Quit job, feel awful

[Kickintheteeth]

Until last night I had a permanent post teaching a Humanities subject at a Russell Group university. There were lots of things I didn’t like about my job but plenty that I did like too. Unfortunately it’s a substantial commute away and I’ve had two children. My husband’s job, meanwhile, has become more demanding and he’s not in a position to be the ‘drop it all and get to school/nursery when the kids are sick’ parent. We have no family nearby. Childcare costs for the younger child are ruinous where we live, and so is the cost of the commute. I thought about it and thought about it and I could not see a way of making it work. I couldn’t see how I could have anything like a satisfactory home life or a satisfying work life at any time in the next 10 years. For the next two years at least we’d be running a loss during term time as childcare and travel costs would be greater than salary. Also, I hate commuting and I have completely lost confidence in my research. Just don’t believe in it, or myself, anymore. So I quit. And I’m so, so upset. That’s it. My career gone and a lot of my identity with it. Friendships with respected colleagues, gone. I feel like it’s an insane thing to do but the alternative is working my socks off, sticking the kids in wraparound care and with god knows who if they’re unwell, missing a lot of breakfasts and bedtimes, and travelling for minimum 4 hours a day, all for net £2k a year and a constant awareness that I’m underperforming at work.

Don’t really know what I want from this. Anyone done the same and made it back into academia? Anyone understand? Have I done something insane?

@SchrodingersKitty Thank you so much for your reply, and I’m very sorry about your DH. I appreciate your giving me that perspective. So much of your answer chimes with me: the tyranny of the REF, the complete impossibility of recommending the career to anyone younger. I’ve routinely given students considering PhDs a grim pep talk, in open rebellion against the pressure to recruit them at all costs. It just doesn’t feel responsible anymore, especially given that I see my field heading into a spiral of decline. The jobs aren’t going to get better or more plentiful.

@GerronBuzanDoThaWomwok Amazing username, btw. Thanks for sharing your story. It’s a good reminder that our working lives, nowadays, are looooong, and it is possible, even with childcare commitments, to fit in more than one career. I’m so pleased for you that your dream job is now in sight, even if it’s a few years off. I hope you’ll be doing your training soon! Good luck!

Good god @StamppotAndGravy an international commute sounds like my actual hell. I’m so glad you’re out of that and thriving! Yet another positive story to help me gird my loins and move on. Funny, isn’t it, how when you’re in the thick of academic work you imagine no other job will ever give you such freedom, even as you spend 4 hours a day travelling, stay up till all hours marking essays, and still feel guilty because the research isn’t getting done…

Whenever I get comments about my lack of progress in my PhD, I point out that it's literally the only thing in my life that's just for me. I can't get promoted without it but no one else needs me to do it. Everything else affects multiple other people, so as soon as something crops up, it's research that takes the hit - OP you'll understand how much time we lost due to sick children last winter. There are many spinning plates but it's the only one that can drop.

I know a couple of women of the book on maternity leave type. I'm full of admiration for them, but I've reached the conclusion that it's not me and I don't want it to be me.

You'll be fine OP. Sounds like you're completely burned out, a bit of time off and I suspect you'll feel like yourself again.

I'm on the continent, so international commuting isn't quite as bad as it sounds from the UK and very common among academics. I was crossing 2 borders in each direction though so it was a complete nightmare with the ever changing covid rules. Hard Brexit was the final nail in the coffin.

Now I've found my feet and a new identity, I can't recommend escape enough. I went for drinks with some old friends who are still in the cult. I'd forgotten how the only topics of conversation is what's the next job/grant, can you find housing and sacrificed relationships. It's all consuming. Why do/did we do this to ourselves?!

I quit academia a couple of years ago. I’ve got a better paid job with no commute where people actually value me and I get to use my research skills regularly in ways that feel meaningful.

I am so very glad I left academia. It’s only looking back that I can see quite how toxic it all was and how much harm it did me.

I’d echo the PPs who ask you why you feel you want to get back in to academia. What is it that you want from a career that you think can only be found in academia? It’s likely that the bits you actually like can be found in a range of other careers.

One of the thing I found was that I just didn’t realise how many career possibilities there actually were for me. Or that, outside the toxicity of higher education, people might actually value my skills and experience. I’d been so worn down by it I wasn’t able to even see them as valuable myself.

I'd love to know what those of you who left academia are doing now? Especially if you were in the humanities. Definitely not asking for a friend . . .

In the internats of preserving some illusion of not over sharing on MN, I have PMed you, rather than putting it in the thread.

I paid 40 p/h for a tutor to help with my dissertation. As a p p said. I did it in the evening as I worked in the day. Something to consider.

