The same year I graduated from Kindergarten, my mother graduated with her PhD in Food Chemistry from the University of Missouri, Columbia. It was a really big deal. There is a picture of freckled little me in an adorable pink dress standing with my mother in her cap and gown surrounded by the entire family (all the way up to my great-grandparents). Being a university professor was the thing my mother most wanted to do.
I grew up in academia. Wandering the university campus and especially the stacks in the libraries. Family friends were mostly professors. Family vacations were at the annual conference. Somewhere deep in my heart the idea was planted that academia was the highest pinnacle of a well-lived life. To this day, spending time on any university campus makes me feel as if I’ve come home.
Life going one way and another, going straight through school for my PhD wasn’t a realistic option. Instead, I built a lovely career as a statistical programmer in the pharmaceutical industry. A career which has given me the great luxury of working from home and having an amazing work-life balance, while still bringing home a sizeable salary. In my late 20s, the idea of a PhD and a life in academia started to creep back up. In my mid-30s, I reached the now-or-never point. If I was ever going to go on that journey, I needed to start now. So I applied, and was accepted, to an excellent program at a good university with an assistantship that covered tuition plus a small stipend. I spent a year doing the grad school “thing.”
Either academia has changed or, more likely, I have. I decided not to go back.
Not because I couldn’t hack it — I was doing more than fine and had been invited by several professors to work with them on projects.
Not because I didn’t like it — because I loved going to class, having long conversations about the minutiae of research, developing hypotheses, and analyzing data.
But because I’m clear now on what it was I was hoping to get from that life — to spend my days learning about diverse topics from different perspectives and to have opportunities to share my perspective with the world.
There was a time when academia was the only place you could do those two things. With MOOCs, online learning communities, blogs, discussion boards and a whole host of other venues, the days of universities being the only place of meaningful learning are long behind us. It is quick, easy and free to explore all sort of topics and discuss them with 100s of people from different perspectives, all without having to take time away from home and family.
As for sharing my perspective, academia is like standing on a stage with 100 other really bright people all of you shouting your ideas at a small subset of other really bright people who may or may not be interested in what you have to say (and are probably already formulating arguments to refute you as you speak). Everybody essentially trying to prove to themselves and to the world that they belong in this elite group of people who have been marked as society’s purveyors of knowledge.
I prefer to stand quietly on a corner and talk with whomever happens to pass by, whomever happens to be interested…talk to learn and to share, and in that way grow my knowledge and spread my ideas without trying to prove anything to anyone. This blog suits that purpose very well. And I get to do it on my own schedule, gracefully maintaining the work-life balance I have discovered is so critical to my happiness.
Walking Through Change 