Why I Left Graduate School (Part 2)

(Author's Note: My original post on this topic, which I wrote in March of 2009, has received a modest bit of Internet traffic. A lot of this traffic comes from Google searches, likely from frustrated academics who wanted to read someone's thoughts at that difficult time. Because it's been a while since I posted in this space, I thought it might be helpful to revisit the debate - one that I know continues in the minds of many academics and post-academics alike - because it touches on many deeper concerns, both philosophical and psychological.)

In the fifteen months since I packed my bags and left academia for a very nice research-related job in industry, I've noticed a few things. The first is that I do not miss the rigors of academic writing; my writing talents (to the extent that they exist at all) lie solely in the realms of spinning the narrative, in the plentiful use of adjectives and in deconstructing the meaning of "stuff" from a big-picture level - they do not thrive in the compartmentalized facilities of academic research writing, with its almost computer-scientist-like attention to detail and linearity.

The second thing, very much related to the first, is that I now know better where my skills lie in general. I'm very much talented as a talker; I talk far better than I write and I love to socialize; on the other hand, I can wade in the analytical waters and I'm able to solve complex problems; I can engineer complex solutions to these problems because I can wrap my mind around complexity; and I severely lack patience but make up for it with overall positive demeanor and a "can-do spirit." We all deserve to know these things about ourselves - the fractal image of your personality as it appears to those around you is likely different from what you assume - and I've found that the best way to understand these things is to change your environment once in a great while.

The third thing I've learned, very much related to the first two that I've mentioned, is that completely changing your environment has consequences. These consequences should and must be weighed against the potential benefits of making such a severe life choice. In my original article on this topic, I walked around an issue that I think I understand better now that I've made the dive into industry - specifically, that in deciding to leave academia for industry, I consciously chose the near-certainty of financial prosperity over the slim chance of notoriety.

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Many people I know, especially the adults, aspire to be famous. I've had my share of fantasies in this regard - until quite recently, I've dreamed of waking up one day armed with a 97-mile-an-hour fastball and the ability to control it with laser-like precision. I would try out and sign with the New York Yankees, of course, and work my way quickly through their minor league system; upon making the big leagues, I would wear number 36 (like my boyhood idol, pitcher David Cone) and quickly make a name for myself as an example of dreams come true, the graduate student-turned-flamethrower.

This was my fantasy until about age 24. (NOTE: Lately, this has been supplanted by a new dream - one of winning millions of dollars at the Main Event at the yearly World Series of Poker. I find this dream only slightly more attainable than the previous one.) But dreams fade as time passes, as the clock very slowly ticks on your own life, and as you start to realize that although you are still young, there is constantly less time than before to make the impact that you wanted to make.

I am nothing if not a realist. This is why, when the inevitable article on NYTimes.com appeared, the one that featured the research that was once in my "academic wheelhouse" - the work of my former adviser, along with a former colleague, in a very specialized topic in which I've earned a master's degree - my major emotional response at that moment was actually one of pure joy. (I ran into the master bedroom, where my fiancee was about to fall asleep, and told her excitedly that I'd stumbled upon a very cool article involving people I knew by first name.)

But this was also the moment where I realized that my last best shot at fame, short of winning the WSOP Main Event or embroilment in a political scandal, had disappeared as a direct function of my own decision making. (NOTE: I should never go into politics; I've written too much. There's too much dirt out there. Even though I could see 50-year-old Fred really wanting to.) This karmic dissonance is something I'd like to explore further, because I think it helps explain why so many intelligent adults - whether they live in academia or in industry - spend so much of their waking time, to paraphrase the Primitive Radio Gods, "letting their money pay for living days awake but half-asleep."

