Feeling guilty thinking about a career outside of academia? Don’t.
Are you in a graduate program, or recently got your masters/PhD and you’re feeling guilty just thinking of looking for jobs outside of a university? If so, I was in those shoes about 10 years ago. It took me over a year just to get past the mental hurdles to even consider non-academic roles. Regardless of what decision you make, you really shouldn’t feel bad about weighing your options. I’d like to ask you to pause and really consider where your guilt is coming from. Who does it feel like you are you wronging by thinking outside the tower?
- Your university? Graduate students are interesting student/employee hybrids. You only agreed to fulfill duties like taking classes, teaching, and doing your program work (that the university benefits from). You never agreed to do a specific thing with your certificate, just like you never promised to go into a specific career with your high school diploma. You don’t owe them anything. In fact you are paying to be there. If you feel guilt on behalf of your university, this is likely due to their direct attempts to make you feel connected to their brand, their school spirit, their prestige. Just remember that your relationship with them is a contract, money for services.
- Your field? The term I’ve heard is “selling out,” which is interesting because it points to a belief that basic science is somehow pure, detached from the capitalistic whims of corporations. The argument that using your skills for to make a living outside of a university is somehow less ethical is laughably feeble. Where do professors get the resources to do their research? Do they write proposals for work that other parties decide is valuable and provide money to hire people to run the lab? I’d like to ask all the folks with grant funding if they’re willing to give all that back and pay for the research out of pocket, for the sake of science. Interestingly I think some would want to do that, but that’s really not how the world works; everybody uses their skills in some way to provide value to others in exchange for money. It doesn’t matter if you are at a university, a nonprofit, a government agency, or a company. If you want to do “pure” work detached from the whims of others, you can make money first and self-fund your endeavors.
- Your advisor? This gets a little personal. Depending on your field, your relationship with your academic advisor can be akin to that of a master and protégé, except your academic productivity is linked to their success too, during and after your time together. You might feel like you owe them for being your mentor. There are many issues with this thought process. First, graduate students and postdocs are the cheap workhorses of academia. You are enabling your mentor to be way more productive than they could be as a solo practitioner, even with undergraduate help. Basically, it’s a symbiotic relationship: productivity for guidance and experience. Also, as a mentor, I believe your highest priority should be the personal and professional development of your student. You should want what’s best for them, and not sacrifice that for what’s most beneficial to you. I get quite upset when I see advisors treat their students like publication farms and pressure, ignore, or bully the ones that dare consider leaving academia. Lastly, your academic advisor is ill-positioned to help you navigate non-academic careers: They likely spent most or all of their careers in academia, and they are incentivized to keep you there too. The university system self-perpetuates, at the expense of most who go through it. It was only designed to create more professors, without much care for the ones that remain after those roles are filled.
- Yourself? You might feel like you owe it to yourself to at least try for an academic role because it’s what you were planning for so long and you don’t want your time to be wasted, or you still feel like there is some value for you in having an academic job. First of all, don’t fall into the sunk cost fallacy: the time and effort were spent no matter what. Second, your time was not wasted. You spent years building up skills that other organizations want and will pay you for. Believe it or not, I am not trying to convince everyone to leave academia. There are some real pros and cons to either path, and you should definitely have the full picture before making any decision. I say you owe it to yourself to figure out what career path leads to the life you want, and that’s only possible if you seriously consider all your options. Graduate level programs tend to encourage their students to have tunnel vision when it comes to career development, which does everyone a disservice.
Final tip: You can apply to both academic and industry jobs at the same time, or one after the other. Just know they are two different paths and you need to do the preparation for them separately, neither one of them should be treated like a backup plan that you can quickly pivot to without modifying your materials. It takes months to really change from pursuing academic to industry roles properly. What happens if you don’t do the work, and just use your CV and academic job talk for industry jobs? Most likely you will get a lot of non-replies, declines, and phone interviews that go nowhere.
Originally published at https://www.davidtangux.com.
