industry products and services, and how this shift is changing the way people work in the security field. Through these regular and candid conversations, I—someone who had spent a long time in an academic setting—gradually gained a much better understanding of what the industry is really like. 

This experience gave me access to a lot of “industry insider perspectives” that are hard to come by on campus. Through Michael, I learned how companies are typically organized and what the day-to-day work of a research role looks like, which gave me a clearer sense of how working in industry differs from holding a faculty position in academia. I came to understand the full cycle of a research role—including proposals, deadlines, and performance evaluations—and I also learned about the actual hiring process, the different interview stages, and the qualities that hiring managers care about most. Beyond these practical takeaways, the experience also broadened how I think about business and, more generally, about life and career choices. 

This experience made me realize just how important internships are to myself. An internship can help me understand what the industry actually needs and lets me see whether my research is genuinely useful to it. Most importantly, it can help me figure out something I can’t answer any other way: whether I’m better suited to working in industry, or to staying in academia and continuing my research. That’s a question you can only answer through firsthand experience, and an internship is the best way to get it. I also learned that interviews for industry roles usually involve several rounds and take different forms. To land an internship next year, I’ll need to prepare systematically for technical, coding, and behavioral interviews—these are the areas I plan to focus on in the coming months. In short, CEI turned my vague career ideas into a concrete, actionable plan. 

The most valuable part was the influence Michael had on me. His approach to solving problems, his expertise in software security, and his willingness to introduce me to his colleagues were all a huge help. Even more valuable was how openly he shared his read on industry trends and his experience with hiring—from what recruiters really look for, to common mistakes candidates make, to the differences he’s noticed among different kinds of interviewees. These firsthand insights from inside the industry greatly broadened my sense of the career options outside academia and gave me a much clearer sense of direction for my next steps. 

The CEI program is a good chance to learn from an excellent mentor, expand your network, and get a broader view of the career options beyond academia. The time it asks of you is fairly modest, but the wider perspective and sense of direction it gives you can have a lasting impact. On top of that, the program offers plenty of workshops to help you build practical skills like interviewing, CV writing, and managing your LinkedIn profile, and its events gave us lots of chances to talk with peers from different years and fields. If you’ve ever felt curious or unsure about what paths exist outside academia, I’d encourage you—without hesitation—to give it a try.