Dr. Julie Ann Ward

The decision-making process

The decision-making process was a long one for me. I had invested years into getting a PhD and felt like I’d won the lottery when I landed a tenure-track position at an R1 university near my family. The great fortune of getting a great job offer when there were very, very few available made it difficult to consider whether it was what I wanted. 

I started my PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley, in one of the more prestigious programs in my field, in 2008. This was also the beginning of the Great Recession. That year the Modern Languages Association Job List, the source for job seekers who wanted to be professors of English or (in my case) “Other Languages,” experienced a dramatic downturn in the number of positions advertised. That trend continues today, and even the jobs that are posted are less likely to be tenure-track every single year. When I got my job in 2014, there were 208 tenure-track Spanish positions advertised; in 2022 there were only 44. This trend bore out in my own department – after I was hired, my university did not approve any more tenure-track positions in Spanish while I was employed there. As the number of students we taught rose and tenure-track faculty left, they were replaced with wonderful, intelligent, highly-trained contingent faculty with heavy teaching loads, by-the-course or one-year contracts, and little to no support for equipment, materials, or professional development. 

My position was the “last of my kind,” and being the only junior tenure-track faculty member in my field frustrated me. It was impossible to cultivate an academic program without long-term investment, and poor working conditions pushed our majority-contingent faculty members to look for work elsewhere. As I approached tenure, I saw friends on the tenure track leave my university and others for jobs outside of higher education. I foresaw a future in which I was the only faculty member in my area with the academic and material protections of tenure while my overworked and underpaid colleagues came and went. I imagined myself as a dragon guarding a horde, lonely and decadent. The concentration of incredibly strong labor rights (tenure and promotion to Associate Professor) only available to an incredibly small and ever-decreasing proportion of workers made matters worse at my university because those rights are only effective when they are shared by many workers. This vast inequality results in divisions between faculty of different ranks and status, and between faculty and staff, stifling solidarity and collaboration.

As the disparities in faculty and staff working conditions became more and more clear to me, and I saw their negative impact on students, I finally faced the fact that I wanted to try something else. Academia itself became unbearable to me – the hierarchical structure is incredibly conservative, and the power dynamics of the tenure and promotion process (not to mention the power that tenure-stream faculty have over non-tenure-stream faculty) create incredibly toxic and dangerous situations. I went about the process of leaving the best way I knew: by reading everything I could about how to leave academia. I attended free webinars about how to craft a resume for industry. I spiffed up my abandoned LinkedIn profile. I interviewed friends who had left about their new work life, and then interviewed people they knew who had left. I was looking for ideas of what I might do besides what I had always done, and what my life might be like if I did.  

The difference between the two worlds

One of my biggest fears about leaving academia was a loss of what I saw as autonomy over my schedule and work. But when I asked former faculty who were working 8-5 corporate jobs how they felt about losing summer break (which any professor will tell you is when most of their research work gets done), they usually just shrugged and said they take paid time off when they want to go on vacation. That they don’t feel compelled to work evenings and weekends. That they rested and cultivated new or forgotten hobbies, got to live in the cities they wanted to, with their partners, and didn’t have to plan their holidays around academic conferences. My own experience since leaving my job as a professor and becoming a full-time grant writer has confirmed this observation; I went to a weeklong surf camp in February (previously unthinkable — the beginning of the semester!). My company observes a four-day workweek and I don’t bring home grading to fill up the three-day weekend. I’ve continued writing but have a radically different relationship with writing than when I was a faculty writer. I learned to play tennis and I teach poetry classes in the community. And I still get to do some of the things I enjoyed as an academic, such as reading and translating Latin American literature.

Advantages and disadvantages of being a former academic

Advantages:

• Project management — Completing a dissertation, publishing research, preparing and teaching courses — all of these accomplishments require advanced project management skills.
• Collaboration — Anyone who has survived a faculty meeting or a university committee has learned to work with diverse personalities with a variety of (sometimes opposing) interests.
• Communication — No matter the field, faculty researchers are generally expected to be publication machines; they write and publish articles for specialized audiences but often are required to translate their findings for more general audiences, whether it is an introductory undergraduate course, an op-ed, or a review for a popular publication. They also get up and give 50- or 75-minute presentations almost every day as teachers and present at international conferences. These skills may seem like second nature after a few years, but they are highly valuable and should be highlighted.

