Academia, my lost love

Dear academia,

It’s been nearly two years since we parted. When we just met, I was so in love. I wanted to be with you, gather data and write papers for you. I wanted to “science” with you and spent many of my waking (and supposed-to-be-sleeping) hours thinking about you. I wanted to stay with you and worked so hard to try and make that happen.

But then, when I was all disgruntled and unsure whether us being together was really what was best for me, I decided to leave you. I decided to join industry. In industry, the building is shiny, the people have had training on how to communicate and I was even offered a permanent contract.

But when I look out of the window of that shiny building, I can still see you. I hear about you at home from my husband and from friends. And now that the honeymoon phase with industry is over, and I see the cracks in the shiny building and the fact that even with communication training, people are sometimes still jerks – but in a politer way – I miss you. I miss doing research without the boundaries of what is commercially useful and what is important to convince the people who need to prescribe or buy things. I miss being able to think of a project entirely by myself and write it down in the hopes of being able to execute it someday. And mostly, I miss the dream of being important someday; having my own lab that does breakthrough science and wins prizes for it.

And I don’t know if this means I should try to get back together with you, academia. Or that I just forgot the disgruntled bits and only remember the good times we had together. Or that – perhaps – I can figure out some way to have a threesome.
 

Babyattachmode (@BabyAttachMode) is the pseudonym of a neuroscience PhD turned industry scientist. This story was published on May 31, 2016, on her Scientopia blog, In Baby Attach Mode (available here), and has been republished here with her permission.