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Leaving academia
Mar. 25th, 2013 06:49 pmIt is possible that my meeting with my adviser, which at the time seemed like such a disaster, was actually productive. I had been psyching myself up all week to go talk to him, to say, I need to get out of here, please let me publish my paper, I don’t care about impact factor anymore, I just want out. I knew I was going to cry, because I always cry, particularly if I’m talking about leaving academia, about going into an industry that seems so compromised, so corrupt, about not living up to other people’s expectations, about the crippling anxiety and despair that I get from not living up to other people’s expectations and how that further undermines my ability to actually achieve anything, about my suspicion that this job is not good for me. But I had to talk to him, because I’ve been finding myself looking around at other people – secretaries, people in HR, lab managers, coffee kiosk workers, stay at home moms, and thinking, I could do that. I could just walk away.
And then we lost our apartment, which I hadn’t realized I was so emotionally attached to; I hadn’t thought about how much I cared that this is the place where I was pregnant, this is the place where my daughter was an infant, this is the only home she’s ever had. And it hit me that I had to figure out how much longer I was going to be a postdoc, because I need to know where (what town, what state, what country) we are going to be living so I can register her for kindergarten. And I don’t want to switch her out of her daycare now, and then move somewhere completely different in 6 month and have to do it all over again, and on the other hand I don’t want to move somewhere cheap thinking it will be temporary, and then find ourselves still there in 3 years, trying to navigate a failing urban school.
But my adviser felt that I was overreacting to everything. That moving isn’t a big deal, that kindergarten is not a big deal, that my paper is almost done, and that in his opinion there is no chance of it dragging out so long that in 5 years I am still here, crazier, more scattered, and even less employable. He said he was worried about me, that there was obviously something else going on with me, and that I should deal with that before making any big decisions about my career. Because, really, he not only needs me to submit the paper (because there is no one else in the lab with the expertise to finish it if I leave) he needs me to go into academia, because his track record on placing his postdocs is getting worse and worse – no one has gotten a tenure track position since I joined the lab seven years ago. But I think that my spiraling freak out in the last year of experiments not going well (exacerbated by the 4 months when I was pregnant and almost too sick to move, and at the end, on bed rest) is exactly the reason why I should not apply for tenure track jobs, because there is a particular kind of academic performance anxiety that pushes all my buttons, and I’ve known that since graduate school, where as soon as the exams ended, I started getting unmoored and desperate, but when the experiments are going well, I convince myself that it had nothing to do with work, that it was just my mood going off the rails for no reason.
But even though my adviser thinks I’m crazy, fragile, emotional, anxious, depressed, brittle, I now how a timeline for finishing the paper. Six months, with a serious evaluation in three months to see if things are on track, and if we need to make the paper less ambitious to get it submitted by October. And he agreed to hand off a bunch of my other work – stuff he wanted done stat, but which I had no real interest in – to a former student who’s killing time while she waits to see if the final paper of her thesis is going to get published. So, weirdly, for the moment, things are working out.
