Having dreamt of being a professor my whole life, dropping out of my doctoral program due to my deteriorating mental health felt like the end of the world. Being almost exclusively in the academic setting since 2006, the idea of finding an industry position with a humanities master’s degree was daunting and adjuncting and staff positions kept me in the same toxic setting, feeling like I was never good enough. During this time, I volunteered to become an admin of TPIO page to help gain and provide support to other academics considering exploring positions outside of academia.
In my world view, a career path that doesn’t work out as expected is treated with optimism, creativity, and curiosity. I act in ways to manifest that, and I speak it into existence whenever possible. That was how I left academia. After 20+ years of teaching freshman writing full-time (NTT), I recareered in 2016 and started a dog walking and dogsitting business.
Bringing that sense of optimism, creativity, and curiosity to the process of recareering is also why I became an admin here.
And now I have to go. A dog a) wants dinner b) needs a walk c) pooped behind the couch d) all of the above.
Dr. Elana Jefferson-Tatum
Elana Jefferson-Tatum, Ph.D. is hypnobirthing coach, full-spectrum doula, and practitioner-scholar of Africana religions. After several years in the academy teaching at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and then Tufts University, she shifted her life entirely. She came to the Professor Is Out to find a sense of community as she continues to navigate her life beyond academia. Now, in addition to being an admin for the group, she’s a proud homeschooling parent of two amazing kids (with a third on the way) and the owner of Lunar Flow Doula.
Charity Phillips-Lander is a disabled veteran’s spouse and Senior Research Scientist in astrobiology and Raman spectroscopy at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI). Her PhD is in biogeochemistry from the University of Kansas. Since her PhD, Charity has focused on understanding life in extreme environments analogous to those we have observed on other planetary bodies in order to design instrumentation and missions to search for life elsewhere. Since arriving at SwRI, she has served as Chair of both the Institute’s and theSpace Science and Engineering Division’s Management Advisory Committees. She is leading the development of the Astronaut Raman instrument for ISRU and Astrobiology (ARIA) and the Mars Astrobiology Cave and Internal habitability Explorer (MACIE) New Frontiers mission concept, named for Macie Roberts, former head of the human computers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She also leads a multidisciplinary research team who are determining the distribution of organics and quantify the habitable volume of Europa and Enceladus’ ice shells as a step toward searching for life on Ocean Worlds.
Alice is an historian who left higher ed after twenty years. Subsequently, she spent time teaching in high schools in California, Pennsylvania, and Texas, and she now teaches World History in China. In China, she shares her life with two former street cats, named Nangua (Pumpkin) and Didi (Younger brother). She is respected, well paid, lives a good life, has evenings and weekends free, and is generally a whole lot happier (although she looks forward to being able to leave China to see her family).
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