Posts tagged as:

career change

What to do with those proverbial lemons

December 4, 2009 · 0 comments

I was just reading about Films That Move, a film series staged here in Toronto that:

creates a friendly space to bring people together and share ways to make our communities better.

We invite people of all ages and backgrounds to our free movie screenings. This includes education, non-profit, communications and government communities – all are welcome.

Each screening features a community focus, and provides opportunities to participate in sustainable partnership.

The film they’re screening next week is called Lemonade, about advertising professionals who got laid off and subsequently turned their lives around. I haven’t seen it, but I’m a sucker for inspirational shiz like this, so I thought it was appropriate for a Friday posting.

Have a good weekend, all!

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Tagged as: career change

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Post-academic careers for scientists

August 27, 2009 · 0 comments

in Miscellany

Some people have asked me — in very kind terms, of course –what qualifies me to work with people who are coming from scientific fields, when I was trained as a mere social scientist. My reply is that science folk are looking for answers just as much as humanities and social science people, and my approach — to not feel constricted by your disciplinary background — seems to suit them.

But a reader at Brazen Careerist sent me a link that the scientists among you probably will appreciate quite a lot. It’s called Uncertain Principles: Physics, Politics, Pop Culture. You’ll find there are a number of transcripts of interviews with scientists working outside of academe (and no, they’re not all in big pharma, either). The non-scientists among us can also glean some stories of how networking, luck and timing played in their career trajectories.

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Tagged as: career change, science

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Looking for a flexible work schedule? You can find it–or create it.

July 2, 2009 · 3 comments

in How To

I got an email last week from someone who asked me a question I didn’t know the answer to, so I thought I would throw it out to the readers to see if any of you have any insights.

The Ph.D. who asked me this question has, since graduating, worked as an adjunct/sessional teacher. Though she has an impressive CV, her decision to live near her family has limited her ability to apply for jobs far from home. As a result, she is considering leaving academia. But, she writes:

I have a pretty big obstacle standing between me and the Outside World: I have a hidden physical disability that makes going into a workplace five days a week impossible. College teaching, on its every-other-day class schedule, allowed me to excel at my job without becoming ill or having to say “no” to employers’ expectations.

I had tried other professions before grad school, and despite good health care and a stabilized condition, I couldn’t work within the 9 to 5, Monday to Friday parameters. Are there job placement offices or career advisors for a situation like this, and how do I find them?

I told the reader I knew of no particular career resources for people with disabilities. All I could suggest was the obvious, which she had already looked into (you know, the campus career centre, the office for persons with disabilities). So the first question to you, the readers, is whether anyone knows of job offices or career advisors who specialize in persons with disabilities.

Our email conversation then moved on to trying to identify forms of work that don’t involve the 9 to 5 life. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view), a movement towards flexible labour (read: part-time, contract, home-based, etc.) is the way the job market appears to be going these days. Isn’t that what Time Magazine just said?

The help-seeker said she had tried consulting and entrepreneurial enterprises when she was younger, but her health and the trials of job searching has made it difficult to cobble together the work that being self-employed requires. Moreover, she likes working with and for people. She also said:

I just wish I could simply show up at a stable, humane place and “serve.” You know what I mean?

Reading this, my suggestion was for her to

Pinpoint some organizations that are in need of people showing up and serving, and see if you’d be interested in working for them. If you made some cold calls (gulp!) and did some information interviews, you could find out from people what kind of flexibility those organizations offer (like telecommuting). If you found work with a place that let you work part of the time at home, perhaps that would be a way for you to manage your disability.

When she replied, she said she’d like to first know more about what kinds of industries have flexible scheduling and hire Ph.D.s. These are, of course, two different questions. Here’s my take on the first.

Some job ads will actually specify that some of the work is done virtually, aka, no need to come into the office; you interface with co-workers and/or clients from home via the web. I actually just helped a client write a resume and cover letter for a job in Washington that stated that much of the work was done virtually. So it’s a good idea to keep an eye open for language like that (”flex-time available,” “virtual work environment,” stuff like that) when you’re scanning job ads.

