What I really wanted was to not have to decide to [...]]]> Before I was able to take the actual steps that would let me leave academia, I spent a lot of time daydreaming. You know, of that perfect job I didn’t hate, of being able to ride off into the sunset of a different life.

What I really wanted was to not have to decide to leave academia. I wanted it to just happen, so that I didn’t have to take responsibility for making this hard decision, for explaining it to skeptical friends, for doing the work of figuring out how to translate my academic work to a non-academic audience, for moving us away from a town we loved that had no jobs to a city we didn’t love that had opportunities for us.

I wanted to skip all the parts I didn’t know how to do and move right into the better part. That included the emotional stuff — I wanted to skip right over the grief of leaving, the disorientation of reimagining myself, the having to meet new people.

And from this vantage point, years later, I have so much compassion for the me who was struggling through this. Of course I wanted to skip the hard parts. Of course I wanted to just fast-forward to the next bit. Why wouldn’t I?

But at the time, I alternated between wanting the magic wand and beating myself up for not just getting a grip and doing things already. As you can imagine, castigating myself didn’t actually make me any more likely to do anything.

What finally did get me moving was hitting my own personal breaking point, that moment when it felt easier to do anything, anything at all rather than stay where I was.

I know some of you are in this space now, the dreaming of other possibilities while being stuck with the actual practical steps. If you can avoid beating yourself up for this and instead accept that this is part of the process, even a necessary part of the process, it’ll be easier on you. You’ll hit the point when it’s easier to make change than to stay where you are, and when you do, you’ll make change.

I can’t promise it’ll be easy. But when that day hits, you’ll be shocked at how fast you can change your life.

A few weeks ago, he was offered [...]]]> I have a friend who is heading a tiny little tech start-up. He and some friends have been dreaming and coding and testing and talking it up, all in the spare hours around dayjobs and with whatever money they can scrounge from their budgets and their credit cards.

A few weeks ago, he was offered some venture capital funding.

It’s what every start-up wants, right? You might think so, but my friend is really conflicted about it for all kinds of reasons.

Basically, it looks good on paper, but it doesn’t feel like the right choice.

Paper lies

We’ve all had the experience of having something or someone look perfect on paper and not work out in reality. Or look like a disaster on paper and be absolutely fabulous in reality.

The guy who has all the right degrees and interests, but is really annoying in person. The job that looks really odd, but is really fun when you’re actually doing it.

When we say something looks good on paper, what we’re really pointing to is that is makes sense within the cultural narratives that apply. Good benefits, good alignment with our degree, a good job, a good family.

A lot of our lives get left out of the cultural narrative. Our quirky personalities. Our specific histories. Our actual likes.

Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, has as one of her Secrets of Adulthood this gem: “You can choose what you do; you can’t choose what you LIKE to do.”

Trying to force ourselves to like what we don’t like – however much it makes “sense” in some way – is a sure-fire way to making ourselves quietly miserable.

Academia loves paper

There are a lot of things that “make sense” in academia that run counter to many people’s actual experience.

The flexibility is to die for – unless you want to work reasonable hours and have things in your life other than work.

Professoring is the best job in the world – unless it doesn’t work for your particular personality and skills and needs.

Etc. I’m sure you can think of lots of others.

The problem is not you

The problem is a cultural narrative that insists that certain things are universally good – for everyone, or at least all good people.

But you know what? People vary. Even within communities like academia, which bring people together around some shared values or goals, people vary.

You are allowed to vary. You are allowed to be your own particular, fabulous self.

And you don’t need to apologize for that.

Academia tends to spin our emotional compasses until we don’t know which way is north. If you’re feeling lost, I offer one-on-one coaching to help you figure it all out.

Once upon a time, they knew how their lives would go. They would go to graduate school. They would get a job directly related to their degree. Everything else would fall in place around that.

Except [...]]]> I’ve had several conversations lately with clients who are feeling caught between their old plans and their current selves.

Once upon a time, they knew how their lives would go. They would go to graduate school. They would get a job directly related to their degree. Everything else would fall in place around that.

Except somewhere along the line, something changed. Maybe they got married. Maybe they had a kid. Maybe they got interested in something else.

And now they’re anxious that not following through on the original plan means something bad about them, that they’re lazy or weak or insert-your-favorite-self-insult-here.

All it means is that your plans changed

There’s a famous adage in both military and entrepreneurial circles that goes something like this:

Plans are useless, but planning is priceless.

It reflects the reality that baby, this world is complicated and chaotic and it keeps right on moving, so there’s no possible way that any plan could take into account all the different variables so completely that everything will turn out as you planned. Life happens.

