Six Myths About Leaving Academia, Debunked!
If you are considering leaving academia, you know this is a hard decision. I left about three years ago (you can read more about my journey here) and struggled with grief and anxiety about what my future held. My story turned out well—I’m happier in my new job as an academic editor than I ever was as a faculty member and feel more fulfilled in my work. Reports from friends and colleagues who made the switch suggest I am not alone in feeling that this was ultimately a good move for me.
But as I was making the decision to leave a tenured position, I worried that I would be giving up too much—I felt like I would be losing the most respected job in the world, giving up significant vacation time, and throwing away my only hope of employment.
I’ve been thinking about these worries lately because I hear them echoed by others who are considering leaving faculty jobs. So below I tackle six myths that circulate about leaving academia. You’ll see I’m basing this discussion on my own experiences, which of course are not representative of everyone’s. But based on many conversations I’ve had with other people who left faculty positions, I know that these experiences are widely shared. If you’ve left too, I’d love to hear about your own experiences in the comments below.
Myth #1: You are unemployable outside of academia! When I decided to leave academia, I worried a lot about whether I had skills that would transfer over into a new context. This is a common concern, partially because it feels like PhD programs are often training students only to become academics (though this is changing).
However, the skills we gain in PhD programs and as faculty members do make sense outside of academia. Your work as a teacher has taught you how to convey information clearly to others, how to communicate with diverse audiences, and how to learn new materials quickly. Administrative work often involves skills like budgeting, facilitating meetings, and planning programs, again, very transferable skills.
If you are thinking about a career change, start paying attention to job ads from positions you might consider pursuing and think about how the skills they mention coincide (or not) with what you have learned in your position. (Thanks to a client who suggested this approach!) If you aren’t leaving for a while, consider how you might expand what you are doing in your faculty job to build new skills or nurture existing skills to help you be competitive on the job market.
Myth #2: You will lose your social worth and standing! For a long time after I left my faculty position, when people asked me what I did for work I would launch into a long explanation about how I used to be a professor, but now I was an editor. It mattered to me that people knew about this previous career. I think this is because we often hear a message in academia (through PhD programs, colleagues, conferences etc.) that being a faculty member is the best and most valuable thing you can do with your PhD. I’d somehow absorbed this message and felt concerned that I’d lost my social worth by leaving.
What I soon learned was that I was the only one hung up on this distinction. I started telling people that I was an editor and they reacted just as they had to hearing that I was a faculty member. Normal non-academic people do not buy into the idea that the only valuable job is being a professor. You don’t have to either! Try instead to evaluate how you really feel about your job and whether it is time to move on. Being unhappy and miserable in your work is awful, whether you are inside or outside of the academy. (For more ideas about how to decide if you want to leave, see this post.)
Myth #3: You will rescind all flexibility! Yes, faculty jobs can be flexible. You can sometimes shape your teaching schedule (especially if you are tenure track) to fit your life needs. You can theoretically be around to pick your kid up from school. There are vast portions of the year when you are not teaching. So I worried about this loss of flexibility when I left teaching. But when I was honest with myself, I also remembered how inflexible faculty jobs also are. For parts of the year we are chained to our schedules. Missing class (at least at teaching institutions) is frowned upon. Missing various meetings is also frowned upon.
In my new work, my schedule is flexible, but in different ways. I work for myself so I set my own hours and vacations. I recognize that many people moving to different kinds of jobs won’t have this level of flexibility, but you will have the ability to have more control over when you take time off. I took a week off in October last year and one in April, something I hadn’t done for over a decade. And, of course, if flexibility is really important to you, you’ll want to consider positions that provide room for this.
Myth #4: You’re not a [insert your PhD discipline] anymore! When I talk to people about leaving academia, it’s not uncommon for them to worry that they won’t be an anthropologist/philosopher/biologist etc. anymore. I worried about this too. I’d studied and worked for so long in anthropology, how could I just give up being an anthropologist?
Since leaving what I’ve learned is that you will, like it or not, always be an anthropologist/philosopher/biologist etc. It may be that you find a career where you directly use skills and methods you learned in your discipline, and then the connections will be obvious.
But even if you end up doing something quite different, you will still be able to understand and consider the world through the lens of your discipline. As an editor/anthropologist, for example, I have used the observation skills and interest in evaluating how various people approach the world that I garnered through my anthropological training to help better understand my clients’ needs and their approaches to writing. This makes me unique as an editor and different from editors who trained in other disciplines (who bring other important skills to their work). Similarly, I’ve continued pursuing anthropology-related interests outside of work, including travel, attending cultural festivals, and getting to better know my community. If being an anthropologist/philosopher/biologist is important to you, you will find ways to be one whether you are in the academy or not.
Myth #5: Your publishing career is over! You may well want your publishing career to be over and, if so, cheers! But, if not, do not feel like leaving academia means that you will never write or publish again. Plenty of PhDs outside of the academy continue to publish (though of course there are challenges related to funding research depending on your field) and scholarly publishers do publish work by non-faculty members. If anything, you may find expanded opportunities for writing. Being outside of the constraints of academic expectations may allow you to write for new and broader audiences than you could before. I, for example, have really enjoyed blogging and the fact that my writing about academic life and scholarly writing has reached more readers than my scholarly work ever did.
Myth #6: Those summers! They disappear! I was really worried about what would happen to my summers when I was no longer in a faculty position. I worried about losing long open days of freedom.
Here, again, I was wrong. First, my faculty summers really weren’t free. I worked most of the summer and sometimes did intensive research-related travel. Most summers (since I was pre-tenure) I felt a lot of pressure to get writing done or prep new classes, which dampened my feeling of freedom.
My summers are different now. As an editor, summer is a busy time for me given that I work with academics who need a lot of support over the summer. But I still take time off in the summer and, in some ways, they feel freer. I don’t have the pressure of producing extensive work before the crunch of the semester, and I do have the pleasure of letting my work go at the end of the day (rather than staying up in the middle of the night obsessing about it, as I did as a faculty member). I’ve also found that working shorter hours means that I am generally better rested and less desperate for long breaks. In short, a healthier work-life balance means that my work has shrunk in intensity, giving me more rest and recovery time on a daily basis.
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You may not want to leave academia and that’s great! But the point of this discussion is to remind you to not let these myths hold you back from leaving. You will have value when you are no longer a faculty member, you will still have time off, your discipline won’t just disappear from your life, and so on.
If you are contemplating leaving, work to identify the elements of your job that you really enjoy and would hope to continue in another kind of position and then try to find another job that still provides them. Care about flexibility? Try and find a job that allows for it. Love teaching? Think about jobs that involve the elements of teaching you love.
Good luck with your journeys!
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