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Regardless of what I wrote above, I love my job and I don't regret for a second my decision to leave graduate school and to move back home to New Jersey. I have a delicious work-life balance, and I do not dread Sunday evenings. I am paid meaningfully for my work, and doing work that I enjoy helps pay for a lifestyle that allows me a great deal of personal and experiential freedom. Simply put, my gamble on finding a job in the midst of a terrible recession worked, and worked swimmingly. (As a concrete example, next year I'm probably going to buy a pretty big and pretty nice house. Probably.)

Academics - and Ph.D. students, in particular - often take an extreme "longview" of life itself. (As I wrote last March, "Graduate students, because they're mostly young and extremely driven, always forget that their hearts will inevitably give out one day.") In retrospect, this is not as terrible of a thought process as I once thought (although I still don't think that way). However, even in exchange for ultimate knowledge, it is an extreme, almost immeasurable, sacrifice to earn almost no money during one's twenties and early thirties. It puts a person at a financial disadvantage that is almost impossible to overcome within the current human lifespan (one in which we retire before age 70), and because so many people out there are concerned about money, it almost self-selects the population of Ph.D's to be either (a) independently wealthy prior to entering a Ph.D. program or (b) completely oblivious to the concept of money in general.

But money, whatever its merits or inherent problems, is important. It's, like, really, really important - so important that as an outside observer, I have to consider whether item (b) is such a serious problem that it might in our lifetimes turn on its side what we've always considered to be "intelligence." For all the talk of grade inflation and the hyper-education of American society, we still live in a society where people (in New Jersey, at least) with only a high school education and skills in a meaningful trade can earn six-figure incomes well before age thirty. A tenure-track academic, if they are lucky, will hit that salary level some time between ages 35 and 40 (assuming a "traditional" academic path). This doesn't strike me as "fair," in its most basic sense, but if you're like me and you believe that people are generally paid what they're worth, it also makes an interesting statement about the value of academia in general.

Right-wing hemming and hawing aside, America is going to remain a capitalist society for the foreseeable future. Given this, money is going to remain important as societal incentive. Given this, I think we need to re-think whether advanced education, as it is presently constituted, is useful. Are Ph.D.'s receiving a lifetime benefit commensurate to their 5-7 years (at least) of low-paying indentured servitude?

(NOTE: If I weren't a lazy person, this would be where I would Google the pay differential between, say, Ph.D.'s in the social sciences vs. those with masters'- and bachelors'-level educations. I'm not going to do this, because I am lazy, but my educated guess is that Ph.D.'s do earn somewhat more per annum, compared with the masters'-level folks in a given field - but not by so much to justify the lost earning potential experienced in their twenties and thirties. These are the times when compound interest builds, so it kind of makes sense to make money right now.)

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This is just my opinion; it's highly analytical, and as a consequence, it's probably quite controversial. Life is not predicated by a 401(k) balance, to the same extent that it is not predicated by one's retirement; after all, if you're like me, you find it pretty pathetic when you hear people talk longingly for their retirement years. Waiting to have fun in retirement is like waiting to relax until Sunday night (if you're one of those people who hates Sunday nights). In fact, if there's one takeaway from this entire post, I hope it's that the frustrated academics who read this article realize that every work situation - academic, industry, the priesthood, whatever - has its pros and its cons, and that your happiness in that work situation is created (constructed, if I may borrow a phrase from the scientific study of emotions) by the extent to which your interaction between you and your work environment is a holistically successful one.

So, if your commute sucks, you're not going to like your job. If your boss sucks, you're not going to like your job. If your pay sucks, or if you find your work dull and boring, or if you're in over your head with work, you're not going to like your job. Do you get my drift? Liking what you do isn't about liking what you do - it's about proactively seeking a work environment where you're challenged, happy, well-paid, and well-liked, all at the same time. So the good news and the bad news, all rolled up in one, is that finding this sort of happiness at work takes exactly the same amount of effort as finding this sort of happiness in a relationship. As I observe other people, it is unsurprising that the exact same people who have little problems in the one realm have few problems in the other, and the converse - that people who can never be happy in love are never happy at work - is completely true as well.