Five things I wish I had known, part II: the practical bits of leaving academia
In my last post, I reflected on needing to deal with the five narratives we tell ourselves and/or are told to keep us on the academic hamster wheel. In this post, I want to tackle five practical things I wish I had known last year when I started scrambling for non-academic jobs.
Picture the scene: you’re totally burned out. You’re feeling desperate as the number of potential interviews from the apps you submitted dwindles and you’re left with nothing. You feel like you’re useless because you can’t get a job you’ve trained for. You’ve worked so hard. The very things that brought you to academia don’t sound remotely interesting and if you have to look at another article draft, you might scream. It seems like an insurmountable climb to attempt to shift gears and get a job doing something completely different outside of academia.
I’ve been there. I feel you. I was there rather late in the game in 2021 about six months before I decided on this path. Like I said before, this process takes time, so the earlier you can start with the emotional baggage and putting the feelers out on how to shift gears, the less desperation you’ll feel! And trust me when I say that regardless of when you start, it’s hard. It’s hard to get over the grief, it’s hard to shift gears and continue to work on your research, and it’s hard to come to terms with the fact that maybe academia isn’t going to work out for you. Here are five steps to get you started down the path.
1. Feeling lost? Start with those around you.
Look, I get it. I’ve been there. You’ve invested your life, your soul, your mind to this profession and now you’ve got to figure out some other path forward. But literally you feel like you’re unqualified, dare I say incapable, of taking on any kind of work because academia is all you know. There was a point at the beginning of last year (2021) where I thought I knew nothing. If I couldn’t get a job in what I was trained to do, I didn’t know anything, I was stupid, and totally incompetent. How was I supposed to get a job elsewhere? You gotta call on your non-academic friends and family to help you see yourself in a different light.
My first instinct was to try to explain my worthlessness and lack of knowledge to non-academics, and all I got were blank stares. They told me that was patently false. I am a smart person and on top of that I’d spent a lot of time reading books. “But, but, but!” I said. Resist the urge to tell non-academics that they just don’t get it. No, they don’t understand. How could they? They didn’t choose that path for themselves. But you know what? They sure as hell can listen and tell you from an outside perspective that the brutal conditions academia requires are bulls**t and wouldn’t be tolerated in any other workplace. Listen to their advice and be open to incorporating some of it into your plan. They can reflect back to you your strengths and capabilities in a language legible to non-academics.
When I felt lost and had no idea where to start, I called on the help of my brother and sister-in-law who had never set foot in academia. I didn’t want to do the whole informational interview cold emailing on LinkedIn. Despite having cold emailed a lot of people to recruit them for interviews, I just wasn’t up to it this time around. They both helped me figure out and proof my resume and cover letter. My sister-in-law set me up with some informational interviews. They provided emotional support and answered my hundreds of questions about the work culture differences between academia and the rest of the universe, a couple of which I describe below.
I also reached out to friends outside of academia for general advice and support, which sometimes led to other kinds of connections. My yoga teacher from grad school who had become a friend connected me to one of her colleagues who had transitioned out of teaching (K-12). At first I didn’t see the point, but I talked to her anyway. I got so much out of a half hour conversation. She showed me her resumes and how they evolved over time from “converting” her teaching resume and one that she has now after a few years out from teaching.
She also ended up helping me realize that I have a ton of skills that I take for granted. The example she used was about how colleagues observed her skills at setting an agenda, facilitating a meeting, and getting the room to come to a final point. I was like, isn’t that just something everyone can do? She said it’s not. In fact, it’s a pretty rare skill. She helped me reframe various aspects of teaching into non-teaching skills that shaped how I presented myself in my resume and cover letter. That all started from just mentioning career transitions with my yoga teacher while catching up.
And then there are all those people who I talked to when I was at a crossroads, academic and non-academic, who provided critical insight and perspective when I was at my academic and non-academic crossroads: which one should I pick and why? What kind of perspective did they bring to my decision making? I talked to my geograpals, my mother, my brother and sister in law, my academic mentors, my besties who are all outside of academia. I cannot stress enough: find your people.
2. You know a ton… but not in the way you think
In academia, we’re conditioned to think that the quantity of of books and papers we’ve read, bodies of work, and minute subject matter expertise is what non-academic employers care about. This may be more critical for the STEM (science, tech, engineering, and math(s)) folks amongst us looking for lab-based jobs, but regardless of our training, we know a ton that we as academics take for granted. Take the example above from my informational interview. If I hadn’t talked to a bunch of non-academics I would have stuck with the mindset that I knew a lot about niche topics.
My research centers around how race and class shape and are shaped by urban development. I explore gentrification, segregation, strategies to revitalize deindustrialized cities, narratives about diversity, and movements organizing for just cities. I have book shelves brimming with books and articles by the likes of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Clyde Woods, Laura Pulido, and Jodi Melamed. The vast majority of you reading this have never heard of these folks, and that’s my point. Non-academic employers don’t care if you engage with these scholars.
