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Introducing The Professor Is /Out/ Admin Team

By Karen Kelsky | February 10, 2022

The Professor Is Out private FB group is closing in on 20K members as it nears the end of its first year.  Leaving academia is so painful, and so scary (especially now in the covid collapse), and the need for concrete advice and resources is so great, that this kind of community support and mutual aid has never been more necessary. The page has become much more than I ever expected—generous, kind, deep, profound, challenging, inspiring, and very, very intense.
 
 
So intense that very quickly it became clear I couldn’t handle it alone. And because the community there is so wonderful, even before I started sharing my challenges, people stepped up to volunteer to help.
 
 
Now as TPIO celebrates its first birthday, I want to introduce our splendid admin team. These are the folks who, together with me and in a lively ongoing DM dialogue, approve new members, approve posts, and monitor comments. Not a day goes by when we don’t collectively discuss some post, comment, or commenter and make judgment calls on how to handle it.
 
 
Don’t be me wrong–the page is really wonderful. People make genuine efforts to be supportive and kind, and to avoid academic gaslighting (“the academy isn’t THAT bad”)  and other trollish behavior. But… there are always personalities to manage, conflicts to calm, and the occasional disrupter to ban.
 
 
A more dedicated, genuine, thoughtful team you will never find. I pay them a stipend of $100/month because nobody associated with me works for free. These are the costs I am asking for donations to help cover, after covering them myself for the first year. Check out my Ko-Fi page here.
 
 
I’m beyond grateful to Amanda, Linda, Elana, Chastity, and Alice, and grateful to those who share their wisdom and resources on TPIO, and grateful to those who have generously donated funds to keep this whole enterprise moving forward!  Please join me in saying thanks!
 
 

Amanda Catron
 
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.
 
I started planning my exit in 2021 by looking for a “right now” job, my next step, not my forever career. In 2021, the stars aligned and I made my graceful exit. Since my exit from academia, I now hold a position as Editor for a service-disabled veteran-owned small business and I am looking forward to recovering from burnout and growing my passion projects.
 

Linda Chesky

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.
 

Dr. Charity Phillips-Lander

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.

Her spouse’s military career provided her many opportunities to work in a variety of industries prior to and during her PhD, including emergency environmental response, oil and gas, cartography and illustration, and grant writing and pitch development. She supports organizations enhancing disability access to outdoor spaces. In her free time, she loves playing outside (rafting, kayaking, climbing, horseback riding, gardening), weight lifting, and photography, and is the proud momma to two fur babies.
 

Dr. Alice Walters
 
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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