Escape the Ivory Tower

How can you tell if you should leave academia?

When you’re unhappy in academia, it can be hard to tell what your misery means. Is it a sign that this career isn’t for you? Is it a sign you need to shift something within your institution or discipline or career? Is it a sign you need to take better care of yourself?

And just to make things more complicated, it could mean more than one of these things. Maybe you  need more self-care AND you need to get off that one committee that makes you dread going to the office. Charming, no?

So how can you tell if you need to hit the road or “just” make some changes? Here are a few ways to tell the difference.

Think back to your last break, whether it was summer or a real vacation or a sabbatical or any time that didn’t have regular commitments of time outside of yourself. After you had a bit of time to decompress, what did it feel like to think about doing work? Were you dreading it? Avoiding it? Excited about it? If you dreaded it even after you got some sleep, then something about this job is not right. If you got excited, then for heaven’s sake, work on better self-care!

Think about each component of your job separately: Your research, your undergraduate teaching, your graduate teaching, your advising work, your administrative work, each and every committee you’re on. As you contemplate each one, really tune in to how you feel physically and emotionally. What patterns do you see? What do those patterns suggest?

If you adore teaching and research, maybe you need to rethink your service work. If you like teaching but hate research right now, does it feel any different to contemplate a different project? Do different kinds of teaching feel different? (I, personally, hated teaching graduate seminars, despite the fact that they were what we were all “supposed” to want to teach.) Maybe a different mix of teaching would work better for you, or a different institution with different students. If you hate teaching altogether, however, academia might not be the right place for you.

Imagine your perfect day: Where do you wake up, what is the environment like, what do you do next? Dream your way through a whole, perfect, everyday-day, and see what comes up. Does anything about it look like your current life? If so, what are the parts you want to keep and what do you want to get rid of? If not, what do you want instead?

Inventory your extracurriculars. What do you do when you’re not working? Do you spend time with a partner, with kids, with friends? Do you have hobbies? Are there things you want to be doing but “can’t” because your work has taken over your life? Academia, like many things, expands to fill the time available to it, and that wonderful time flexibility means there aren’t any external structures to help you keep it within reasonable bounds. If you’re miserable and your job is taking over your life, try setting aside real time for non-job-related fun and see if you feel better. It’s easy to resent even the perfect job if it isn’t leaving room for other things you love.

Get rid of the shoulds. If you take a break from telling yourself what you “should” do, what do you WANT to do? Does anything on your to-do list sound fun? We spend so much time learning by watching in this career that it can be hard to notice what we need to make this work for us. Maybe your colleague can grade four papers a day and get them all done efficiently, while you really just need to set aside five hours in front of Glee reruns. If that’s your way, having “grade 4 papers” on your to-do list every bleeping day will likely make you want to stab your eyes out. And that will affect everything else.

You “should” serve on committees, you “should” contribute, you “should” teach a certain way, you “should” write a certain kind of essay — what happens if you drop the stories?

At the end of the day, there’s no one thing that will tell you whether you should stay or go or how to fix what’s wrong. But by accumulating evidence, paying attention to yourself, and refraining from “should”ing  yourself into someone else’s life, you’ll get some clues — and maybe even a whole path.

The problem of careers

There’s this myth we have about the importance of careers. We have this idea that our working life is supposed to be coherent and progressive, that it should continually rise towards a pinnacle (full professorship, an X- or C-level corporate job, directorship of a non-profit) that indicates that We Have Made It, that We Are Good And Worthy People. A career indicates expertise and gravitas, “settling down” and “growing up,” all at the same time.

In short, we should have one. But only one.

Now, I’ve got nothing but respect for people who’ve known since they were small what they want to do and who have experienced fulfillment and joy and all of that from that very same career. Power to them! But that’s not what happened in my life. And it’s not what happened in the lives of many people I know.

