Editor’s Note: What follows is an edited transcript of a conversation between William Pannapacker, a retired professor, and Jennifer Polk, a career coach for graduate students and Ph.D.s, on the challenges of leaving academe and transitioning to a new profession.
Jennifer Polk: I finished my Ph.D. in history at 32 and discovered I had no meaningful prospects for a faculty career. This was what I was meant to do! Now what? I remember telling folks I was a loser with a Ph.D.; I was only half joking. I had to figure out what I was all about beyond academe. No small feat.
William Pannapacker: I retired at age 54 from a tenured faculty position at a liberal-arts college after 22 years. I did so without a job in hand for reasons that I wrote about in The Chronicle here. To put it simply, the humanities were being downsized almost everywhere in favor of preprofessional programs, and my areas of expertise were no longer needed. I took a leap of faith, moved to Chicago, and began a process of career exploration that has lasted more than two years now.
It has not been easy. Undoubtedly, one of the greatest challenges — apart from money and health care — has been an initial loss of identity. Expect depression, feelings of worthlessness, and a persistent belief that nothing outside of academe really matters.
Polk: The emotional journey out of faculty life can be a rough ride for many former academics, especially those who were long-time professors in the humanities. In your case, it seems like you strongly identified with your career, as someone who didn’t just work as a professor, but was one as a person. Grieving the loss of that identity is a process, as is sorting out who you are now.
Navigating the Nonacademic Job Market
Pannapacker: I lost count of my job applications after 100 or so — before I accepted that networking is probably the only way to find work that you’d want to have. Cold applications, on LinkedIn or wherever, now have such a low response rate from employers that they are not worth the trouble. And who can predict what HR-screening strategies (presumably automated for larger organizations) are using to weed out candidates? The few times I’ve had my résumé professionally “optimized” — that is, translated into the key words favored by automated HR-screening methods — it’s always come back so laden with business jargon that I don’t even recognize myself.
All along, the most helpful resource for me has been informational interviewing: finding people you can talk with who are in interesting positions and who understand that academe is not disconnected from the so-called real world. Social and volunteer activities have helped me to meet new people, too.
Polk: Once you grasp the basics of what’s required for a successful job search, people are your best resource. I was hesitant to do informational interviews years ago. Why would anyone speak with me? What did I have to offer? I didn’t want to embarrass myself or waste anyone’s time. But people like to talk about their work. I quickly realized that not only were these conversations incredibly educational for me and enjoyable for the other person, but [they were] also a kind of self-care.
Networking really is so important — for identifying and assessing possibilities, learning about opportunities, understanding how to craft compelling application materials, and building a supportive professional community around yourself. And sometimes informational interviews turn into job interviews and offers. You never know.
The First Next Job
Pannapacker: Through an unexpected connection, I eventually found a job working as a development officer for an all-Black middle school on the West side of Chicago. While I admired its mission, after six months I learned that I am not cut out for that kind of work, which mostly involved making phone calls to strangers asking for money.
Since then, with a partner I’ve launched a college-admissions counseling business. I’ve made a new social life through membership in a variety of cultural organizations such as the Union League, the Harvard Alumni Association, the Nineteenth Century Charitable Association, and the Chicago Literary Club. I’m now looking into volunteer service in local government and activist work, and I am open to wherever that might lead in the years ahead. Of course, I continue to write, and that connects me with a lot of people who have similar experiences.
Polk: What I did as a doctoral student is connected in many ways to what I do now in my career-coach business working with professors, postdocs, and other Ph.D.s. Back in graduate school, I enjoyed running tutorial discussions as a teaching assistant; since then, I’ve discovered an appreciation for group coaching and facilitation, and center these activities in my business. I loved doing research in archives. It turns out I get a similar thrill learning about my clients. I was active in my graduate department, organizing regular pub nights and other events; now, community building is key to how I work with clients and market my services. The details are definitely different, but the general interests and strengths remain the same. In other words, I am still very much me.
Rediscovering Identity and Purpose
Pannapacker: Age discrimination, even in one’s mid-50s, is pervasive and real. Plus, there is a lot of misunderstanding about professors (the view that academics are privileged, individualistic, and used to being unaccountable) and our supposed lack of transferable skills. After more than 30 years in higher education — including my time in graduate school — my ingrained values are still oriented toward working with students and creating programs to support institutional change through major grants from foundations.
As a first-generation college graduate, I also have an existential commitment to help young people improve their prospects through education. While most clients come from highly educated and wealthy families, in the long run, I would like to see college-admissions advising become more affordable and accessible to underrepresented students of all kinds. And I would like to see it become broader in scope than simply sending everyone to college by default.
Polk: It’s common for Ph.D.s to initially land work outside of academe that isn’t quite the right fit. This describes a lot of my clients over the years: Ph.D.s with nonacademic jobs already who want to move into roles that are a better match for their skills and interests. Bill, you found that it makes sense for you, as a former professor and scholar, to run a college-admissions business.
