• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

The Professor Is In

Guidance for all things PhD: Graduate School, Job Market and Careers

  • Home
  • Courses & Events
    • How To …
    • The Art of the Academic Cover Letter
    • The Art of the Article
    • Unstuck: The Art of Productivity
    • On Demand Courses
    • Upcoming Live Webinars
    • Free Productivity Webinars
    • Gift Certificates
  • Personalized Job Help
    • Document Editing
    • Quick Reviews
    • Specials
    • Interview Prep
    • Personal Negotiating Assistance
    • One on One Career Consults
    • Testimonials
    • Interview Testimonials
    • Graduate School Application Assistance
  • Productivity
  • Coaching
    • Productivity Coaching
    • Private Coaching
    • Leaving Academia Coaching Group
  • The Professor Is Out
    • It’s OK to Quit
    • Our Art of Leaving Program
    • Prof Is OUT Services
    • Our Prof Is OUT Team
    • Prof is OUT Client Testimonials
    • Ex-Academics: A TPIO Support Community
  • Workshops
  • Blog

On Being a Grad School Quitter, Part II – Guest Post by Adrienne Posner

By Karen Kelsky | June 1, 2018

Adrienne Posner quit grad school cold turkey in 2015 mid-dissertation and now works at Google as a Program Manager for various educational initiatives.  She received her BA in Art History from UCSC and an MA in Art History from UCLA, and then an MA and a CPhil in Comparative Literature from UCLA. She lives in Oakland.


This post is a continuation of my last post, where I started to talk about what lead me to quit grad school mid-way through my dissertation. You’ll want to read the first post for context before continuing on with how I transitioned from Comp Lit PhD candidate to the tech industry.

I think it’s important to say this very directly: I quit grad school. I didn’t hedge my bets and take a leave of absence, I didn’t move away and try something new while I pretended to make progress on my dissertation, I didn’t transition to a new field. Those are fine choices, of course. But hopefully it will be a breath of fresh air to some readers to hear that I happily admit that I am grad school quitter. Quitting is the word for it, and no other.

I also think it is important to say that I struggled with some shame around quitting for a time. I did go through a difficult period that I can only describe as melancholy, where I wrestled with feeling like I had lost an essential part of my own identity – that 5 year old self who wanted to really understand and know things, and wanted to be really listened to in turn – and then another period that felt more like mourning, where I was just really, really sad. It wasn’t at all easy. I had to do the unflattering work of changing my conception of myself, of acknowledging that the very idea of “following one’s passion” was privileged and problematic, that my dream of being a professor was couched more in a fantasy – a common, shared fantasy, but one that I had also deeply internalized – than in any experiential knowledge of the culture of academia or familiarity with what it really means these days to actually be a professor. I had to confront the fact that academia, the real version of it and not the one I had imagined, was not for me. I had to accept and eventually learn to be happy with being a quitter.

Now, when I talk to grad students or meet an old colleague for drinks, I’ll occasionally get nostalgic about what my wonderful undergraduate advisor liked to call “the life of the mind.” But then I remind myself: that was always already a myth. And then, even more importantly, I remember the long list of things I don’t miss, which was always so top heavy with the largest questions of all: will this degree that I’m putting all my intellectual and emotional energy into getting actually result in a job that feeds me and pays my rent? Is “being a professor,” whatever that means these days, worth all of that? To be free of that fundamental anxiety, to have quit, is one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself. It was a decision that filled a deep need for better self care and, paradoxically, felt less selfish than staying. It was a decision that allowed me to critically examine my own participation in academia and to understand that I felt that participation to be problematic. It was a decision that provided a deep sense of relief, one that has helped me to better trust myself.

It was also a decision that opened up real options. An investment in education and a love of teaching are fundamental to who I am, but quitting helped me to see that being a professor wasn’t the only or even the best way to engage in work that I care about.

