Your nonacademic career is not a consolation prize
Photo Credit: Shutterstock / solarseven
This work situation has given me the vibrant and varied workdays I was after. My schedule is constantly changing and the series of projects I’m tasked to work on are always new, affording me opportunities to learn and grow. I may not be making new scientific discoveries. But I get to work on challenging and sometimes uncertain projects—especially when preparing patents—which gives me the rush of excitement I was looking for. The flexible schedule also gives me time to be a mum in the afternoons and the freedom to work remotely from a variety of locations, including from where my parents live in Italy.
It was risky for me to try to piece together a career from multiple part-time positions. But it has turned out to be more practical than I imagined—and as rewarding as I hoped.
But collectively it all started to make my choice feel like something I had to defend. I was hopping off the train, cutting a hole in the pipeline, or whatever analogy best suits the practice of eschewing the expected and disappointing everyone who believed in my potential. And as sure as I had felt about my next step, doubt started to creep in. After 4 years of college and seven of grad school, more than a decade of living the campus life, I was going to exit this world forever and get a job job? And, what, be, like, an adult? As I prepared to leave, somehow simultaneously content in my decision and freaking out, I just couldn’t shake two words: “consolation prize.”
Growing up in the 1980s and ’90s, I watched a lot of gameshows. There was always a moment, just before the winner would be whisked off for their bonus game, when the camera would linger on the losing contestants—whom, unfortunately, we need to say goodbye to. But they’re not leaving empty-handed, the host would remind us, because just for being here today, they’ll receive a lovely parting gift! A year’s supply of Rice-a-Roni! Car wax! The home version of the game they just lost, so they can relive the trauma! The camera would always show the tight-lipped grins on the contestants’ faces as they pretended they were happy just to be there, anticipating a rich year of rice and wax, when steps away on the same stage, just off camera, stood their competitor, bouncing up and down and preparing to win $10,000.
And as I watched many of my classmates select their postdoc labs, taking the next step up a rather well-defined academic career ladder, I couldn’t help but feel that maybe I had opted for the car wax, a consolation prize career, a path out of academia for those who couldn’t cut it.
I hadn’t gone into my Ph.D. with my heart set on a long-term academic career, dreams of tea kettles and elbow patches and eventually authoring an expensive textbook I’d force my students to buy. I enrolled in a Ph.D. program in part because I was a person who loved school, and this was more school. It just felt right, and hey, I’d have several years to figure out my next step.
And over those years, as I started to feel that my project passed the point of Maybe Saving the World and instead veered hard toward Getting the Next Grant, I decided I wanted out, fabulous bonus round be darned. Still, the culture of science training and its assumptions about a Standard Path and an Alternative Path, a right way and a whatever-floats-your-boat-I-guess way, a fabulous bonus round and a lovely parting gift, got to me.
Ultimately, it was probably my disappointment in my research that gave me comfort in my decision. I tried to remind myself that scientists left academia all the time—my mother, for example—and were just as talented, lauded, and useful to society as those who remained. When guest speakers would tell us about their nonacademic careers, I’d think, “See, this is a thing people do, and apparently it’s fine. It … is fine, isn’t it?”
And it has been fine. I’ve worked as a scientist in industry and in the federal government. Of course, it hasn’t been perfect—but I know it’s been a better fit for me than staying in academia.
Since my time in grad school, as nonacademic careers began to outnumber academic ones, this conversation has evolved to some extent. Some of the old pressure, though, has never left. Professors still lament the leaky pipeline that lets people like me realize that careers outside the university aren’t consolation prizes, they’re a completely different bonus round—one that doesn’t need to be defended because it’s time to stop assuming it’s suboptimal in the first place.
The tenure track is certainly right for some folks, but not for everyone. You shouldn’t have to Google career options in secret, or hide them from your adviser, or pursue a postdoc that doesn’t interest you. Advanced training in science should boost your career options, not restrict them.
You didn’t lose the gameshow. You just found a different way to win.
