Another season of academic job-hunting has come and nearly gone. Interviews are under way and offers are being made. A lucky few Ph.D.'s are weighing their options and negotiating with department heads. Others are still anxiously hoping for the phone to ring. And still others are resigned to waiting for that dream job yet another year. Me? I'm happy to no longer be a part of this picture. Not because I already have an academic job, but because I don't want one.
My first year out of graduate school, I interviewed for several teaching jobs in my field -- evolutionary biology -- knowing that I didn't really want any of the jobs but thinking, well, this is what you do when you get your Ph.D. I was still too indoctrinated with tenured expectations to respond any other way to all the pressure to "get those applications out!" I got some good interviewing experience, stayed in some nice hotels, met a lot of interesting people, and visited parts of the country I doubt I will ever visit again.
I was more selective the next year. I applied for two academic jobs and interviewed at both colleges, but neither was a good fit. I figured it wasn't meant to be. That was in the fall of 1998, and I haven't applied for a single academic job since then. Still, I peruse the academic job ads, curiously, as though some day the perfect position will materialize. But I know it won't, because the ad would have to read something like this:
Looking for someone who wants to use her scientific training in evolutionary theory and population genetics to write fiction and nonfiction.
I went to graduate school because I was curious about what the natural world looked like to a scientist. But by the time I was done, I was tired of thinking about nature through the grid-pattern lens of quantified analysis, and I was no longer enjoying its beauty the way I used to, before I started dissecting it into statistical packages of DNA. I wanted to simply love it. And I wanted to write.
So when my postdoctoral fellowship ended in December 1999, and a friend hooked me up with a freelance writing gig for an Internet startup, I jumped at the opportunity. Contrary to everything I'd heard about dot-coms being money-making mills, my hourly compensation was $12 an hour, peanuts for a Ph.D. But I figured it was O.K., at least for a while, since it was my first step outside of academia. And even if my assignments didn't exactly provide the gut-spilling creative outlet I was seeking, they marked the beginning of a writing career that I had fantasized about long before I knew what a Ph.D. was.
With my new assignments in hand, I headed to the library, opened up the medical journals and started reading and writing about cancers, neurological disorders, gynecological complications, and more. At a party a few weeks later, while talking with some new acquaintances, the wine must have slowed the frantic firing in my brain that would so often fluster me when someone asked their variation of "what do you do?" Or maybe it was the check I'd recently received in the mail, a monetary seal of approval embossed on my writing ambitions. "I write," I said, surprising myself with the courage of those two simple words.
A few months later, my freelance writing gig turned into a full-time, in-house position. I quickly realized, however, that for someone who went into biology with fantasies of long summer days spent studying birds on remote, fog-shrouded islands, I wasn't exactly in my element sitting in a cubby, in front of a computer, the sounds of office chatter challenging my concentration. And the writing was too technical. I was bored. But it was a way to pay the bills for a while, a means to an end.
The end came last month when I left the dot-com job, not because of impending layoffs, but because I decided to take the plunge into full-time freelancing. I made the move after attending the recent annual meeting of the National Association of Science Writers in San Francisco, where I met several editors and filled my plate with exciting freelance assignments on topics much more exciting than medical-report writing. Although my short-lived dot-com days were a good start to a professional writing career, it was time to take yet another step forward.
Leaving academe behind hasn't been easy. It's a seductive life -- a guaranteed lifetime income, cozy retirement benefits, your own laboratory, your own schedule, smart colleagues, prestige, recognition, and more. Of course everything comes with a cost, like not having much choice about where you live or much time for outside interests, but compared with a lot of other professions, tenure is an enviable bargain.
Harder than forfeiting the lifestyle perks is battling the demons of shame that seek to remind me that I have given up academe for something less worthy. "Don't you feel a duty to carry on your adviser's intellectual genes?" a friend and young professor at a nearby college once asked me. "If you're smart, you end up in academia. There's really no other place to be," one of my graduate professors cautioned me.
And there have been moments of inspiration that make me want to do science again. I frequent the science library at the local college and skim through familiar journals. I look for papers on inbreeding -- my dissertation topic -- and suddenly I want to be using my mind again in that familiar way. Suddenly I feel an acute longing for the life I have left behind. I imagine the experiments I could be doing, the questions I could be asking. It keeps me awake some nights, anxious and tossing in my dreams of the past, wanting to get up and go to a lab that doesn't exist anymore.
But do I really want to be doing science again, I ask myself, or do I just want to write about it?
Thankfully, as time passes, those moments of doubt are few and far between. Now, when I see my academic work cited, instead of longing for the research life I have left behind, I feel proud, both about what I've accomplished and how I've moved on.
I always knew that writing was more important to me than science, but as a fledgling academic, I could never seem to find the time or motivation to actually write. It was probably all that left-brain activity mixed with the stress and demands of academic research. I'm not even sure I kept more than a couple weeks of a diary, all told, over the entire seven years I was in grad school.
I keep a daily journal now. I attend writing workshops and enroll in fiction-writing courses. I am learning Spanish, dabbling in art, and living where I want to live. I am making choices based not on the availability of a job or a grant application, but on my own desires. I'm doing and feeling things I can't imagine ever experiencing if I'd stayed on the tenure track. I don't know where this path will take me, and I don't need to know.
Many of my peers and friends have indeed found their perfect (or near-perfect) fit on the tenure track, and I am happy for them. Others are still struggling, and I wish them well. But for those who hesitate, wondering if there is something else out there worth pursuing, it is a marvelous and exciting challenge to strip yourself of the tenured grail of the Ph.D. and believe that you are capable of so much more.
