can they do that?

I had a pretty good idea of what my perfect job would entail. The question then became "Is that possible? Is there anyone out there actually doing this?"

When you've spent your life in school -- and always assumed that you'd spend the rest of your life teaching and working at a school -- it's not surprising that you don't know about careers that exist outside of school. As part of this process of figuring out what went on out there in the real world, someone suggested that I find some role models, essentially people who had studied what I'd studied and didn't end up in academia. Reasonable, yes, but easier than it sounded. On my first pass, I found a science writer and a TV personality, and that was about it. No joke. There was no obvious industry drawing people away from universities.

Lacking role models, I spent every waking hour looking at job postings and reading job descriptions. There's the Chronicle of Higher Education job board (which has separate sections for non-academic careers). Science and Nature have job listings, some of which aren't at universities. But more interesting were sites like Indeed, which searches listings from tons of job sites and aggregates them for you. Here, I found job titles I'd never heard of: Program Coordinator, Assistant Editor (different from Editorial Assistant), and Awake Overnight Life Skills Coach (also known as your boyfriend/girlfriend).

I also made lists of companies I admired for whatever reason, whether they had anything to do with my specialty or not: The Gates Foundation, United Nations, Wikipedia, and countless others. I made lists of places I liked to spend time: Museums, national parks, libraries, cafes. For each of these companies and venues, I checked out their online job listings to find out what people there actually do. What are their job titles? What sorts of backgrounds do they have? What value would they see in a niche-geek like me?

When I started looking outside of the academic bubble, I got really excited. There are thousands of interesting companies out there and millions of people doing really interesting things. But I also got worried because I didn't see many job ads geared toward people like me.

In reading my posts about this whole process, you might get the impression that I approached it all rationally and intelligently like a good scientist should. And to some extent, that's true. I knew that I needed to figure out for myself what I wanted in a job, and I needed to figure out how those desires fit in with the already existing working world. But at the time it felt like utter chaos, and there were many times when I was hard on myself for not knowing what I wanted to do next. It didn't feel rational or intelligent to give up things like money, health insurance, and direction in hopes that I'd find something better. It was kind of a mess, and I can't claim that I navigated the process with grace, but I did eventually find a job that met all of my criteria.