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When I ended up leaving academia after graduate school to start a consulting job, life-long academics told me that was it for me.

“You are leaving physics…!! I am afraid…”

“It’s always sad to see promising young people decide to leave the field…”

“You were doing particle astrophysics! Why would you ever leave that?”

“You can’t come back to academia if you leave now…”

I don’t know if that last one is true or not, but it shouldn’t be. Academia should be open to good scientists who are also good educators – no matter where they come from or how many detours they take.

Leaving academia after graduate school to do a job outside of academia and outside of my immediate field is the best thing I could have done to make myself a better physicist.

Leaving academia does not have to mean leaving science.

I was hired because I am a physics Ph.D. who can do physics. The physical sciences such as physics are not just things you write about in journal publications. Physics experts are needed in the real world too and it really matters there as there are tangible consequences for not doing physics right.

Physics is a fundamental science not only governing heavenly bodies but also the business of very earthly people.

The fact that academics think leaving academia is the same as leaving physics is rather chilling. That is how little they know about the ‘real world’ while many of them are responsible for guiding the futures of bright, generally (a lot) younger people nearly ALL of whom will have to end up in that real world.

That alone is reason enough to leave academia and get some experience in the real world. Unless you leave, you will never see or know what goes on outside academia!

Leaving academia temporarily will improve your ability to provide better career guidance to your future students. 

Think of it this way. If you never leave, how are you going to advise students on their careers? You won’t even know what options they have because you never explored them yourself. It will be difficult for you to make meaningful connections outside of academia if you never cared to build relationships with anyone who isn’t also an academic. You can’t even begin to help students with the following:

• How to get a job outside academia

• How to write their resumes for industry jobs

• What are some opportunities/careers that will allow them to best use their training

• Who are people they can get in touch with for more information

• Who are some people who can refer them for different positions

As someone who had to figure all of this out on my own and with no support, I understand the pains of students who go through the process with zero guidance and maybe even some resistance. Cuz, we all trained to become postdocs, right? So that we can (not) become professors.

Just knowing someone on LinkedIn or having a brief conversation with them after a talk does not usually lead to a job. Getting hired into a position requires the successful building of a long-lasting relationship. If your professor does not have friends outside of academia and I mean actual friends or people they know well and for a while, then you have zero connections to the outside world, at least, through them.

But that’s the student’s job! THEY should go out and network and make connections so THEY can secure a position. Uh-huh, in their infinite free time, of course. After they have worked in the lab from hours before the start of business to hours after the closing of business.

The truth is students feel GUILTY to go to networking events, to career fairs, and meet-ups. Because that takes TIME that they feel they should be spending on their research instead. If you haven’t EXPLICITLY encouraged your students to go to these events and actively network, you can feel free to blame yourself for horribly misguiding them.

But there are no consequences for academics when they are bad managers. They still get and keep their tenure. So, a little thing like not helping students with their CAREER is not going to mean anything, will it? Besides, how do we even know whether we are being a bad manager or a good manager? It’s not like there was ever any… TRAINING on managing people!

Leaving academia will help you to get trained to be a manager. 

Seriously, how often and how much have we students suffered from awful managers? Professors are NOT just our teachers and passive advisors. They are our BOSSES in graduate school! And they really, really suck at it!

Everyone knows about these horrible managers and we can do absolutely nothing but endure them as they are the top dogs without the blessings of whom we can’t live or breathe or finish our educations.

We all know about the…

• the oblivious and happily absentee advisor

• the ruthless and paranoia-filled micromanager

• the passive-aggressive emotional abuser

• the (known) sexual harasser who, of course, never got fired (because of tenure and grants)

• the powerful, big grant-winning, albeit horrible human in every possible way

Seriously, not even kidding, but THIS is what we deal with. Not saying it will solve all our problems but even some semblance of manager training would perhaps help to make professors aware that what they are doing is WRONG. If all of them continue on without some much-needed education on how to actually manage a team, problems will persist and good science will not get done.

Bad managers lead to good students leaving the field. Sound familiar to anyone? Well then, would it not be nice if the accepted trend was that being a bad manager is at least criticized. Let’s start there.

Academia is still the only place I know where people take on managerial roles without proper training. When I made the move to industry, I was pleasantly surprised by how good my managers were at treating me like a human. Human resources are not just words there. It matters to companies that their employees are happy and treated well.

Guess what? When you mistreat your students/employees, you are making them unhappy and less productive. Less science or worse science is getting done. They are people who brood over unprofessional behaviors, over abuses. When you prevent them from taking enough time off, you are burning them out and ensuring they do not succeed in the long term. It won’t matter that they have been trained to be experts in their field – you are ensuring the disintegration of those experts and the expertise they bring to the table.

For once, put your research to the side and get trained on how to be effective leaders and role models. It will save you trouble and also save science.

Now, I know I promised to talk about how leaving academia will make YOU a better scientist, but so far I have only talked about how it will help you help your students. However, I wanted to make sure I talked about that because although it seems to be often forgotten, especially in research-focused programs, students SHOULD be a big focus for academics. You SHOULD be interested in helping your students.

Without your students, you are nothing.

Let’s just face it. You don’t do science. Your students do science. You write grant proposals and thank you for doing that but the daily grind and act of DOING science is carried out by students and postdocs. Ensuring that your students are happy, that you are doing a good enough job of leading them, is a service to science. That IS how you can be a better scientist. So never forget that.

The future of science lies with your students, not you… So, by being a better leader to them, by selflessly helping them, you will help to retain people in science. You are helping science and the world even when you help students to leave academia.

