Is leaving really irrevocable?
This is one of the biggest fears – and biggest stumbling blocks – I hear from people who are considering leaving. Once they make the decision to go, they say, there’s no going back.
And to a large extent, they’re right. Especially in a market like this one, where there are dozens, sometimes hundreds, of applicants for any given open position, hiring committees aren’t likely to look closely at someone who has left and returned when they’ve got application after application from bright young things just out of graduate school, bearing the latest theory and impressive credentials.
But that doesn’t mean the situation is quite as clear-cut as all that.
There are exceptions to every rule
This you-can’t-go-home-again bias is more true in the humanities than in the social sciences, business, or the hard sciences. Not only are the humanities the hardest hit in the undersupply of jobs and oversupply of PhDs, but the humanities encompass the fields that put the least value on practical, hands-on experience.
Many other fields have a long tradition of people moving from industry to higher ed and back. How likely it is in the case of any given academic depends on things as varied as specialty, grant funding, trends in the industry, and the phase of the moon.
The converse is not necessarily true
But often, when I’m talking with people who are afraid that if they walk away, a door closes forever, I’m wondering just how open that door actually is right now.
Given the trends in academia – towards contingent labor, towards less and less public funding, towards increased service obligations, towards fewer viable university presses and journals, towards an ever-more imbalance between the number of PhDs and the number of jobs available – I’m not sure that the door is open for any but a very few, very lucky people who happened to be in the right place at the right time with just exactly the right combination of scholarship and experience and personality.
In other words, the writing may be on the wall even if you aren’t deciding to walk away.
The realities of the job market are not about you
None of this is to say that you aren’t qualified or aren’t deserving or aren’t absolutely brilliant. You are. You are all of those things. You absolutely deserve a real job doing what you love.
Unfortunately, deserve has very little to do with what actually happens. And what is actually happening right now is that many – and I would say most — of the qualified, deserving, brilliant graduates aren’t getting those tenure-track jobs, because they don’t exist. And that’s not because anyone is out to get you, and it’s not because administrators don’t value tenure-track faculty. It’s because we happen to be around during a particular historical moment when the economic circumstances of higher ed are changing in ways that may never reverse.
So when people worry that walking away is irrevocable, what I always want to ask is how likely it is that staying will produce a different outcome. In every case I can think of, it’s not that the door was absolutely closed, but it wasn’t open very far. That’s because when people are honestly considering leaving, it’s because things, for one reason or another, haven’t worked out as planned or hoped.
Some people are going to want to take their chances on that crack, and that’s reasonable. But there will be a point at which that crack disappears and the door is effectively closed. Maybe it’s because you’re too many years out of school and you’re competing with people who are newly graduated. Maybe it’s because your field is being systematically trimmed from various institutions. Maybe it’s because tenure-lines in your field are rapidly disappearing and the only things that are really available are contingent positions.
When that door closes, the question of whether leaving is irrevocable isn’t really relevant anymore.
I hate being the voice of doom
But I hate watching people throw themselves against impossibilities even more. I hate watching bright, amazing people, people who have so much to offer, doubt their own self-worth because the numbers just weren’t in their favor. I hate watching people compromise their own futures by accepting section work that doesn’t pay the bills. I hate watching people get bitter and angry because things haven’t worked out.
This is a particularly horrible time in academia. Maybe it will shift for the better sometime. I really hope it does, because I believe in the importance of higher education and I believe particularly in the value of the humanities. I know too many amazing academics, people who are working hard with increasingly fewer resources, to write it all off.
But I also know too many amazing people who didn’t get the brass ring to believe that this situation is benign. It isn’t.
Walking away may be irrevocable. And if that door is still open a crack and you want to take your chances, power to you. I want every person who wants an academic job to get a good one, because we need that brilliance and dedication. We need it desperately.
But if that door is closed, I hope that you are able to mourn and walk away. Because the rest of the world needs your brilliance and dedication just as desperately.
If you’re walking away but don’t know what else you could do, join Jo VanEvery and me in a six-week class designed to help you figure out what your options are. We start June 12. Click here to find out more.
Have you heard of the soggy potato chip theory? It goes something like this: A kid would always love a crisp, new potato chip, but if soggy potato chips are all there is, they can be satisfying too. It’s an analogy to attention, and the way kids would always prefer positive, supportive attention, but if negative, critical attention is all they can get, they’ll take it. Attention is that important.
Many of us in academia are like those kids.
