I turned my back on academia and I’m happy
Given the chance to return to science, my PhD and academic dream, I’ve chosen not to.
I just made the hardest decision of my life. I declined the offer of taking on another PhD. I turned my back on my last chance to chase my long-held dream of an academic career. It’s taken around three weeks of sleepless nights and stress-filled days to reach this conclusion, but I know it’s the right thing to do for me and my family.
The backstory to “another PhD”
In case you’ve missed the tale of what happened here, let me get you up to speed. In 2006 I started my PhD at Cambridge. I had three years of funding and even got to spend one of those years at Harvard. “Ecstatic” would’ve been an understatement.
The science proceeded how science always does: there were peaks and there were troughs, successes and failures, early starts and late nights. And plenty of stress between the bursts of excitement. I loved research — I felt like I was doing what I was ‘meant’ to do because it was what I’d alway hoped to do.
Fast forward three years. Thesis-writing time. I was a little behind, having faffed around a bit at Harvard spending a few weeks to get the new lab up and running. So I was out of funding.
Anyway, I was writing my thesis from home and working part-time (because Cambridge ain’t cheap!). For better or worse all my work was digital. I had dozens of 4D timelapse videos of tiny of cells migrating in complex patterns over the embryos I was working on. All in all, it was close to 350GB. I had this precious cargo backed up on my trusty old-school 500GB Western Digital hard drive. At the time, around 2009, this wasn’t so “old school”! Because I was sensibly paranoid, I also had a few essential bits duplictaed on a USB stick and some more on my laptop’s hard drive. No cloud storage big enough back then. Ahh, the past.
One morning, I came home from a quick trip to the lab to find my front window ajar. I peaked in. Nervous. I unlocked the door. I went in to find everything in a mess. We’d only recently moved in but burglars had cleaned us out. TV, Xbox, valuables, laptop, hard drives. The laptop and hard drives. The data. Gone.
The stuff was irrelevant. It was my data, all that data. Three years of lab work and nothing to show for it other than some thesis chapter drafts in emails.
No more funding. No more time. No more data.
I finished writing the thesis, but without the supporting data. I had to submit what I had as an MPhil rather than a PhD as Cambridge told me “ We are unable to examine you on data you do not have.” And what I did have left didn’t constitute a PhD.
So, I printed it. Bound it. Submitted it. Had my viva examination. Passed it. Got my wholly disappointing MPhil.
No ‘doc’ meant no postdoc, which meant no academic career. I struggled to find any work after that. Devastated doesn’t do how I felt any justice. But I had to move on. There was rent to pay.
I took what work I could. I worked as a cleaner, an Apple reseller, and even a research associate for three short but wonderful months. As I became increasingly desperate, I managed to find a job in medical writing, and the rest is history.
A decade on I’m a senior science writer, doing science communications. It’s a career that’s a dream for many, but it’s a career I never wanted. Unsuprisingly and unhealthily I’ve always held up every writing job I ever had up to the life in the lab I’d always wanted. Until just recently, that is…
Return of the lab
After nine years in the private sector, I landed a job in the public sector. I started to write stuff that wasn’t for profit. Let the soul-cleansing begin.
Academia was still a distant dream that I’d all but given up on by this point. Plus, I’d been out of the lab for so long, who would ever take me in again? Could I even still wield a trust pipette?
In case you didn’t know, the science-writing industry is bursting at t he seams with scientists who ditched academia, so I’ve always maintained a close tie with happenings at the Ivory Tower.
Getting into the swing of my new job, the soil cleaning charity work didn’t bring the satisfaction I was hoping. Charity hubs are just regular jobs but with way less funding and organisation.
Randomly, I saw an advert for a fully-funded PhD. It was in an interesting field that I was actually confident in. By a strange turn of events, it combined by original Master’s with elements of my MPhil-that-should-have-been-a-PhD. Tempting. Tired of almost touching academia, I reached out and grabbed it. I fired off an application with pretty low expectations.
Quite a while later, amidst a pesky global pandemic, I got an invite to an interview. For a PhD. In a good lab with an excellent supervisor. The only phrase that comes to mind is, “WAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!”.
I got to work. I read all the papers, formulated questions, planned research and devised excellent questions to ask. Oh, and prepared equally excellent answers on why hiring someone approaching 40, for essentially their second PhD, was an awesome idea. Experience, time management, facial hair, etc.
It paid off because they offered me the position! A decade on from missing out on the PhD I actually completed, here’s the super rare the chance to finally restart my academic dream.
The first seeds of doubt
“I’d like to offer you a PhD in my lab,” read the email. Holy shit. I did it. I could go back to the lab! A thousand thoughts rushed through my brain. Excitement was definitely in there, but also, anxiety. Panic. Straight up fear.