But in some cases, that kind of working arrangement is negotiated between an employer and employee. Sometimes this negotiation will happen once you’re already working for a company or organization. When my crack I.T. team was still working for the big I.T. company, he had orchestrated a routine work-from-home arrangement. A friend of mine who’s a former academic works in an office in the recruitment sector, and she has been able to make occasional arrangements to work from home; she also gets Friday afternoons off in the summer time.

But in other cases, it can happen prior to even starting the job. I have a friend, for example, who negotiated a 4-day work week with her previous two employers. She did this simply because she hates the 5-day work week; she is a more efficient and happy worker at 4 days. The negotiation occurred when the job offer was in hand and they had gotten down to salary negotiations. With the first job, she ended up actually working the equivalent of a 5-day week because of the time she put in on the weekends. With her current position, though, her 4-day week is actually a 4-day week.

So to answer the first question (who offers flexible arrangements?), my take is: potentially anyone, if you ask them at the right time and in the right way (by “the right way,” I mean, “by spinning it to their advantage,” in terms of lower costs, increased efficiency, etc.). On this, I’m going to quote from that Time magazine article:

More and more, companies are searching for creative ways to save – by experimenting with reduced hours or unpaid furloughs or asking employees to move laterally.

At Deloitte, each employee’s lattice is nailed together during twice-a-year evaluations focused not just on career targets but also on larger life goals. An employee can request to do more or less travel or client service, say, or to move laterally into a new role – changes that may or may not come with a pay cut. Deloitte’s data from 2008 suggest that about 10% of employees choose to “dial up” or “dial down” at any given time. Deloitte’s Mass Career Customization (MCC) program began as a way to keep talented women in the workforce, but it has quickly become clear that women are not the only ones seeking flexibility. Responding to millennials demanding better work-life balance, young parents needing time to share child-care duties and boomers looking to ease gradually toward retirement, Deloitte is scheduled to roll out MCC to all 42,000 U.S. employees by May 2010. Deloitte executives are in talks with more than 80 companies working on similar programs.

…The recession provides an incentive for companies to design more lattice-oriented careers. Studies show telecommuting, for instance, can help businesses cut real estate costs 20% and payroll 10%.

To me, the task of finding work that interests you and uses your skills is about seeking out (or, the case of entrepreneurship, creating) that work specifically. While you are at the research stage, it is useful to know who hires Ph.D.s (and you can start with this list here). But the fact of the matter is that there are ABDs and Ph.D.s everywhere, in every sector, at every pay scale. Thousands of people earn Ph.D.s and don’t get tenure track positions. They scatter to places that interest them. So that’s why I urge people to do the same: look for work in fields that interest you. Then find out (through applying, networking, information interviews, studying the web site, etc.) whether or not particular organizations can cater to your needs (physical, emotional, mental, geographical), etc.

What kind of requirements do you have of a post-academic job? What steps have you taken to ensure those needs are met? And what companies have you found hire Ph.D.s?

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Tagged as: career change, disabilities, flextime

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A Canada Day link roundup

July 1, 2009 · 5 comments

in Career planning

It’s Canada Day here north of the 49th parallel. I know that when I was a grad student, every day was a work day, including civic holidays. Now that I’m out of academia, plus self-employed, plus a mom, I carve out very deliberate boundaries with my time (this has sometimes been difficult for people who would rather I conducted business outside of my M-F, 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 pm work schedule!).

Because today is a holiday, I’m going to be hanging out with my crack I.T. team and our child, trying to find a fun activity to do out of the impending rain. But I offer to you a collection of links sent in from readers this week:

This New York Times story on the English prof who became a nurse (a possible future podcast interview!)
A 10-year-old Chronicle story on converting your CV into a résumé that still mostly holds water (which reminded me of Beyond Academe’s piece on the same topic)
Jo Van Every’s post on careers in policy research

Happy Canada Day, Canadians!

