Escape the Ivory Tower

Sometimes academia is like a soggy potato chip

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.

Two weeks until our next class!

Two weeks from today, Jo VanEvery and I are starting another round of our Choosing Your Career Consciously course. If you’re wondering what, besides academia, you could do with your life, we’d love for you to join us.

We started the class because we kept encountering smart, talented, skilled people who were convinced that they weren’t worth anything outside of academia. They’d say they had no experience or training or ability to do anything else, and so they felt either doomed to stay or completely at sea out there in the non-academic world.

But they aren’t doomed to stay in academia, nor were they actually rudderless in the non-academic world. And neither are you.

Academia can make us believe that it’s the only job we’re fit for, that it’s the only place that will make us happy. Occasionally, that’s true. But only occasionally. Most of the time, in fact, there’s a whole set of interesting, fulfilling, compelling, righteous jobs and careers that you would rock.

Finding that set, though, that’s where people get stuck. And that’s what this class addresses. We help you figure out what you have to offer, what kinds of jobs and situations you’re actually interested in, and where those jobs might be hiding.

If you’re considering leaving academia but don’t know what else you could possibly do, join us for this six-week class. We would love to help you find out. Just click here to find out more and sign up.

Questions? Drop us a line at joandjulie@joandjulie.com and we’ll get them answered.

It’s not just what do you want to do, but where do you want to do it

One of the challenges I run into with people as we’re talking about what they might want to do next in their professional lives is this: We don’t actually know very much about the kinds of jobs that exist out there in the world.

We’re also facing a lack of familiarity with all the different things a given company or organization will need in order to fulfill their mission.

So, for instance, we’ll think an accounting firm only hires accountants, or chefs only work at restaurants, or fitness people only work at gyms.

But really, that accounting firm needs lawyers and writers and marketers and techies and coders and managers and business strategists and HR professionals and office people to make the day-to-day go.

Chefs work in restaurants, sure, but they also work in hotels, and airlines, and food manufacturers, and big companies, and for high-net-worth individuals. Fitness people work for gyms, and individuals, and companies, and hotels, and hospitals, and rehabilitation centers.

In other words, there are two separate but related pieces to figuring out what you want comes next: the kind of work you want to do, and the kind of organization in which you want to do it.

It’s easy to conflate them

Because many jobs have an industry that goes with them, it’s easy to conflate the two. But what happens then is that I hear people say things like, well, I want to do the work of consulting, but I hate all the consulting firms. Or, I love higher-level math, but I’d shoot myself in the head if I had to do actuarial stuff.

People dismiss the work they would love to do because they have a limited understanding of the contexts in which they could do that work.

The reality is that there are very few jobs that have only one context, one industry, one type of organization in which they exist. In fact, as I’m sitting here trying to think of some, I’m coming up blank.

So if you really don’t think a giant for-profit is for you, then look for something small and quirky. If you don’t think government work is for you, check out non-profits. If you hate suits and cubicles, look for a company that lets you go to work in jeans and flip-flops or that lets you work from home or whatever.

Whatever you want to do, chances are there’s a position out there in an organization you’d love to work for. The trick is figuring out both parts – what you want to do and where you’d like to do it – so that you can go out looking for that position.

Figuring out what you might like to do and where you might like to do it is some of what Jo VanEvery and I cover in our Choosing Your Career Consciously course. We’re starting another round of this 6-week course on June 12 – click here to learn more.

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