Why I joined and left academia
By: Juan Manuel Contreras
Tags: Graduate School, Academia, Life, PhD, Decision Making

I was 15 years old when I read Primal Fear, a novel about a person alleged to have multiple personalities—a condition now called dissociative identity disorder. The psychology depicted in the book impressed me so much that it started me on a decade-long study of the brain and found me, at 25 years old, a doctoral student at Harvard’s Department of Psychology.

But I’d grown disillusioned with the prospect of academic life and curious about other ways to make an impact on the world. A newly-minted psychology Ph.D. a year later, I walked into the Team Disney building at Walt Disney World to start my post-academic life as a decision scientist.

The Team Disney building in Lake Buena Vista, FL. Photo by Arata Isozaki at Domus.

The following is a story I’ve shared dozens of times with friends and friends of friends curious about leaving or entering academia. I’ve written it down to share it more easily with others and for me to reflect on two of the best decisions in my life—joining academia by getting a Ph.D. and leaving academia to become a data scientist.

Grad school and the pros of academia

Grad school is a lot of fun.

This feeling is partly wishful recollection, partly Stockholm syndrome, but mostly sincere enjoyment of life as a doctoral student.

My 15-person class was a motley crew of smart, sociable students, my older labmates were the cool kids I looked up to who showed me the ropes, and my professors were the éminences grises whose work I’d read as an undergrad and who now indulged my company and ideas as their junior colleague. It was a delight to be surrounded by brilliant scientists who relished discussing research ideas, from clinical treatments to improve social anxiety, to children’s understanding of negation, to the design of visual illusions, to the semantics of abstract concepts, to the social psychology of power.

Grad school is fun but rough.

I spent long hours—in the lab during the week and at home on weekends and holidays—catching up on published research and designing, running, and writing about experiments. The long hours weren’t the experience of all my classmates, but it wasn’t unusual and, as an unmarried 22-year-old, it was less costly to me. Classes weren’t too demanding: A faculty member told us to put in the minimum amount of work to ensure we passed them, but that otherwise we should prioritize our research.

The research was at times mundane, tedious, and thankless. And grad students are often responsible for the most mundane, tedious, and thankless parts of research. But months of hard work would eventually be rewarded by data collection. Data that I’d get to wrangle and investigate to get answers to the research question I’d asked months—if not years—ago.

I’ll never forget the pleasure and thrill of sitting alone in the lab late at night staring at a computer screen with statistical output answering my question, knowing I was the only person in the world and in the history of our species privy to a potential discovery about how the human brain works.

I didn’t pursue academia to a professorship so I can’t speak for what it’s like to be a professor. But I understood the life of a professor to involve scaling your research by directing a lab of research assistants, grad students, and postdocs and handling much of the administrative efforts and contributions required to keep the lab’s research funded and on track.

It seemed like an idyllic life, but I started to realize that it would come with a significant impact on my quality of life.

The ivory tower and the cons of academia

Academia is isolated.

As an academic, your immediate professional network is small. A few hundred people made up my subspecialty, social neuroscience. And, although nice and welcoming, they weren’t an especially diverse community. I remember thinking that I didn’t know a social neuroscience professor who was Latine.

Academia doesn’t have many job opportunities and what opportunities exist give you little choice to live where you want. There are too few high-caliber research universities and even fewer jobs available in them, making it difficult to have much flexibility about where you get to live your life.

Academia is significantly removed from “the real world”. An academic’s impact on the world is more diffuse and felt in a longer-term than that of applied professions that let you wrestle with the complexity and messiness of the non-academic world in realtime.

Academia makes work-life balance hard.

The work easily becomes all-consuming, as it did for me during grad school. This is especially true before tenure and for type A personalities. Its competitive publish-or-perish culture doesn’t help, encouraging a disappointing bias for quantity over quality in work output.

Academia is less complex than the world outside.

The work is fun and hard, but it adheres too much to a formulaic rinse-and-repeat process of producing work that started to feel like a slow but certain deceleration in my learning rate. The laboratory has only so many dimensions to explore and learn about compared to the vastly higher-dimensional world outside—with the pros and cons of this complexity.

It didn’t help that I started becoming aware of the limitations of neuroscience methods to answer the interesting psychological questions that originally motivated me to become an academic, and the seeming unwillingness of my colleagues to acknowledge and grapple with these limitations.

The cons of leaving academia

Leaving academia is hard…

Doctoral programs—the gatekeepers of academia—demand significant research experience and an explicit desire to become a professor from their applicants. As a result, they select people who, like me, methodically cultivated a resume replete with academic research experience. I’d never worked outside of academia full-time before grad school. And neither had most of my classmates and professors.

I had no immediately accessible role models who could tell me about the world outside the ivory tower as a psychology Ph.D., let alone how to land a job there. Even worse, many professors look unkindly to doctoral students who don’t want to pursue an academic career path. (Many of my classmates felt uncomfortable telling the professors who advised them that they were considering a career outside of academia.)

…but doable with the right help.

I was lucky that the two professors who advised me as their student respected my desire to leave academia and supported me as professional references.

Family, friends, and classmates put me in touch with ex-academics and other professionals who helped me navigate careers outside academia. And my university’s Office of Career Services helped me understand how the skills I’d developed and refined as an academic could translate outside academia.

Advice to prospective and current academics

Academia serves a vital function in the modern world and is the wellspring of scientific advancement for our species. It offers a rewarding life for scholars who cherish its advantages and are ready and willing to handle its challenges.

Anyone excited at the prospect of being a part of the production of human knowledge—even if only to get a Ph.D.—should follow their curiosity where it leads them and join this community of scholars.

But prospective academics should be aware of academia’s limitations and challenges, ideally knowing themselves well enough to understand how their personal disposition, lifestyle preferences, and professional objectives align with life in academia.

Joining—or leaving—academia could be some of the best decisions you make.