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Tagged as: career change, CV to resume

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Former academic rock star becomes union organizer–during the recession!

June 30, 2009 · 0 comments

in Inspiration

Last week, I received a wonderful email from one of my readers–one who said he’d visited the Leaving Academia site many times in the middle of the night when overwhelmed with doubt. His email was so great that I asked his permission to run part of it here. Call it this week’s dose of inspiration (and a rejoinder to those who believe changing careers during a recession is a bad idea).

This happy academic ex-pat wrote to tell me that, earlier in the spring, he had quit his six-year long academic career when he was about a year away from earning his Ph.D. Like so many others, he wrote, he was ABD but found himself stalled after exams. He and his partner discussed how miserable academia was making him, and together, they decided he should quit. But right around the same time, he had also gotten involved in getting the graduate teaching assistants at his university organized and into a union. Once he decided to quit, he writes, he informed his committee:

“They were shocked that someone ‘like me’ would leave when I had, according to them, such a promising career ahead of me. They were worried I’d never find a job given the economy. (I was tempted to joke that being in grad school isn’t a job, but more like an insult; of course that isn’t true. The insult is the treatment and pay).

I told them that for six years I had felt like a failure, like none of my projects were coming to fruition, and critically, that my work and contributions were in no way valued by the department, my colleagues, or the university. And as for the job, it wouldn’t take much to replace the puny salary they were paying me [...]

Within four days in mid June, I was offered THREE union organizing jobs, including the dream job I thought I’d never land, in a place I’ve fantasized about living for ten years. I’m starting work soon, and can’t wait. I’ll be paid nearly five times what I’ve been making for the past six years, in addition to a generous benefits package for myself and my partner. I’m going to get to do work that is important, enjoyable, and challenging. My employers value my experience and potential to contribute to their organization. Wow, that was so easy!”

I wanted to run this man’s story because I thought it was such a great example of how much one’s bravery can pay off. It also points to the ways in which our “sideline” activities–in this case, union organizing–can become a full-time gig, even if it has little direct connection to your area of study. It also shows that, no matter how much of an academic whiz you are, academia still may not be the thing that satisfies and nurtures you. It says a lot about confronting those powerful feelings of failure, disenchantment and insecurity on the road to something better. Of course, it also shows the importance of having a supportive partner who’s willing to demonstrate a lot of flexibility in the face of a career change and a move, and not everyone is in that situation. And, this former academic adds,

“Times are indeed really tough, and that is certainly an obstacle to quitting, but it is hardly the only one. Obviously for me, the biggest obstacle was within myself rather than out there in the world. But I do feel VERY fortunate to have had such good luck with the job search.

I think that is a testament to how the skills we learn in grad school
can help afterward — I was able to think on my feet and give good
interviews, strategically and practically compose an effective resume,
and say with confidence that I have the communication skills necessary for this new gig.”

In a few months, I’m going to follow up with this academic escapee to check in and see how post-academic life is faring for him.

In the meantime, readers, I’d love to hear strategies that you are using to shift into post-academic work. Are you jumping off from your sideline projects and interests? How much do you think luck plays a role in finding work? Are you doing anything in particular to create luck or opportunity for yourself?

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Tagged as: career change, leaving, union

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Longing to leave academia and be an agent of social change?

June 25, 2009 · 1 comment

in Career planning

One thing that’s been obvious to me since I started this project was how much the academics I’m in touch with having a longing to be relevant and useful in the world. So many of us have gone into higher education because we thought the world needed more great ideas, or because teaching was a way of creating social change, or because we ourselves wanted to understand the world’s problems better before trying to tackle them.

But when the realities of academic life sink in–that there is little time for activism when funding proposals need to be written, little time to engage students meaningfully when you’re limited to 50 minutes a week of dull curriculum–ambitions to change the world get thwarted. But that longing to make a social contribution doesn’t go away. It just gets buried.