Many of us fell into careers instead of choosing them. I, for example, went to graduate school because I loved learning, not because I had the faintest idea what being a professor actually entailed. A dear friend of mine got an entry-level job after college in a mailroom to pay the rent and later became VP of that same organization, without necessarily ever having an ambition for international development. An acquaintance got a part-time job telemarketing in college and now runs a division of that company.

But once you have a career, however it came about, it’s not just a job — it’s part of who you are. After all, “what do you do?” is one of the first things we ask new adult aquaintances, and we often conflate the answer with the person. We say, “She’s a lawyer,” or “He runs a non-profit,” instead of “She’s a rock-climber” or “He’s an amazing wildlife photographer.”

In my experience it’s even worse in places like academia, where there’s the combination of a long training period and an explicit working identity at the end of it. When everyone around you is an academic — when your friends, picked up through the slog of graduate school, are academics; when your social life in College Town is all other academics — and when you have put in years of explaining to family just what it means to be an academic (no, we don’t get summers off!), well, it can be really, really hard to realize that this career you have, this identity you’ve taken on, does not make you happy.

And because it’s not just a job, but a career, an identity, it’s easy to move from “I’m unhappy” to “WTF is wrong with me?”

The answer is: nothing. If the career you’re in right now is making you unhappy, nothing is wrong with you. This just isn’t the career for you.

But the myth of The One Career helps keep us stuck exactly where we are, because the very idea of “becoming an accountant” or “becoming a professional photographer” or “becoming a radio talk-show host” all seem so very daunting, so very large. “It’s years of training!” “Do you know how long it would take to get to this level in that career?” And so we suck it up and continue being miserable in this career we have, because examining and changing our identity around work is hard, scary, and frankly, not modeled very many places.

If you’re in that position, if you’re miserable in the career you’re in, instead of thinking in terms of a career, try thinking in terms of the kind of tasks and work environment that make you deeply happy — “doing” instead of “becoming.” Do you love working with people? Do you like involving your whole body in your work? Do you need to be outside? Do you enjoy regular hours, or do you want to work at 11pm? Do you want a mission-based job, or do you like to go home and put work away?

The bottom line is this: You don’t need a career. Think about that. You don’t need a career, which is, after all, an external story about success that has nothing to do with you and your experience. You need a job you enjoy and that pays the bills so you can be your whole self. That’s all.

And then, when people ask you “what do you do?” you can tell them you’re a rock-climbing, book-reading, trivia-loving movie buff — and mean it.

On the virtues of quitting

Tom Magliozzi is one of my heros.

You might know him as one of the brothers who does Click & Clack, the classic car fix-it talk show on NPR. But have you ever read his bio?

This guy has quit careers in industry, in executive training, and in academia — all because, at the end of the day, he didn’t enjoy it. He wanted to avoid what he called the big W — anything that felt like work — and he did. Repeatedly.

I can only imagine the horror stories the people around him trotted out to convince him that all of this quitting was a bad idea — you’ll never work again, you’ll be homeless, you’ll never amount to anything, don’t you want to DO something with your life?

But, at least in his retelling, he blithely went ahead with all of the quitting because his lived experience mattered to him. And it’s clear that honoring his actual lived experience — not the social story about that experience, but how he actually felt about it — has not only led him to a life he enjoys, he’s gotten to have fun all along the way trying things out.

Too few of us follow his example — what with the naysayers in our heads and out of them.

Yes, it’s hard to imagine quitting a career we’ve put time into even though we don’t enjoy it, because we imagine just doing the same damn thing again — years of struggle and hard work to get to the point of not enjoying it. But what people like Tom Magliozzi show us is that it isn’t always like that, and quitting the thing we don’t like makes room for the thing we do like. Better yet, it makes room for the thing we love.

So think about your lived experience — is there a part of it, maybe to do with academia or maybe not, that you experience as boring, deadening, eternally frustrating, exhausting? Consider quitting.

Maybe it won’t happen today, or even tomorrow, but if you’re unhappy, consider quitting. And imagine what could grow in its place.

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