When I think about my own answer to a similar question — why it makes sense that I work as a career-clarity coach for Ph.D.s — I see broad connections to my graduate training, even though this career doesn’t align directly with my doctorate in history, my disciplinary training, or my specific research focus. But it does make sense for me, as a person.
This gets at the choices I made in the past and make now about how to spend my time and where to put my energy. This is about values, character strengths, interests, goals, and priorities, as well as knowledge, skills, and networks. And money too, including access to it and feelings about spending it to get a business going.
Pannapacker: In many respects, my education and academic career have been preparing me for entrepreneurship at least as much as seeking salaried employment. Being a professor in the humanities, especially, is more than scholarship, teaching, and service; it’s building a personal brand to compete in a global marketplace for positions, audiences, and students. It’s anticipating trends, tapping emerging opportunities, raising money, and collaborating with a wide range of stakeholders to achieve outcomes that have a measurable impact.
If you can’t do all of those things at a high level — from the beginning — then it’s harder to succeed on the tenure track. Academe can be as ferociously competitive as anything in the corporate world, and it can be as contentious as an ongoing campaign for a political office. The stakes are high because the existential rewards are high: Your livelihood and identity are regularly on the line. You have to preserve your reputation for productivity and innovation while not provoking the wrath of administrators, colleagues, students, and the broader public. And tenure is a relatively weak protection from investigations, defamation, and marginalization. But you do have more freedom as a professor than most people with the exceptions of those who are either retired or self-employed.
Polk: In addition to age discrimination, expectations and preferences come into play. I’ve supported folks who’ve changed careers in their 50s; they tend not to wind up in entry-level roles, but it can take some doing on their part to bridge the gap between their decades of professional experience in one industry and the requirements, desires, and norms of a different one.
In leaving academe, Ph.D.s of all ages assume that their main task is getting a job elsewhere. Now, yes, that is the goal. But as your experience demonstrates, landing other work doesn’t necessarily solve the bigger issue, which is knowing what you want to do so you won’t hate your life, at the very least. Here’s the general process that I recommend for former academics:
- First, disentangle your sense of self from your day job, especially if you identify as a professor or academic. This isn’t a rejection of what you do and care about. Instead, it is a recognition that you are separate from what you do for work. This is crucial for a successful career transition.
- Second, focus on yourself. Think about what makes you tick. Make a few lists (values, skills, interests), and set goals and boundaries for your job search. Such introspection will clarify what you want even if you don’t yet know what it’s called in terms of job titles or fields of employment.
- Third, take that picture you developed of yourself and go learn about possibilities. Read job ads and company websites, get curious about industry trends. And most important: Talk with people, especially by doing informational interviews and networking more generally. This will help you both broaden and narrow your list of options. You need to do the latter to make your job search manageable.
- Fourth and finally, you’re ready to start an active job search. I call this step “marketing yourself to employers,” and it involves (a) figuring out how hiring actually works in the new profession you are seeking to enter and (b) identifying your ideal employers. You’ll continue to network, spruce up your online profiles, and tailor your application materials for different roles.
Introverts like me — as well as folks long used to thinking that their work speaks for itself — might balk at my advice to network. But it is incredibly important, even if only to help you better discern who you are, who you want to be, and what places and spaces might fit you careerwise.
Pannapacker: Agree, of course. I think the major mistakes that I have made, professionally, were related to prioritizing any job over the right job. It’s hard to sustain a high level of commitment to an organization in which you cannot be your authentic self. And unfortunately, academe makes it nearly impossible to change positions once you have tenure.
Higher education has a culture of unhappiness: Professors in low-demand fields — feeling like we have no options — often practice resignation rather than pursue opportunities that might suit us better. Academe systematically convinces extraordinarily talented people of their own relative worthlessness: “You’ll never meet our expectations, and no one else wants you.” It’s gaslighting from start to finish.
I am not saying that I would never return to higher education in some leadership capacity. There are many things I miss: the students, colleagues, scholarship, fund raising, program-building, and even the atmosphere of it all. I still “love” academe, and I miss being a “professor.” But I am also happier — even with so much uncertainty — having left that role behind in search of something that better suits who I am now, rather than remaining trapped by the choices of my younger self.
Polk: Many of the faculty members, postdocs, and other Ph.D.s I work with are ready to leave academe, but struggle to land jobs where they’re valued and respected. You have to learn how to confidently communicate what you have to offer so you can live your version of success, even if it’s very different from where you imagined you’d be at this point in your career.
This is usually about getting a job as an employee or full-time contractor, but sometimes it means going out on your own as a freelancer, independent consultant, or growing a different kind of business. Starting a business is one way to do mission-driven work. That might seem counterintuitive to folks in academic environments — that businesses have missions beyond generating income — but of course they do.
This is so important for everyone: Figure out what you want to do and how you want to live instead of trying to fit yourself into someone else’s idea of success. Put yourself first, always.