Disadvantages:

The biggest disadvantage I see is the mindset created by years of indoctrination during a PhD program and years on the job market and the tenure track. Many academic workers fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy, believing that their years in academia will have been wasted if they move into another career field. I spent over a decade pursuing the education necessary for my former academic position, and it was easy to catch myself thinking that leaving would seal my fate as a “failure.” For many people who have spent years submitting themselves and their work to endless, internally incoherent committees with conflicting requirements, deciding to walk away rather than jump through the next hoop is a deeply emotional, difficult step. 

What you would recommend for someone considering the transition?

Academia is a hermetically sealed world; it can be hard to imagine a life outside of it. If you’re considering leaving, I’d recommend asking as many people as you can for “informational interviews” — 20-minute conversations where you just ask them what they do at work, how they got there, what they like about it, and what they think they might do next. Be sure to ask them if there is anyone else they think you should talk to and for an introduction. The more you learn about other stories, other paths, the more real they become, and the more you will be able to imagine and realize a fulfilling path for yourself. 

Additionally, be honest with yourself about the skills and experiences you have and the ones you may lack. Many academics, especially those who have not worked outside of that context, may also be unaware of the professional landscape outside of academia, including necessary skills, professional norms, and the state of a given industry, and will require some study and observation to learn. Many academics, however, also fail to realize just how well prepared they are for many jobs and how in demand their skill sets may be in many industries.  

Dr. Stephanie Weaver

The decision-making process

When I took my first academic job, there were a lot of constraints on my choices. Besides the usual limited number of job postings, I also had an academic spouse and we were in the same field. What we ended up with was about the best we could hope for – I had a teaching-focused position at a big state university and my partner had a lecturer position at a small liberal arts college about an hour away that would very likely turn into a tenure-track position once the school got its budget in order.

Because my job was exclusively teaching – I taught four sections of writing courses every fall and spring semester – I didn’t have much time to continue pursuing research or turning my dissertation into a book project, the usual next step in my field. I had summers off, but my research area was time sensitive and rapidly evolving and I just couldn’t keep up while other people published the kinds of articles I would have been working on if I had the time. I also began to realize that I didn’t actually like writing for academic audiences that much, and I experimented with other kinds of writing instead. I kept a blog on science fiction and fantasy texts for a while. I did a vlog on being a writing teacher. I wrote a novel. I wrote essays on current events. I found all of that more interesting and rewarding than writing for academic journals.

The fact was that I loved writing, but it wasn’t part of my job as a teacher. I also loved teaching writing, but the demands of my job and the lack of any meaningful career growth were souring my relationship with it. Like many people during the pandemic, I began to seriously reevaluate what I wanted out of my life and my work, and I got the ADHD diagnosis that helped me make sense of so much of my habits and tendencies in my work life. My partner and I also wanted to relocate in the next couple of years, and doing that would be a lot easier if we were only looking for one academic job instead of two. So in Spring 2022, I decided to leave my academic job at the end of the semester.

The difference between the two worlds

One of the problems I had with academic writing was actually sustaining interest in my own projects long enough to get all the way through the academic publishing pipeline. While the timeline of a grant – from the initial call for proposals or opportunity listing to actually receiving the funding – can take months, it still goes faster than academic projects. In general, my work feels like it has more immediacy than it did in academia, and as someone with ADHD, I’m a lot happier having fewer projects that I’m slogging through long after I’ve gotten bored with them.

The other huge difference is that there are actually mechanisms for work life balance in place rather than you having to set your own boundaries and then feeling guilty about them. There are enforced lunch breaks. There are vacation days. There are sick days built into your contract. As an academic, I had to shoe-horn these things in. It’s true that work-life balance can still be a struggle, but it’s less of a struggle for me now.