We want the tenure-track job in our preferred geographic area for a decent wage and a reasonable teaching load. We want friendly colleagues and a supportive research environment. But if adjunct teaching or a non-tenure-track and thus year-to-year job with a high teaching load and crappy conditions is all we are offered, we’ll often take it.
We want so badly to be part of academia, to live that life that we imagined for ourselves that we’ll accept a watered-down version that actively drains us – because it’s less painful than walking away from what we really, actually want.
I say this not in condemnation. Not at all. I say this because walking away from what we want is incredibly, terribly painful.
That’s why it takes so long
It would be great if we could sit down, make a pro and con list, and rationally decide that yep, leaving is the way to go, then dust off our hands and dive in to the process of finding another job, maybe moving.
Maybe that’s how it works for some people. That’s not how it worked for me, and that’s not how it works for most of the people I talk to.
For most of us, it looks more like this. Spend weeks or months or even years miserable and ground down and exhausted. Consider leaving. Get excited about a few possibilities. Look at real estate somewhere we actually want to live. Have a lovely weekend imagining a different life. Go back to work on Monday energized and excited. Teach a great class. Have a nice conversation with a colleague. Start doubting that you really need to leave. Maybe you just need an attitude adjustment. Maybe you just need to buckle down. Spend a few weeks throwing yourself into your work. Find yourself crying or angry for no apparent reason. Start looking at job ads. Find a few that seem exciting. Sit down to try to draft an application. Freak out and decide you’re staying.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Leaving is a process, not a point
You are going to doubt yourself. You are going to question every single one of the experiences that led you to consider leaving in the first place. (Maybe they weren’t that bad.) You are going to go back and forth between hope and despair. You are going to try to talk yourself into staying. You are going to try to talk yourself into leaving. There may be weeks when you get nothing done at all, in any direction.
This is completely normal.
Leaving academia is an enormous thing. It affects your identity, it affects your sense of the rightness of the world, it affects your belief in yourself.
None of that means that you’re a bad person, or that you should stay or that you should go. It means only that you’re grappling with something huge, something that will likely be a fork in the road.
It is not fun. But it is normal.
Ways to make it a little bit easier
If you can accept that this is as much a part of the process as everything else – i.e., you avoid beating yourself up for all of the back-and-forthing – it’ll be easier on you.
If you can give yourself the space and understanding and compassion to just watch all of the doubts and fears and hopes and dreams arise, you’ll learn something about what you really want and what matters to you and what’s standing in your way.
If you can be patient, you’ll arrive at a point that has some foundation to it. You’ll find a place to stand and a decision you’re committed to, however scary it is.
If part of what’s standing in your way is a fear that there’s nothing else you’re qualified to do, join Jo VanEvery and me for a six-week class designed to help you expand your sense of what careers are possible for you. It starts June 12, and you can find out more by clicking here.
 Most of us thought we’d spend our whole lives in academia. So when it turns out we won’t — whether we learn that we don’t want to, don’t get a job that actually pays the bills, or hit a roadbump along the way — it feels particularly craptastic. This is true even if we’re planning to stay but are having to rethink our relationship to academia. So this is a space for talking about the kinds of things that come up for people and how we can move past them.
Extended adolescence on line 1
It’s so easy, when you’re in graduate school, to fall into the assumption that you’re not really a grownup yet. Most of us weren’t buying houses, or having kids, or even getting married – all things that mark adulthood in our culture.
Worse, graduate school can often look like an extension of college: Classes and bars and parties and late nights and very little responsibility outside of showing up to teach your own classes. It never did inspire me to feel like I hadn’t moved beyond my life at 19.
But it makes sense. If (felt) adulthood is roughly correlated (in this culture) with leaving school and getting a real, paying job, then those of us who went to graduate school delayed adulthood by five to ten years.
The apprenticeship model only makes it worse
Under the apprenticeship model of academia (there’s a lot to critique about said model, but work with me for a minute), you really aren’t a full grownup until you become a Master. (In some times and places, it was customary to delay marriage until you were a Master and thus could support a family.)
Since academia is only sort of an apprenticeship model, we don’t actually have a mark for when that happens. Graduation with a PhD? Achievement of a tenure-track job? Tenure? Full professorship? It’s all of these and none of them.
Little good comes of it
Because we often don’t feel like grownups, because we often don’t carry the trappings of grownuphood (and no, unbearable student loans don’t quite count), it’s easy for us to assume that we aren’t grownups – and that therefore we also don’t have the authority to make decisions for our lives.