Leaving academia will help you to continue your learning. 

There is a notion that universities are the only places where education and learning take place. Although it is true that universities are where you are awarded DEGREES and DIPLOMAS for learning, it is empowering to realize that LEARNING can take place ANYWHERE!

I often heard during my Ph.D. that graduate school would be the last opportunity to truly be a student. This cannot be farther from the truth. I am still a student and learning constantly. Not only do I love learning constantly, but it is also actually REQUIRED for my job. If I stop learning, I am done for.

I am trained to be a scientist and to solve hard problems. Hard problems are those that cannot be solved right off the bat without doing research and without learning new things. That is what I do at work every day and what I was hired to do because people know that PhDs have this training and the mindset to pursue difficult-to-solve problems.

As a physics Ph.D., I am learning more physics as well. It’s not like once you have a doctorate in a subject, you understand or know everything there is to it. More than anything, my doctoral training has taught me that if there is something I don’t know or understand today, that does not mean I can’t be an expert in it tomorrow.

By entering a world so different from my immediate academic field, I am faced with new problems that require different expertise. The physics and other skills I know well from my Ph.D. projects come in handy, PLUS I have to get better at things that were not a focus during my Ph.D.

An opportunity outside of academia might allow you to realize that you need to relearn something important.

The nature of academic research is that you get really focused and good at things pertaining to a narrow field. This might actually lead to rusting of your knowledge and expertise in other aspects of the broader field you were studying. For example, if your research project only required a very thorough, in-depth understanding of only one of Newton’s laws of motion, then you might forget about the other ones! But if you take even one step back, you should realize that the other laws are equally important and not to be forgotten. A job opportunity outside of academia allows you to take that step back and to realize that you might need to review or relearn something important that your research has led you to neglect.

Good learning and science happen when you think about the same problem from different points of view. For me, unless I have thought about something in several different ways, and on several different occasions, I don’t understand it well. For me, it is critical to revisit concepts under different circumstances and that is what I am doing now.

It is important for me to see physics in the applied world in order to understand it. Physics is not just a theoretical science meant to be in books and papers. It plays a role in everything around us and to learn its applications and revisit its concepts in that light is helping me to learn what I could not learn in school.

Leaving academia can help you to become more well-rounded in your field

This has to do with being less one-dimensional as well as having more work-life balance. I have more TIME now to follow what is going on in the broader field of my Ph.D. research! It is crazy.

My Ph.D. had to do with ultra-high-energy neutrinos. This research is in the sub-field of particle astrophysics. There are lots of other things that are also in that sub-field, such as, dark matter – a super intriguing problem that continues to haunt as well as escape us!

During graduate school, I struggled to keep up with any research that was not directly about the very thing I was doing. I was so busy producing, producing, and producing. You know how it is with work-life balance in academia, there is none.

Now, I am spending part of my free time catching up on everything I missed during graduate school. EVEN about particle astrophysics! You’d think I’d be totally up to date on everything that goes on in at least the sub-field of my research, but on a daily basis, it’s more like the sub-sub-field that was my bread and butter. So now, I have all this new-found interest, time, and energy for the parts of particle astrophysics that I was not able to focus on so far. I feel like a more well-rounded particle astrophysicist now.

Leaving academia will help you to avoid an echo chamber. 

Let’s be honest. You are not just in academia, you are in a narrow field of research having daily interactions with only those who can stand to write papers with you. That’s called an echo chamber. You are all alike and think alike.

Doing something new

During graduate school, I worked on a new analysis technique to search for ultra-high-energy neutrinos. That’s what it was: new. It was new and it was, therefore, developing. This led to uncountable attacks on the work by our collaborators. Every time I gave a talk on my ongoing work, I was ripped apart. I was even told that I would not get help securing postdocs or jobs because of it. Because the people who would otherwise help me were against this work. It’s true: I did NOT get any postdocs or jobs through those people but I was also not counting on them to help me. I knew better than that and I did get postdocs and jobs WITHOUT their help.

My attackers were relatively young professors and scientists at notable institutions. It’s not like my work was wrong or the science was bad. I was able to publish it without problems (at least from the reviewers or editors) in a TOP JOURNAL. Indeed the work got published with minimal edits and changes. But it irked a lot of people who did not grow up with this new method. It was not the technique that they had grown up on, what they had followed during their PhDs.

Doing the same thing

Besides the whole thing is extremely messed up and bad for science, think about how sad it is. These people had done literally the SAME thing since their PhDs. They built their careers on basically ‘improving’ their Ph.D. projects! Whatever they did for their Ph.D., their students were working on to improve. They (and their students) will literally know or do nothing else. That, to me, is SO LIMITING. I mean, come on!

The ‘established’ scientists in academia are sometimes people who have learned and know only one thing, and how to aggressively defend that one thing. They are not open to new ideas and new ways of doing things. That’s terrible for science and academia allows it. As long as you are publishing with your echo buddies, you are ‘successful’ in academia. Your echo buddies say you did good work, they are your peer-reviewers, and you spend life in academia happily ever after while science suffers.

Being a life-long academic is kind of like acting in Hollywood and never leaving Los Angeles. You start thinking that LA is all there is to life and to the world when in reality if you don’t sometimes leave LA, you might turn into a monstrously bad actor as you have zero perspectives on the characters and roles you are portraying.

Hope this post was helpful if you are trying to decide whether to stay in or leave academia… Either way, I am sure you will do great!

Please leave any comments or questions below. I’d love to hear from you. Please also feel free to share the post as you like.

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