Advantages and disadvantages of being a former academic

Advantages:

Project management

I didn’t realize this until after I left academia and started a job as a policy analyst, but academia – especially teaching at a college level – actually gives you quite a few project management skills. If you’ve taught a college-level course, you likely know how to take a set of desired outcomes, plan project phases (the major projects of the course), break those down into actionable steps (lesson plans, homework assignments, etc.), evaluate the stakeholders involved (students, administrators, fellow faculty, etc.), build in assessment practices to identify problems (i.e. rethink the second half of the semester after everyone bombs the mid-term), and perform final assessment and evaluation (final grades, student evals, annual reviews, etc.). Thinking about big projects in terms of these steps comes pretty naturally to me after spending so many years in a classroom, and inside academia, we kind of assume everyone can do these things (or that they should be able to), but these are actually highly desired skills outside of academia.

Self-directed worker

For better or worse, a lot of work in academia happens without supervision. You’re kind of turned loose with a set of classes and list of expectations for tenure and you just have to figure it out as you go. There have been efforts to change this – to provide more support to faculty – but it does mean that academia tends to both attract and produce very self-directed workers. Even in graduate school, you either learn to keep yourself on track or you fail, and maybe because the consequences are so dire and it seems like everyone around you has this skill, it’s easy to forget that it is a skill, and it’s a valuable one, especially as more and more work is shifting to being partly or completely remote.

Disadvantages:

Work/Life Separation

When I started my first non-academic job, I had to ask my supervisor how to take time off, and I don’t mean that I didn’t understand how to use the HR interface. In academia, we have so much freedom with when and where we do a lot of our work that the idea of scheduling a day off is completely foreign – you just cancel class and rearrange the lesson plans. Making the shift to working the same hours every day and every week was a bit of a struggle, especially when I was so used to doing certain kinds of work when I felt like it.

Collaboration and Shared Work

My first non-academic job involved a lot of looking at documents with a group of people and making adjustments as we discussed them. For me, it was a struggle on the best days and an absolute nightmare on the worst. Unfortunately, the flip-side of being a very self-directed worker is that you might not be very good at doing collaborative or shared work. 

What you would recommend for someone considering the transition?

Start by telling yourself, repeatedly, that academia isn’t the only option. Outside of a few specific, narrow things, academia isn’t the only place you can do whatever work it is that you like doing. If you decide you want to go back to academia, you’ll return with a set of skills and experiences that will set you apart from a lot of other candidates.

Take the Clifton Strengths assessment. This assessment, which starts by identifying your top 5 strengths out of a list of 34, really helped me see the skills that I took for granted as desirable and employable. Nothing in my top 5 strengths surprised me, but the assessment put those strengths into language that I could use to describe myself and the value of my past work experience into language that transferred to non-academic contexts. The assessment also helped me gain a deeper understanding of the kinds of work I find enjoyable and feel well-suited for. For example, one of my top 5 is “strategic,” meaning that I’m really good at identifying possible courses of action and evaluating them. In resumes, I’ve talked about this as proficiency in identifying and evaluating strategies for achieving desired outcomes (and I’ve backed this up with examples from my teaching career). This also helped me understand why I’ve been so unhappy in some jobs. I need to feel like I have the flexibility and autonomy to make choices and where I feel like my input on courses of action is valued.

Dr. Krista Kurlinkus

The decision-making process

The first time I remember entertaining anything other than becoming an academic was when my best friend and I started toying with the idea of opening a writing consultancy during the fourth year of our Ph.D. program. We even started working on the website together. Nothing ever came of it, probably because we both became so busy, but this friend also graduated and then left the academy to go into nonprofit work. She is now a program director at a nationally recognized humanities nonprofit. 

Soon after we started developing our business website, the West Virginia Water Crisis happened, and I started going to West Virginia all the time to film and advocate. That took over my life for the semester. Then that summer, my boyfriend, who had graduated a year earlier than me, moved to Oklahoma and started a tenure-track faculty position. That fall, I moved down to Oklahoma to be with him while I finished writing my dissertation remotely. It was an unusual move, but my advisor expressed confidence in me and was happy for us (we were both her students and she had seen us fall in love).