What we want – and what we sometimes desperately want – is for someone else to take out their magic adulthood crystal ball and tell us what to do next. We’ve existed for so long in a world that has clear pathways as well as people who shepherd us down those pathways that the idea of finding a new path, an unmarked and perhaps unauthorized path, is daunting.
Yes, part of the daunting is about how the hell we learn a new set of skills around exploring the world of work. But part of it is about daring to take responsibility for our own lives, to claim ourselves as adults who get to decide what’s best for us regardless of what the authority figures think is best.
This, then, is what it really means to be an adult
To take responsibility for your own life and your own happiness, no matter what the authority figures think is the right, appropriate, or responsible choice. What is right, appropriate, and responsible is something only you can decide for yourself.
I say none of this dismissively or contemptuously. We can be (and often are) some of the most responsible, thoughtful people around while still feeling like little kids playing dressup, like someone is going to come along at any minute and put us in the corner for time out.
I say all of this because I so often see us (me included) hoping and waiting for someone else to tell us what to do, for the real grownup to step out and make the pronouncement that will decide what the right choice is.
The reality is that there is never only one right choice. There are better and worse choices at every juncture, but we can’t even necessarily know which is which until much later.
The reality is that our lives are only what we make of them, and there’s no secret blueprint telling us what we’re supposed to be doing. What we’re supposed to be doing is making the best choices for ourselves and for the life we want to be living.
So go ahead. Take a look at your real options. Put away the voices in your head that are labeling those options as responsible or not, right or not, appropriate or not. Look at your real options and ask yourself what your wisest self would tell you about them. Then choose.
If you’d like help figuring out what your real options are, Jo VanEvery and I are teaching a 6-session telecourse about strategies for expanding your sense of career possibilities. You can find out more by clicking here.
Most of us thought we’d spend our whole lives in academia. So when it turns out we won’t — whether we learn that we don’t want to, don’t get a job that actually pays the bills, or hit a roadbump along the way — it feels particularly craptastic. This is true even if we’re planning to stay but are having to rethink our relationship to academia. So this is a space for talking about the kinds of things that come up for people and how we can move past them.
How being smart gets in the way
I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark here and guess that you’re pretty smart. You were recognized for your smarts in school, and that smartness got you passed along from one form of school to another. After all, what do you do if you’re smart? More school.
But now, things are harder. Maybe you haven’t been able to find a job that meets your needs. Maybe you’re so sick of graduate school you could hurl. Maybe that tenure-track job wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
Your smartness isn’t helping you now.
I promise you’re still smart
The reality that smartness isn’t helping us now is profoundly threatening. We’re supposed to be successful because we’re smart! And we’re afraid that our struggles now mean that we might not really be smart after all.
It’s not true that we aren’t smart. Clearly, we are. (Graduate school requires lots of things, and smartness is one of them.)
But it’s not necessarily true that smartness equals success. And it’s certainly not true that lack of success equal a lack of smartness. (Sorry — I’m having flashbacks to my undergraduate symbolic logic class.)
Success requires a lot of things – smarts, persistence, timing, and luck, just to name a few – and it requires them all together. One alone won’t get you there.
As academics, so much of our identity gets wrapped around this idea of our own smartness that anything that threatens our ideas of ourselves as smart feel like they threaten our very selves. This is why struggling with academia can be so much more painful than struggling with other professions.
It’s time for a different kind of smarts
All of that gets compounded because the kind of smartness that gets validated in school isn’t the same kind of smartness that can help you figure out what to do next, when you’d like to leave academia but haven’t the foggiest idea how.
For all of its other faults, academia has a clear trajectory. If you want to be a professor, you have to earn a PhD. If you want to earn a PhD, you have to successfully defend your dissertation. If you want to defend your dissertation, you first have to write your dissertation. And so on back to the day you send in the application to graduate school.
There aren’t very many other jobs like that.
First, there aren’t all that many professions, taken together, that require the kind of schooling and certification that academia does. Lawyering, doctoring, counseling, accounting, yes. Business planning, no. Editing, no. Graphic design, no. Social media guru, no. Writing, no. Outdoor trainer, no.
That means there will be lots and lots of ways to get to all of those other professions, even though some will have more common pathways. It also means there are clear next steps. We don’t have to figure out our own goals, because they’re all laid out in the graduate student handbook.