And yet, it’s still helpful to plan, because planning asks us to articulate our goals and think about how to solve that problem, and that gets us further along the path than picking daisies. (Not that I’m against picking daisies!)

All of which is to say, of course your plans have changed

Many of us started graduate school in our early twenties. I would really hope that things in our early or mid-thirties are different than we expected back when we made our master plans back in our early twenties.

First of all, that’s another ten-odd years of life informing us. Complicated, messy, rich, beautiful, life. We know things now we didn’t then. We understand what’s important to us in a way we might not have then. We’ve probably had a few more hard knocks and challenges to help us put things into perspective.

Second of all, the world hasn’t stopped. Stuff has changed around us, and maybe the world doesn’t offer the same opportunities we thought it would. Jobs exist now that didn’t then. (Whole industries exist now that didn’t exist when I started grad school. The internet didn’t exist for everyday people when I started grad school.)

In other words, I’d actually be a little bit worried if nothing in your plans had changed since you started grad school.

We are not computers

There’s a cultural narrative that suggests that we should follow through completely on everything we start, that quitting is, well, quitting. But that’s so very computer-metaphor-driven.

We aren’t computers. We’re organic systems. And organic systems flow and adapt. We respond.

In other words, your plans changing based on your life progressing? That’s exactly how it’s supposed to work.

So, if you can, try not to beat yourself up for the reality that plans change. Plans always change, because we live complicated, messy, long lives. And isn’t it beautiful?

Know you’re leaving but not sure how to actually make that happen? I offer two things that might help: a resume and cover letter writing service and a class designed to help you create a successful job search system.

I want to spend a little time untangling it today, because it’s underneath so much of our pain and our grief.

Deserve tends to show up in two different ways.

The first has [...]]]> Deserve. It’s such a little word for such a big, tangled set of things.

I want to spend a little time untangling it today, because it’s underneath so much of our pain and our grief.

Two, two kinds of deserve (ah ah ah)

Deserve tends to show up in two different ways.

The first has a tinge of self-righteousness to it. “Don’t I deserve a good job after all the hard work I did?” Well yes, you do deserve a good job. But so does everyone else.

The second has a tinge of despair to it. “I don’t deserve a good job / nice colleagues / decent pay because I haven’t worked hard enough / someone else is better / I’m not good at X.” Oh sweetie. You deserve all kinds of good things.

Both versions of deserve are predicated on two assumptions:

1)      That we’re somehow special, different, set apart. (Those other people, they didn’t work as hard as I did, or they aren’t as smart as I am, or they have special privileges I don’t get to have, or they’re all competent and I’m the lone idiot.)

2)      That our inherent worth has anything at all to do with things like jobs, degrees, or self-improvement.

It’s the combination of these two assumptions that leads so many of us to believe that if we didn’t get the job, it’s because we suck as a human being, or to believe that we have no options, or to believe that nothing we’ll do will change our situation.

And both of those assumptions are based in fear. Fear of being different. Fear of being not good enough. Fear of failure.

You deserve everything

You are inherently worthy just as you are right now. And I mean right now, with bedhead and unfinished to-do lists and applications that have gotten no responses and complicated relationships and more pounds than you would like.

Right now. Just as you are. You are worthy. You are a gift of the Universe.

You deserve happiness. You deserve a good job with good pay doing work you love. You deserve amazing relationships that buoy you up and challenge you and help you grow. You deserve a nice home.

And so does everyone else.

Our modern economic systems aren’t set up to support everyone having what they deserve. When we get good things, there’s an element of luck to it, because there’s someone out there who worked just as hard who didn’t get this blessing. And when we don’t get good things, there’s an element of luck to it, because there’s someone else out there, with all of our faults and problems, who did get this good thing.

Sure, qualifications and hard work and being nice, they all matter. But this world we live in is powered largely by luck.

The economic and racial and social situation you were born into is a matter of luck. Being born here instead of someplace else is luck. Fitting a job situation well enough to get an offer is luck – there are lots of applicants who could rock any given position. Being born at a moment in time when there are more jobs than applicants or the reverse is luck.

Sometimes it’s nice to have a good wallow in deserve. It can be cathartic to rage at the universe because you deserved that job that someone else was offered. It can be almost pleasurable to moan about how we don’t deserve the good things because we didn’t eat our carrots.

But when we get stuck there, we stop taking action on our own behalf. And that’s a sure-fire way to not getting those good things you want.

Do this instead

Don’t take it personally that our modern economy isn’t set up to actually take care of actual human beings. That has nothing to do with you. Yes, that’s true differentially, that is, it’s set up to take more care of some people than others, but again – that’s not about you as an individual.

