Hi writers! I've been putting off talking about leaving academia for a long time now, but it can no longer wait. My clients are consistently asking for coaching on this, as are participants in my workshops. I decided to record this episode in the hopes of helping more people who may be trying to figure out how to navigate this really difficult career and life transition.
Today I’m going to primarily focus on how to assess whether or not you really want to leave the academy. I give my own story of how and why I left a tenured faculty position. And I end with some questions you can ask yourself to figure out whether it’s your specific job that’s the problem or whether it’s the profession itself that’s the problem.
Check out Leslie's website at www.YourWordsUnleashed.com
Hi writers! I've been putting off talking about leaving academia for a long time now, but it can no longer wait. My clients are consistently asking for coaching on this, as are participants in my workshops. I decided to record this episode in the hopes of helping more people who may be trying to figure out how to navigate this really difficult career and life transition.
Today I’m going to primarily focus on how to assess whether or not you really want to leave the academy. I give my own story of how and why I left a tenured faculty position. And I end with some questions you can ask yourself to figure out whether it’s your specific job that’s the problem or whether it’s the profession itself that’s the problem.
Check out Leslie's website at www.YourWordsUnleashed.com
YWU Podcast Episode #45
Navigating the Decision to Leave Academia
Hi there writers!
I hope you are hanging in there during these last couple weeks of the semester!
I’m talking to my clients lately and can tell that they’re barely hanging on.
Soon they’re going to shut down and shut off for a well-deserved break.
This podcast is mostly devoted to all things writing-related, but lately many of my clients are asking me to talk to them about leaving academia.
They are mostly women of color, often first-generation professors who aren't sure if all the sacrifice they’ve made for this job is worth it.
They're burnt out and exhausted. They feel like they’re working 24-hours a day and still not doing enough.
Some of them are facing looming budget cuts that will soon eliminate their positions.
Others are struggling to care for young kids in one place and elderly parents in another.
They're stuck in a system that wasn't set up for them to succeed.
And yet they don’t know what life might look like on the other side and often worry about disappointing their loved ones.
They also don’t necessarily know who they are outside of being an academic.
I’ve been putting off talking about today’s topic for a long time but I feel like it really can’t wait any longer.
So I decided to record this episode in the hopes of helping more people who may be trying to figure out how to navigate this really difficult career and life transition.
This is just the first on the topic of leaving academia that I will be putting out over the next few months.
Today I’m going to primarily focus on how to assess whether or not you really want to leave the academy.
I’m going to give my own story of how and why I left a tenured faculty position.
And I’ll end with some questions you can ask yourself to figure out whether it’s your specific job that’s the problem or whether it’s the profession itself that’s the problem.
You can find the full transcript of this episode at YourWordsUnleashed.com/45.
My Story of Leaving Academia
Those of you who know me or have listened to my podcast for awhile know that I was an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
I officially quit my position in August 2023 to focus on running my coaching business full-time.
What you might not know is that this entire process of starting to question whether academia was a good fit for me to actually leaving took four entire years.
And these years were really tumultuous, filled with some of the best and worst moments of my life.
Of course, now I’m thrilled to be where I am and I don’t miss hardly anything about my previous career.
But it took a long time and a lot of inner and outer work and experimenting and making mistakes to get to this place.
People use all kinds of analogies to describe their relationship with academia, usually in negative terms.
Some people call it a cult where everyone has bought into these insane standards and expectations, and then it’s hard to leave.
Others liken it to an addiction where you get addicted to achievement and are constantly striving for the next high.
I personally have compared my relationship with academia to that of a romantic partnership.
I fell in love with doing research at an early age, committed to this path in sickness or in health, and then went through a major emotional crisis when I realized I wasn’t happy and wasn’t sure I ever had been.
There’s a lot to this story, so let me start by telling you about when I first started feeling like this relationship wasn’t working out.
Everyone who leaves academia—or really, anything they’ve long identified with and given many years of their life and energy to—faces a turning point.
These turning points are often quite dramatic -- such as health crises, financial troubles, and their positions being cut.
But they can also be very mundane.
One grad student I know who prioritizes work-life balance decided not to pursue an academic career after seeing her mentor answering emails at midnight and attending meetings while on a family vacation.
When the work culture is not aligned with your needs and values, even seemingly simple moments can be pointing the way forward.
For me, my turning point was fairly dramatic.
As I’ve talked about in previously, my father, who lives across the country from me, nearly passed away from sudden heart failure in 2017.
In the months afterward, he made a miraculous recovery.
But I was starting to face the consequences of my devotion to an academic career, for which I had been willing to do nearly anything or move almost anywhere for nearly two decades.
Between earning my PhD at the age of 31 to starting my tenure-track position in Boston at 35, I had completely uprooted my life three separate times.