Second, by virtue of being in college at all, we have mentors sitting at our fingertips. If we want to be a professor, all we have to do is show up at the office hours of someone we already know and already like in order to ask some questions. When we want to be something else, anything else, it’s a lot harder to find someone to help us. (It’s not that hard, but it’s harder than showing up at office hours.)
The kind of smarts that gets us through school likes to connect the dots. It likes knowing what’s next.
That’s not necessarily the kind of smarts that will help you make the psychological and intellectual leap to doing something different. The kind of smarts you need now is an intuitive kind of smarts. It’s a curious kind of smarts. It’s an intrepid, brave kind of smarts.
This is just another problem to solve
The reality is that you are smart. And this is just another kind of problem to solve. You know how to solve problems. This one just comes with a lot more baggage than most.
So when you feel yourself beginning to spiral into the “this means I’m not smart and then I’m dooooooomed” kind of mindset, take a deep breath. Remember just how smart you are. Remember that you are strong and persistent and fantastic. (You got this far!) Remember that you can solve problems once you frame them that way. Take another breath and begin again.
If you’d like some help figuring out what else you might be able to do, Jo Van Every and I are running a 6-week course designed to help the academically inclined expand their sense of career possibility. You can learn more here.
Most of us thought we’d spend our whole lives in academia. So when it turns out we won’t — whether we learn that we don’t want to, don’t get a job that actually pays the bills, or hit a roadbump along the way — it feels particularly craptastic. This is true even if we’re planning to stay but are having to rethink our relationship to academia. So this is a space for talking about the kinds of things that come up for people and how we can move past them.
I work, therefore I am
Sometimes I think the hardest part of the whole do-I-leave-academia-or-not conversation is grappling with the ways this choice affects our very identity.
People have written ad nauseum about the ways Americans identify with their jobs, and that goes double for careers like academia that both entail a long apprenticeship period and are engaged as vocations more than careers.
By the time we get to the end of graduate school, and often long before, there’s a sense of in and out, us and them. Moreover, we identify ourselves with the specificities of our work. We’re Foucauldians working on the philosophy of the self. We’re Victorianists. We’re vacuum physicists. And most of all, we’re academics.
And then it’s all in question
When we think about leaving, we are considering the possibility that we might have to take off that mantle and do the hard work of reconceiving of who we are. The more we’re identified, internally, with academia, the harder it is to contemplate leaving and the more painful actually doing it is.
The same is true of any change that affects our sense of who we are in the world – even if the change is good. Getting that tenure track job and having to step into the identity of “professor” can be as disorienting as leaving. But disorientation plus loss equals terror.
And in that terror, we can be utterly, completely convinced that we’ve made the wrong choice. It has to be the wrong choice, right? It feels too terrible to be right.
Even the right choice will feel like crap for a while
The not very fun truth is that every transition – no matter how much you want it, no matter how much it’s the right decision for you – will start off with loss and feeling like shit. It has to. You have to let go of the old identity before you can put a new one on.
Getting married to the partner of your dreams will entail some losses. Having a long-longed-for kid will entail some losses. Hell, finishing your dissertation and moving into a job, even a coveted tenure-track one, will entail a whole host of losses, including of guidance, of a cohort, of friends and support systems, of what is known.
And if you’re stepping out of academia, your losses may well be significant. You might be losing a dream you had for yourself. You might be losing friends and colleagues who don’t know how to relate to you outside of the structure of academia. You might be losing work you found meaningful. You’re likely losing a sense of exactly who you are.
And then it will feel rudderless
After the acutely sucky period (and sometimes intermingled with it), you’ll get the terrifying rudderless period. William Bridges calls this period of transition “the neutral zone,” and I’m sorry, that’s just much too nice a word for this period.
In the middle of the transition, you will have a time when you have no fucking clue what’s supposed to happen next or where you’re going to end up or what you’ll be doing in six months time or where you’ll even be living but it’ll probably be under a bridge somewhere.
If you’re leaving academia, you’ll probably be overwhelmed by trying to figure out what to apply for and how and where and anyway, do you include pubs on your resume? You’ll probably vacillate between “I could do anything – how the hell do I figure out what?!” and “I can’t do anything – no one in their right mind is going to hire me!”
And finally, the new identity will develop
And then, like the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, the proverbial dawn after the dark, you will gain a direction, and you will gather around yourself a new life, and you will settle in to your new identity. At first it’ll feel kind of awkward, but also kind of exciting, and you will be full of possibility. And then it will feel awkward again, and exciting, and strange, and kind of weird, but fun.
It really will happen. It can’t really help happening, because it’s as necessary and true a part of the transition as the sucky part and the scary part.