Don’t get me wrong: all of those folks above still shape the way I analyze and orient myself in the world. I regret nothing about reading their books. I don’t, however, go around telling people that they influence my world. No one gives a s**t about how many books you’ve read or conference presentations you’ve made about your niche research. Unless you’re going into a field that requires really specific knowledge and skills like working in a genetics lab, it’s going to be about broadly presenting your skills to an employer. This is both freeing — in the sense that your horizons for what you can do are so broad — and terrifying — you have so many choices… where do you even begin? But because we are trained to become so specialized, we forget that most people train on the job.
What employers do care about are things like writing concisely and quickly for a variety of audiences. It’s not the sexiest writing (I use a lot of bullet points these days) but it conveys what I need to get across to federal funders, community organizations, and public health professionals. In doing a dissertation and having a research program, you have at least a decade of project management, grant writing, administrative, public speaking, and leadership skills all in one person. In any other job I’ve seen, there are people assigned to do each of these components of a project. We are trained to both envision and execute a project from beginning to end. We are taught to ask good questions. You’d be surprised how valuable a skill that is (and let’s be real: many of us trained to ask questions are still working on it).
My point with this section is our need to be clear about the underappreciated, overlooked, and frankly, assumed strengths you need to have to barely function in academia. You need to spend time thinking through what you bring to the table and which ones you actually want to spend your precious time doing.
3. And because you know more than you think, look outside of academia.
Until I started my current job, I had never had a non-academic job. Even when I graduated from college, I worked in a university as a staff person. When it came down to the wire to look for non-academic jobs, I defaulted to looking at university staff positions. They were positions I could see myself in and I’d still be able to keep those academic ties alive. They also felt safe and an easier jumping off point should I ever want to jump ship completely.
But when I dug into them — and by dug, I mean took a cursory glance and quickly changed my mind — I realized a lot of them are underpaid, understaffed, and just not that great. I’m not saying coveted staff positions don’t exist or that staff at universities aren’t deeply committed to moving mountains with nothing. But the vast majority of those positions sound like they have a lot of the same negatives of being a prof, tbh, which is precisely what I was trying to avoid with a non-academic job. They also weren’t jobs that I could see myself in long term. I quickly told myself that while I couldn’t imagine where I would end up, being staff at a university wasn’t going to be it. So I set myself a boundary: if I was going to bother leaving academia, I was going to endeavour to find a job away from the university.
It was terrifying. That decision and the inner critic of “you don’t know anything” coincided and it wasn’t pretty. Ok, so I had made the decision to leave academia completely if the academic job market didn’t come through for me. But I also felt like if I couldn’t get a job I was trained for, what other kinds of jobs was I going to get?! I felt lost and was beginning to feel desperate.
Another job I defaulted to was User Experience (UX) research. It seems like anyone who got a social science or humanities PhD wants to go into UX and I was one of them. After talking to some people in UX (going back to point #1), though, I realized I wasn’t interested in solving business problems. I wasn’t interested in making better products for a 2.0 version or improving a website. Yes, I could do the work and it would be satisfying but it didn’t quite feel right for some reason. I realized that I was interested in solving social problems, or at least contributing to a better world. I’ll talk about getting specific about what you enjoy below.
When I took those two potential job paths off the table, what was I left with? I didn’t know. Scouring LinkedIn was incredibly stressful as it isn’t really made for academics. The jobs it was suggesting I was a match for were way below my actual skill level. I was scrolling LinkedIn day and day out to the point I had to delete it off my phone. I was becoming obsessed. Once I had set that boundary for myself, though, I committed wholeheartedly to going somewhere else. I didn’t realize then but I needed to get out of the soup that was making my feel like I was worthless, didn’t know anything, and couldn’t contribute to the world. Did it add to my stress levels? I don’t know… I just knew I wouldn’t be happy staying in the university so I just kept throwing job apps out there into the ethers.
4. Which parts of academia do you really enjoy? And conversely, which parts do you hate? Get specific about it.
Being really clear about the aspects of academia you love and hate is key to exploring alternative paths because such an exercise requires you to reflect on whether academia is actually a good fit for you or if you’ve become conditioned to think it is and feel like you don’t have a way out.
For me, I love the intellectual stimulation. I love the challenge of reading and thinking with bodies of literature, my friends, and colleagues. I love being challenged to look at our past and present from a variety of perspectives. I also love giving voice to those who are often left out of decision making or storytelling and contributing to the world in some way. And most of all, I’ve always known that I care about using research to make a difference in the world, how ever small it may feel.
Notice that I didn’t say research. I see a lot people saying they love research… but what about it? Fieldwork? Proposal/grant writing? Presenting? Same thing for teaching. I see a lot of people saying they would miss teaching and your students but what about teaching and students will you miss? Get specific.