I went back on a promise I made to myself during graduate school to never leave California.
I spent two dark, lonely years as a postdoctoral fellow in Canada, followed by a brief, also very lonely, stint in the Midwest for my first tenure-track position.
But at that point I was a junior faculty member at a reputable university in Boston, which many people consider a desirable city.
I had a relatively low teaching load with graduate TAs to help me with grading.
To outsiders, I was living the academic dream.
But now this “dream” was preventing me from being there to support my loved ones in full-blown crisis.
Even on a day-to-day basis, though, I had been truly miserable before my dad got sick.
The job I had been taught as an idealistic grad student would ensure my happiness and security was far more stressful than I could ever have expected.
My institution, like so many other American public universities, was mired in financial chaos, while also expanding programs unsustainably.
The administration was depressingly out-of-touch with the needs of students and staff, leading to a palpably low sense of morale across campus.
Even before the pandemic hit, faculty were burnt out, feeling underappreciated, and significantly underpaid for the work they performed in a very high cost of living area.
This led to constant turnover and seemingly endless, labor-intensive hiring cycles.
Which, if you’ve ever served on a search committee, you know what I mean!
On top of that, broader institutional dysfunction fed toxic dynamics in my own department, which was full of senior male professors eager to bring new hires into decades-long personal feuds.
It was like clockwork: junior faculty began their positions fresh-faced, energetic, and hopeful about making a positive difference.
But within a year or two, most were disenchanted and looking for an escape route.
Meanwhile, the university did little to invest in and retain its workers, continuing the downward spiral.
To add to the stress, I longed for a partner and family but watched my window for having children get narrower by the day.
Yet instead of prioritizing my life goals, I had been putting all of my time and energy into my job in the misguided belief that achieving more would somehow complete me.
And tenure was close.
All the boxes were checked off in terms of publishing books and articles, winning grants, creating research collaborations, and mentoring grad students—things I had once blindly assumed would satisfy all of my needs.
Of course, I often did feel tremendously lucky to have my job—one that afforded me a great deal of autonomy over my schedule.
I had also grown by leaps and bounds as a teacher and researcher.
But I was nearing 40 and becoming less and less willing to allow this all-encompassing career to steal precious time away from other parts of my life.
I could no longer deny that my relationship with academia was failing.
And it felt like my heart was breaking.
So this challenging situation touched off a four-year-long period of soul-searching.
In 2018 I did two things: I submitted my tenure file and then decided to enroll in a 9-month-long life coaching certification in Los Angeles.
It was something I had in the back of my head for a long time, but I had never taken it seriously before.
But I did a weekend-long retreat that introduced me to all of the principles of life coaching and I was immediately hooked.
I loved that it was not deficit-oriented.
The premise of life coaching is that we are already whole and resourceful.
The role of the coach is to help people access their own power and design strategies and solutions that align with their own unique values and purpose.
There is nothing to fix, which was such a relief after devoting myself to a job that’s all about fixing problems.
I used that time to also get coached myself on who I wanted to be and what I wanted to do.
I recognized I was in a full-blown career and identity crisis, and I didn’t have any tools to figure out a solution.
During that time, I began helping women academics navigate career-related challenges.
During that time, I also got married and had a baby at age 42, which was followed immediately by the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, which clarified my own priorities even further.
Before all of these life changes, I was convinced that resolving my internal crisis was simple.
I thought I just needed to find another faculty position at an institution with more resources and better leadership.
But after tuning into my own inner wisdom—something I had grown totally unaccustomed to doing—it eventually became clear that changing institutions was not a lasting solution.
I realized I needed to breakup with academia altogether.
Every part of me resisted this internal message, but it kept resurfacing.
I was flooded with fear and guilt, as if I was harboring a forbidden, deeply taboo secret.
Questions and doubts ricocheted through my brain like, how could I even consider giving up the security of tenure?
What other work would fulfill me as much and still let me pay the bills?
How would my colleagues, peers, and family members possibly judge me for leaving?
On top of that, I had no role models of other scholars who had done something similar and didn’t know where to turn to for advice.
Nowadays there’s actually a lot of resources out there, which I’ll give you at the end of the episode.
But back in 2018, a non-scholarly career seemed unimaginable to me.
YET I was confronting the sad fact that my values were no longer aligned with academia—and perhaps never had been.
Similar to folks who married their high school or college sweethearts, higher education was the only professional relationship I had ever known.
So the decision to leave was as confusing, painful and complex as a breakup.
It not only meant changing professions, it also required me to relinquish an identity I’d worked very very hard to create.
I was also scared of losing the support of my academic community, which totally overlapped with my social networks.
On top of that, I felt guilty for even considering leaving when so many deserving others never get a shot at a tenured position.
