First Person

On the Nonacademic Market

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By Hannah Goodwin

When I graduated with my Ph.D. in chemical engineering a little over a year ago, my husband had just been accepted into an M.B.A. program. I felt fortunate to have landed a postdoctoral research position at the same university, working for a professor I knew and admired.

He was happy to hire me, and I was happy to be hired. I was excited about the prospect of gaining experience in a slightly different field from my own and of working for someone whom I respected.

A year later, I am trying to figure out whether or not I want to be a professor.

Initially I felt a sense of obligation to pursue an academic career, even though I was fairly certain it wouldn't make me happy -- like a moth drifting toward the light that will sap the life from it. In trying to decipher where that feeling of "If I don't become a professor I'll disappoint everyone" came from, I've recognized a few lucid points in my otherwise muddled thought process.

First, I know that I am not alone in facing this dilemma. In commiserating with my postdoctoral colleagues, I've found quite of few who share my conflicted feelings and I can't help wondering if that reflects the way that engineering graduate programs train (or fail to fully train) their graduates.

Although my engineering school made a noticeable effort to educate graduate students about a few alternative career options, such as patent law or consulting, I still left with a vague notion that my choice was either (a) professor, or (b) not professor (most likely industry hack). And I never heard a peep about such varied vocations as technical illustration, science-policy advising, or science editing.

Then there is the fact that choice (a), for whatever reason, is much, much, much better than choice (b). I'm not entirely sure why my brain tells me that is so, but it might be because most Ph.D.'s, like myself, are type-A overachievers. We think that if something is more difficult, then it must be better, and that you get rewarded for working harder. We think that telling everyone how little sleep you got last night is really impressive and means you're smarter and better than everyone else. That really doesn't make any sense, but once you get sucked in to that world, it's hard to stop.

A contributing factor to my affinity for choice (a) is my apparent good fortune. Let's look at the facts. I am a U.S. citizen who is female and in an engineering field. In addition, I have two degrees from a well-respected institution and a decent publication record.

I've been told by several people that I would make a good professor. I've been lucky to have a fantastic education given to me, and I've worked with some amazing people. Part of me feels like I could be -- and part of me wants to be -- a role model for young women out there.

Part of me feels like I should be a professor, if only to justify all the wonderful opportunities I've been given. That overwhelming sense of obligation is what I really think is pointing me in the direction of an academic career.

But I just don't want to be a professor.

Most of my friends who are assistant professors on the tenure track seem to have found some inexplicably rewarding aspect of their job that makes the long hours and sleepless nights worthwhile.

I have thought long and hard about whether there might be some intangible aspect of an academic job that I would find similarly fulfilling. So far, I haven't come up with much. That could be due to a lack of experience on my part; I've never really taken a stab at teaching, and I don't know what it feels like to have one of your students defend his or her thesis. I suppose you could argue that if I had really wanted to know I would have found an opportunity to try teaching by now.

One of my major sticking points about taking an academic job is the inherent difficulty of committing maximal effort to my career during my childbearing years. My husband and I want to start a family sometime soon. Spending 14 hours a day in my office writing grants and lectures while pregnant, nursing, and having a child in day care really does not appeal to me.

Some female faculty members are able to manage that process, and I applaud and revere them for their determination, strength, and ability to function on extremely little sleep. I know that many universities are changing their tenure-track schedules and policies to accommodate working mothers.

But to be honest, I just don't think I have it in me to be a trailblazer in that respect. Even if I felt up to the challenge, I have seen very few female professors who seem to have the kind of lifestyle (happy first marriage and children) that I hope to achieve. That doesn't encourage me to head in the direction of the ivory tower.

I've thought of pursuing an academic job somewhere warm and tropical, where the lifestyle and pace are ratcheted down a few notches from what I'm accustomed to on the East Coast. In my head, I made a deal with myself that sounded something like "I'd be willing to put up with the torture of being a professor if I could live in paradise."

That seemed like a great plan until I visited a university research center in which I was extremely interested, and was told that it didn't normally hire and develop junior faculty members. It typically hires faculty members who already have grants at other institutions.

Basically I'd still have to spend some time as a struggling assistant professor, most likely in a non-paradise location, before I could (maybe) transfer to my dream job in paradise. So that's out. I guess the word "torture" should have been an indicator to me that I was off target with my career aspirations, anyway.

To add to the growing cacophony of warning bells in my mind, I've come to the realization that my graduate education really didn't train me to be a professor either. Yes, most people who end up with "Ph.D." stuck after their name are smart enough to satisfactorily fulfill the requirements of an academic job. But for all the unspoken emphasis that seems to be placed on training graduate scientists and engineers to be professors, doctoral programs really don't teach you how to be a professor.

I feel fortunate to have had a hand in writing a grant proposal, supervising undergraduate students, and purchasing equipment as a graduate student and a postdoc. But that seems woefully inadequate training when I consider the overwhelming minutiae of handling budgets, biosketches, NIH review boards, faculty search committees, grant deadlines, and grading. As a postdoc working for an untenured assistant professor, I have seen the hideous monster of academic commitments up close, and it isn't a pretty sight.

After mulling over these and many other thoughts for a while, I finally took my first step out of academe. I've spoken with an industry contact at a pharmaceutical company at which I might be interested in working.

It was an impromptu phone interview on a Friday afternoon, and I gave my best deer-in-the-headlights responses to the questions I was asked. It was the most illuminating conversation about my career goals that I've had in the past seven years.

Being caught off-guard forced me to give unrehearsed, and therefore honest, answers about what I thought would fulfill me professionally. My interviewer thought I might be a good fit for drug development. I think he might be right.