For those who do dream of/think about/consider leaving academia, it’s often that call to be useful in the world that leads the way. Working in isolation on research papers that no one will read is the antithesis, for many, of making a social contribution. As a result, I hear from clients and blog readers who are looking for the right kind of work where they can make an impact (right now, actually, I’m working with two different U.S. clients who are applying for really cool sounding jobs that are precisely in the field of knowledge mobilization, even though that phrase isn’t explicitly used in the job ads).

Some people look to the government (local, provincial/state, federal) to do that kind of work. Others look to think tanks. Some try entrepreneurship. And there are gobs of grassroots nonprofits and highflying NGOs, too. (NB: If you’re Canadian and are interested in this kind of work, check out CharityVillage.com. If you’re American, try out Idealist.org. And if you’re not from North America, please let me know of any resources that serve as clearinghouses for jobs available in the non-profit sector).

Lately, I’ve been hearing more and more about two really interesting areas for people who want to have and make an impact. One is “social innovation” or “social entrepreneurship.” The other is “knowledge mobilization.” Here in Toronto, we have something called the Centre for Social Innovation, an incredible (and incredibly beautiful) shared workspace for over 180 different organizations, each of them committed to creating positive social change. We’re not talking about armchair activists, here–we’re talking about organizations like Bikes Without Borders, the Pembina Institute, and the David Suzuki Foundation. These are the people who put their money where their mouth is and make change happen. They are, in the parlance I am only now learning, change agents.

Social entrepreneurs, I have also learned, are entrepreneurs who are interested in makign a profit, sure–but doing so through social innovation. Their work lies not only in making money, but in creating value like trust, connections, community, capacity-building, and so forth. The first time I’d heard the phrase social entrepreneur was from someone I met at Congress who runs this company.

This brings me to this thing called knowledge mobilization. The more people I talk to about this, the more I learn that either you work in a sector where knowledge mobilization (or knowledge transfer, knowledge exchange, and apparently endless variations on the same) is a given, or you’ve never heard of this crazy thing. When I was at Congress, though, and heard knowledge mobilization defined as “making what we know ready for service or action to build value,” my ears pricked up. How appealing this would be, I thought, to so many of the academics I’m in touch with who have a longing to take their knowledge and research and make it meaningful and useful to the world.

Social innovation and knowledge mobilization are fields that need people who understand the ins and outs of research, but who are interested in applying it to the world. And that might be you. There is so much research that has already been done that could make a difference–but instead, it sits in journals, not being, well, mobilized. Maybe you are someone who could work with others to bring that research to life.

Now, if you’re getting excited about this as a possible career trajectory for yourself, that’s awesome. But I’m going to link to kind of a downer of an article about social entrepreneurship. The only reason why I’m doing that, though, is because although the piece complains that a lot of people are excluded from the “social entrepreneurship club” (and that includes people who don’t have M.B.A.s), the piece (and the comments section) includes a litany of organizations who do this kind of work. It could be a starting place for those who are interested in researching the people and places who have the money to create social change (and perhaps some organizations to avoid). And seriously, in my world, not having an M.B.A. means nothing. With the right networking, the right resume and an endless source of persistence, a Ph.D. can absolutely be leveraged where you’d assume an M.B.A. would be preferred. M’kay? The link to the piece is here.

Have you thought about the path of social innovation? What kinds of foundations or organizations have you researched that appeal to your social justice instincts? Would you ever consider social entrepreneurship for yourself?

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Tagged as: career change, entrepreneurship, jobs, MBA, social change

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If you’re going to quit academia, when should you do it?

May 13, 2009 · 5 comments

in How To

Yesterday I asked, “Should you quit grad school during the recession?” My answer was roughly, “Well, why not?” Related to this is the larger question–which a few people have asked me to post about lately–about timing. If you’re going to quit academia, when should you do it?

