r/LeavingAcademia

1. I don't like the research process. I like discussing and explaining scientific ideas and solving technical problems with creative solutions. I can't stand reading papers and doing data analysis. I also have severe ADHD and, while I can take ritalin and do an adequate job at research for my lab's expectations if I push myself really hard, all the most satisfying moments were about inventing technical solutions to problems and are beside the point of a PhD which is producing new papers and knowledge.
2. I'm 32 and I need a career that's going to allow me to start a family and keep my parents out of nursing homes soon and I don't think the life science world is able to offer me that at the moment.
3. I'm very well sought after for high end tutoring and homeschool teaching work in a way I would never be for actual life science work.
4. I'm not married yet and academic culture does not suit my personality. All of my relationships have started in the theatre world because I'm a very talented stage actor and I click easily with people who are constantly trying to talk about jokes and aesthetically interesting ideas the same way I am.
5. I want time for stage acting (because I genuinely love it in a way I do not love research work) and to take better care of my health.
6. The state of education is absolutely atrocious and I want to start my own homeschooling and tutoring business and personally feel like I've made a dent in the problem.
7. I invented the procedure for a a totally unique experiment last year, and, the minute I pulled it off, I was completely out of motivation and haven't felt different since. Even before then, I was doing idiotic, juvenile shit like staying up all night and having a terrible diet just to get enough work done every week to not look like an idiot in research meetings.
8. My PI said to me "It doesn't matter that this work is important. Building a quantum computer is important but I can't do it because I don't care."

Hi everyone,

I know this mught be going to sound lame, but I al finishing a phd in physics, and deep down I know I should leave academia because:

-I would have to do an amazing postdoc to get back a competite resume

-even though I do like to do research, I am bad at handling the loneliness of autonomy, and I always ends up obsessed about my work in a non-healthy way

-even though I like mentoring, and presenting my work, I hate writing papers, and the idea of looking for grants and stuff to then hire people don't get me motivated

-I don't think I could mentally survive moving out multiple times for postdocs across the world

And so I think I have decided to leave academia after my phd ends, the only postdoc possibilities would be in european national labs, but not universities.

One thing that bothers me though when I picture myself moving into a big company, or a startup, is the loss of "prestige". Now I know this is very shallow, but everytime I picture many month into these works, I feel like in academia you "are someone recognized by others", or at least you feel like you are, where-as back then when I did an intership in a medium size company, I felt like no one cared that you were spending your day at your work. This is stupid, but my brain is stuck thinking like this.

Anyone has felt like this prior to leaving academia? How did you handle it?

Especially sometimes I feel that my career choices somehow try to include this prestige in the list of important criteria, so pushing me to work on what "society acknowledges as the big challenges of our time, like fusion, climate, space, deeptech and blablabla". Rationally I know it is shallow, but somehow it still feels like it matters to me, and I don't know what to do with these feelings in the career decision choices that have to be made at some point. I fear no one will care about me and what I do if its not prestigious (note here that I do have a loving family, gf, and several good friends in my life).

Tl;dr don't know how to handle the pursuit of prestige feelings in career making choices

i don’t really know where to post this, but i need to get it off my chest.
i’m in my late 20s, and i’ve spent most of my life chasing academic achievements. medicine was what i worked towards for years. i made sacrifices, pushed myself, and built so much of my identity around being academically successful.
but now i’m questioning everything.
i don’t know if i want to continue in medicine, and the thought of choosing a different path is terrifying. i’ve already invested so many years into this career. there’s the fear of wasting all that effort, the uncertainty of starting from scratch, the financial concerns, and the feeling that i’ve somehow failed at the life i was supposed to have.
but what makes this so much harder is my relationship with my parents.
i feel like my worth in their eyes is tied to what i achieve. when i’m doing well academically or pursuing something they can be proud of, i’m treated differently. when i struggle, question my choices, or consider a path they don’t approve of, the criticism and berating become unbearable.
i’ve been made to feel that being a doctor is the bare minimum and that anything else would mean i’m good for nothing.
i’m also the eldest daughter, so there’s an additional layer of guilt. i feel responsible for their expectations, their sacrifices, and their disappointment. even when i know i’m allowed to make my own decisions, i struggle to stop feeling like i’m doing something wrong by choosing myself.
sometimes i resent my parents. sometimes i feel guilty for resenting them. sometimes i wonder how different my life would have been if i had grown up feeling that i was loved for who i was, rather than for what i achieved.
i envy people who can call their parents when life falls apart and know they’ll be comforted rather than criticised. i wish i had that kind of safety net.
i’m married, and i have a life outside my parents, but that doesn’t magically erase the emotional weight of growing up this way. their opinions still affect me more than i want them to.
i’m exhausted. i feel like i’ve spent so much of my life trying to become someone everyone could be proud of that i never really stopped to ask what would make me happy.
i don’t expect strangers on reddit to tell me exactly what to do with my career. i know nobody can make that decision for me.
i just want to hear from people who have been here.
**if you left medicine, walked away from a prestigious career, or started over after spending years working towards something, what happened?** did you eventually build a life you were happier with? how did you deal with the guilt, the uncertainty, the financial realities, and the feeling that you’d disappointed your family?
and if you grew up with parents who made you feel that your achievements determined your worth, how did you learn to live for yourself instead?
i really need to believe that there’s a life on the other side of all this.