Okay, but how do you do that? (I hate it when I’m told to stop taking something personally with nothing else – exactly how am I supposed to do that?)

When you start noticing yourself using the language or assumptions of deserve, don’t try to stop yourself. What we repress returns even stronger. Instead, take a page from Barbara Sher’s book and ham it up!

If you think you deserve better than you’re getting, then go all diva on the Universe’s ass and tell it so, as dramatically and expressively as possible. Keep pushing yourself to get more dramatic and more demanding, until it’s so ridiculous you can’t help but laugh. (“And you know what, Universe? I deserve a PONY!”)

If you think you don’t deserve goodness, then go all diva on the Universe’s ass and tell it so, as dramatically and expressively as possible. Get more dramatic and more self-pitying until it’s so ridiculous you can’t help but laugh. (“I don’t even deserve to have a nose to breath air through! I should look like Voldemort!)

The feelings you’re having – the feelings of grief, of sadness, of anger, of fear – those are real. Those are what are underneath our language about deserving. When we give voice to them in these over-the-top ways, it’s a way of acknowledging them and giving them some room to breathe.

When they have room to breathe, then they aren’t in charge. And when they aren’t in charge, we can act on our own behalves, knowing that society isn’t fair, that there are roadblocks, that everything isn’t necessarily going to work out just as we had planned.

And that we’re worthy beings, either way.

Academia tends to spin our emotional compasses until we don’t know which way is north. If you’re feeling lost, I offer one-on-one coaching to help you figure it all out.

No matter how far away we go from academia, those of us who were [...]]]> 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.

Not sure what else you could do with your experience and skills? Check out Choosing Your Career Consciously, a course designed to help you figure out what else you could – or would want to – do.

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 [...]]]> 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.

Know you’re leaving but not sure how to actually make that happen? I offer two things that might help: a resume and cover letter writing service and a class designed to help you create a successful job search system.

Often, people respond that [...]]]> One of the questions I like to ask people as they’re considering what they might do after academia is what their ideal workday looks like. When do you get up? What do you put on? Where do you go? What kind of work do you perform? Who do you work with?

Often, people respond that they can’t think of an ideal workday, that everything they consider sounds stupid or pointless or wrong somehow.

Then they tell me that they’re afraid that, in their heart of hearts, they’re just lazy and don’t want to work at all.

Oh sweetie, that’s not it

When I ask them for evidence that they’re actually, at heart, lazy, they usually can’t come up with any real examples. Maybe they’ve procrastinated sometimes, especially around a big or meaningful project.

Most of the time, in fact, these same people have taken on extra work. They’ve volunteered for non-profits or organized fellow graduate students.

They aren’t lazy. They’re exhausted.

Burnout just happens to look like lazy

People who are basically lazy aren’t likely to end up in academia, because academia involves juggling insane workloads with really tough intellectual effort. No truly lazy person is going to sign up for that.

In fact, the kind of people who do sign up for academia are much more likely to be the kind of people who thrive on challenge, who love learning new things, who take on too much.

And let’s face it – academia is not a place that generally values work-life balance. In fact, it’s the kind of place that points fingers at any time away from work as evidence that you aren’t sufficiently committed.

That, my friends, leads us all straight to burnout.

The way back out

One of the perks of academia is that, other than classes and required meetings, most of the deadlines are, shall we say, not immediate. In other words, there’s often wiggle room to let other things slide for a time while you sleep and commune with nature and watch bad television and do whatever else will help you recover.

Aha! You say. I already slack off like that!

But recovery takes longer than I’m guessing you’re giving yourself. It takes big swathes of time, but it doesn’t actually take that long once you give yourself big swathes of time. Two weeks. Maybe three.

When you can give yourself a real recovery, you can often start to tell the difference between “I love this job / career / program but holy hell, I’m crispy burnt-out” and “oh dear god, get me out of here.”

In that space, you’ll be able to tell what your ideal workday looks like. You’ll be able to notice which jobs or careers or whatevers actually excite you. And from there, you can figure out your Next Right Step.

Know you’re leaving but not sure how to actually make that happen? I offer two things that might help: a resume and cover letter writing service and a class designed to help you create a successful job search system.

Even then, years before I left, a cynical voice in my head would [...]]]> I had a boyfriend in graduate school who would periodically work himself into the ground. When we talked about it, he would say that he only had to work this hard until he got a tenure-track job, and then he could relax.

Even then, years before I left, a cynical voice in my head would say, yeah right. And then it’ll be until you get tenure. And then it’ll be until you make full. And then you’ll have no idea what to do with yourself.

