The grief of leaving academia
It’s that time of the academic calendar where we begin to realize “oh s**t, I have one more month of summer and then I have to teach again. Where did the time go? I haven’t even recovered from the school year! I had all these grand plans to make up for the school year black hole of teaching and churn out some publications but I haven’t even started yet! OMG, the next job season is here! Do I really want to go through this again? I don’t know if I can. But I guess I will coz I don’t know what else to do.” But last year, it was around this time when I finally put my academic dreams, at least how I had envisioned them, to bed. I’ll be honest, the grief was, and still is, a long, painful, and drawn out process.
For me, it started in earnest the summer before (in 2020) where I found myself laying on the ground, staring at the sky watching the clouds pass by and wondering how the f*** I was going to get a TT job in the pandemic. I distinctly remember standing in my brother and sister-in-law’s kitchen, crying in front of them about how I was never going to get a TT job and how I was finished. My life was ruined. The academic life was all I knew so what could I do instead?
Non-academics, you might be thinking “what is this person on about?” This is definitely a post geared towards academics. The above probably sounds hyperbolic and super dramatic to non-academics because I have yet to hear anyone outside of academia experience this much anguish about leaving a profession. Because it is precisely that to us: it is a profession, not a job. We are conditioned to believe that academia is a calling, not a job, and in some senses you have to internalize it if you’re going to make it and be successful in academia.
As I read and hear about more and more academics getting ready to jump the proverbial ship or get “forced out” of academia right now, I want to make sure you know you’re not alone. Whether you’re a few years out from needing to leave academia or literally scrambling to figure out your next steps, I hope you can learn from my mistakes so that you may be able to lighten the load a little bit. You’ll still have to go through the stages of grief and also be more prepared.
Stage 1: Denial
Mmm… denial. I am hopelessly good at denying reality. In summer 2020, I was in full-fledged denial mode. I am an all-in kind of person that wants to put all of my chips on the table so that regardless of the outcome, I know I did my best. So instead of making contingency plans for an increasing likelihood of exit (because honestly, I didn’t know where to start), I ignored reality and invested all of my time in applying to academic jobs. My plans A, B, C, D, etc. only included academic options.
When job season really started in August, I stuffed away those gut feelings of fear and anxiety, as well as the wise little protective voice saying, “I think you need to start making a non-academic plan B.” Instead, I put my nose to the grind stone. I churned out app after app, some of which ended up being 250 pages (I could go on forever at the ludicrousness of making applicants submit multiple publications and documents of which search committees probably only read the first two thirds of the first page of my CV).
At this point, I was feeling confident. I had published an article, had another under review, and another in the works. My CV looked pretty polished, if I do say so myself. That is to say, I had everything a search committee could ask for… but then again what were they asking for? Fun fact: they have no idea and will perhaps never know.
Anyway, I told myself I felt confident in my abilities all the while these little nagging voices ate away at me saying, “are you really good enough for those jobs?”, “how dare you think you can have that”, “urgh, if only you had worked a bit harder, you’d have more pubs by now”, “why didn’t you start sooner”, or “you just haven’t done enough.” My inner critic strikes again!
Ok, but instead of giving you a meandering tale about my inner critic and the abysmal state of the academic job market, which I’ve already done, I want to say this: I was in denial about not getting a TT job. I felt like I had to be if I was going to put so much energy and soul into applications I could be proud of. I felt like I had to invest myself in the process to show I was in it to win it as a professor. And since hindsight is 20/20, what I would say is this: because I was in denial, I had the blinders on and could not see that this was the time to begin at least thinking about what a non-academic job could look like. Because applying for non-academic jobs is a whole different ball game that requires a lot of self-reflection and clarity.
Stage 2: Anger
This stage is more challenging for me to write about for a couple of reasons, including the fact that I find it hard to access one specific example of anger. First, anger is not the emotion I go to first when trying to label how I’m feeling. I often blame myself (so I guess a kind of self-inflicted anger) and/or because I used to be such an angry person in my youth, I just deny my anger now. Second, I think I was straight up just angry the entire year but I was able to stuff it away while I flip-flopped between the other stages of grief.
When I sit down and reflect, though, I was angry at the entire system of academia, made up of administrators and senior faculty who just didn’t give a s**t about me, my work, or my life. I felt helpless and powerless aimlessly punching into thin air at people whom I’d never met and would not even give me the time of day if we did. It felt futile being outraged at a nebulous group of people out there in the ethers making large scale decisions about the university. In a sadistic way, though, it felt good to be angry at them out there pulling mysterious levers that I had no access to nor control over. So I knew that my lack of job was a structural problem but I didn’t feel it, which meant I didn’t accept it.
