The screenshot is from someone on my email list who finished her PhD in English in 2022 and moved straight into an assistant professorship.
When doing everything right still doesn’t feel right
“Then came the top-tier journals, university presses, competitive grants from the NEH and the Mellon Foundation.”
She wrote about her experience after she joined BAE.
“None of it–not even teaching–is bringing me joy anymore. I feel like a shell of a human. Leaving academia has been on my mind even before finishing the dissertation.”
Not even teaching.
Most of the rest of her post you can complain about in a hallway without anyone thinking twice, but teaching is usually the thing people hold onto when they decide to stay in academia. When that’s not enough, what’s left?
Then, there’s the last part of the post: she was already thinking about leaving even before she finished the dissertation. Which means the grants and the publications and the professorship all came while she was already questioning whether she wanted to stay.
This story is more common than you probably think. We know something is wrong, our gut is telling us to make a change, but we keep going anyway. But when it comes to making the decision to leave academia amid the chaos of daily life, it’s a tough question to think through when you have a book chapter due in six weeks, a growing stack of papers to grade, and 18 meetings that should be an email.
Someone in a completely different field shared a similar experience recently. An assistant professor a year into running their own lab, several million in funding, nine people on the team. On paper they were crushing it, they said, and they should have been happy. But they were miserable.
I thought about leaving academia for years
I know the feeling. I did all the things I was supposed to do, as well. My mentors told me to take the tenure-track job, that I could always move later if I didn’t like the city, that it was just a place to start. So I took it. I developed new courses. I picked up the slack for people in the department who weren’t doing their share. I blocked off Friday mornings to write–and the writing never happened because there were always papers to grade or some new service project that had landed on me. I took my laptop on every vacation and spent days at an uncomfortable desk at my in-laws doing data analysis while everyone else was outside enjoying the Maine summer.
When I look back now I can’t explain why I did any of that. At the time I kept telling myself it was normal, that this is just how academia is, that I had to do it until tenure and I would catch up eventually. It went on for years. I never caught up.
There was no single moment. It was a slow wearing down of my joy and my life, and I spent several years asking myself whether I should leave and whether it was even allowed.
You don’t need a crisis to question your career
When I created BAE I assumed the people who enrolled would be junior faculty, exhausted from chasing tenure. We have those folks (and grad students who are finishing their PhDs), but they’re not the majority. It’s mostly people who have been teaching for a long time, who got tenure, and who found out it wasn’t what they’d been told it would be.
So I don’t think the idea to leave academia arrives because something suddenly goes wrong. Usually it’s been there the whole time.
If any of this is familiar, you’re not alone. Looking into possibilities outside academia is one step you can take to start figuring out what’s the right next step for you.