At that point I was already very interested in using my skills and research for something outside of the academic world. My dissertation was on the rhetorics of advocacy in Appalachia, and I knew from my field research that nonprofits in the region could use help with their communications and grant writing. I was also burned out and disillusioned with academic life. 

I wanted to get started right away in the nonprofit world, so in my final semester of school, I applied for nonprofit jobs in Oklahoma City. I didn’t expect to be hired so quickly, and in February, I started working as a Development Director with an organization with an operating budget of over $1 million dollars. I learned quickly that I loved the grant writing but hated the rest of the job. (Plus, it was a toxic, dangerous workplace.) 

When I had finally had the last straw at that job, I quit. I had just graduated from my Ph.D. program, and I no longer felt I had to tolerate the abuse. One Saturday morning in June, I cleaned out my office and sent my resignation via email. That afternoon, I registered my business online, bought a website domain, and that was that.

I had discussed with my husband potentially opening a business before this, and he had even come up with a name and created a logo for me. So with that, I was off. I started “Write Good” with an equal mix of desperation and excitement. 

The difference between the two worlds

It’s true that academic life is very self-directed in terms of how well you do. However, there is a clear path to success that everyone knows the steps to and you are guided through these steps by your academic advisor (if you have a good one, at least). Life as a business owner, however, is even more self-directed and there is no clear path, no built-in advisors, no standard coursework, exams, and dissertation process that everyone completes in order to graduate.

It’s totally on you to figure out what you need to learn, who to learn it from, and then how to implement it. And, at least in the beginning, whether you work each day determines whether you get paid. There’s so much experimentation in entrepreneurship, and you have to create your own metrics for success, whereas in academia, your main metric for success is being hired and then being tenured and promoted. 

Advantages and disadvantages of being a former academic

I know how to work and be persistent. I have a phenomenal attention span when I want to focus on a big project and can focus for 8 hours straight if it’s a project I’m really excited about (not sure if this is just ADHD hyperfocus, a skill I learned in school, or a combination of both). I have always loved learning and my Ph.D. program taught me how to learn efficiently and effectively, and then how to teach it to others.

What you would recommend for someone considering the transition?

In my description of the path I took, I never mentioned agonizing over my decision to leave the academy before I did it. That’s because I didn’t. I just knew this was what I wanted to do; it seemed very logical to me at the time. I realize that isn’t super helpful for those of you who have a lot of uncertainty around the prospect of leaving the academy, and it’s also not to say that I never questioned my decision after the fact. I had many periods in my business where I applied for 9-5 jobs both in and outside of the academy (but never as a professor). 

If I were considering the transition again, I would write down what I value, and not just surface-level aspects of jobs that I value. Ask yourself: What do I, deep down, value in life?

I would write down how each career path might align with/allow me to live out those values. Then I would pick the one that was most aligned.

If you’re struggling to know what your values are or what you truly enjoy, take a few moments at the end of each day to write down how you felt about what you did that day and look for patterns. Then revisit some of your fondest memories from the more distant past and note what it is about those memories that brings you so much joy. Again, look for patterns.

Finally, listen to your body and your emotions. Last week, I was so excited about the prospect of buying a house that we saw and loved. However, the night after we viewed the house, I had a very uneasy feeling and couldn’t sleep. I had to pause and look inward. Why was I feeling so uneasy? What could I trace it back to? It was the house. As much as I loved it, it wasn’t the right house. I had let my excitement over one aspect of the house overshadow the bigger picture. But my intuition, recognition of unease through identifying the physical manifestation of it, and then my ability to trace the cause of that unease helped me quickly and definitively make a decision to no longer consider that house. It took a lot of time for me to develop this ability, and maybe some people are born with it, but it’s one that has served me extremely well in figuring out my path in life.

Grant Writing Boss Club

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