To me, the answer is, “Whenever it’s best for you.” How’s that for precision? But seriously, the answer is going to be completely up to you. The major considerations are many: financial (what will you do for an income if you leave at this stage?), career (what field will you switch to?), family (do you need to support family members? Are you all living together?), geographic (will you need/want to move when you quit?), and so forth.

But deciding on the timing of your departure also has to do with the delicate matter of cutting your losses. Calculating losses, though, is an imprecise science because there are so many unknown factors. For example, if you quit after, say, completing your comprehensive exams, are you cutting your losses by sparing yourself years of the gruelling dissertation-writing process (which can be totalled up in dollars, tears, therapists’ bills, damaged relationships, etc.)? Or are you incurring a new loss by not finishing a project you’ve started (an emotional toll) and having to work to explain what you did during those years on a résumé (a potential financial toll)?

Well, the answer is both, isn’t it? When you leave academia–regardless of when you do–you carry around a balance sheet of losses and gains. Gains: a deep relief, a feeling of freedom, a sense that you’ve narrowly escaped something that temporarily had control of your soul. Losses: debt, regret, the struggle to find a new career and life path.

Sometimes, the dividends blur and the gains start to look like losses; the feeling of freedom, for example, can quickly turn into a terrifying landscape of possibility with no clear direction of where to turn. Sometimes the losses look like gains: struggling to find a new life and career path reminds you of how many wonderful interests you have and all of the fun ways you can pursue them.

This is where the matter of the timing of your departure comes in. The dividends of leaving are going to be felt more and less sharply depending on when you jump ship. The longer you stay in your Ph.D. program, your debt load goes up, but so do your credentials. But do those credentials even mean anything to you if you’re depressed, disillusioned and miserable?

For those of you who are thinking of leaving mid-degree, and are tortured by the thought that you’ve wasted your time and money: here’s a timely link to a post Seth Godin wrote earlier this week. I think it’s brilliant, and although he’s not even thinking about grad students when he’s writing this post, it applies perfectly. The post is called “Ignore Sunk Costs.” Among other golden advice, Seth says:

When making a choice between two options, only consider what’s going to happen in the future, not which investments you’ve made in the past. The past investments are over, lost, gone forever. They are irrelevant to the future.

Here’s a breakdown of the balance sheet referring to different stages of leaving. I’d love to hear more thoughts on your analysis of the gains and losses in the comments section. If you…

1. Leave after the M.A. You’ve got yourself a valuable degree with great income-earning potential. But maybe you feel skeptical about your academic prospects, you don’t think you’d enjoy teaching and although you enjoy your research, you don’t feel crazy about doing 5-10 more years of it. So you quit.

Gains: High. You may have some student loans, but this recent report from StatsCan shows there is a 33% wage gap between someone with a B.A. and someone with a Master’s, but someone with a doctorate only earns 8% more than someone with a Master’s.

Costs: Low. Unlike a Ph.D., a master’s makes you feel good about your capabilities.

2. Leave after the first year of your Ph.D. You’ve had a taste of the program, the university, your colleagues and your potential supervisors. Maybe it’s not a good fit, and when you look at the faculty, you’re turned off by the constant search for external funding, the “publish or perish” mentality, and the lack of value placed on family time (like, uh, making one at all). So you quit.

Gains: Medium-high. You’re sparing yourself the time and emotional aggravation and expense of staying in grad school. You can be honest on a resume about what you did with your year.

Costs: Low. Some debt, maybe, and maybe a little bit of “What if…?”

3. Leave around the comps process (before, during or after). When I speak with former academics, this time of intense stress (comprehensive exams are now also called qualifying exams at some schools) can really bring one’s feelings about academia to the forefront. Maybe it’s taking you years to finish your comps, you’re riddled with insecurity, you feel like a total fraud, and you’re on the precipice of clinical depression. So you quit.

