Coping with leaving

[tomytrueking]

It looks like I'll be voluntarily severed in a few weeks. Realistically I know it's for the best. The career I thought I had has gone, and staying on until compulsory redundancy, or competing for my current job, would be much worse. I just need to get started with my next life. I don't have great options outside the sector at my age, so have to get started - sooner is better.

But I'm really suffering. It's all hit just before Christmas and I feel completely destroyed, financially too. There are so many handovers. I don't know where to start.

Really sorry to hear this. It's been brutal in HE and there has been and will be so much collateral damage. I'm hoping to get to retirement without having to be pushed - like you I've little to offer outside HE. Look after yourself

Sounds tough. Am waiting to be forced into this position too. At late 50s could not get another interview even....so wondering how to scrape together a living before drawing down pension.

Thank you.

I feel invisible, and that as soon as I leave it will be as if I never existed.

Nobody thinks it would happen to them. I picked my specialisms really carefully, to protect myself from vulnerability. This came out of nowhere and was nothing to do with my qualities as a scholar.

There was a Guardian piece a few months ago where the writer referred to the higher education funding crisis as a tsunami where the people on the beach are unaware that they are about to be destroyed. I read it at the time, and felt so lucky that my department was solid. I felt sorry for the people about to be destroyed, and relieved that I was lucky to have foresight, and that I had picked so well.

I just found it - the wonderful Gaby Hinsliff: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/29/britain-universities-freefall-saving-them-funding-international-students

I’m sorry it’s come to that. I know if the same happened to me I’d lose a lot of my sense of identity which is quite tied up with work. Your post is all kinds of worrying. I sort of assumed that it’s mainly hitting universities and departments that have long known they’re vulnerable. Sounds like I’m kidding myself.

Not precisely the same situation, but I found myself out of a job after 25 years in academia this summer, and I’d say just take a while to sit with the discomfort. Yes, identity-sapping, and deeply odd to have a September without new modules, new students etc. I felt as if I’d stepped off the wheel of the academic year for the first time in my life, if you include school university and being an academic. I’m trying to see it as an opportunity.

Oh @tomytrueking I'm so sorry to read your posts. For some of us, this job really is a vocation. My work is my life, and I've been hugely lucky that I can do this and that I'm good at it. I'd be lost & bereft in your position as well (and panicking as a single older woman with no other support at all).

It will take time to adjust and find your new self. I have a colleague who quite happily sought VS, and it's taking time, but I think they made the right decision for them. OTOH, I hope never have to retire completely.

If you do FaceBook (and can cope with equal quantities of virtue signalling & whinging) the closed group, Women in Academia Support Network (WIASN) might be helpful. There are a lot of threads on new careers and also some great recommendations for academic coaches - women who specialise also in redirecting careers away from university employment.

Huge sympathies and a big unMumsnetty hug.

I'm also furious! And refusing to be a good victim.

Friends and family say things like 'time for work-life balance'. But I don't want work-life balance, or hobbies, or a chance to get stuck into my local community.

God, I feel so stupid for putting everything into this.

Awful. Are you of an age when you could get another academic job?

Sorry, wrong thread!

Possibly! But nowhere is hiring, and I would be competing with younger, more mobile peers. So I will do something else for a little while at least.

It's not a tragedy! We will all be fine, but the shake-out is not going to be a just or efficient process. It's happening too quickly for that.

It took me a least a year to get over it and find my feet again. The freedom is wonderful though!

I took VS and retired early. I had a wobble for a while, but now am so glad I did this. Being away from academe for a while gave me a lot of perspective, and I also did not realise until I was able to rest how tired I was.

HE is so brutal right now. OP, I wish you all the best as you consider next steps

I sensed what was coming so began planning for exit some months ago. I'm still sad (indeed, destroyed), but have been reading some of the better quit-lit today and it really does help.

It also helps to hear from people for whom leaving has been a positive move. Thank you. I am used to being successful, so hearing robust accounts of positive exits really does help.

I've realised that we're only really valued - institutionally, socially, economically - in terms of the income we bring in, and our next-best option externally. It's 'mark to market'. That's been quite hard to accept, but I'm lucky. I do have marketable skills.

I've begun to tell people - who are very kind and understanding.

I'm sending best wishes to people reading this who might be going through the same thing, shell-shocked. We've just been unlucky.

I'm in the same position and it is hitting hard that I won't ever be going back. I left on VS just before Christmas, after many years, and the holidays have been fine, as I wouldn't have been there anyway. We have lots of chocolates and biscuits left over from Christmas and I absentmindedly made a note for myself that I would take them into work, as I usually do. Then I remembered that I have no workplace to take them into and it was like a punch to the gut.
It's hard on us individually, and simply a crying shame what is happening in the UK HE sector.

Just to say I’m sorry and hope you feel better soon. I had this same feeling at the beginning of autumn term when I took VS and retired. HE in the UK is in a bloody mess.

@MimiGC I'm really sorry too. It's really helped me though to realise there are so many of us. Thank you for helping me feel less alone in this.