Looking in All the Wrong Places: How I Let Go of the Academic Identity

By Sarah Yunes

I thought I knew who I was. I decided I wanted to be a professor before starting undergrad. I did everything I thought an academic was supposed to do.  I worked all the time and I didn’t attend any other events. I was a dutiful, idealistic academic, focused on pushing the bounds of knowledge for the sake of knowledge.

I was also miserable.

It turns out I’m ill-suited for research and academic life. Staying in academia was not an option I could stomach. But I had a problem. I saw myself as an academic, and I had never considered myself as anything else. I had built an identity I thought I wanted, that I was supposed to want. All I needed to do was push myself to be the very best and reach for the career only available to those that were good enough. Rejecting this path meant rejecting who I had made myself out to be and, worse still, figuring out what I was actually supposed to do.

This clash between the life I thought I wanted and who I was exacerbated my already underlying mental health issues. Imposter syndrome, that feeling that I was never good enough to be here, met up and befriended my pre-existing anxiety disorder and turned my brain into their summer house. I had built up the academic career as the “one true path” and anything else was a sign that I couldn’t cut it, or in the worst case, that I was a selfish sell-out that wasn’t willing to put in the work for science. For a long time, I lived in denial and buried myself in my research, determined beyond all reason to fit into this life even though I knew, deep down, this couldn’t last.

Even with all of my guilt and doubts, I began looking for alternatives. The more I looked, the more despondent I became. Every career on the outside looked hopelessly out of reach. I came to believe that I was doomed to a miserable life in academia. There was no way I could get one of these mysterious industry jobs.

This is when I discovered BU BEST, an NIH-sponsored initiative for biomedical PhD students and postdocs to explore career options. I got their newsletter in my email and snuck out of the lab to attend one of the career panels. It was here I discovered medical writing as an option. Writing was one of the only things I still enjoyed about academia and had some confidence in doing, but I still didn’t think I could do it professionally. I still identified as a failed academic. Why would anyone want to hire someone like that? Over the next several months, I kept attending BEST events and I got to know the two coordinators who ran the program. They both introduced me to many people in the field who talked about how they too were no longer happy with academia and moved into medical writing after completing graduate school. BU BEST also helped me get an internship in science writing in a field very different from mine. I’ve been there about a year now, and this experience has convinced me that I’m heading in the right direction.

I still struggle with this new identity, but I guess that’s normal. I was so convinced I was someone else, it will probably take some time for me to really feel comfortable in this new mental space. I no longer see myself as a failed academic scientist. I’m still building my new identity one step at a time. I’m starting to feel comfortable introducing myself as a science writer and communicator instead of a grad student or a researcher. Looking at the end of my PhD and, if all goes to plan, the end of my time in academia, I’m excited about discovering who this new person actually is.