Motivation to Change

Over the past weekend I found myself talking to a very smart, well-educated and successful woman. She has a job, is good at it and makes a lot of money doing it. That is a fantastic set up. Except for one thing......I'm not sure that this particular woman likes her job as anything more than what she is trained to do and what pays the bills (Disclaimer: this may be far from the truth, it's just my speculation). She brought up a mutual friend of ours who went to school in one field and then after a particularly bad postdoctoral experience ended up going to get another degree in a completely different field. This friend is now very successful in his new field - and is much happier and despite being incredibly busy and stressed on a regular basis I'm pretty sure that he actually enjoys his job and feels like it's a much better fit for him. Ironically, he was very very good at what he did pre-second run at graduate school.......but that's not always enough. I suspect that he knew for quite some time as he was progressing from college to graduate school and beyond that this wasn't quite right for him but there was no motivation to change course - he was good at what he had been trained to do and he was paying the bills. Until one day his post-graduate situation made him unhappy enough to endure 10 months of unemployment followed by 2 more years of school all the while amassing a large debt of student loan. If he'd just stuck it out life would have been much easier and much more comfortable.

My conversation partner didn't understand the use of a miserable situation like the one our friend found himself in during his postdoc. I offered her my take: yes, it was an extremely rough 2 years for him in this particular lab but if his postdoctoral experience had been a good one, he may never have gotten quite uncomfortable enough to actually go back to school. In other words, sometimes those rotten situations are exactly what we need to make us take control back and take steps towards what will make us happier. While she failed to understand what I was getting at all kinds of bells were going off in my head. The situation of the above mentioned friend totally parallels what I'm going through and I came to the sudden realization that without the trauma of having my job and essentially my current career path taken away from me abruptly I would never have had the motivation or the courage to do what I'm doing now........figuring out a way to get into teaching regardless of how much clawing and scratching I have to do to get there.

And for the first time since this whole thing began I truly felt like I was doing the right thing. I have struggled with my decision since that first day - with the economic climate in its current state, who am I to turn my nose at all the jobs that I am the most suited for (ie, another postdoc)? Who am I to choose right now to stand on my soap box and scream out that I'm finally done following the typical path of people who've gotten a Ph.D. in a scientific discipline? Who am I to put all kinds of pressure on my husband to perform at work so that he never gets laid off so that I can work part-time just to get the experience that I never had the courage or the gumption to get while I was in graduate school? I should just suck it up and get another postdoc and hope (again) that eventually I'll get the teaching experience I need to get out of this miserable life in research. I can't tell you how many times over the past 3 weeks I've berated myself for not sticking up to my graduate advisor a little more and getting that teaching certificate that would have allowed me to skip this postdoctoral step and that if I'd been a bit smarter and more selfish and career savvy I wouldn't be in this mess.

But that's not true. I may not be in this mess, but I'm sure I'd be in a different one. And I realized after this conversation that I really needed this. In my one year of postdoc experience I've met amazing people who will always be my friends and I've had the chance to work for someone who realizes that I'm a human in addition to a data machine and I've gotten the experience at the bench I needed to realize that I'm better at this than I thought and, most importantly, I realized that I gave myself the opportunity to see if research really was for me (graduate school is painful enough that you shouldn't make that decision while you're still in it)........and it's not and that's ok and now I'm doing something about it. Because of this year I've see that it's ok to change your mind and follow your heart or gut (you pick) and that the thought of doing a job I don't love all my life is far far more terrifying than what I might have to go through to find the one I do love.