Transition from academia – Launch an awesome new career

New series: Transition from academia

I am starting a new mini-series to discuss the process and emotions that have surrounded my choice to leave academia after I got my PhD. Topics will include:

  • My decision-making process
  • How I honed my job search
  • Navigating academia with one foot out the door
  • Shifting my self-identity
  • Finding ways to stay involved with academia
  • Finding ways to teach
  • How I use my academic skills in an applied workplace
  • Regrets and how to work around them

There are a lot of “how to transition from academia” resources out there, and I will share as many as I can in another blog post. So what makes my blog different? I think there are two differences:

  1. I am writing from a social science perspective. When I was in my job search phase, I noticed that many of the PhD help sites were geared to science fields or humanities fields. These are important fields to cover, but they get the lion’s share of attention. I think social scientists can have it a bit easier in making the jump out of academia, but people still can freeze up when trying to figure out how to translate academic skills into real job search terms. My plan is to help defrost your thinking!
  2. I will be writing it from my own perspective. Many of the resources available are from folks selling products and services and they are speaking in the aggregate. Which is great, and is needed. But I have a different perspective, and I can give you a true, first-person, unfiltered view of the process.
Transitioning from academia - A sign on the side of the building that reads, "Come in We're HIRING!"
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Ready to talk

After I finished my dissertation, I assumed I would need some downtime from writing. I had not planned on the curveballs life would throw me over the past year. My original plan had been to give myself the summer off and then start digging into my dissertation for publications. I was excited to start blogging for fun again. But then the hurdles came fast and furious and I turned my focus inward. Even keeping on top of emails has been difficult this past year.

I need to give myself grace about that. Now I will move forward. I hope I am ready to create more. My plan is to try to write on this topic and soon maybe get back into my gendered media posts as well. Please come with me on my journey as I learn to love writing again.
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There is a lot about the academic job that I love, and it was a difficult decision to transition from academia. But when I weighed each side of the equation, the non-academic world won out. Read up on 7 reasons why I left academia here