Grief, identity, and changing careers as a long-time academic

Dear Reader,

It might surprise people who don’t have PhDs that grief is often part of the job search process, especially when you’re first changing career directions.

In my own case, I didn’t experience grief per se. At least not much, and not for long.

What I did have to do was disentangle my sense of self from having an academic job.

I didn’t know who I was beyond my PhD, a scholar-researcher-teacher affiliated with a university.

Rather than shed this identity completely, I connected with who I was as a person in the world on a deeper level.

And given who I was, it made some sense that I’d pursued the academic path. It wasn’t foolish of me!

But working as a faculty member or otherwise pursuing an academic career was NOT who I was; following that path was a choice I’d been making based on information about myself and the world.

The task ahead was to reacquaint myself with who I was and then seek out new and perhaps different information.

And that was an appealing project, in a way.

It connected with my innate curiosity, love of learning, and the high value I place on perspective-taking and open-mindedness to new ideas and data.

So for me, shifting my career direction didn’t involve grieving for a path not taken / life not lived so much as exploring possibilities by engaging my character strengths.

And since I was engaging those strengths, the process felt more exciting than lamentable for me. In other words, career exploration was thus FUN once I realized what it involved doing.

The shift in perspective I made was that this was an opportunity to pause and consider who I was, now, and then pursue work that aligned. Perhaps in ways that an academic career never could, or at least didn’t in reality.

Does this make sense? What’s your experience with grief, identity, and careers?

What’s Happening

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