PhD Program or Microsoft Employee? Do both! This is my story

Here is the link.

After informing my advisor that I was leaving, he wisely suggested that instead of directly quitting the PhD program that I instead take a leave of absence for up to two years.

By the end of those two years I was already well integrated in my team at Bing and I felt like I might be able to continue the PhD on a part-time basis. I was determined to find a practical problem that would benefit both my research and my employer. I met with several teams inside Bing to learn about their most difficult challenges. In the end, I decided to focus on IP geolocation (finding the city level location of IP addresses), with a focus on mining search engine logs.