Gains: medium-high. Getting out before you lose any more of your precious time, precious money, precious brain cells and spend any more on prescription drugs is really smart. Living in a world where you don’t have to prove yourself through comps fuckin’ rulz.

Costs: medium. Suffering through the comps and STILL leaving without parchment in hand is gonna sting. You will have to explain to employers what it means to be ABD with respect to your transferable skills, which is kinda annoying.

4. Leave during the dissertation stage. Whether you’re struggling to get your proposal done, churn out that first chapter, or finally kick the final chapter to the curb, the dissertation process is a long, emotionally intense, wearing process that can tear down the mental health of the most balanced grad student. Maybe you loathe your topic. Maybe you’re burnt out. Maybe you’re making yourself miserable trying to keep up with the demands to teach, publish, present papers and produce a brilliant 300 page document all at the same time. Maybe you just don’t have it in you anymore. So you quit.

Gains: high. Though departments notoriously do not keep track of their attrition rates, I’ve read research (which I will cite for you in a follow-up post) indicating 50% of social science and humanities doctorates drop out of their programs before finishing. That means you’re in pretty good company among people who decided that life was too short to wait for a satisfying career, to move out of poverty, to save their mental health, or to just figure out that the academic life was not meant for them.

Costs: high. The niggly feelings of “what if?…” or “if only…” might linger for a long, long time. Feeling like a failure–or being worried that other people will see you as a failure–may be very intense. Your possible debt load may amplify feelings of anger, resentment, shame and bitterness. Feeling lost and unsure of how to orient your life is a strong possibility. Struggling with the concept of waste–a waste of your time, money, energy and potential–may stay with you.

5. You leave once you’ve finished the Ph.D. You’re done! Yahoo! But you got what you came for and you are outta there.

Gains: high. Freedom, sweet freedom. Sweet, quaking-at-the-knees, dripping-with-relief freedom.

Costs: medium-high. Severely compromised mental health, a significant debt, relationships that needed some nurturing after long periods of neglect. There is some belief (which I believe is a myth) that having a Ph.D. makes you unemployable.

(NB: Perhaps I’m biased here (since this was the path I chose and I’ve had three years to gain distance from the experience) by seeing the costs as “medium-high” and not “high.” To me, though, the gains far outstripped the costs, in terms of the feeling of freedom, the wild array of life choices I knew I could make, the ability to do the teaching and research and writing that I wanted that wasn’t limited by the classroom, and yes, the satisfaction of having the degree in hand.)

6. Once you’ve done contract/adjunt teaching, done your post-doc or gotten a tenure-track position. It might seem weird to lump these three types of academics into one category, but I’ll explain why below. Even if it’s news to some grad students, people do actually leave secure, tenured positions (Rebecca Stienitz is one of them–here’s her story–and so is Kenny Mostern of “On Being Postacademic” fame–which you can read here. NB: I’ll be interviewing Dr. Mostern and Dr. Stienitz for the podcast series in the next few weeks).

Gains: high. Once you’ve got your Ph.D., you can go anywhere and do anything with confidence. Contract faculty have a lot to gain by landing in a job that actually pays a living wage, and they, along with tenure-track faculty, gain by being able to move to the city of their choice, actually have free time, start a family, make more money, etc.

Costs: low-to-medium. I haven’t been there, and so far I haven’t done any interviews (yet) with people who’ve made this jump. So I am only speculating here. But making a career change at this point just makes a lot of sense to me in the same way that any other career change makes sense. I know someone who used to be an award-winning, professional Irish dancer and is now an IT guy at an art college. I know someone who used to be a professional chef and is now a naturopath. I know someone who used to make giga-bucks at Goldman Sachs and is now a freelance writer living in the English countryside with her young children. I admire people who make crazy career leaps because although there are potential costs (like failing), the gains (like actually being happy and/or satisfied) seem to be so much greater.

What do you think? If you’re going to quit academia, when is the best time to do it? What other factors are there that contribute to your decision? (You can also read a post-doc’s far more brief take on the matter here at Damn Dinosaurs).

