Yicong Huang: From 100 Applications to 9 Offers: Lessons from the Academic and Industry Job Market

Abstract:
In this talk, I’ll share my personal journey navigating the academic and industry job markets during the 2024–2025 academic year. I’ll reflect on key decisions, behind-the-scenes experiences, and the lessons I learned through 100+ applications, 20+ interviews, and 9 offers across both domains. Along the way, I’ll highlight the differences in timelines, expectations, and evaluation criteria between academia and industry. This session is intended to be informal, candid, and interactive—an honest look at what the job market feels like from the inside. Whether you’re an early-stage Ph.D. student beginning to explore career options, a researcher actively preparing for the job market, or someone still deciding between academia and industry, I hope this talk offers useful insights and encouragement. There’s no single “right” path, and I’ll share both successes and challenges to help demystify the process for anyone thinking about their next chapter.

Bio:
Yicong Huang is a final-year Ph.D. candidate in the Information Systems Group (ISG), Computer Science Department, University of California, Irvine. Under the guidance of Dr. Chen Li, his research focuses on big data management, data-processing systems, and machine learning systems. Yicong has made significant contributions to the Texera project. He has published in top-tier database venues such as VLDB, SIGMOD, and ICDE. His interdisciplinary reach spans venues like TOCHI, PNAS Nexus, JAMIA, AMIA, and PLOS ONE. Yicong completed research internships at ByteDance, VISA, and Observe, and contributed to patents and papers. His research earned a Best Demo Runner-Up Award at SIGMOD 2024. He received honors such as the 2025 Joseph & Dorothy Fischer Memorial Endowed Fellowship, the 2025 Beall Family Foundation Graduate Student Entrepreneur Award in Computer Science, the 2024 Graduate Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship, and the 2023 Public Impact Fellowship from UCI. In 2025, Yicong will join Databricks, where he will work in the Apache Spark Runtime team. In Fall 2027, he will begin a faculty appointment as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) at UMass Amherst. For more information, please visit yicong-huang.github.io.