Your Career

How to align the ideals of your vocation and the realities of your position

You are more likely to burn out when there’s a growing gap between what you really want to do and what you actually do day to day. You try to bridge that divide, but as it widens, you’re stretched ever thinner across it. You lose resilience. You feel exhausted, angry, useless. One day, you snap. Employers play a big role in whether their workers flourish or burn out. But of course, you play a role, too, and you can help or hinder your own success.

To be happy in a faculty career requires aligning, as best you can, your actual job duties with your professional ideals. There is no single “hack” to help you make that alignment and prevent burnout. But if you realize you need to make a big change in your academic career, five core principles can help you figure out what to do next.

Continue reading: “How to Build a Sustainable Faculty Career,” by Jonathan Malesic

Share your suggestions for the newsletter with Denise Magner, an editor at The Chronicle, at denise.magner@chronicle.com.

What we’re reading

Here’s more on career issues and trends from around the web. See something we should include? Let me know.

• Advice in the latest Work Friend column in The New York Times on “how to disclose an office romance.”
• In the Harvard Business Review, an essay on how “the pandemic proved that remote leadership works.”
• A report in The Wall Street Journal found that parents who work in tech fields “want their kids to go into the arts.”