I have always had the desire to move to academia but I am not exactly sure how the process or profile building for academia works in general. Yeah, surely, I can ask AI and get answers but I don’t have much confidence in that . I did my PhD from a mid-tier school. My research focus was mostly on LLM model efficiency and some RL work (meta learning and bandit ) . The research direction I went with was totally out of my professor’s scope . As a result, I don’t have grant writing or funding related experience or don’t have those innovative idea of how do you create a research program or more specifically a niche sort of a program which I feel is required for Tenure track positions. During my PhD , I was able to hit top 3 ML( ICML,ICLR,Neurips )and top 3 NLP conferences ( ACL,EMNLP,NAACl) (in case having paper helps) . Being a grad student dictating his research, it went a bit scattered and not much concentrated on one research topic . For that I ended up joining a FAANG but still I want to get back to academia.…