pleasantly surprised

Telling my parents that I was leaving my job rated about a 7 on the Dread Scale. I knew they thought I was crazy for doing it, but I figured that they saw my leaving a "perfectly respectable" job as the latest in the slew of questionable decisions I'd made since leaving their house to go to college. The conversations I was really dreading were the ones I had to have with my postdoc adviser (an 8.5) and my graduate adviser (10).

I started with my postdoc adviser, since he'd only invested a few months in me. I had been spinning up a new project in the lab, and we'd gotten a proposal funded for it, but I hadn't actually done anything in the field or in the lab yet. When I told him that I was leaving, he seemed completely unfazed. We talked about the reasons why, and he suggested some alternatives. Would I be happier at another university? Different projects? Then he said a couple of things that gave me the nerve to talk to my graduate adviser. First, that you have to try to find something that will make you happy. If it isn't academia, bail! Second, that he's had about a dozen students and postdocs at this point in his career. Some have stayed in academia, and some have left. In each individual case, he was completely unable to predict whether a student would stay or leave based on that person's performance or intelligence.

With that conversation out of the way, I composed an email to my graduate adviser. Over the years, she and I had had a few personal conversations, but our relationship was primarily professional, and we weren't very close. Yet I couldn't imagine her freaking out or getting angry with me for what amounted to a personal choice. And I was right. Her response to my email was truly incredible and extremely kind. She wrote that she thought it was a good time to be exploring all my options. She herself hadn't really done that at any point in her academic training and career, and had wondered if she'd be happier in another field.

Telling my mentors that I was leaving lifted a huge weight off my chest. Instead of constantly looking backward (Should I not have wasted all those years in school?) or fantasizing (Oooh, maybe I'll go to culinary school!), I started looking forward to what I really wanted to do with my life.