I want to start this off by saying that however you feel about leaving academia, your feelings are valid and you deserve the time and space to process them. When people ask me about my own career change, I talk about how it took me at least 6 months even after I committed to leaving to process how that made me feel. I went to therapy! It was very helpful! The months between solidifying my decision and actually submitting an application saw a lot of crying, screaming, gnashing of teeth. I swung unpredictably between despair, anger, self-righteousness, confidence, perhaps even arrogance, then back around again.
Working through those feelings is a deeply personal exercise and I think it’s very important that you do that first before jumping in to things like informational interviews or, hopefully, actual job interviews. Why? Because you need to do the work of shifting your focus from the things that “push” you out of academia to the things that “pull” you into your new career.
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.
When I was in graduate school, one of my life-sustaining hobbies was training and competing with my extremely stubborn dog, Cerberus. A really useful lesson that my dog trainer-turned-life coach Karen taught me is that it’s not helpful to focus on what you don’t want. When you work with owners of untrained dogs, they usually have a litany of issues: “I don’t want him to jump up on guests. I don’t want him to chew my shoes. I don’t want him to pull on the leash when we walk.” Cool, cool, cool, of course we don’t want those things. But what do you want? Telling the dog ‘no’ every time he does something you don’t want gives him absolutely no information about what he should do instead. What is the behavior you want to see? “When he meets new people, I want him to stay seated. Instead of chewing my shoes, I want him to chew these toys. When we walk, I want him to keep the leash loose.” This is much more helpful framing because it gives you something to actually work toward, a trainable behavior that we can reinforce with praise and other valued rewards. We can ignore the things we don’t want to see and, without reinforcement, they will fade away.
Process your feelings about all of the things that pushed you out of academia and then stop feeding them with your attention. Let them fade away. Focus on the things you want from your new career so you can feed them with your attention and reinforce your excitement and motivation.
It might help you to write this out. You can make two lists: “push” factors (get ’em off your chest!) and “pull” factors. Here are some of the things I thought about when I was sad and angry, followed by my attempts to reframe them as things I could actually seek out in a new position — and, importantly, things I could say in an informational interview or job interview to indicate my excitement and avoid going negative about academia.
“Push”
I feel underpaid and overworked; my wages are low and stagnant, there are no reliable cost-of-living increases or opportunities for promotion (other than to Full in another five years or being tracked into admin work), and I expect there will be even more cuts and workload increases in the future.
I feel burned out. My work has lost meaning and I am struggling to see the purpose in my teaching, research, and service activities. Things I used to enjoy or at least tolerate have become unbearable. Goals that I once only dreamed of achieving (e.g. winning grants, publishing in top journals, winning awards) feel hollow when I actually achieve them because they’re not aligned with my values.
I have a long commute, which adds hours to my days on campus, costs a lot of money, and keeps me from being present in either my home community or campus community.
I am being crushed under the weight of my own competence, because I feel that my reputation for getting things done well means that everyone comes to me with extra work while others are not asked to do so much. I had to take on the role of Graduate Program Director before I was even tenured; I was being eyed for Department Chair at the same time. I was not interested in those roles but saw no way out.
I don’t see a path forward for myself if I stay here. I don’t have the resources or mentorship I need to advance my career, and the work that takes up most of my time is not going to help me get a better job.
I tried to build collaboration networks with people in better-resourced positions, but my low salary puts upper limits on how much I can supplement my income with grant money, and my heavy teaching and service loads mean I am doing a lot of this work on nights and weekends, contributing to my burnout.
I feel isolated from other people in my discipline. I feel like I have to claw out every project and every publication by myself. It’s exhausting.
If I try to get another academic job, it will almost certainly require moving my family away from the town where we’ve been building a life.
I feel like academic careers are fast-moving trains and if you don’t get on early, at the first station, then you will be forever running to catch up as the train pulls ahead and fades from sight.
“Pull”
I want to do more applied research where I work directly with professionals and communities to have real-world impact. This is the work that is most meaningful and motivating for me, and it would be exciting to spend more time on this type of research.
I want to work as part of a team, because I think that the best work comes out of diverse groups of people each bringing their strengths to the project. I don’t think that every individual team member needs to be an expert in all things and I don’t subscribe to the “one brilliant mind” model of scholarship – research shows that diverse teams make better decisions!
I want to write for a broader audience so that the research that I think is so important actually gets into the hands of those who need to hear about it. I enjoy designing presentations and written documents, as well as speaking to a broad variety of audiences.
I want to work closer to home so that I can be more active in my community, because I think that is the best place to start pushing for important reforms.
I want opportunities for professional advancement, including promotions to work toward, new skills to develop, and new professional networks to build. It’s important to me that I be challenged, because that is how I grow.
I want to work for an organization with values and a mission that align with my own orientation to this work. This means I want to work on issues of criminal justice reform, promoting public health, and generally advancing social justice. I want to work for an organization that is interested in reducing the size and deleterious impact of the criminal justice system and crime policies.
I want to serve as a mentor to team members and others. I enjoy teaching, but teaching isn’t restricted to a classroom. I would like to be able to teach colleagues how to do different types of data collection and analysis, how to share results, and how to use different software to facilitate our work. It would be great if the teaching materials I have prepared over the years could be put to a new purpose, for example, using my Research Methods slides as crash-courses for our non-researcher project partners.
I want to be a role model for graduate students and others in academia who don’t know that other careers are possible. I want to remain active and visible in my discipline so that I can be the person I needed when I was younger: an example of how to do excellent research with real impact outside of a university and still have a healthy and happy personal life. By remaining visible and upholding a high standard of work, I can elevate the reputation of my organization and light the way for the next generations of scholars.
I hope that these examples are helpful. My experience is that people generally do not want to hear sad things (everything you hate about your current job), they want to hear about why you want to work for them. Frankly, many of the folks I spoke with have PhDs, so they know the reasons people are leaving academia. You don’t need to dwell on them! It’s perfectly appropriate to say “I’ve appreciated my time in academia and the skills I’ve developed there, but I’m ready for new challenges and opportunities.” Focusing on what you want is helpful for both you and for whoever you’re speaking with, so I encourage you to try and cultivate this mindset — after you’ve done some healthy grieving.