Performing a Post-Academic Career

It’s not about how it looks, it’s about how it feels. But what if I can't stop feeling bad about how it looks?

Many, many (maybe even a third many) years ago, I did yoga along with a videocassette featuring the Santa Monica yogi Brian Kest. He would walk around his students in a light-filled warehouse, wearing only a pair of cut-off jeans and Paul Stanley hair. It was Power Yoga, high energy and westernized, delivered in his trademark midwestern accent. A strange place to get wisdom! But he said a lot of useful things. One point he made over and over was that the success of a pose isn’t about outward appearance, “It’s not about what it looks like, it’s about what it feels like.” That saying, in exactly Brian’s voice, popped into my head during one of my recent freak-outs about my post-academic career.

In academia, we learn early on that how things LOOK really matters.

One of the faculty members at my graduate institution was famous for working all the time. There was always a light on in his office and a coat on his chair—at least all the time that I was there, which I hasten to tell you was a lot. Then, one of his students whispered to me that this faculty member wasn’t actually always around, he was just staging his office to make it seem like he was never not working. This confirmed what I was already discovering about academic science—that success depended on convincingly performing your dedication.

It was important to perform your intellect, too. I learned to pretend to know about a recent paper I hadn’t read, or a particular faculty member I’d never heard of at MIT, to never admit “I don’t know”, to drop names as fast as I could. These were all skills I would use to my advantage for many years to come. Even as a full professor, mentioning where I went to graduate school or who my postdoc advisor was could change the way other scientists saw me in an instant.

It took me a long time to be able to say “I have never heard about that, but it sounds interesting. Tell me more!” I learned to do this in part from my science hero Rob Phillips, a biophysics professor at Caltech and author of Cell Biology by the Numbers. When we were working together on a grant, or chatting on his front porch at Woods Hole, he was never afraid to admit he didn’t know something. I hadn’t run in that phenotype before and was fascinated.

All this focus on appearance in academia is tied, of course, to what we discussed in my last post—the never-ending work of judging others. Not just their work, but their work habits, their productivity, their professional connections. And when I learned to constantly evaluate others, I learned to constantly evaluate myself, which made me angry and more judgmental of others . . . creating what felt like a never-ending cycle.

“I’m just a brain on a stick!”

All this focus on appearance made me forget what I was actually feeling. In fact, the way to get a grant in on time, to bust out 5 days straight of nothing but writing, to work both days on the weekend for years in a row, to check my email ten times a day on vacation, to make myself grade exams before students would get antsy—was to not feel anything at all other than a kind of emptiness when all the tasks were done.

I remember saying to my therapist during my worst days on the tenure track “I feel like a brain on a stick!” I was living in my computer, moving from task to task, never pausing to rest and return to my body. The book Burnout is all about the problem of living in high stress situations without “completing the stress cycle” by moving, breathing or interacting with people or hobbies. For a while, I found pleasure in art journaling from a kit, but unfortunately that was more of a quick fix than a permanent solution.

Shaking my concern with appearance has been HARD

Leaving academia didn’t exactly fix this problem, either. I’ll be honest, one thing that made the decision to resign my faculty position a little bit easier was that I thought I had three relatively prestigious non-academic jobs to consider. These were three new, full-time positions that I thought I had a shot at getting, and that I felt I could be proud of, that I could picture various colleagues judging to be admirable.

But I didn’t get any of those positions. All three rejections were demoralizing in their own way—each one probably deserves its own post, but I’m still not over some of what went down. As a result, I had to face the reality that I would not move from a tenured faculty position into a new shiny way to use my skills or change the world. Instead, would move from a tenured faculty position into unemployment. It was a terrible feeling, and I hated telling the many, many people who asked me, “what’s next?” that I didn’t have any idea.

I was asking a fundamentally stupid question: how will people know I’m valuable if I’m not demonstrating it through production and performance? Basically: how does it look to have left academia?

How does it feel?

But “what do I feel like?” is an entirely different question. I started freelancing after we moved to Portland, helping lawyers create scientific presentations and writing questions for an online college textbook. Working part-time from home gave me the mental space and time to buy a house, move into it, and to see a lot more of Griffin. That felt luxurious, but also financially precarious. Last month, I launched my own writing and editing service, The Sustainable Professor. It seems to be meeting a need, and I really enjoy the work. I love helping people organize and communicate their ideas. And that feels good.

Until I start worrying about what it looks like.

---

Discussion Section:

• How can I/anyone who’s been caught up in the performance of excellence and prestige shake the need to appear good, or better?

• What are some ways we can help our students worry less about the performance of passion and prestige, while still encouraging a love for their science?