Any chance Of consultancy or related work? I used to work in academia. Couldn’t manage it with a disabled child but ran my own business offering a specific research related service to academics..A friend did similar wasn’t massively exciting but paid the bills

Solidarity, OP. Others have made excellent comments before me, so I'll just float the possibility that maybe, in the future, leaving academia will make you fall in love with your research again, even if this sounds paradoxical. In many Humanities it is possible to keep researching and publishing as an 'independent researcher' - particularly if you can keep affiliate status with your university and reorient your research to draw upon the multiple archival materials that have been digitized in the last few years. I know a few people who do so in my discipline, and no one in their right mind would say that their work is lesser work; I can also see how they publish what they want and when they want, instead of folding to REF and grant-capture pressures. I am not saying you should rush into doing this but I can see that your research was a huge part of your identity and I completely sympathize.

I was today years old minus a couple of weeks when I realized that many of my colleagues are still actively encouraging final year and Masters students to do a PhD. As in "hey you're really good at this you should do a PhD!". Which of course will give the students the impression of having been head-hunted. It made me feel so bad about the whole thing, I thought this was not the done thing anymore.

(ps I'm also in Humanities, in a lot of STEM and perhaps some Social Sciences there will be more career opportunities and hence it's perfectly legitimate to actively recruit students)

@Kickintheteeth I don't have any meaningful advice, but can I just say that I really admire you (even though I know you are feeling ambivalent and anxious about everything). And I am sending you my best wishes. Take some time to grieve, and to celebrate. You are basically me, with a slightly longer commute - everything you wrote resonated so strongly with me, especially about research. I did have a 'niche' that I was so excited about pre-kids, but two mat leaves and a punitive teaching load afterwards, being stuck in a 'starter-level' contract, and just general apathy has seen that slip away and I can see other people filling that gap right now. I'm starting to actively dislike the culture in academia - not just the professional pressures/corporatisaton etc, but even dealing with students at this point (the burdens of pastorol care are so heavy at the moment, and I'm reaching my kindness limits). I am teetering on the brink of doing what you have done, but am terrified, and instead am clinging on in anxious misery, which is not healthy for me OR for my family, who are experiencing it vicariously. Any PMs from recovering Humanities scholars would be most gratefully received.

The very best of luck to you.

Also very keen to know what those who have left humanities academia have gone on to @SudocremOnEverything and others!

This thread resonates with me hard. Languishing at SL in humanities. Feel I’ve gone totally off the boil research-wise and the rot of disillusionment with the ‘cult’ set in with the strikes about 4 years ago and has only been exacerbated by Covid and endless re-structuring.

Problem is that I’m the ‘breadwinner’ so I feel trapped as can’t imagine being able to move into something different that pays as much and has the same perks re. flexibility and self-governance. It might sound mad OP, but I envy you being in a financial position (I assume) to quit.

UX is user experience and CX is customer experience. They have both quantitative and qualitative elements, but mostly the latter. The aim is to help a service provider to provide their service. It could be a quant research role analysing customers' paths through a website. It could be a qual research role, talking to customers about how they navigate their high street bank since all the desks closed. It could be a desk research job, using existing research to advise a company on how best to introduce their existing customers to a new service. Essentially, it's working things out - just like academic research. Only it pays better and is less misery-inducing.

I'm currently doing government work - research for government clients as part of a private research company. It's not stress-free. But it has realistic prospects.

Yep. Better pay. Less misery.

and people valuing your skills!

You probably all have considerable UX/CX experience. All that student engagement, testing out module changes, iterating your module and programme design. Evaluating and iterating based on qualitative feedback and a whole range of metrics (results, the data that is spat out about attendance, VLE usage, and so on). That is all UX basically.

Good luck @Kickintheteeth It sounds like you've made a really good and brave decision for you. I hope it's OK to say this, but I have found your post and the responses strangely comforting (makes me feel a bit less alone in finding it hard?), so thank you.

I'm a languisher. Been an SL for absolutely ages, with no prospect of moving up any time soon, although on the upside I have recently got a new job - a Fellowship, with quite limited teaching. I love being an academic in some ways but I grapple all the time with really debilitating shame as my publication record is pretty dire, and I constantly see younger people promoted much faster than me. I swing between thinking I'm just a bit crap but also thinking that it is objectively quite hard - I had two babies in the first years of my academic career when I was in an incredibly male and quite unpleasant environment. My DH was working very long hours, and then a bit later I had a series of very painful pregnancy losses which really knocked me sideways for a while. I could only just manage my teaching and admin - I had very little emotional bandwidth left for the rejection which comes with research and partly because of that I refocused my efforts towards public engagement and impact where the emotional stakes didn't seem so high. I'm reasonably successful at that now but although the uni says they really value that, they don't, really - and now I find doing that work quite painful too, as it involves giving some quite tough messages to a very powerful interest group who don't always like me that much as a result!