I thought about it, and came to the conclusion that I enjoy the puzzle of finding the best data collection methods for the question I had. I enjoy talking to people and using those conversations to drive my questions. I don’t care for the constant hustling to justify why my research matters only to be told that it wasn’t quite sexy enough (by the constant rejections). I thought I loved teaching but what I actually love is mentoring students and supporting their growth as scholars and young people. I like teaching but honestly, I can do without the admin, grading, and constant catch up building lectures. What I actually prefer is the one-on-one relationship building and learning that comes from a mentorship relationship. If the itch to teach should arise again, I can draw on my academic network to adjunct somewhere and teach a couple of classes.
And there is so much to hate about academia. I hate the precarity, the poverty, the constant moving, the job market, and the lack of permanent positions. I hate the lack of transparency in standards and decision making. I hate the abuse that gets shielded by tenure — no, I am not necessarily saying get rid of tenure, but you have to admit it’s flawed if it gives life time protection to abusers and plagiarists — and the petty, infantile, nepotistic behavior that is unacceptable in any other workplace.
I’m not trying to say that workplaces outside of academia are free of abuse, nepotism, and petty arguments but many behaviors I’ve witnessed and heard about in academia are totally unacceptable. There are mechanisms to hold people accountable (even in deeply flawed ways). For example, you don’t get to refuse to work together to make a team/department function and move it forward. You are accountable as a team to some kind of funder, city council, the community, etc.
To be honest, I’m still fumbling my way through refining and figuring out what specifically makes me tick professionally but that’s like anything in life. You refine and reevaluate and keep refining… and the cycle goes on. That first iteration of refining above came in really handy for figuring out my jumping off point outside of academia, because as we know, there’s no such thing as a forever job.
5. Find your job search people.
This one sounds a lot like point 1 about starting with the people close to you and sounds really obvious… but instead of being people you consult and/or ask to refer you to informational interviews, these are people with whom you spend dedicated time to support each other emotionally and practically through the job process. The key to anything in life are your relationships, knowing when to call on them and ask for help when you need it. They helped me get through point 4, getting specific about what I actually like about academia, to help drive my job search outside of academia.
Honestly, I could not have endured that summer of scramble had I not found my people who were in similar positions desperately looking for jobs outside of academia. It’s only in retrospect that I realize how grateful I am to this group for listening, discussing, complaining, crying, and supporting each other during a really stressful time. I did not know the majority of these people and do not really keep in touch with them now, and it really doesn’t matter. We had one purpose (get a non-academic job), we all accomplished our goal, and all got what we needed out of the group.
This group came together quite organically through my best friend from grad school. We had discussed blocking off a couple of hours every Tuesday night to dedicate to our job search process. Since we were spread across the country and it was still corona-times, we held the sessions virtually. This meant that a bunch of us could get together consistently. She asked if a couple of others in the same boat could join us. The more the merrier, I said! Once we settled on a group, we discussed our goals for meeting and the overall structure. We helped each other with our resumes, cover letters, finding and referring each other to jobs, interview practice, and the list goes on. We celebrated the highs and lamented the countless rejected applications.
In my opinion, what made our group particularly successful was how we mutually agreed to structure it. This might seem like a silly point, but in my experience, lacking structure leads to 3 hour venting sessions where no one gets anything done. In our planning sessions, we discussed our goals for coming together and described what each of us was looking for in a job (e.g. location, salary expectations, types of jobs, etc.) so we could be on the lookout for each other.
Here’s how each individual session went:
a. First we had time to check in, catch up with each other about life and our job search, and then set goals for our overall time together.
b. We then set a specific goal for the 50 minute block (hello, pomodoro!), such as drafting two paragraphs of a cover letter, set a timer, and turned our mics and cameras off.
c. Once the timer went off, we’d come back together, discuss how our sessions went, and set our goals for the next 50 minutes.
d. Then we’d take a 5–10 minute break.
e. Start the cycle again until the group feels done. Normally, we’d get through about three cycles before debriefing.
f. In between sessions, we’d email each other with jobs we thought the others might be interested in and we’d read over each other’s materials and provide feedback on them.
While the job search process was grueling and an emotional rollercoaster, I truly could not have done it without them. Having that dedicated time carved out provided accountability and a limit to a process that can often take over your life if you let it. Truth be told, we all got rejected from most of the jobs we applied for and that was ok. We helped each other get back on the bandwagon and try again. We served as a committee of no for each other, encouraging each other to reject crappy jobs with crappy pay that we considered taking out of desperation. I kind of ended up looking forward to seeing and catching up with the crew even if I was dreading what we were doing together. Like in anything in life, finding your people and the purpose of those people in your life is key to moving forward. I am forever grateful for that job search crew for getting me to where I am.
Here’s to all of those people who supported me, cheered me on, encouraged me to live my best, most fulfilling life working with an amazing team of people at Public Health, playing with the kiddos, reflecting on my career change, hearing from all of you, and continuing to dabble in the parts of academia that I love.
