First Person

Moving Out

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By Eduardo Zea

As soon as I made up my mind to leave academe, I started feeling better. It was hard coming to that decision, but once it happened, it was as if a great weight had been lifted from me. I was free again! I was in command of my life once more! I could be whatever I wanted!

Now, I'm sure some readers are thinking, "Gee, it's not like he got off death row." And yet I'm sure that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of fellow graduate students who know where I'm coming from, who have been -- or are now -- in that tight spot.

When I began my doctoral studies at the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University, you could hardly find someone more motivated than I was toward an academic career. I was thrilled to be in a top program, and coming from a country with a very weak scientific tradition, I was flabbergasted by the level of support and the resources that were available to me. It couldn't have been better.

And yet after four and a half years of "things couldn't be better," I found I could hardly stomach the daily grind anymore. First I thought it was "thesis exhaustion," that heavy feeling that all doctoral students endure to a greater or lesser extent. I thought that after I finished my dissertation and the pressure was off, I would again recover that "fun factor" I had for research when I first came to graduate school.

I managed to finish my dissertation last June, and accepted a postdoc in the same department from which I graduated. In between my defense and starting at my new job, I took three weeks off to replenish my energy. I went home to spend time with my family and friends, and began noticing that my feelings toward my profession had seriously changed.

To that insidious question, "So, what are you doing next?", I found myself spouting a response I had conditioned myself to believe for the last four and a half years: "I'm going to do a postdoc for a couple of years, publish some good papers to build my CV, and then I'm going to apply for a tenure-track position at a research university."

I realized I was not saying this in the way one answers the question: "What are your dreams for the future?", but rather in the way one answers the question: "How are you going to support yourself now?" In my heart of hearts, I knew something was fundamentally wrong with this. But it would take me more time to confront that reality and act on it.

To compound my feelings of discomfort, after returning to Princeton, I began to realize that my postdoc salary was not exactly empowering. I could keep up with the bills, but had almost no ability to save money.

I started to think about the reward structure of academe. You work very hard as a graduate student, then a postdoc, and finally a tenure-track professor, for a decade or more of your life. During this time, your financial compensation grows at a very slow rate, although you are helped to some extent by university benefits. The promise of life-long job security is supposed to make this extended period of austerity worth it. I began to feel like the whole process was not too different from the life of those people who break their backs working so that some day they can move to a comfy retirement community. It doesn't add up, I thought.

"But this has never been about money," I argued to myself. That's correct. The compensation gap between academe and the business world is huge. An entry-level faculty position for a Ph.D. pays on average $63,000 in the New York area (which may seem like a lot unless you live in New York). A postdoc position in a top university pays something like $35,000, judging by the salaries paid to me and my friends. If money was the criterion, academe would be deserted of talent.

That train of thought began to give me some clarity about my own ambiguous feelings toward an academic career. When I came to graduate school, my main motivation was the excitement of the intellectual adventure. In those days, I used to read research papers as one would read comic books, eager to see what comes next, reveling about the subtlety of the artwork and the colors. After getting an insider's view of academe, I recognize that: 1. Now I would rather read comic books than research papers, and 2. The main, most pervasive, and powerful incentive in academe is ... the ego.

I sure don't want to spend the best years of my life grooming my CV and reputation, hoping to get that one paper in Nature that will buy me tenure or make me a superstar in the small, ivory tower of science. Billy Joel's "Movin' Out (Anthony's Song)" comes to mind: "If that's what you have in mind, yeah, if that's what you're all about, good luck moving up, 'cause I'm moving out!" So am I.

In my next column, I will write about the panorama of career paths that opened before me once I made my choice, and how I went about sorting through them to find a good fit.