Anyway. Not sure what I'm saying really. But I really admire you for choosing to do things differently when this is not working for you. I am absolutely sure there are many ways to live a good and happy life - and very few of them involve being an academic! I think I wish I had your courage - I hope it all goes really well for you.

Very very sympathetic with your situation @Kickintheteeth and by the sounds of it that of many others. Sometimes things like this happen to us in our lives and it is only some years later that we can see why that had to happen and what good indeed came if it in the end

Those who are saying there are other jobs out there that we don't even think of while in academia, and where you feel valued- please do share what they are? To me the crux is- are there jobs out there where you can still do in-depth research? Say spend your working time reading academic books and really thinking deep? Qual/quant skills jobs I can imagine but what about those academic skills that revolve around deep thinking- is this somewhere out there too?!

I did very similar and had 5 years out to raise the children when small. I have never regretted it. They had a stable home life with one parent who was not meeting themself coming back and under stress. I returned to my profession with no problems at all. I did some mugging up while I was at home with the children and was not totally out of touch.

Playing the long game with pensions etc. in mind is one way to go - but it is worth remembering that nothing in life is certain and you would be wasting your healthiest and best years in a stressed whirl that is to your detriment and to that of the whole family. My OH became ill with a neurodegenerative disease before he had even got to retirement age.

Can you find ways to keep a little on top of your subject during this career break?

Done well, parenting can be as stimulating and satisfying as your career. And this situation is only temporary.

I can completely understand that at this moment you feel you have jumped off a cliff and do not have the safety net in place. But it will be fine if you take steps to make this career break a positive step - look for the positives; indeed create the positives. You have made the decision for sound reasons and now you have to decide to make it work for everyone. I am sure that your skills will enhance your parenting and that you will find situations in your new life where those skills can be put to good use

At the moment all you can see are the negatives - you have to make the positives happen.

Look at it from another point of view and think about what you want for your children. Do you want them to work their tripe out at school and university, then go on to have a high stress career and lifestyle? - I think not. You want them to have a sensible work/study/life balance as they move forward in their lives. You just have to want the same for yourself.

I have retired now and when I look back I do not regret a moment of spending time with family, but sometimes I do feel I worked too hard and was ground down by the whole work stress scenario. I regret that. I do not regret that my pension is lower than it might have been, because the trade-off is all on the plus side.

You are starting out on a new and temporary phase of your life. Embrace it, put your all into it and be ready to start the next career phase with a job well done to look back on. Good things happen when you make them happen.

I'm a scientist so deep thinking maybe isn't the same as in humanities and arts. I've got a job in a non-profit research institute. We work for clients and are expected to come up with imaginative and innovative ideas, therefore we are definitely paid to think and read. We go to conferences, write papers and supervise students. The time and problem scales are much smaller than in academia though: solve this process problem within 6 months rather than find a cure for cancer over 10 years. I actually like it because the shorter timescales mean fewer ruts to get stuck in and opportunity to reinvent myself. My little deep thinking niche in academia got very lonely and lost focus.

The equivalent for humanities might be political think tanks, highly specialised consultancies and random social science bits of companies like Google? I certainly see people I used to work with doing what looks like interesting work there. I can't imagine anywhere outside universities pays you to sit in an archive on your own for 6 months though.

That sounds amazing @StamppotAndGravy !!! Thank you for replying. I didn't know this type of research institute existed, and you could still go to conferences and supervise students.

The students aren't even directly our problem which is even better! They do thesis projects with us at all levels, with an official university supervisor who signs everything off. If they do no work, we can hand them back

Sorry for disappearing for so long — kids have both been unwell and DH away — and thank you to everyone for your replies. It’s been so heartening to hear all your advice and positive stories of life after academia.

@aridapricot I know. I understand why many of my colleagues are still actively recruiting PhD students because it’s next to impossible to achieve career progression without supervising PhDs. But i cannot in good conscience do it. Partly it’s because my university doesn’t have good facilities at all for studying in my field so I have to advise that they would be better off at an institution or in a city with better research options. But partly it’s because the jobs available are scarce, the working conditions and perks (especially pension) are being eroded all the time, and I do not see things improving. If my field were one in which the skills and expertise taught by a PhD were clearly and easily transferable to other sectors I would worry a lot less. But that’s not so.

@leafinthewind and @SudocremOnEverything This sounds great and thank you for the explanation. I’m definitely going to look into this. Any pointers would be very welcome!