One of the most helpful things for me when I was deciding to leave academia and preparing to do so was that a friend of mine was a few months ahead of me on that journey – she was applying and interviewing at the same time that I was coming to the realization I wanted to leave, then she secured her offer while I was applying and interviewing, and now she’s settled into her new role while I’m just starting out. I can’t say enough about how helpful it has been to have a friend climbing the mountain just ahead of you, showing you where to find each handhold.
So with that said, this is my “how I did it” post, because since announcing my exit I have had at least five or six people message me privately for information. I’m going to break this into pieces because, once again, I have rambled on and you should skip to whichever bits are most helpful.
This post is part of a (highly) irregular series of posts about things I learned as I transitioned from being a tenured Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice to being a Senior Research Associate at a research and evaluation non-profit. The information and advice I provide here is based on my own experience and may not be applicable to people in other contexts, other disciplines, or facing other push or pull factors in their careers. I offer my thoughts simply to try and ease the difficulty of making this type of career change, to be another data point for people collecting information and considering their next steps. You can find other posts in this series under the Leaving Academia tag.
The Contemplation Phase
As early as graduate school, I had serious doubts about academia and the ‘publish or perish’ model. But I fell in love with my dissertation research and with teaching, and I was socialized to believe that the only place I could pursue those activities was in academia, so I spent a lot of time, effort, and tears clawing my way in. I think there were times when I was really happy and everything felt like it was clicking, but in the same breath I would say that those times stand out because, well, they stand out. For much of the time, academia made me deeply unhappy as I struggled with feelings of inadequacy and blocked opportunities.
More acutely, I would say that the pandemic years really deepened my unhappiness (unsurprisingly) and I never quite shook off that cloud of grief, resentment, and burnout. Things came to a head toward the end of 2022, when I felt extremely distressed about work and where my career could possibly go from here. I had submitted my tenure packet that September and I was confident I would earn tenure and promotion, because I had exceeded the requirements in the first few years. But instead of feeling excited or accomplished, I just felt numbness and dread. Achieving tenure didn’t feel like any sort of accomplishment at all when the requirements were quite low and the outlook at my institution so shaky. Wages were low and stagnant, workloads were increasing as we were pressured to do more with less, and I questioned the value of tenure and job security when I was so unhappy and so uncertain the university would continue existing.
In January 2023, a surprising Twitter DM seemed like it might turn things around. I woke up one morning and checked my phone to find that a professor from local Very Fancy U (VFU) had sent me a Twitter DM with a job posting, asking me if I would be interested in applying. To be blunt about what this would mean: getting that job would likely have doubled my salary, placed me in a world-class program alongside absolute superstars in the field, and given me access to the best available resources for advancing my academic career. I let myself actually imagine what my life would be like if I got this job – that I had made it, that I was affirmed and validated, that I had been seen, that my hard work meant something, that I had been capable all along. It sounds so pathetic now to write it all out and reveal how deeply dependent I was (am) on external validation and how much my experiences in academia had absolutely crushed my self-confidence, but it also feels important to be honest about just how impactful this was for me.
Obviously I didn’t end up getting the job. It was awful at the time, but now I’m able to say: thank god I didn’t get that job. It still would have been a long commute, long hours, all the things that had burned me out. The only thing it had going for it was prestige. I was absolutely dazzled by it, but after seeing behind the curtain I realize that the root causes of my unhappiness would not be changed by a fancier wrapper.
Summer 2023
Not getting that job was the push I needed to get serious about changing careers. I went into summer 2023 profoundly depressed, but as the weeks wore on I solidified my decision to leave academia. I started saying it out loud to people around me: I’m going to leave. I’m done.
The biggest task, or so it felt at the time, was turning my CV into a resume. I had taken a 10-week course back in 2016 (just one of the many times I had thought about leaving academia) that involved working with a resume writer, so I started by updating that old document. I didn’t really like the flow of it, though – the standard way of organizing an academic CV (chronologically, list form, most competitive to least competitive accomplishments, etc) just wasn’t working with how I needed to organize and present my experience. I paid another resume writer to help me recreate it and that was helpful, but I still went through another several revisions before I got to the format I have now. If you ask me if I recommend paying for resume writing services, my response at this point is probably a “Maybe?” It depends on how far you can get by yourself and then how far off you still are from where you need to be, which is an impossibly vague standard – I think you need input from people in jobs like the jobs you’re seeking, and if you’re not clear on what it is you’re seeking then preparing your materials feels impossible.