I mostly felt angry at myself for believing for a minute that I could make it. That led to a spiral of shame and embarrassment for being arrogant enough to think I could be a professor. At the same time, I was so angry that people who were completely incompetent and taking up precious space as faculty: profs repeating the same research over and over again, not caring at all about students, thinking of teaching as a burden, cutting down graduate students at every turn, and generally being self-aggrandizing wastes of space. How lucky they were to come of age at a time when professorships were a dime a dozen.
For a while last spring, I found myself taking solace in podcasts about con artists. Can you tell I was feeling duped? I found myself thinking “how could these people fall for these schemes? Anything that sounds too good to be true is too good to be true.” Listening to stories about immensely charismatic leaders drawing people into their perfect schemes and then pulling the rug out from under them just drew me in. I could feel outrage and anger for them at the injustice of it all. I would listen to these podcasts for hours on end. Somehow it felt comforting to know that while no academic I had met was nearly as charismatic as these con artists sounded, I felt heard and took pleasure in the fact that I wasn’t the only one who felt duped.
And yet even with all of this outrage and anger, I was still unwilling to begin thinking about a non-academic plan B. I just sat there wallowing in my anger, punching at the invisible administrators and search committees instead of giving them the middle finger and making contingency plans.
Stage 3: Bargaining
When I went on the job market in 2020 (for a job that would start fall 2021), I promised myself one thing: I would not take any one-year positions. I was done. I couldn’t do it anymore: uproot myself again only to go on the job market immediately and always have one foot out the door. Then there was the practicality of packing up my entire life, finding somewhere to live, unpacking, only to pack right back up again. Even thinking of that makes me tired.
And yet, as job season dragged on into 2021 and the available pool of jobs turned from varying quality of TT jobs to short term postdocs and visiting assistant professorship-type gigs, I found myself just applying for them no questions asked even though I had told myself I wouldn’t take any of them. I found myself saying “weeeellll, I might as well apply for them and see what happens. I already have all of the materials ready!” False. Postdoc apps always require much more work since they have tons of little essays, organization-dependent applications, and so forth. But again, I found myself bargaining with myself: “these postdocs fit my expertise so well! Oooo, this postdoc is so prestigious… maybe I just need one more job market cycle that get the job I’ve been waiting for. If I just had a little bit more time!”
So apply to them I did and I got quite a few interviews for them, too. I proceeded with these interviews no questions asked of myself. I told myself, “let’s just see what happens. This is good practice for when that coveted TT job interview rolls around.” I ended up not getting most of the positions I interviewed for, but I wasn’t surprised by it since it’s so much more palpable how random candidate selection from job interviews can be. Oh, it hurts to reflect on how much stress and anxiety I put myself through for a career that never materialized.
I think at this stage though, little cracks began to appear in the armor around my academic aspirations. I was beginning to see that I needed to start making moves towards a potential exit plan. I didn’t have to take any of these jobs but I definitely needed to think about it. I was starting to feel desperate. That little voice whispered “you really should have started much earlier but hindsight is 20/20!”
But then! At what seemed like the last minute, I was offered a shiny one-year postdoc… one of those postdocs that anyone from the social sciences and humanities from any university can apply for. I felt elated, proud of myself and vindicated for all of those hours of struggle, anxiety, and panic because this prestigious postdoc program would choose me out of thousands of applicants. Thinking back on it now, I imagined myself on a stage having flowers thrown at me and me not so humbly thanking everyone for their accolades. “Thank you, thank you,” I said as I bowed slightly and turned my humble gaze gently downward. I was back in the game towards the TT!
You might be thinking “uhhh, didn’t you promise yourself you wouldn’t take a one year gig?” Yes, you are correct. And yes, you guessed it: I 100% allowed myself to bargain with myself and I took the postdoc. I allowed my boundaries to be porous as long as I could keep my academic life alive. I mean, I was being given one more shot, and surely this of all positions was the one that was going to launch my TT career.
Stage 4: Depression
Even though I took the postdoc and felt an immediate minor sense of relief and vindication, I couldn’t help but feel salty about how this round of the job market had gone once the elation wore off. This was a one year gig. Moreover, the postdoc I accepted was a humanities-based one, and most of the interviews I got for humanities-based positions. I find that utterly hilarious since I squarely think of myself as a social scientist through and through! I was happy to be in conversation with humanities folks but I couldn’t help but feel betrayed and rejected by my own discipline and fields, which I had so fervently pledged my allegiance to… and it was all that I knew.
I’ve written at length about my depression and inner critic in a previous post. While this round of depression came no where near the depths I write about, I nonetheless felt both hopeless and completely apathetic to the work I used to be so passionate about. It felt anticlimactic after accepting the postdoc. What was the point in suffering and sacrificing? And instead of being elated at all of the potential doors opening with this postdoc and the ability to continue my research, I found myself being irritated at once again being asked to put my life on hold while I pursue this dream of becoming a professor.
