from eager beaver to eager emigrant

Each Ivory Tower exile has his or her own reasons for leaving. There are some common themes in their stories: Lack of desire to compete for an ever-shrinking pot of federal grant money; failure to receive tenure; a lack of passion for teaching, research, or some fatal combination of the two that leads to the failure to receive tenure; research projects failing or never making it to publication; money, and the perception that you could be making more of it outside of academia. While many of these played bit roles in my own departure drama, they weren't the primary players. In these next few posts, I'll write about why I decided to leave despite being relatively successful at what I was doing.

My ambivalence toward academia became firmly rooted mid-way through graduate school. I had finished up all of my coursework, and was in the early stages of my dissertation research. In other words, I was far enough along to be invested, but far enough from finishing that it seemed implausible that I ever would. Each time I glanced at the hundreds of samples in my "to analyze" stack, my heart felt heavy. It wasn't so much the time that it would take to analyze them or all of the failed experiments and instrumentation issues that would inevitably occur in the course of the analyses that gave me pause. I simply didn't care anymore.

Not caring about my research saddened me, even depressed me for a while. For years, I had soaked up all I could about my field, reveled in it. I knew what it felt like to stay up all night reading journal articles like they were steamy romance novels. My college roommates had made fun of my insatiable desire to learn. Losing that desire was unsettling because I knew what it was like to have it. Without it, I felt like a fake who was simply going through the motions*.

Over the next few years, as I completed my thesis, I had moments in which I truly enjoyed my work. My friends and I propped each other up when necessary, and the bonds between us were genuine and lovely. My mood lightened considerably when I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. By the time I defended I was, by most standards, one of the most promising new scientists in my field. I had published four first-author papers by the time I finished school, and had one more in the pipeline. I had received a highly coveted postdoctoral fellowship -- the kind of fellowship that you don't turn down. Despite my very deep concern about whether or not I wanted to continue in academia, I did. Hoping that a new research direction -- in a new lab, in a new part of the country -- would reinvigorate me, I took the fellowship. Once I arrived at my new university, it became strikingly clear that I needed to leave academia.

* Interestingly, the phenomenon of feeling like a fake who could be exposed at any moment is so prevalent amongst students and faculty members at high-level institutions that it has a name: The Impostor Syndrome. I'll write about it someday.