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Tagged as: career change, leaving, timing

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Who’s responsible for informing grad students about their career prospects?

May 7, 2009 · 7 comments

in Career planning

If you’re planning on staying in academia, a sometimes-reliable source of good information is the Deans’ Weblog. If you’re planning on leaving, there is an occasional post there that might pertain to you. I’ve learned a lot from this blog, including how compassionate deans can be towards the plight of graduate students. But I was kind of agitated when I came across this post:

In bureaucratic and academic circles, HQP is the acronym for Highly Qualified People (or Personnel if you like). According to Statistics Canada, the definition of an HQP is a person with at least a bachelor’s degree from a university…

The employment record for PhD graduates is also mixed. Fewer than 50% of them will go on to academic jobs of any kind, never mind tenure track positions in research intensive universities, the position for which they are Highly Qualified… In summary, we are training people for careers that don’t have have anywhere near enough capacity to absorb the graduates at the same time as we are unable to attract and retain students for careers that are crying out for people.

As a society, it does not seem like we are doing a very good job of allocating our scarce development resources in a way that is going to get the right mix of HQP. I don’t know what the answer to this might be. But it is clear that we share responsibility with the students themselves. Somewhere, somehow, we have got to do a better job of teaching them how to do their own “due diligence” prior to starting down a path that is going to end with huge debt and poor prospects in their career of choice.

Well, yes and no. Faculty and administrators do need to do a better job of making it clear to prospective and current doctoral students what their job prospects in academia really are. And sure, it is up to students to make sure they have investigated their career options at some point on the way to getting a Ph.D.

But I kind of bristle at the idea that faculty have to teach students how to do that “due diligence,”as though the current problem was that students don’t know how to investigate their career options. To put it like that entirely misses the point by misplacing the burden onto students. The problem is not with the students–it’s with programs (faculty, administrators, institutional inertia) that do nothing but groom students for lives in academia, completely complicit in the fabrication that if you just work hard enough, you will get a tenure-track position.

The fact is, most faculty a) don’t, b) won’t and c) can’t teach students how to do their “due dilligence” regarding the students careers because they haven’t a clue themselves how transportable academic skills are to other industries. Many faculty are also heavily invested in building up their own field of work by grooming their proteges; it would not at all be worth their while to emphasize the difficulties of the academic job market with their students.

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Tagged as: career change, grad school

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What is it about leaving academia that is especially difficult?

April 22, 2009 · 3 comments

in Reflection

Last week’s issue of Toronto’s NOW magazine had an interview with British director Steve McQueen (no, not that Steve McQueen…the one who’s alive and directed Hunger). In it, he said,

At the end of the day, you know, we die. It’s not about money or how much stuff you can take with you–it’s all about what you do. As long as I can pay my mortgage, I’m happy–it’s as simple as that. Therefore we can take risks, because what else is there? There’s nothing else to do, literally. As long as you can have shelter and you can eat and you’ve some clothes on your back, what else is there to do but to take risks?

I thought this was really inspiring for Leaving Academia readers…until I remembered that when you’re considering a career change, it’s not just about self-actualization. It is precisely about being able to pay the mortgage, have shelter, eat and keep the clothes on your back. Staying in academia as a contract prof makes it very, very difficult to do that, but leaving academia doesn’t promise any of those things, either. Hence the quandary academics face.

But I also read another interview with a different director, published in another local publication about a month ago. This was with Adventureland’s Greg Mottola, who said, “If this film doesn’t work out, there’s literally nothing on this planet I can do well.”

This also echoes the sentiments that so many grad students and scholars feel–if I don’t get a tenure-track job, there is nothing else I can do with my life to support myself. This brought me back to the question I’ve had for years: in what ways is being an academic-leaver different from leaving other types of jobs? What is it about academia that makes it seemingly more wrenching to leave than other careers in other sectors?

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