I can remember one particular instance that underscored for me that maybe all was not well in (academic) paradise. My soon-to-be boss contacted me soon after I had accepted the postdoc and asked if we could meet to plan the year. I found myself saying “wtf? I haven’t even finished the postdoc I’m in right now. I don’t work for you yet… let me finish this first!” I was even more irritated that they were doing fieldwork half way across the world and bending over backwards to talk to me.
Instead of reading it as this person is interested in me and wanting me to get the most out of the experience, I read it as encroaching on my time and work, they were trying to extract as much labor out of me as possible. I was so exhausted and burned out that I didn’t have much to give in the way of collaborative spirit. I found myself saying yes to a bunch of activities that crossed my COVID and professional boundaries just to get the conversation out of the way. I was utterly overwhelmed and didn’t know how to deal with the situation. I knew this was not where I wanted to be and yet I didn’t know if there was a way out of here. I felt stuck and trapped and completely helpless.
Stage 5: Acceptance
A little while after this situation with my soon-to-be supervisor, I got an interview for a non-academic position — the only one I got out of about 50 non-academic job apps I submitted, I’ll admit… but as my dear advisor said, you only need one! — and I told myself that I just wanted to see how far this went… I know where you were going with this, self! Aaaaaand then I was presented with the real dilemma of choosing between: 1. a poorly paid shiny postdoc and another year on the job market without the guarantee of a TT job, or 2. a unionized job in public health in a city I wanted to live in that utilized many of my academic skills (at least the ones I cared about) that paid at least 33% more and came with a pension and amazing benefits. On paper, objectively, I know which one I would have taken hands down immediately. I still struggled, nonetheless, to make a decision. Was I really ready to let go and step off the path of the professor? Was I really ready to step away from the hustle and grind? The answer was yes, a definitive yes. But it still took me a while to accept that this was the right answer for me.
One of the glimmers of acceptance came when I realized that the grief I went through over the past year or so was about letting go of this ideal vision of academia I had, and not the fact that I wasn’t going to become a professor. I came to realize that the place I strived to get to didn’t exist: a well paying job where I could live in a city I liked, do research and teaching in equal measure, be rewarded for mentoring students, and have colleagues who want to collaborate to make a welcoming learning environment for all of us. And that’s what ultimately drew me to take a different path and made the grieving process a lot easier: because the profession I aspired to didn’t exist, I could part ways in a much healthier way.
Of course, the logical part of my brain needed reassurances and validation so I literally called up everyone I trusted, academic and not, and asked them for advice. Not because I wanted them to give me a definitive answer but as a true researcher, I wanted to gather data and code it into themes before making a decision. I understand the flaws in this method since everyone I talked to only wanted the best for me, but knowing myself and my need to talk everything out, sometimes ad nauseam, I needed permission in the form of evidence. I’m sort of ashamed to admit it, but I needed validation to say it was ok to diverge from the path I set for myself and find happiness and contentment elsewhere. I had to accept what my gut was telling me and what my loved ones were telling me were aligned, and that all signs pointed to leaving academia.
And so I did: I accepted that I needed to let go of the academic run-around as the status quo and to go live my life differently. I had to accept that my life and career would not look the way that I envisioned it to and that was perfectly ok because life is weird and a non-linear process. I had to accept that I was walking into the unknown, into a job that I had no experience with, and that I had to take the fear and anxiety by the horns. It couldn’t be anymore fear, anxiety, and stress-inducing than the academic job market. I could always do something different if I didn’t like this job or it didn’t work out.
This has been a long road. I’m still working on it 10 months later but I can honestly say hand on heart that exiting when I did was the best decision of my life. Do I miss aspects of academia? 100%. I miss my beloved geograpals, the time and space to think for a living, the amazing students, and the intellectual exploration and creativity. But these are not the only things that make a life. Life is for the living as they say, and the question I asked myself when I was at the crossroads was, “when I am on my death bed, what are the kiddos going to remember? An article I write in Progress or an amazing lecture I gave? No, they’re going to remember that I came over for dinner every week, we went to the beach together, and I cheered them on at their soccer game.”
By actively choosing to take a non-academic path, I made the decision to take control of my life and accept that there are other jobs out there for me that still allow me to engage in the parts of academia I love and care about with much less of the bulls**t. Once I accepted my desired profession didn’t exist, I could made the decision to refuse the academic run-around and choose something that worked for me. It wasn’t academia kicking me out anymore. It was me looking out for number 1 (me), taking care of myself, and prioritizing my life and health over an institution and profession that just doesn’t care.
So here’s to the non-linear nature of grief and the healing process.
