My experience of 6 years in academia is that I thought the politics there was far worse than anything I've found in the years since then. As Wallace Stanley Sayre famously said: "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low".

That is just a beauty of a quote and exactly how I feel.

> As I've gotten further into the degree, I've realized that academic research is as plagued by corporate-style politics as any other venture. The fun started to die.

I've actually gone through precisely the same realization, but it hasn't ruined the fun for me. Namely, I seem to be an observer while the messy politics are played by the faculty members.

I entered graduate school with the intention to become a professor, but am now leaning more toward taking my chances in industry. But I'm happy with my destination being unknown for the moment. :-)

I decided not to continue with academia after my PhD not because of the internal politics[1], but the external. I failed completely to find external funding, and with NSF only funding 11% of applications, that's typical. And when you going for external funding, you're having to do what they want you to do, not the blue sky research I naively thought I'd get to do when I started my PhD.

If I'm going to have to justify what I'm doing all the time, I'd rather do that in industry, where people have deeper pockets and you're closer to the source of the money.

[1] The internal politics is actually easy to understand. It moves very slowly, and it's based entirely on getting a critical mass of influential people in the department to be on your side. It requires a lot of closed door chats to get things done. But no-one is ever actively looking to bury you as I have heard can happen in law/accounting.

> The internal politics is actually easy to understand. It moves very slowly, and it's based entirely on getting a critical mass of influential people in the department to be on your side. It requires a lot of closed door chats to get things done.

Definitely. I'm entering my fourth year now, and in retrospect, it's completely unsurprising. But when I entered graduate school, I almost immediately realized that I had idealized the notion of academia. Probably because I was a newborn pup as far as academia was concerned and really wanted to believe bullshit didn't get in the way of quality publications. (And I don't even have any sour anonymous review experiences myself.)

But academia is just like everything else: most people seem motivated to publish to advance their career. Only a few good ones are out to publish something to help others. I really thought it'd be the other way around when I entered. Naive, I know.