Leaving academia: I mourn the ideas that will never turn into experiments

Sometimes in life you find yourself in a relationship where all of a sudden you realize that things are not like you want them to be. It takes time filled with doubt, anxiety, and lots of thinking, but then you realize that you need to quit this relationship. You realize that you will be happier when you’re not in it anymore. And even though you realize this and are ready to take this step, it is inevitable that you will mourn what is not there anymore. You will always have the memories, but you won’t have all the things you imagined you would have had in this relationship and it takes time to mourn the vacations you never went on together, the children you imagined that will never be born and all the other things you fantasized about.

Quitting academic science comes with the same feelings of mourning for me. I am sad about all the cells I will never patch, the excitement of cutting slices and seeing gorgeous layers of neurons. I mourn the ideas that I have that I won’t get to turn into experiments, data, and papers – for now at least. I mourn the fantasy that I had about becoming a full professor (which in the home-country is surrounded by this whole day filled with ceremony when you become this). Heck, I even mourn the Nobel Prize that I dreamt about winning. More than once did I daydream about getting the call from Stockholm saying I won the Nobel Prize (if only I knew what I won it for). Quitting academia means I won’t have these things and I would be lying if I wasn’t sad about that. For the past ten years or longer, I thought this was going to be my life and now I realize that it really isn’t.

But of course, ending one thing means the beginning of something new. I will still be a scientist, but not at a university anymore. I will still get to think of new science-ideas, just not the ones I was currently working on. I will still get to talk, write and present science. I’m super excited about this and I will soon write more about how I got this job, why my postdoc experience was still very useful, and what led me to decide to quit academia.

Babyattachmode (@BabyAttachMode) is the pseudonym of a neuroscience PhD turned industry scientist. This story was published on July 21, 2014, on her Scientopia blog, In Baby Attach Mode (available here), and has been republished here with her permission.