I’ve been thinking a lot about the term “post-academic” and what it means, so I’d like to unpack it a little bit here. And I’d love to know how my definitions fit with and don’t fit with yours.

It incorporates academia

No matter how far away we go from academia, those of us who were academically inclined enough to actually head to graduate school will always carry some version of academia with us.

Maybe it’s the theoretical constructs that reconfigured the world we thought we lived in. Maybe it’s habits of close reading. Maybe it’s a tendency to head to the library to answer our questions about the world. Maybe it’s the belief that individuals can create knowledge.

Maybe it’s an deeper understanding of both exploitative labor practices and ideology. Maybe it’s a cynicism about our own idealism.

Whatever it is, our experience in academia – both positive and negative – comes with us as we move away from the Ivory Tower. We don’t ever leave it truly behind, although you’d be surprised just how distant it can feel.

It’s about something else

Post-academics aren’t failed academics. We all walked away for our own reasons, reasons that both did and didn’t intersect with the structural problems inherent in higher ed. At some point, we chose something else.

I want to emphasize that, because so many of us have felt backed into a corner by the shitty job market and the shiny optimism of professors who haven’t been on the job market since Moses was a lad. It doesn’t always feel like we chose something else. But somehow, somewhen, we did, even if we can only articulate it as “I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

And that choice, while it’s going to be colored by our experiences and our skills, most of which were honed in academia, isn’t only “anything but academia.” There’s always an element of “this, not that.”

Ultimately, becoming post-academic is about choosing to orient yourself a different direction. As such it’s about recognizing academia as one space among others.

We find ourselves again

One of the most comment stories I hear from people coming out of academia is that, in their long years inside the Ivory Tower, they’ve lost something of themselves.

Maybe it’s a natural optimism that got laid down for a more-popular cynicism. Maybe it’s a love of “low” culture. Maybe it’s a work-life balance that allows for both meaningful work and a personal life that isn’t always rushed and shoved into corners.

When we change contexts, these parts of ourselves we’ve disavowed can come back. We can look on them with new eyes and notice the parts we want to invite back in.

It’s about strength

What I most notice as I’m working with post-academics is a kind of strength. In most of us there’s a sense of having lived through something challenging, maybe even life-changing. Even when we’re desperately sad, or scared that we have no other options, there’s an underlying strength in the ability to see what’s going on, to be considering another life.

I have to say, that’s one of my favorite parts.

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When you finish your PhD, no matter what your plans for the next right step, you will inevitably encounter a steep, steep learning curve.

Since academic culture tends to inculcate in all of us a deep case of Imposter Syndrome, it’s easy for us to assume that because things are hard, because we’re struggling, because we have to learn still more, we’re doing it wrong.

Worse, we tend to assume that struggle means that we are wrong, that we’re in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing.

The thing that’s wrong is that assumption.

Welcome to transition

I natter on about transition a lot around here, but graduating is a classic transition point. You’re losing your identity as a graduate student, and taking on an identity as a professional, whether that’s as a tenure-track assistant professor, an adjunct, or an employee in a non-academic job.

(In fact, one of the hardest parts of being an adjunct – apart from the being paid a pittance and being jerked around – is the sense of being betwixt and between: no longer  a graduate student, but not quite a professor, either.)

Any time we shift a major point of our own identities, it’s like all hell breaks loose. We vacillate between missing the old identity, being excited by the new identity, and feeling utterly lost and confused and doubting.

And underneath it all is one thought: This is so much harder than I expected it would be.

And that’s okay

The thing is, all that hard, all that vacillation? It’s entirely normal. It’s exactly what happens to everyone when they shift a major point of identity.

Where we often get into trouble is comparing our insides (muddled, confused, wishing desperately for someone to tell us what to do) to other people’s outsides (polished, urbane, confident). We don’t often notice that we’re probably presenting the exact same outside, because we don’t want anyone to know that our insides are so turbulent and painful.

Which only stands to reason that those polished, urbane people you’re comparing yourself to? Their insides are probably as roiled as yours.

Accept the learning curve

The way through is to accept that there’s a difference between graduate school and whatever comes next.

If you’re stepping into the professoriate, you’ve got to learn how to be a colleague. You’ve got to learn how to advise, and participate in committee meetings, and propel your own research without an advisor there as goad and check.

If you’re stepping outside of academia, you’ve got to learn an entirely different culture, with different values and practices. You’ve got to learn a different way of working. You’ve got to learn a different way of engaging the topic at hand.

In short, there’s a lot of learning to be done.

Good thing you’re good at learning

One of the characteristics that unites most academics is this: You’re really good at learning things. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have done so well in school. But you’re the person who loved learning and school and the topic so much you voluntarily signed on for more.

You’ve got mad skills to bring to this problem.

But unlike all those years in school, now you’ve got no one to tell you how to learn this stuff. There’s no syllabus, there’s no reading list. There are no office hours.

What you’ve got is this: your own skill at learning (and teaching!) and people who’ve done this before.

Be a teacher and find a mentor

Most of us taught our way through graduate school in one way or another. We know how to take a complicated subject and break it into its component parts and teach those parts and the whole to someone who may not have our facility with the subject.

And we can do the same thing with a new context. We can identify component parts: tasks, hierarchies of power, unspoken assumptions, cultural norms. And then we can use these brilliant brains of ours to figure them out.

Finding yourself a mentor – someone who’s done this before – will help speed up the process, because they’ll be a person you can ask questions of and test your own theories on. Is this how the decision-making structure really works? What’s going on with that odd tension you saw in the last meeting?

But keep in mind that a mentor isn’t a teacher. It’s not their job to do the work to define what you need to learn and devise a way to do that. That’s your job.

You can do this

You’ve done things like this before. Remember the first month or two of graduate school, when everything seemed incredibly complicated and you weren’t sure it would ever make sense?

By now, all those things that confused you are second nature.

The same thing will happen here. You just have to trust yourself and know that this is all part of the process.

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