Maybe if I yell, that’ll help. “YEEEESSSSSSSS!!!!! WOOOOO!”
Nope. That didn’t help. Oh well, let’s not worry about it. Dead inside. Classic. But, back to the lab!
I started to think about all the science I’d be doing. Real science! I started to think about the experiments I could run. I contacted a couple of scientists from different fields who might have some interesting input. I started to get excited. Started to think about doing the science! Finally!
The notion of being back in my lab coat, at the bench, at the microscope, filled me with joy. I remember so well sitting in the cold dark confocal microscope room late at night. (It’s more fun than it sounds!) It should’ve been a chore but finally looking at your samples was always great. I’ve said it before but that sort of thing made me feel like a proper scientist. (Romanticism is strong.)
Hmm. But late nights? I can’t be doing that anymore. My son goes to bed at 7.30 and I want to be there in the evenings. I also want to see my wife! I guess the same thing goes for wekend trips to the lab like PhD Round One.
And so the first doubts crept in. I started to consider the mundane details. The logistics weren’t insurmountable, but they were a bit of a pain in the arse. (Ash Ambridge would doubtlessly shout at fear of logistics here.)
Logistics and cash money
The PhD was in a different city so we’d either have to sell our house or rent it out. We’d make money on the house if we sold it, because the value had gone way up (and is continuing to rise!), but lose the asset.
Renting it out was more tricky. Once we’d covered the mortgage and agency fees, we’d, at best, be breaking even. More likely, we’d lose a little since rent in the new city is higher. Plus I have fundamental issues with being a landlord.
And moving! Close to £1,000 for a removal van! Shit, I think I’m in the wrong industry. Boxing everything up yet again — eeuuuggghhh. Since my wife and I have been together, we’ve moved house seven times. Seven times we’ve packed up everything and lugged it across the country or the Atlantic. Suffice it say, I am so very bored of moving house.
Then there’s having to deal with estate agents and rental properties. I cannot express how happy I was when we bought our house, after years of renting, at the prospect of never having to deal with utter cockwombles that are the vast majority of estate agents. Oh, and their neverending list of pointless, money-grabbing fees for every conceivable thing.
Speaking of money, I’m now in a position where I’m not struggling. And damn it’s taken a long time to get here. Science writing in a managerial post pays me a little over £37k, which is still most I’ve ever earned. The PhD would see me going back down to a tax-free studentship of around £16k.
Material stuff doesn’t interest me but that’s a big old loss. It’s three more years of not paying off my student loan. It’s three more years with no pension contributions. Three more years with no savings. Things I’d never even thought about until I started to do them.
As a result of me being a struggling but intellectually fulfilled scientist, my wife would, once again, be bearing the financial brunt of my academic pursuits. While she’s 100% supportive (and so very, very awesome), it didn’t sit well with me that I’d be putting us in that situation, again.
It’s no longer just me
When I started on this academic path, it was just me and my girlfriend. We’d finished our Master’s degrees, didn’t have too much direction and owned no property (obviously). So, we were game for moving wherever. Throwing our stuff in a bag and buggering off to the US for a year, for example. Then packing up again and moving to London. And so it went. Carefree.
But it’s different now. My girlfriend is my wife. She’s built up a career and a reputation over a decade in marine conservation. She’s good at what she does. Really good. We also have a mortgage for a house we’ve done proper boring grown-up things in. Things like having a second bathroom installed and the floorboards varnished. Real adult crap. We also made a human. Nearly five years ago now we made a human and my god does he takes up a lot of time.
When I think about restarting my academic dream, I now have to factor in my family. Moving cities for the PhD would mean my wife would have to work from home and commute once a week. No big deal — others do it.
My son would need a new school. He already has a place secured at primary school here, so we’d need to find one in the new city. Bit of a faff, especially at such short notice and with a global pandemic gathering steam in the background, but not impossible.
But what happens after three years? I’m not chasing the PhD experience here — I’ve done that. I want the postdoc. The next postdoc. The associate prof. The full prof. The lab and PhD students of my own.
After the PhD, I’ll almost certainly have to move cities again. That means it becomes increasingly likely my wife is too far away from where she works to be able to commute, which means she’d have to change jobs. My son would also need to change school again after only having only recently done so. He’d be close to eight by then and I worry that moving would become more and more disruptive.
And then after that first postdoc finished in another one-to-three years? Yup, likely another move. And this is all without any sort of job security.
I don’t have many friends that I spend time with and, quite frankly, I’d always rather spend my time with my wife and son. They are the most important thing to me. And I’d feel terrible to take them along for such a disruptive ride. I couldn’t put my wife in a position that cost her her career, or my son in a position that stressed him out.
It’s a lot of forward thinking but shit, I feel I have to do that now.
Soul searching and hard work
I consulted every academic I know. I asked everyone for insight into an academic career. The results were pretty unanimous:
“I love it, but it’s a lot of hard work and a lot of sacrifice.”
