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.
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