A year in reflection
Happy solstice, everyone. In this time of reflection on yet another challenging year for everyone, I wanted to take time to process and digest one positive that came out of this year.
If I were to summarize my year, it has been the year of reconnecting with and trusting my gut.
My gut is telling me to write out my career transition process and reflection.
This year, I was at the end of a fancy three-year postdoc and I found myself at a crossroads: take a really prestigious one-year postdoc and go back on the job market for the fifth time or take a non-academic job. Spoiler: I took a non-academic job.
Since I can remember, I’ve been overriding my gut and trusting my brain. Surely logic wins over any kind of irrational gut feeling. I felt those voices in my brain pulling me towards the postdoc. I heard that inner voice saying you would be silly to not take this. This is so prestigious. Many people would do anything for this postdoc. What are you waiting for? You just have to hold on one more year and you’ll get a tenure-track job. And yet when presented with a non-academic job, I felt butterflies in my stomach and relief that I could have some semblance of job security in a place I wanted to live.
I’ve decided to share my story because I’ve also been reading what are essentially SOS messages from academics at all levels, from PhD candidates about to embark on the job market, to long-time adjuncts, to tenured professors. While we all have different orientations to academic power and privilege, we all share many characteristics in common: burnout, constant hustling, hopelessness, stress, anxiety, exhaustion, depression, underappreciation, invalidation, frustration… and the list goes on.
There are a lot of blog posts, articles, books, and Twitter threads with advice and opinions about the logistics of how to make the transition. My goal in these posts is to reflect on the how and why of my decision-making process; what I thought, and how I felt in order to get to where I am today: three months into a non-academic job and trying to keep some of my academic projects alive. Honestly, I haven’t taken the time to process this year, so this is my way of working through the year!
Let me be upfront about a couple of things. I did not fully quit academia. Instead, I’m looking to pursue a hybrid career where my day job differs from my academic work. In times of distress, we look for beacons of definitive truth who give you all of the answers. Unfortunately, I’m not here to tell you how to do things. Nor am I here to engage in toxic positivity by telling you that it’s all roses and sunshine once you leave. I can’t give you a listicle of the five ways to leave academia. Changing careers is hard work, terrifying, risky, uncomfortable, frustrating, and a reality check.
So, if you’re looking for an honest, messy (because what in life isn’t messy?), and personal account of how I switched tracks, you’re in the right place. I only hope these posts can provide you some semblance of validation in a sea of invalidation, and perhaps these posts can be a reprieve from the overwhelming knots in your stomach and fuzziness in your brain.
Here’s to a 2022 of trusting our guts.