The people I spoke to talked about the cut-throat nature of getting funding. The high workload. The long hours. The uncertainty. But of course, they also talked about the thrill of success and joy of intellectual pursuits. A very senior and active scientist summed it up nicely in her brilliant email to my barrage of questions:
“I enjoy academia but it’s certainly not low-stress, and you basically have to accept at some point you might not make it, even at my career stage.”
It’s nothing I didn’t know. But I hadn’t considered it for myself, as a real and imminent possibility, in quite some time.
Did I still want to take that on? Especially when the odds aren’t stacked in my favour. Fewer than 1 in 25 grads make it to a permanent research post and only around 1 in 200 make it to the professor level.
And then you go and throw in the work hours and stress that at one point were something I took on the chin. Not any more: I can’t take stress and high workloads. I’m more about sitting in the garden, reading a nice book with a cup of coffee.
Wills and won’ts
As I lay all this out for you to read, I realise that I’ve said “couldn’t” and “can’t” a lot. But the truth is, it comes down to what I will and won’t do anymore. I’ve worked hard over the years — I’ve put in my time and had my hardships. I fell out of academia and had to create a new career. I’ve started a family. And although I have no intention of staying put forever, I’m not ready to start ramping things up again so that I can restart a 13-year-old ambition.
After a whole lot of introspection, it turns out I don’t want to spend my evening and weekends in the lab. I don’t want to finish up my work and still be reading papers in the evening. I don’t want to work super hard anymore. And I’m not willing to jeopardise the security and stability that we’ve built up by taking a few giant leaps backwards to maybe go forward.
It kills me to say that. It hurts to conclude that I’m no longer the ambitious scientist I used to be. I don’t doubt that I’d enjoy the PhD. I’m confident I’d enjoy research. But I’m not prepared to make the sacrifices that go along with being successful in academia. It’s a broken system at best.
With that in mind, I emailed the supervisor to reject the PhD. I apologised for the whole thing but thanked him for the opportunity. He was understanding — a little disappointed, but he understood.
I also broke the news to my friends. I’d been pestering them with cries for opinions for ages so I thought I should keep them in the loop! I thanked them all for their advice (which had ranged from “Stay the hell away from academia!” to “Who knows what the future will be like — go for it!”) and gave them a brief version of this. They were bloody lovely and supportive, which helped loads. Plenty of them had bailed on academia themselves — chasing that easier life.
Well, most were supportive. One ex-academic had some very choice feedback. He told me that my son would grow up “tell all his friends how much he doesn't want to be like his father who gae up his dream for security”. He went on to call me a coward and that I’d regret this the rest of my life. Which was nice! Can’t please everyone eh?
Three weeks of going back and forth, not sleeping and interrogating every scientist I could. Three weeks of internal crisis. Three weeks of anxiety. But finally, I felt some calm. Decision made. Time to move my focus elsewhere.
Time to find contentment
Am I passing up the chance at an adventure? Sure. Was it my dream? Yes. Do I still love science? Of course. But is it really what I still want? No. I don’t believe it is.
For the past ten years, I’ve compared every job I’ve had to the academic life I always wanted. And it’s a good bet I’ve done so with rose-tinted vision — the glorious filter of retrospect. It turns out the grass over there in academia isn’t any greener. In fact, a lot of that green grass seems to be on fire.
But now I can stop. I can stop looking back, and instead look at what’s right in front of me. I do science communications for a job. I’m good at it. I’ve taught people about it. But I’ve never appreciated it. I certainly don’t intend to to say in this role role but it’s a stepping stone. One more arrow in the quiver. Maybe I take the leap into the adventurous life of a freelancer, selling my science word skills to the highest bidder!
And I’m up for an adventure. I’m so up for an adventure! But I want the next adventure to be one that me, my wife and my son take on together. I don’t want the next few years to be my family following me around while I chase an outdated dream of romanticised research. I am eternally grateful to my tremendous wife for being completely supportive of this, but I now know it’s not something I want for us all.
What I want is for us is to be able to spend less time working. Not more. We’re already down to four days per week and that’s been great. Let’s see if we can get that down to three. I want us to spend more time living — reading, writing, surfing — not more time working and stressing. I want to be able to pick my son up from school. I want to be able to take extended time off over the school holidays. I want to be able to spend as much time as possible with my family. To take us all to new places. But also, I want to have time to myself. And yeah, I want a little more security now.
Science and research will always hold a very special place in my heart. But when confronted with the reality of it, ten years on, I’m not willing to make the sacrifices needed. And yes that makes me a little sad. But then again, I can finally close that door on academia, find contentment in what I have.
I may not be about to become an academic, but I’ve learnt a lot about myself and I can rest easy with a real sense of closure.