Every one of these stages is important. Every one of them is necessary. And every one of them means you’re on the right track.
If you’d like some help figuring out what else you might be able to do, Jo Van Every and I are running a 6-week course designed to help the academically inclined expand their sense of career possibility. You can learn more here.
 Most of us thought we’d spend our whole lives in academia. So when it turns out we won’t — whether we learn that we don’t want to, don’t get a job that actually pays the bills, or hit a roadbump along the way — it feels particularly craptastic. This is true even if we’re planning to stay but are having to rethink our relationship to academia. So this is a space for talking about the kinds of things that come up for people and how we can move past them.
Lennard J. Davis rocks
I was fascinated last week by a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed in which Lennard J. Davis, a professor at the University of Illinois – Chicago, outlined how he mentors his graduate students.
He goes far beyond the obligatory “the job market sucks” speech. When they first become “his” graduate students, he outlines the baseline requirements to even get into the job game and reminds his students how slowly academic publishing moves. He tells students to plan their dissertations and their committees with the job market in mind. He personally walks students through the book displays at conferences and introduces them to editors. He takes their job materials well in hand and helps them shape those applications to their best possibilities.
In short, he believes a significant part of his job as advisor is to explicitly professionalize his students.
This is not usual
While I hope that this kind of explicit professionalization is happening more and more, I have to say, in my experience this kind of support is rare. And there are reasons why it is so rare.
First, many academics, whether they’re aware of it or not, still subscribe to the myths of merit and intellectual purity. In this story, what gets jobs is the best intellectual work, and the best work naturally rises to the top, like some special thinking-flavored cream. In this story, shaping your work to get a job is pandering, because it’s supposed to be the work itself that matters. In this story, the good students will get jobs, regardless of how they’re positioned vis a vis the market.
Under this myth, the job of the advisor is simply to get the best intellectual work out of the student, and that not only keeps everyone in the realm of research and writing, if often leads to work that doesn’t fit nicely into disciplinary categories, further complicating a job search.
Second, few academics were properly mentored themselves. Even those who battled job markets that were, in their day, notable, were rarely given this kind of explicit instruction or support. They muddled along with the hints and the unspoken expectations, trying to figure out how journals ranked, how many pubs they needed, and how to get them.
So many of academia’s rules and procedures are unspoken, assumed, and passed along through a kind of departmental or institutional osmosis that they’re hard to articulate at all – much less pass along to graduate students who might themselves be clinging strongly to the myths of merit and intellectual purity.
In other words, it’s not your fault
It’s not your fault that you couldn’t intuit early enough or quickly enough what the rules were and how to play the game at the highest level.
It’s not your fault that the rules weren’t laid out where you could find them.
It’s not your fault that you didn’t get this kind of explicit advising and mentoring.
It’s not your fault that you landed in the worst academic job market for the liberal arts without the tools you needed to maybe make it work for you.
But it’s not their fault either
While I would argue that it is every graduate advisor’s responsibility to professionalize students and help them learn the game, it’s not surprising that it happens so rarely. So many structures are in place to maintain the intellectually pure status quo that it’s the rare person who can buck so strongly against it.
But the bottom line is that, if you weren’t given this kind of support and mentoring, you were left without some of the key tools you needed to succeed in this profession.
Would it have made a difference? Maybe yes, maybe no. The bottom would still have fallen out of the academic job market. The national economy would still be in the toilet, and states would still be responding by cutting higher ed allocations right and left.
Maybe it would have given you an edge. Maybe that would have been enough.
But when I talk to people who are struggling because they didn’t get a tenure-track job in academia, what I hear is self-blame, when what I see is a set of structures that didn’t much allow for success to begin with.
The state of the job market is not your fault. The quality of the advising you got was not your fault. Even the naivete most of us start off graduate school with isn’t exactly our own faults – it’s part of being young, part of being passionate, part of following the dream.
Sure, there were things we might, in hindsight, have done differently – chosen a different advisor, chosen a different topic, chosen a different school, asked more direct questions, made a different kind of plan. But there’s no guarantee that it would have changed the outcome. And there’s nothing to say things couldn’t have turned out differently even with the choices you made.
All of which is to say this
Try not to beat yourself up too much, wherever you are in the process.
Yes, if you haven’t gotten that tenure-track job, it’s disappointing. It’s horribly disappointing. But let it stay disappointing. Don’t beat yourself up over things you only had a little bit of control over. That turns disappointment into self-loathing. Disappointment we can recover from. Self-loathing is much harder.