As per the title, I'm in my 4th year (the final year, in my country/program) in a social sciences program, and I feel like I have accomplished very little in this time.

I have some interview data (maybe 20-25), some fieldwork, maybe 20k words written up, and not much else. I don't feel like I have enough data to coherently show anything, and I've lost track of what my question even was in the first place (partly because my plan kept changing).

I realised throughout the course of this program that it's extremely likely that I have ADHD (and I have been told as such by psychologists, but not diagnosed). One of my supervisors retired in my second year, and the other travels extensively so hasn't been around much. There were several bumps in the road. I didn't give my thesis enough structure to begin with, and I never really figured it out in time to bounce back. I have been on stress leave for the past year as a result of chronic health issues, but my time is coming to either rejoin the program or leave.

I'm not confident that I can finish the thesis next year, given that I really have extremely little data. What I do have is basically incoherent; I'm not confident that I can answer a clear research question with what I do have. I won't be funded next year, though I will probably be offered regular tutoring work and/or could work part time. I think that my supervisor has lost faith in my ability, and I don't have much other support or encouragement. With developments to AI, academia increasingly seems like it will become just a passion project for the elite. On the other hand, a finished PhD does have obvious benefit for potential careers in the future, and 1 year more isn't so long (especially compared to starting a new PhD years down the line).

So my options are:

1. Carry on unfunded, push through the stress and try to submit something, even though I'm not confident it will pass

2. Quit the PhD, move on and build a career

3. Master out

4. Something else I haven't considered

I'm certain at this point that I do not want a career in academia, but research adjacent areas are not off the table and indeed are likely required skills for many jobs in my field/industry. I know lots of people think I should just push through and submit, but I genuinely feel very lost and hopeless about it. If I spend a year (unfunded) writing something that doesn't pass, I will be putting myself into a worse situation than I am currently in.

Does anyone have any words of advice? Is academia worth it? This experience has totally eroded my own confidence in my abilities, and I don't know what to do.

I finished my PhD about a year ago in a European country in Epidemiology at a good institute. I have some high impact publications and all the usual nonsense that we are conditioned to have to be "good" in the academic setting.

I rewrote my CV to be ATS compliant and to be skills focused for the industry so it gets past the screening tools. It passes through the filter but there's just too many applicants. However I have not been able to find any jobs in any other industries... and it is getting really demotivating. I have spoken to several people in the same boat who are struggling to find jobs. Networking: All network in my institution seems to lead to more academia. Great for another postdoc not for anything else.

I have been trying to leave academia for a year now. At this point I'm even considering starting an AI masters or an MBA to reset my career and actually get something that is relevant to the job market (I have a quantitative background before I went into Epidemiology).

Anyone else having the same struggle?

Still in academia, and my field has been hit hard with funding cuts. These past two years have been hell and I am exhausted. I know with my skills I can get a corporate job, but I don't even want to do that at this point.

Honestly, I just want to recalibrate and not make work a huge priority in my life. Just have a job where I can be social and not do science or anything related for a bit while being able to manage the bills.

Has anyone ever done this and did it help? Tbh with how low post docs pay bartending might even pay more.

My husband is 10 years out of a PhD and is still busting his ass in research labs at universities.