That’s why, during that summer of 2023, I did chase my own tail a bit. I was trying to prepare job materials but didn’t know what sort of jobs were out there. I tried to use LinkedIn but it wasn’t very helpful — it kept suggesting random academic jobs (Professor of Biology?), and when I tried to set up job searches for the positions I was seeking, I ran into the wall of needing specific job titles. I didn’t know what those were! Eventually I gave up on LinkedIn (for job searching, specifically, not for connections) and set up notifications on Indeed and Idealist, which were much more useful.
But the single most useful thing I did, and the most important piece of advice I can give, is: informational interviewing. Informational interviewing is what it sounds like. You’re not interviewing for a specific opportunity, you’re just talking to someone about their organization, role, career path, or whatever else you need to know. Before I started doing it, I wondered why anyone would ever agree to this type of interview – some rando wants, like, 30-60 minutes of your time to just… ask questions? Luckily I found that people were very willing to chat with me and were so generous with their time and advice. Informational interviewing was key to learning about the types of companies and roles I would be interested in, job titles and job requirements, how to pitch my skills and experience to match, and getting feedback on my application materials. It was also a networking technique, which I feel is even more important outside of academia than in it. My experience applying to non-ac jobs is that dropping your application in an online portal is a terrible way to get a job; every interview I got was because I had previously spoken to someone at the organization that I was then able to list as a connection or who could look out for my app and make sure it got to the right desk.
The next question people typically ask is how to find folks to interview. This is where my lifetime of being a loud busybody paid off, because while I tend to be a bit of a homebody myself, I have a large network of friends-of-friends. The decision to be open about looking for jobs meant that I had freedom to straight-up ask people if they knew folks I could talk to. “Does anyone know anyone at RTI, AIR, Urban, or other places? Can you connect me?” I didn’t know anyone working in those jobs, but I definitely knew academics who knew people – former students of theirs, colleagues who had made the non-ac move, or non-ac research partners. I leaned hard on my network and they leaned on theirs, and that was really crucial to my search.
Through informational interviews, I gathered really helpful information. I learned about the specific positions that someone with my credentials and experience would be considered for (Senior Research Associate, maybe Principal Investigator but that would be a stretch, better for a full prof), which then helped me narrow my job search. I also learned more about the types of projects that these social science research institutes worked on, which made me more excited and motivated. Long story short: I strongly recommend informational interviewing.
Another thing I did that was helpful was write out — physically, on a post-it! — my non-negotiables. What would it take to get me to leave my current job? After all, I was giving up tenure, familiarity, the whole career path I had spent a decade paving. I didn’t have many specifics about the exact nature of the work, but I did write down the minimum salary (current salary divided by 9 months then multiplied by 12, to match my current salary but for a year-round job). I stuck the post-it note to my computer monitor.
Fall, 2023
I think I submitted my first application in early September, 2023, and things did not go well. I had the incorrect impression that hiring outside of academia moves much faster, like in the span of a couple of weeks, but I’ve since learned that this isn’t true for the types of places I was applying – it was not uncommon to find that the job posting may be up for a month or more before application review began, with interviewing unfolding for weeks after that. I also encountered a lot of frustrating things like outdated/filled job postings that were set to auto-renew (I know, because I would apply for them and hear the position was filled but continue to see the ad!), dysfunctional application systems, difficulty finding an actual person to contact if I had questions about the application process, etc. So I won’t present the non-ac application and hiring process as any better than academia! One upside is that it’s not as seasonal, so you’re not, say, waiting around until August for the annual hiring cycle to begin, but I do think that the types of social science research jobs I was looking at have a bit of seasonality to them as organizations apply for grants, see what they get, and then staff up in specific areas.