This is part one in a series of blog posts. In my next post, I am going to talk very honestly about transferable skills, the cultural norms, communication styles and ways of thinking that easily translate from academia to the tech industry, as well as those that don’t seem to translate at all. For those that are interested, I will follow that up with posts about what tech jobs are available to grad students, both with and without PhDs, and how to find and apply for them.

Similar Posts:

  • From English PhD to Digital Marketing Entrepreneur – Langer 1
  • Mentoring as Self-Care – WOC Guest Post
  • They’re Not Quitting! Reclaiming a Genre – a #Postac Guest Post
  • Letting Myself Leave Academia as an Act of Self-Love – Prof Is /Out/ Guest Post
  • Chasing Rainbows – An Adjunct Farewell

Filed Under: Post-Ac Free-Lancing and Small Business, Post-Ac Job Search, Quitting--An Excellent Option, Strategizing Your Success in Academia

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Buy My Book!

4.8 stars on Amazon!

The_Professor_Is_In.indd

Get Immediate Help

In addition to our blog and book, we have upcoming live webinars, pre-recorded webinars and other programs that you can get started on right away:

The Art of the Academic Cover Letter
The Art of the Article
Unstuck: The Art of Productivity
Quick Reviews
Free Productivity Webinars

Categories

  • #MeTooPhD
  • Academic Job Search
    • How To Choose and Manage Recommenders
    • How to Interview
    • How To Write Academic Job Cover Letters
    • How To Write CVs
    • Landing Your Tenure Track Job
    • Major Job Market Mistakes
    • Negotiating Offers
  • Adjunct Issues
  • Advising Advice
  • Alt-University Critique
  • Black Lives Matter
  • COVID19
  • Dispatches
  • Goodbye Ivory Towers
  • Graduate Student Concerns
    • Bad Advisors and Good Mentors
  • How To Do Conferences
  • How to Get Grants and Fellowships
  • International Perspectives
  • Intersectional Analyses
  • Makeup
  • Marginalized Voices
  • Mental Health and Academia
  • Ph.D. Poverty
  • Podcast
  • Post-Ac Free-Lancing and Small Business
  • Post-Ac Job Search
    • Careers Outside
  • Postdoc Issues
  • Productivity
    • Book Proposals and Contracts
    • Publishing Issues
    • Writing
  • Promote Yourself!
  • Quitting–An Excellent Option
  • Racism in the Academy
  • Rearview Mirror
  • Resumes & Postac Docs
  • Sexual Harassment in the Academy
  • Shame
  • Stop.Acting.Like.A.Grad.Student
  • Strategizing Your Success in Academia
  • Teaching and Research Statements
  • Teaching Demos
  • Teaching Portfolios
  • Tenure–How To Get It
    • How To Build Your Tenure File
    • Surviving Assistant Professorhood
  • The Campus Visit
  • Unstuck
  • Webinars
  • What Not To Wear
  • Women of Color in Academia
  • Work/Life Balance in Academia
  • Yes, You Can: Women in Academia
  • Your Second and Third Jobs

Footer

About Us

  • Who Is Dr. Karen?
  • Who Is On the TPII Team?
  • In The News
  • Contact Me
  • FAQs
    • Why Trust Me?
  • Testimonials

Community

  • #MeTooPhD
  • Peer Editing
  • PhD Debt Survey
  • Support Fund
  • I Help With Custody Cases for Academics

Copyright © 2023 The Professor Is In·

We Are Redefining Academic Community

That’s why we upgraded our private
Mighty Network.

We are committed to building a community with a focus on productivity support. Every day, in a dedicated space, we offer free coaching advice and encouragement. And the couple thousand people who have already joined are steadily building a supportive and interactive community devoted to that elusive idea of work-life balance.

Learn More

Get on Dr. Karen's Schedule

Get on my schedule to work on your tenure track job cover letter, CV, grant applications, book proposals, interview preparation, and more.  [si-contact-form form=’2′]