The 4 Things I Say Repeatedly to People Leaving Academia

As I think I’ve mentioned before, my wife has spent the last few years going through seminary, internship, and all of the accompanying institutional work. From my outsider’s perspective, it’s been remarkably like academia, right down to the vocation, low pay, institutional hurdles, and the mythology.

In the end, she decided that congregational ministry wasn’t for her, and for a while she turned her attention to applying for jobs.

Despite all the conversations we’ve had over the years, she became temporarily convinced that because she wasn’t going to get a job doing what she had trained for (ministry), she was limited to jobs in the fields she’d had before she went back to school: fundraising or telemarketing. The problem was, she didn’t want to go back into fundraising or telemarketing, having left them both for good reasons. Cue the spiral of panic: if she wasn’t going to be a minister, and she didn’t want to do fundraising or telemarketing, she was never going to get a job.

Now, I’ve spent too long talking to people switching careers to believe any of this, but it makes complete sense that it was part of her process

Transition is hard. Transition is destabilizing. Transition is exhausting, which makes things like figuring out the next steps of your life even more challenging. Leaving a career path you trained for, that was part of your identity, is most certainly a transition.

When you’re in the middle of a transition, it can be a challenge not to walk into walls. (No really — coordination goes to shit.) In that context, is it any wonder that trying to think beyond the categories of familiar career paths doesn’t happen naturally?

We eventually had a conversation, my wife and I, in which I told her about all the different jobs my friends do, and reminded her of all the various jobs I’ve done over the years. None of them were the kinds of jobs that emerge linearly from degrees, and none of them were the kinds of jobs it’s easy to know about from the outside. But once we started talking about them, she realized that she could totally do that one! And that one! Okay, not that one, her ability to manage paper is negligible, but the one over there, that involved corralling people? Right up her alley.

This is why I tend to say four things over and over again when I’m working with people who are leaving academia.

1. You have more skills than you think.
2. The best way to find out what jobs actually exist in the world is to ask people what they do and what they like about it.
3. Of course you’re exhausted and grieving, and that is as it should be.
4. Step one is always abundant, luxurious self-care, as much as you can possibly stand.

You’re going to be okay. You’re going to figure it out. And it makes total sense if, along the way, you have a few meltdowns of the “I’m doomed” variety. Not because you are doomed, but because that just seems to be part of the process.