All in all, I really resisted leaving.
But as I got more and more experience with coaching, I came to see that I could have a viable new path that was fulfilling and far less stressful.
I got incredible satisfaction from helping people to live in alignment with their core values.
For some of these folks, leaving academia was the ultimate end goal.
So as I helped them figure out their own career crises, I was also able to gain clarity on my own.
In the end, I realized there were two criteria I needed to meet before I even started planning my exit from the academy.
I’m going to share these with you because I think they’re helpful for anyone who is overwhelmed and unhappy but can’t see the forest for the trees.
My first bit of advice is: try everything you can to fix your situation (and in a minute I’ll give you some exercises to figure out how to do this).
And the second is, if at all possible, don’t quit until you have something that excites and invigorates you on the other end.
In other words, make sure you’re moving TOWARDS something you like and not just AWAY from something you don’t.
I know some folks don’t have that option to play around and figure this out because they’re in toxic environments or their jobs are going to be cut.
But it’s the best insurance for making sure you have a soft landing and don’t end up regretting your decision.
2 Exercises to Assess Your Fit with Academia
So now I want to give you two exercises that you can use to start assessing your current fit with academia.
The first is around your core values, and the second is about assessing your job and workplace.
The goal here is NOT to make a decision about leaving.
Instead, it’s about getting some clarity on where you are and how you might improve your circumstances so you can make a more level-headed decision in the future.
This first exercise on Core Values I’m borrowing from Episode 35, “Three Steps to Heal from Burnout,” which would also be really helpful for you to listen to after this.
1) The first part of assessing whether or not to leave academia is to get back in touch with your core values.
Core values are guiding principles that tend to be fairly consistent across various parts of our lives.
When we honor them, we feel aligned and purposeful.
When they are not present enough in our lives and our work, you probably experience some internal conflict or feelings of resistance, dread, or energy drain.
Therefore, the goal is to identify your core values and figure out ways to make them more present in your work life.
If you’ve never done this before, I have a free core values worksheet that you can download from this episode’s page on my website.
And here’s another way that you can figure out your values are:
Think about the qualities or behaviors that drive you crazy—as in, total annoyance—when you see it in other people.
This points to values you have that they don’t share.
For example, some of us absolutely hate it when friends show up late to everything. This shows you that you value timeliness.
On the other hand, you might hate the pressure to be punctual to everything. This could represent a core value of freedom and flexibility.
And so on.
Once you have your list of 5-8 core values, you want to do three more things:
1) Create a personalized definition of each one.
2) Rank each one on a scale from 1-10 (10 being the most) for how present you feel like they are in your work life right now.
3) Finally, write down a few thoughts about how you might be able to bring this value more into your work.
2) Assess Your Workplace
The second exercise I want to offer is a list of questions to assess your workplace and what you can do to change things for the better.
Take out a pen and piece of paper and really take some time to reflect here (or at least come back to this when you’re not driving or jogging or doing the dishes, etc.):
1) Do I feel valued? Is that possible here?
2) Do I feel respected? Is that possible here?
3) Do I feel adequately compensated? Is that possible here?
4) How is my physical and emotional health being affected by my work?
5) How are my important relationships being affected by my work?
6) Have I done everything in my power to change my current circumstances to serve ME rather than the institution?
A. What fulfills me here, and what doesn't? What can I do to increase time and energy spent on doing fulfilling work?
B. What can I give less than 100% to because I dislike it or it actively harms me?
7) Where else do I want to invest my time when I’m not at work?
Like I said, you want to do everything in your power to improve your work situation so you can know with confidence whether it’s your specific job or the career path that’s the problem.
Summing Everything Up
So let’s sum everything up.
I’ve talked about my own story of leaving the academy and given a couple of exercises you can do to start assessing your own situation.
If you’re just starting to consider leaving, I want to suggest three additional resources that can help you get started:
1) Buy the guide book Leaving Academia by Chris Caterine, which was published by Princeton University Press in 2020.
2) Join the Facebook group The Professor is Out, which started only during the pandemic and now has more than 30,000 people in it
3) Start listening to the Self-Compassionate Professor Podcast, hosted by Danielle delaMare, a former professor turned coach.
In the end, to even start down the path of making a decision about whether or not to leave academia, you need to start creating strong boundaries with work.
You need to invest more in your life beyond work.
And you need to start aligning your career and what you do on a daily basis with your own core values.
Doing these things can create some clarity so you can move forward in a more informed manner.
Finally, if you’re unhappy but don’t know whether you should stay or you should go, let me just share:
Every single person I’ve met who has left the academy (and I know a lot of them) is happier than they were before.
I don’t know a single person who regrets leaving.
If you want more help or guidance on this, just reach out!
I’ll talk to you again soon.