There were times through fall semester that I cursed myself for not applying back in May/June, because I felt I would then be “further along” in my journey. I was dealing with a lot of non-response or rejection, and I was starting to panic that the very, very arbitrary “deadline” I set for myself of getting a job before fall semester ended was not going to pan out. It did take me some work to unpack my panic about that and remember that no one imposed that deadline but me, that I could survive another semester at my institution, that nothing bad was actually going to happen if my job search took me a little longer than I thought. Seeing my friend go through similar experiences ahead of me was reassuring, too, as was her insistence that I should expect it to take 5-6 months, at least. Still, I was antsy and grappling with voices in my head telling me I was unemployable and had wasted more than a decade developing experience and skills that had no value outside of academia.
The Light at the End of the Tunnel
Finally, around November, I started getting callbacks and interviews. I was slightly dismayed to learn that the interview process at some orgs was actually longer than the academic interview process. Academic interviewing is usually a 2-stage affair: a phone interview with long-list candidates, then campus interviews for the short-list finalists. A campus interview is intense, but it’s still just two stages. In comparison, some of the places I interviewed had four- or five-interview processes: screening calls, preliminary interviews, interviews with potential colleagues, interviews with actual senior and hiring staff, and interviews with directors, all happening at least a week or two apart! I made peace with the fact that I would not get a job before the end of the year, even if I continued to get interview opportunities, because things just weren’t moving as quickly as I expected.
The first offer I received was with a familiar organization, doing work I thought I might enjoy, and I quite liked the people I interviewed with, too. But the salary was about $20,000 below what I had written on the post-it note as my non-negotiable minimum salary. I was torn. What if I didn’t get anything else? I wanted out of my current job and here was my opportunity, even if it wasn’t perfect. And it was still more than I was making now and stood to make in the near future! I talked about the offer in therapy and my therapist asked me “Does it meet your minimum salary? If not, why would you say yes?” I realized I felt pressure to say yes because it felt bad to say no – it felt like disappointing someone (the people I interviewed with? idk), it felt like being too proud, it felt like asking for too much, it felt… cocky. Arrogant. But it wasn’t a good offer. It wasn’t competitive with other listed salaries for similar jobs. And as much as I wanted to leave my job, I didn’t need to leave, so I could stand to wait for another opportunity to come up. I turned down the job and I felt relieved (but nervous).
Two weeks later I got another offer for $30,000 more than the offer I turned down, amounting to an increase of 40% over my academic salary with the opportunity to earn additional raises in the coming years. Exciting work, cool people, fully remote, nice benefits, an employer who seemed thrilled to have me. I accepted. I cried. My husband cried!
The problem was that it was now January 2024, the week before spring classes began. This was the situation I didn’t want to be in – I didn’t want to dip out at the last minute and leave my colleagues and students stranded. Could I? Yes, of course, we are not obligated to stay in our jobs, but I didn’t want to leave that way. Fortunately, my new employer is familiar with academia and were very happy to set a June start date and pay me on an hourly basis for work I did up to my official fulltime start. I was able to teach out my two courses for the semester while also doing ~10 hours week in my new role so I could get to know people and get a feel for the work. This turned out to be an ideal situation, because I was able to ease in and then hit the ground running on my first actual day.
And now?
I haven’t looked back. Life on the other side is so good. I’ve started going to the gym regularly and taking pottery classes. I’m home for dinner with my family every night. I’m healthier in every way. I love my new colleagues and the culture of the organization. I feel welcomed, appreciated, and valuable. My work is intellectually stimulating, fun, and meaningful. I do more research than ever before and get to manage large, multi-year and multi-site projects, but never alone and always with my team. The organizational values are a good fit with my own. While there are some bumps and awkward moments that come with working for a small organization that is “building the plane as we fly it,” so to speak, I feel confident that if I ever had serious concerns, I could speak to my executive team and they would listen to me and take me seriously. I feel like I can play a role in the success of the organization and simultaneously advance my own professional reputation through our work. Is it a forever job? Who knows. But I know that by making this move, I have already set myself up to be more flexible and agile in the future – if this job stops working out, there are others, and I won’t have to pick up my entire family and relocate them just to make it work. I’ve already done the hard part, and it has given me more confidence and clarity about what matters most to me.
If you’ve made it this far, congratudolences. I really hope that this story gives you hope and inspiration to take charge of your own career, whether that is finding a way to be happy with the path you are on or making a big, brave change. Please know that meaningful work is not limited to the academy and that there is joy and abundance out here in the wild!