I have a masters in adjacent field (same degree, different focus) and my first post grad job in industry made more money than he has ever made. I made more money than him last year and I was on maternity leave for most of it!

Those who haven't been a grad student before: you are basically slave labor making minimum wage and working long hours and the payoff of that is you can take your research experience and shiny new degree and go get a better job. My husband has changed research labs many times and is making barely more than a graduate student, only because the university requires certain minimum wages for researchers.

Honestly I don't mind that the job doesn't pay great money but the problem is this job drains his happiness, his energy, and his time. He has told me many times how he hates his job and when I ask if he wants to quit and pursue something else he just shrugs and says he just doesn't want to work at all so I say fine stay home with our kid then I will work but he still wont quit. I even said okay how about we send kid to daycare and you can still stay home not working but he wont even do that he loves the misery.

Its always the same situation, he works 2 year contract jobs so there's no long term job stability, no retirement savings, and he works 10 hour days most days comes home stressed and tired. Then whoever he's working for wont renew the contract so he finds another research lab to hire him because he's getting paid 50% of what he's worth.

This current one is even worse because he's developing a new product and he's meant to have a % stake in the company but when i asked him he said he's never signed anything so he's just believing these lies the employer is telling him, whenever I ask him to talk to the boss he gets angry at me and tells me to stop bugging him about it.

So fine I said, if he wont get the employer to put him on the company like he promised I asked him to start collecting evidence that he is meant to have a stake in the company like emails and to forward them to a different email so that when this blows up (I predict less than 12 months) I can get my lawyer on it but he wont even forward a bunch of emails or initiate those discussions via email because he is so deeply non combative.

This employer has lied to him before, we planned me to go back to work from maternity leave and for him to stay home for 3 months with the baby but his boss didn't want him to and offered him $10,000 bonus to work those 3 months and that money never appeared and my husband gets angry when I bring it up so instead I stayed home longer and our income was significantly cut.

He gets defensive whenever I bring it up, I have tried to send him job postings in industry but he never applies because he says he's not qualified which I think because he's never been out of academia he doesn't understand that jobs will train you up from the basic scientific knowledge set.

This happens on a 2-4 year cycle, he works in a lab, believes all the bullshit the boss tells him, then is left holding his dick in his hand when he's no longer needed.

TLDR: My husband has been acting and treated like a graduate student for 10 years its draining his mental health which is draining my mental health.

I have a master's in engineering and have spent the past year looking for a PhD position. I've worked as a researcher for the last 3 years, so this felt like the natural next step.

I've now received an offer, and I was thrilled at first. One thing is making me hesitate, though: the stipend is $1,300-1,400 a month. I have heard that the area is cheap. As a single person I could live on that, but only just, and only if inflation stays under control over the next few years.

The workload doesn't worry me. Peers have told me it's demanding, but I've been doing research for three years. I'd be close to mid 30s by the time I finish, assuming four years. Being single, moving isn't an issue.

What's bothering me is the bigger picture: AI changing the job market, weak hiring, a near-minimum-wage income, and four years without a clear career progression. I enjoy research, especially the technical work, but I also need to be able to support myself. I also don't want to start and then drop out, since that would waste a professor's time and feel unethical.

I'd appreciate any perspective, especially from people who've been in a similar situation.

Does anyone have any recommendations for good career coaches or headhunters who specialize in people looking to leave academia? I'd prefer someone (or some organization or firm) that leans more on the headhunting side, who will actually identify specific and current job opportunities for me given my background and skills, but a career coach who leans more towards just teaching me how to identify those opportunities myself would work. Thank you in advance!

Hi everyone,
I’d really appreciate hearing from anyone who went into a technician role after completing their PhD.
What was the transition like for you? Did you ever feel that taking a technician position was a step down after completing a PhD, or did you see it as a different career path with its own advantages?
I’d also be interested to hear what you enjoy about the role and what you find challenging or frustrating. For example, how do you find the level of responsibility, opportunities for progression, work-life balance, and the day-to-day work compared with what you were doing during your PhD?
If you made the move from a PhD into a technician role, would you make the same decision again? And has the role opened up any opportunities that you hadn’t anticipated?
I’m considering this route myself, so I’d really appreciate any honest experiences, both positive and negative. Thanks in advance!