If you got in to graduate school, you’re by definition smart and capable and interested. Whatever has happened since you got that acceptance letter, all of those things are still true.
Most of us thought we’d spend our whole lives in academia. So when it turns out we won’t — whether we learn that we don’t want to, don’t get a job that actually pays the bills, or hit a roadbump along the way — it feels particularly craptastic. This is true even if we’re planning to stay but are having to rethink our relationship to academia. So this is a space for talking about the kinds of things that come up for people and how we can move past them.
So, something has changed
We deal with change all the time in our lives – a company discontinues our favorite lip balm, the city installs a new traffic light, we get a new sweater. But most of the time, change doesn’t tweak us for more than a few minutes.
When something is purely change, then we might have a few minutes of disgruntled or confusion or forgetting, but soon enough we’re acclimated. We buy a different lip balm, we remember to stop at the light, we enjoy the new garment.
When change affects our sense of who we are or who we could be, however, it’s more than change – it’s called transition. Change is external, but transition is internal, and transition is really hard.
Lots of transition
Transition is hard whether the change is something you want (you got a tenure track job! Yay!) or something you don’t want (you’re considering leaving academia). Transition shows up whenever we have to reconceptualize who we are to ourselves.
Did I mention it’s hard? It’s hard. It’s always hard. And that means that, if you’re going through transition right now and it’s hard? Totally normal.
Varieties of hard
Regardless of whether or not you think the change is a good one, the first thing that happens in transition is loss and grief. Why? Because you’re leaving a part of yourself behind, and that part had a lot of good things about it.
For example, however much we might all be ready to be done with graduate school already, there’s a lot of security in being in a situation where someone else has made the rules and we’re just playing the game. There’s a lot of security in having an advisor. There’s a lot of security to being in the same place we’ve lived for half a dozen years.
But now, no matter what happens next, we’re graduating, and we’re losing all of those points of security. Even if you’re excited about where you’re going, that part will be hard.
After the loss and grief comes what William Bridges calls “the neutral zone,” but that’s much too nice a term. No, what comes next is the wilderness. What comes next is the underworld. What comes next is not knowing what the hell you’re doing or how this transition and change is going to manifest.
In the wilderness, you’re a beginner again. You’re lost, you’re confused, and you’re trying to get your bearings. Maybe you’re trying to find your balance as a professor. Maybe you’re learning how to get along outside of academia. Wherever you are, it’s new and it’s unfamiliar and it’s scary.
And after the wilderness comes the new beginning – the new identity, the new situation, the new you. Even if it’s a transition you didn’t want to experience, this part comes with its own rewards in the form of relief, of feeling more secure, of maybe even being a little bit excited about where you are.
In other words, it’s all normal
Rage, grief, exasperation, impatience, fear, hope, curiosity, despair – they’re all totally and perfectly normal when you’re going through transition. They are exactly what you’re supposed to be feeling.
They are not a sign that things are wrong. They are not a sign that you should go back (which you can’t do anyway). They are not a sign that you’re messing it up.
They are, in fact, a sign that you’re right where you’re supposed to be.
Transition isn’t fun. At all. But it comes with the territory of being human, and it’s what we go through when we change and grow.
And knowing that it’s normal to be sad that you’re leaving behind something you’ve decided you don’t want can help you stop beating yourself up or second-guessing yourself. Knowing it’s normal to be lost and confused and feel helpless can help you stop panicking and trust the process. Knowing it’s normal to get a little excited at your new prospects even though you didn’t want this change at all can help you stop the self-recrimination.
You’re doing it just right. I promise.
Most of us thought we’d spend our whole lives in academia. So when it turns out we won’t — whether we learn that we don’t want to, don’t get a job that actually pays the bills, or hit a roadbump along the way — it feels particularly craptastic. This is true even if we’re planning to stay but are having to rethink our relationship to academia. So this is a space for talking about the kinds of things that come up for people and how we can move past them.
Have you heard this one?
Something I hear frequently when I talk to people is some variation on the following: “Well, I shouldn’t feel so bad – at least I got a job.” Without fail, people will dismiss their own pain because someone else in the world has it worse.
By that logic, only the person who has it the absolute worst in the whole entire world is entitled to his or her pain. Given that the world’s population is now somewhere north of 6 billion, that means somewhere on the order of … 6 billion people should just suck it up.