He wasn’t working himself into the ground because it really was necessary in order for him to get a tenure track job, although I’m sure he believed this. He was working himself into the ground because he was profoundly anxious about the process.

Moving the goalposts

I pick on my ex only because it was such a blatant example of what I’m talking about. We all do this all the time.

I’ll be happy when X happens. I’ll take time off when Y happens. I can’t do Z until Q.

We conditionalize a lot of our behavior on things that may or may not be within our control. And that means we give over our happiness and our choices to a capricious world.

This is not an argument against working hard

There are times, sometimes sort and sometimes long, when there really is a meaningful relationship between behavior we don’t want to have long-term and a goal.

When you’ve got six weeks until the deadline to turn in the dissertation, maybe you are working 18 hours days. But as soon as that diss is turned in, you’re not going to keep working 18 hours days, because it was about a concrete goal.

But there’s a difference between a concrete goal and a moving target.

Success in sheep’s clothing

A tenure-track job may seem to be just like the dissertation deadline – something concrete you can point to. But there are two fundamental differences.

First, the dissertation deadline is (for the most part) within your control. You can work more or less, you can ask for more or less help, you can plan or not plan. It’s not easy, but meeting it, barring serious and unforeseen circumstances, is something you can actually accomplish.

The tenure-track job, on the other hand, is subject to dozens of difference institutional, generational, and locational forces that have nothing whatsoever to do with you. There are thousands of bright, capable, utterly qualified people out there who do not have tenure-track jobs because there weren’t enough to go around.

Second, the dissertation deadline is clear-cut and tied to an end in itself. You finish the diss, and you graduate with a PhD. You may want to deploy the PhD into other things, but it is, itself, an end point.

The tenure-track job, or tenure, or the promotion to full – these are all usually markers of academic success rather than being ends in themselves. And that’s why the post moves every time we achieve one of these markers.

What’s your definition of success?

I’m going to generalize for a second: Academics, as a group, are deeply uncomfortable with success. Every time we achieve something that might count as success, we decide it doesn’t really count until we achieve the next thing that might count as success, which doesn’t really count until we achieve the next thing that might count as success. Lather, rinse, repeat.

It’s damn hard to feel good about the work you’re doing when success gets infinitely deferred into something still farther away.

So let me ask you this: What is your definition of success? How will you know when you’ve succeeded? What will deserve a celebration?

How much is that within your control?

This is the heart of the struggle

We didn’t just make this up out of whole cloth, every one of us. This deferral of success is built in to the fabric of the academic world.

This is a large part of why we feel like failures when we don’t move neatly through the milestones of success. This is a large part of why we feel like grad school was a waste of time unless we achieve full professor somewhere (we think of as) prestigious. This is a large part of why we can’t give ourselves credit for all of the amazing things we’ve already done, whether or not we go forward.

Look carefully at what counts as success. Be wary of being Charlie Brown to the academic football. It ends messy.

I’m running up against my own internal, not-wholly-resolved, critic on this one, so let me say this at the outset.

There are lots of ways [...]]]> I want to talk about the ways that being female in the academy is complicated, the ways in which it still, despite all of our rhetoric to the contrary, matters.

I’m running up against my own internal, not-wholly-resolved, critic on this one, so let me say this at the outset.

There are lots of ways the academy is hard for different people, and lots of different “minority” identity positions get screwed in this system. (I put “minority” in quotes only because the people who are not marginalized in some way don’t actually constitute the numerical majority.)

I do not subscribe to any kind of Pain Olympics, in which only the experience or position that is the very most hardest counts. All of our pain and othering counts. All of it.

Okay? Okay.

Why I’m talking about this

Because academia relies on a narrative of merit, there is often a cultural assumption that academia is an equal playing field. And because of this, lots of smart, talented women have blamed themselves for the ways the system has undermined and devalued them.

And that shit has got to stop.

Despite all of our claims to post-feminism, the world – and that includes the academy – is still unequal. And blaming ourselves for that reality only makes it harder for us to identify it, respond to it, and find creative ways to call attention to it so it can be transformed.

So, to that end, I’m going to list all the ways I can think of that women experience inequality in the academy.

