you can take the academia out of the academic...

I recently mentioned that less than 20% of science and engineering doctoral recipients are in tenure-track positions 4-6 years after they graduate. According to survey of 2003 graduates, though, 80% of those who don't go on to do a postdoc after graduation are still employed in their specific field of science*. In trying to find people who'd left the ivory tower from my super-specialized niche, I only found a few. So where are all these people going? Do they go into hiding after leaving the tower?

Data from 1996 to 2003 from this same report shed light on where these mystery folks go. It turns out that a majority (40-68%) of those fleeing academia find jobs in...drum roll please...academia. Yep, you read right. The survey doesn't go into any depth about what these non-academic roles in academia are, so they could be anything from technical research positions to janitorial jobs. Who knows.

The fact that there are people doing jobs aside from research and teaching at a university often goes unnoticed by the faculty members, postdocs, and students. As a graduate student I -- admittedly -- assumed that pretty much everyone who wasn't a researcher or professor at my school was a secretary of some kind. But when you start to really look around your university, you'll find people working on the periphery of science in all sorts of roles. There are grant writers, journalists, science communicators, K-12 outreach specialists, academic administrators, lobbyists, event planners, caterers...the list truly goes on and on. They are truly working on the interface between the research world and the real world.

In my experience, these people are an incredible font of information about leaving academic research. Many of them have their doctorates, but either lost interest in their research or simply wanted to explore different positions. I met with many such people at both my graduate institution and my postdoctoral institution, and I found that they were always happy to share their stories, experiences, and, most importantly, their Rolodexes (Rolodices? Rolindices?). Best of all, these are people who are actually at your current institution. You can just stroll into their offices in your lab coat and start asking questions.

This is a good time to announce that I, too, will be joining the ranks of the non-academics in academia. I start at my new job (!) at a large R1 university on Monday. I started this blog at the prompting of friends who are curious about what it's like to work on the periphery of science, so I'll finally start writing about that on Monday. For those of you who have read about all of the emotions that lead up to my decision to leave academia, I hope you don't feel betrayed by the fact that I'm headed back into the halls of the Ivory Tower.

* If I site this survey, it will be revealing too much about who I am, and we can't have that. But if you'd like me to send you the published data, leave a comment.