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.