This is not the Pain Olympics
We are not in competition for who has it the worst. And we are entitled to our pain no matter how small, how petty, or how much worse off we could imagine ourselves being.
Sure, it’s good to remember, every now and again, just how freaking privileged we all are, on the whole.
But just because we’re privileged in many, many ways doesn’t mean we don’t experience pain or that our pain isn’t legitimate.
Also? It doesn’t work
I don’t know about you, but when someone says to me, in the face of something I’m struggling with, that at least I’m not living in a hovel in Mumbai / I didn’t lose a baby / I’m not being raped in a war zone / put your favorite “worst” here, however gracious and polite I am on the outside, I pretty much just want to punch them in the nose.
On the odd occasion when I somehow take it into my head to say it to myself, I want to punch myself in the nose.
Because saying such things neither makes us feel better nor helps us deal with the very real pain we’re experiencing.
What they do is make us feel ashamed of our pain, of our struggle, of our complaining, of, yes, our whining. The not-so-secret message is that our pain doesn’t matter.
Our pain does matter
Sometimes, no matter how privileged we are, things suck. We didn’t get the job we wanted. We didn’t have the defense we had hoped for. We didn’t win the scholarship or the grant or the award. Our parents get sick or our kid gets sick or our dog dies or our car is totaled in an accident.
Every pain is legitimate. Every one. Even yours.
And in fact, when we are able to legitimize our pain, when we’re able to take it seriously and recognize it as a sign that something is wrong, then we can respond. Acknowledging our pain creates the space for making change.
So the next time you’re tempted to dismiss your own pain and your own struggle, stop. Acknowledge to yourself that you’re hurting. Acknowledge that it’s okay, even if it doesn’t feel okay. Notice what a difference it makes, to your own mood and to your ability to transform the pain into something else, something that might even, after a while, feel better.
Most of us thought we’d spend our whole lives in academia. So when it turns out we won’t — whether we learn that we don’t want to, don’t get a job that actually pays the bills, or hit a roadbump along the way — it feels particularly craptastic. This is true even if we’re planning to stay but are having to rethink our relationship to academia. So this is a space for talking about the kinds of things that come up for people and how we can move past them.
A month or so ago, I was in my wife’s hometown attending my father-in-law’s memorial service. It went the way you expect these things to go, except for one small thing: My father-in-law taught in the same university department in which I earned my doctorate, and approximately a dozen of his colleagues — and my former professors — were there.
Cue the vague discomfort
Now, it was a department that very much operated around Old Guard v. Young Turk lines, so most of the people I worked most closely with were not, in fact, present that day. But one woman had been the head of the composition program for most of my graduate school career, and one gentleman had screwed up my entire year’s masters’ exam, and another ran the writing center when I put in my hours trying to help undergraduates pass their English classes.
And most of the rest I recognized and they recognized me, because you can only wander the same hallways for a few years without the indelible feeling of “I know that person.”
Somewhere near the end, I stood talking with a few of the MFA faculty, who asked me what I was doing now. I told them the short version of the saga (tenure-track position, didn’t like it, decided to leave), and one of them looked at me very seriously and told me that I had been very brave.
Brave? Really?
I thanked her, and the conversation moved on, but in my head I was thinking, That wasn’t bravery. That was desperation. That was saving my own life.
But I’ve been turning it over in my head since that day, and now I think she was right. But so was I.
Bravery and desperation — I’m not sure there’s much distinction there. We do what we have to do because we are at the end of our ropes, because we do need to save our own lives. But that doesn’t mean valuing our own lives and making the hard choices isn’t brave.
You, too, are brave
If you have ever confronted your own unhappiness in academia, you are brave. If you have thought about leaving, you are brave. If you’ve tried to figure out how to improve the situation you’re in, you’re brave. If you’ve contemplated finding a new career, you’re brave.
It probably doesn’t feel that way. But the safe course — the easy course, in many ways — would be to become cynical and jaded and deeply angry about the state of things and yet to accept it all as your due. To do anything else — to question, to explore, to problem-solve, to admit — is deeply, passionately brave.
And when you’re feeling desperate, remember that desperation is another form of bravery.
A few comments about comments
The whole question of being unhappy in academia — no matter what stage you’re in — can feel fraught. If you’d like to comment but are feeling shy about “being out there,” feel free to make up a persona or comment anonymously. You can also email me directly.
First-time commenters are always moderated (because you wouldn’t believe the spam I get), so if your comment doesn’t show up immediately, hang tight! Chances are, I’m not right on my email.
