The Messy Middle of Reinvention: And why it doesn't need an explanation.

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I started watching a show called “Middlehood” last night. The storyline (at least the first few episodes) focuses largely on a woman who is about 50 years old. She is in the middle: the middle of family caregiving for aging parents, the middle of a divorce, and the middle of re-defining herself after unexpectedly leaving her career.

And I thought to myself, “that woman has to have recently left an academic job and now needs to re-invent herself.” Too much resonated for me and my own feelings and experiences for it to be anything else. But the story wasn’t clear. I kept finding myself questioning – what exactly was the career she left?

And so, as one does, I went to the internet and searched for what job the character left. Some reviewers described her as “leaving a corporate job”, which I think is what it may have said in the show description, while others wrote that “it’s never said”. The internet in general agreed, that “no one knows” what job she left, although I did find a few references upon more digging deeper to leaving an academic job.

I have recently seen a new set of posts online about “do people even care if you didn’t get tenure” or if you “left your job at the university?”. Tenure is basically a multi-year probation period, for those unfamiliar with the term. These posts come up periodically, especially with the oversaturated market and very few traditional professor jobs. Various sources report that only about 20% of PhD holders work within academia in Canada. The number is even lower for those who hold PhDs in STEM fields, though the estimates for how much lower vary.

While within academic circles, the question is clearly yes. People will care why you left and if you do not give a good reason, they will assume you were ‘just not good enough to hack it’.

However, if you signed an NDA, you will never be able to talk about the ins and outs of your experience before leaving that may have had absolutely nothing to do with your skills or success as professor. If your tenure application wasn’t approved and you did not pass probation, you may not ever truly understand why. It could even just be that there were budget cuts that were not made public or that someone else you work with was lucky enough, and skilled enough in grant writing, to bring in more money.

At the end of the day, no. It doesn’t matter. You left your corporate job, and universities are, indeed, very complex corporations, and you are applying the lessons learned to a new venture. It is not starting over after academia, it’s pivoting to what is next. And that is enough of an answer.

The expectation of a common academic career trajectory is: secure tenure-track position, spend 4-5 years working long hours, apply for tenure, receive tenure, maybe move to another institution for more prestige, usually in a different part of the country. However, many stay in the same basic role with the same office for the entirety of their career. Some people may pivot within the field of interest, but these are often gentle pivots, not major changes. The term ‘leadership role’ within academia is also reserved for very few people with very specific job titles.

When I started working full-time outside academia, I saw that it is normal, and often expected, for people to have dramatic employer and subject-matter shifts. For example, a person may be hired as a government employee. During their career with the government, they may hold jobs within many different ministries such as  health, transportation, education and justice, moving ministries as they work their way up to a more senior role or possibly a leadership role. As I thought increasingly about how we explain academic jobs to those who are outside of universities, I realized that many, if not all faculty members truly do work within a leadership capacity as it is understood in many other industries. And as I have spoken to people about how they wish for their units to grow and what professional development needs they have, time and time again people report that they are interested in how leadership can have better work-life balance while ensuring they role model that for the people who report to them.

As people increasingly prioritize who they are outside of their job title and are asking themselves what matters to them and what they want their legacy to be, or what life would be post-retirement, I think the question of “what job did they have?” become moot, and corporate is just as good an answer as anything else.

We all deserve to find a place where we are more than our jobs. Where we can feel fulfilled, have enough money to live a life that fits us, and if that isn’t a faculty role, which increasingly with budget cuts, it is not, then there is absolutely no shame in finding something that will. And it is not starting over. It is changing directions.

After all, if the internet cannot figure out the difference between a “I’m not sure it was ever said, maybe corporate? Must have been corporate?” for a fairly popular comedy, and my read of, “she has to start something else. She didn’t get tenure and she is out of her job”, then most people ‘in the wild’ won’t either. But maybe that is the point. Being in the middle is disorienting. Finding people who can help make sense of the messiness and remind you that there are other paths out there can make a world of difference. Not going at things alone, to only makes the mess easier to navigate, but offers opportunities to laugh together. Because at the end of the day, life, like the TV show, is often more of a dark comedy than anything else.