In this week of the Recovering Academic podcast we talk with Dr. Gary McDowell and his journey outside academia. Gary is the executive director of The Future of Research, a non-profit organization created for and by early career researchers to make the research enterprise more sustainable for future generations. Their mission is to champion, engage, and empower early career researchers with evidence-based resources to improve the research endeavor.

Gary tells us how even though his path out of academia was somewhat ‘easy’ to delineate, it was still very hard to finally take the decision and leave.

“But I don’t know if I’m ready yet.
You come walking into this room
Like you’re walking into my arms.
What would I do without you?”

I don’t think people understand how difficult is is (to leave academia). @BiophysicalFrog

He also discussed how almost everybody that leaves academia experiences the same feelings of disappointment and feelings of failure. Also how it seems most of the recovering academics have a self-imposed isolation from academia to have a ‘clean break’. Unlike them, Gary is still directly involved with academia, and most of his daily duties seem a lot academic-like.

I hear this a lot: “Nobody twists your arm and say you have to be a post-doc”. Nobody physically does it, but psychologically, they do. @BiophysicalFrog

You can read more about Gary’s career in the FoR website and contact him on his Twitter account: @BiophysicalFrog

Mentioned in this episode:

• K99 NIH grant: NIH Pathway to Independence Award (Parent K99/R00)
• Love and Anger by Kate Bush: lyrics
• The expanse: TV show
• Athena Swan: ECU and Wikipedia
• Putting mentoring at the heart of academia: conference in Chicago in June 2019
• Athene Donald

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On this episode, we talk about what surprised us the most about the transition from academia to our post-academic lives.

What has surprised you the most when leaving academia? Was it the difference in working life? Was it the different feeling about work? Did you have a lot of free time? Was it an easy adjustment? Or difficult? Transitioning can be all of these or none of these. We’ll share our stories.

Mentioned in this podcast:

• Original surprise tweet from @drmarenw https://twitter.com/drmarenw/status/1055191449858383872
  

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The Recovering Academic trio takes some time to reflect about the past year and make plans for 2019.

We also discuss how it is hard to find motivation and focus during this time of the year, but we give some tips about how we can trick ourselves to have some work done during this holiday season!

It’s the season of generosity, but there’s actually little time for generosity @IHStreet

As recovering academics, we need to get used to the idea that the metrics used to quantify your “success” might be very different than the ones on academia, and not very well defined.

Chance favors the prepared mind @ladyscientist

In the end we should all aim for balance @Doctor_PMS

Thanks everybody for listening, we hope everyone has a wonderful holiday and an even better 2019!

Mentioned in this podcast:

• Forest app: https://www.forestapp.cc/en/
• Papyrus – SNL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVhlJNJopOQ
• Season 02 Episode 09: Reflections and Resolutions: https://recoveringacademic.net/season-02-episode-09-reflections-resolutions/

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Have you ever felt ‘decision paralysis’? With so many choices and not sure which way to go? Hesitant to put all your eggs on a single basket?  Well, you are not alone!

In this week’s episode we discuss how to define your career path when you leave the ivory tower. Academia has a defined career path, but that may not be the case once you leave it.

There isn’t a unique answer to these questions, but we discuss the importance of taking breaks to analyze and reflect about these things.

Not making a decision is also making a decision – @ladyscientist

 

 

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In this week of the Recovering Academic podcast we talk with Dr. Dennis Eckmeier, his journey outside academia and his actual advocacy projects, including the Science for Progress podcast and its twitter rotating twitter account @SfPRocur.

This was a joint podcast between the Recovering Academic and the Science for Progress podcasts, so we all discuss our reasons for leaving academia and realized Amanda was the only one of us that never did any experiments in the dark!

There’s always the transition period, but after you decide that you’re going to do it, it feels good. @Doctor_PMS

One of the challenges Dennis is facing is that, although advocacy is supposed to be for free, he is still trying to find alternatives of how he can proceed with this and make money with it.

Some people make it sound like networking is like another skill, is like learning to act, but I’ve learned that it’s not like that @DennisEckmeier

The goal of the Science for Progress podcast is to explain how academia works to people that are not academics. What is sort of the opposite of our recovering academic podcast that tries to show what PhDs can do outside academia.

You can contact Dennis through his webpage or his Twitter account: @DennisEckmeier

Mentioned in this podcast:

• Marcha pela ciencia // March for science Lisbon
• EAT CHEESE LIVE FOREVER
• This Is Why The 2018 Nobel Prize In Physics, For Lasers, Is So Important
• Science Magazine article: Sunshine outside the ivory tower
• Science for Progress podcast: The Journal Impact Factor: how (not) to evaluate researchers – with Björn Brembs

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Dear listeners,

Our Recovering Academic Podcast is two years old! Special thanks to all our listeners. We could never have done it without you. When we decided to start the podcast, we never thought that we would have such a warm welcome and audience. We just passed the 40,000 downloads mark in July, as we start recording Season 3 of the podcast. In this next season, we plan to continue with a mix of topic discussions between the ‘Recovering Trio’, and interviews with other Recovering Academics to tell you their transition stories. Let us know if you have any suggestions of discussion topics or interviewees. We have an ongoing list of possible topics, but we are always open to suggestions. Let us know what YOU want us to talk about. Now is the time!

We also started to get a lot of followers in our Twitter account (1,751 as of this writing). We tried for a while to alternate between us and each one of us would take care of the account for some days/week, but that became somewhat difficult. Life happens, and we ended up taking a summer ‘break’ on our Twitter account as well. However, one of the main goals of the podcast is to make you know that you are not alone, that there’s sunshine outside the ivory tower, and that there’s a lot of people out there to reach out to. We also started interviews in Season 2 as a way to bring more exposure of PhDs that successfully transitioned away from academia. We wanted you to hear their history, their uncertainties, and how they succeeded. But we want to bring more people in touch with you, and in a more interactive manner.

That’s why we are going to transform our @RecoveringAcad twitter account into a Rotating Curator (ROCUR) account until the end of the year as an experiment. Like other ROCUR accounts, someone will be given full access to the @RecoveringAcad twitter account and will tweet about their experience within academia and beyond the ivory tower. We are seeking curators who are PhDs or soon-to-be PhDs that left or/are planning to leave academia. Let us know through this Google Form if you would like to be a curator! Don’t feel pressured to tweet 24/7 during that week. Do it at least a few times that week and share whatever you are comfortable sharing. Your three Recovering Academic hosts will curate the first three weeks to show the diverse ways of curating and plan to have our first guest curator in the early fall.

We don’t want to impose many rules, but we hope that we can trust the curator common-sense and avoid problems. The three of us will try to keep a close eye into the account, but and we will generally trust the curator. But if you see something that doesn’t seem quite right, or if you feel offended in any way, please tweet to either one of us (@ladyscientist, @Doctor_PMS, @IHStreet) and let us know.