Let me count the ways

• Women, especially junior women, carry a disproportionate amount of service work in many departments, which jeopardizes their chances for tenure.
• Women in traditionally male fields (read: hard sciences) are often subjected to outright misogyny and abuse.
• Women are punished for their desire to have a family through family-unfriendly policies and practices, unlike their male partners, who are often seen more positively for their family commitments.
• Women have fewer mentorship opportunities.
• Women have a more difficult time projecting and owning authority in the classroom, which is often worsened by the responses of department chairs, deans, and other higher authority figures.
• Women are often perceived as threatening to the often-all-or-nearly-so-male “old guard.”
• Women who are cross-hired into Women’s Studies and their “home” department are often denied tenure because their feminist scholarship is denied credibility in the “home” department.
• Women who aren’t cross-hired are often denied tenure because their scholarship is considered “narrow” or “particular” because it doesn’t buy into the assumption that white men are universal and everyone else is “interested.”
• The fewer women there are in any given field, the more the existing women are called upon to mentor those behind them – leaving them less time to do the work they’re rewarded for.
• Women aren’t often taught how to negotiate, and for this reason among others, women are paid less well than men for the same work.
• Women are assumed to be less committed to their work if they have a baby.
• Women experience exclusion in graduate courses, in which they aren’t called on or in which their contributions aren’t considered equal.
• When women outshine their male peers, their achievements are dismissed as exceptions.
• Administrations are still, largely, male.

The important caveats

Now, not every woman will experience all of these. Departments and institutions vary, of course, and there are some that are doing their explicit best to address some of these issues.

But I’d argue that women in academia experience quite a few of them. Some will be obvious, and some will be the subtle kind that make you wonder if you’re crazy for thinking that gender inequality might be part of what’s going on.

If your gut says that gender inequality is part of what you’re experiencing, trust it. Trust that something bigger than you is at work. That doesn’t make it okay, but it means that it isn’t some fault of yours if you run afoul of the ways gender inequality plays itself out where you are. You are not the problem. A larger social and structural devaluing of women is.

What other ways have you seen or experienced women experience inequality in academia?

I hear this all the time, both from graduate students and professors.

And, like everything else in academia, it’s kind of [...]]]> A dear friend of mine once told me that while she looks like a successful academic on paper, she doesn’t experience herself that way. She’s not sure the institution experiences her that way, either.

I hear this all the time, both from graduate students and professors.

And, like everything else in academia, it’s kind of complicated.

Imposter Syndrome

A grad school friend and I coined the term “academic anorexia” to refer to what we later came to know as Imposter Syndrome. Imposter Syndrome is that persistent fear that you aren’t as smart or as capable or as interesting as people seem to think you are, and one day they’ll wake up and know you for the fraud you think you are.

There’s a lot of reasons we all acquire Imposter Syndrome, including being a student for way too long, the competitive and brutal nature of some departments or advisors, the constant evaluation and judgment, and the constant need to triage a workload that is more than anyone can reasonable do.

I’m not sure many of us get out of grad school without a whopping case of it, and it does damage, especially to women.

By undermining our confidence and our trust in our environment (not always falsely, either), Imposter Syndrome keeps us playing small, asking for approval, and constantly doubting ourselves. It’s exhausting and demoralizing.

Being a round peg in a square hole

Sometimes our intellectual and personal quirks make us a bad fit for academia in general or an institution or department in particular.

Collaboration, for example, is an important principle of some feminist scholarship – but collaboration is not only not valued in the Humanities, it’s actively punished by “not counting.”

Being wide rather than deep is the way some of our minds work, but academia is based on each scholar going deep into one particular facet of one particular research angle.

When we don’t fit, we’re constantly running up against barriers and assumptions that tell us we’re doing it wrong.

Telling the difference

Having Imposter Syndrome doesn’t mean you don’t fit academia or your institution or your department or your field. Imposter Syndrome only means that you’re doubting your own excellence, even as you are getting generally positive feedback.

When you don’t fit, however, you’re constantly running up against barriers to being successful in the ways you would naturally operate. Sometimes you can think your way around them, but you’re always having to check yourself and reorient yourself. And sometimes you can’t think your way around them and you’re experiencing negative feedback.

Imposter Syndrome is painful, to be sure, but with some attention and some processing, can be transformed into a balanced sense of what we have to offer.

Lack of fit, however, can only be fixed by moving – to another institution, to another kind of institution, to another department, to something outside academia.

They both suck

Neither one of these is fun. In fact, experientially, they’re both pretty terrible, because neither of them allows you to be your full, beautiful, whip-smart self.

But doubting yourself when everything is generally working isn’t the same as not fitting. That self-doubt needs compassion, to be sure, and care, and space to process the underlying fears. But that doubting of your own abilities doesn’t mean you don’t fit. In fact, it probably means you fit really, really well.

All that being said, you don’t have to put up with it. You can, in fact, be in academia and be both confident and happy. I’ve seen it happen. And assuming that academia is where you want to be, you deserve that.