Is it a good day to have a meltdown? It’s cold and there is sun outside, neh maybe not. Procrastinating even having a meltdown. But this audience doesn’t even let me do that. Today, we’re answering Kai’s question:
Why do we consider leaving academia a failure?
Dear Kai,
Sorry, the question ended up in my spam folder, otherwise, I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t ignore poking the hornet’s nest 😶.To be honest, I have been hearing this question a lot recently and almost everywhere, starting with myself. Every day I wake up saying that I will leave academia and the next hour I change my mind. Maybe, deep down, a toxic academic convinced me that it would be a failure if I left. It has to be one of those dinos. Wait, that’s not fair to the ancestors of great albatrosses, even though those ancestors were around for ~60 million years?! Similar vibes, if you know what I mean.
Anyway, we’d better crack on and since I’m taking this question seriously you won’t get to enjoy my delightful puns in this section. I seriously think this is because of how academia is perceived by others and meritocracy which has its problems that I cannot simply cover in this reply. Or here is the alternative theory I have: most of us are here because something about research speaks to us. It’s either you love learning or teaching, exploring new things, discussing ideas or you have a special interest in a topic and you want to devote more time to it. Do you see where I am going? You slowly start creating a connection between your job/career and your identity. Now, that’s a dangerous territory for many reasons but I will point out the one that strikes the most for me. I said it’s a dangerous territory because all this love is often used to exploit you. You start realising in a job market where everyone shows some excellence and the number of available positions is limited, you have to do more and more to stand out in the applications. Because that’s what the system tells you, and uses your love to do that. You are overworking yourself to the point that you get a horrible burnout. You follow the “mobility rule” so you don’t have stability, cannot financially support yourself or simply don’t get what you deserve. All this leads to falling out of love, and you start putting distance. It merely takes away the joy. -Are we good so far? Following it? Right.- This brings us to two potential outcomes:
- if you put a distance, you might start seeing that you are being exploited and/or academia is flawed. You start questioning why the system is like this and you want out * this week’s member leaving the island is … *
- you are not one of those lucky ones – yes getting a permanent position or even finding a postdoc happens when the dice land in your favour- and decide to leave
Since you created that link and your career became part of your identity, the moment you find yourself in one of these branches, you feel guilty like you are betraying your identity. Often in academia, we mistake guilt for failure. So, this is the personal effect. If we come to the outside view, warning: this one is mixed with famously problematic meritocracy, it is perceived as you didn’t try hard enough, you didn’t work enough, you don’t love research/science, you were not built for this (it’s not your identity), so you ‘failed’. Spoiler alert: I will call this bs. If one thinks that’s a ‘failure’, GET AWAY from them. They are one of those toxic academics that normalised this structure: having no life-work balance, you either publish or perish, anything other than scientific work is not worth spending time on it. Their way of thinking became the main bone of academia -thanks dinos, I guess?!-, and we started internalising this thought. So leaving academia started meaning failure. I obviously don’t agree with that.
What we need to do is normalise (this questioning and) leaving academia wherever you are at your career stage. It’s nothing to do with your skills and achievements. If you weren’t happy in a job or it was not working for you, you would try to change jobs. It is a bit like that. I ran into this blog post, it’s a long one but there is something I want to take from there: “If you get the job you dreamt of, you are brilliant and lucky; and if you do not, it is because you are brilliant and unlucky. But also: that we have trained you to have limited dreams. Perhaps the academic dream is your true calling, but know that your brilliance and skills are valued and will be valued in places and by people you have yet to dream of.”
If you think poking the hornet’s nest was not enough, you are welcome to the open pandora’s box1,2,3,4,5.
I will leave this with a brain teaser: Have you ever considered leaving academia?
Yours truly,
The Sassy Scientist
p.s. I mean we love dinos, that’s why I can’t use their name like that. If you ask me my favourite, I guess it has to be anchiornis huxleyi. It could be tiny but the exact definition of a punk. Also sizewise we are alike.
p.p.s. the title should have been The Sassy Scientist – Sound of Letting Go but I was afraid about potential copyright issues with Orla Gartland. “I can’t change you, can’t change me can’t change anything so I guess I gotta let it go that’s the sound of letting go”
p.p.p.s. did covid take away my sassiness? as they say, what doesn’t kill you, mutates and tries again.