And most of all, let’s all practice compassion for ourselves and others in this difficult time and space.
One of the hardest parts of deciding to leave academia from graduate school is telling your adviser.
After all, they’ve devoted (hopefully) countless hours to supporting your transition from baby-student to proto-scholar. Your academic success depends on their approval and satisfaction. For better or worse, the adviser often becomes something of a parent figure — less fraught, perhaps, but no less weighty.
All of that means that contemplating telling them brings up lots of gunk: shame about choosing to leave, fear about their reaction, maybe even anger about their part in your being where you are and needing to leave.
Why you need to do it anyway
Assuming your adviser isn’t an abusive asshole (and if they are, you can mostly ignore everything I’m about to say), there are several reasons it’s a good idea to tell them.
They need to know. Since they are, in some administrative sense, “responsible” for you, they need to know that you’re disappearing and that it’s because you’re choosing to leave, not because you’ve had a horrible accident and can’t answer your phone or email.
They need to know why. You won’t be the only student of theirs who questions academia. If they understand why you’re choosing to leave, they’ll be better able to advise future students.
They might be helpful. Although we tend to view our advisers primarily through academic lenses, they are, like us, fully-articulated people with lives that go beyond their office doors. They may know someone. They may be able to connect you with someone else who once did what you’re doing.
You need closure. Unresolved relationships feel pretty terrible. Whatever else your adviser is, they’re someone you have a real relationship with, good, bad, or indifferent. Giving that relationship (or that phase of the relationship) a period frees up your head to think about the future instead of about the past.
How to deal with the gunk
Like I said, knowing it probably needs to be done doesn’t make it any easier. There will likely be Big Feelings. This is totally normal.
The best way I know of to deal with Big Feelings is to uncover and examine them. Yes, it’s scary. But it also makes them much less powerful.
We often resist uncovering our deep-seated shame and fear and anger because we’re afraid they’ll take over. We’re afraid we’ll never get back out. We’re afraid they (and by extension we) are irrational or silly. But every feeling we have is rooted in a real, true, human need — for safety, for acceptance, for autonomy, for creativity. In other words, even if the form of the feeling is silly, the feeling itself never is.
Uncovering and examining is a two part process. First, you write down as much as you can — what are all of the fears or beliefs or whatevers attached to this feeling? Second, you ask yourself questions about each and every one of the fears and beliefs. Is it true? What’s the evidence that it’s likely to happen? What would you or could you do if it did happen?
By doing this, you bring things into the light and you connect to your own capacity to handle things. The combination of demystifying the dark and realizing that even if something terrible happened, you’d be okay (you aren’t going to die a pauper in a box next to the river, for example) helps make everything seem a little more manageable.
Make a plan
Figuring out a few things ahead of time will make the whole experience less scary and more doable.
- What do you need to in order to help you have this conversation in a good way? What will help you feel calm and centered and strong going in? Maybe you need to meditate first. Maybe you need a friend to remind you of all the reasons you’re doing this. Maybe you need to write everything down. Maybe you need to role play it so you aren’t having to think on your feet. Do whatever you need to.
- What is your goal and how will you achieve it? Sure, your goal is to tell your adviser, but are there other goals along with that? Often, we secretly want people to agree with us or approve of our choice — and that’s a goal you can have, but one that’s less under your control. Maybe your goal is to get out without crying. Maybe your goal is to provide feedback on the department. Maybe your goal is to reassure your adviser. Focus as much as possible on goals you can control, rather than goals that involve trying to make someone else do or feel something.
- What do you need to recover? No matter how well it goes, it’s going to be a wee bit stressful. So plan on ways to take care of yourself afterwards. Maybe you need time by yourself. Maybe you need a good cry. Maybe you need a drink with a friend. Maybe you need a run. Whatever you need, plan ahead so you can have what you need.
A few things to remember
Their reaction, whatever it is, goes far beyond you and this conversation.Like everyone else, they’ve got a lot going on in their lives, and their reaction is going to draw on all of that — most of which has nothing whatsoever to do with you.
Their reaction doesn’t determine whether or not your leaving is a good idea for you. Your adviser, however brilliant, doesn’t know the whole of you, and he or she cannot predict the future. You’re a much better judge of what should happen in your life than they are.
It’s going to be okay. However they respond, whatever happens next, you are going to be okay. It might not be fun, but in the end, it will be okay. As a favorite signature line of mine says, if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.
Those of you who’ve left, what advice would you give people about telling their advisers? What helped you?
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