Well-Read Herring

Academic quit lit is a tired genre, and eight months ago I decided to make my own contribution . It was certainly not my intention to beat a dead, overqualified horse, but after announcing I had quit my postdoc at Ghent University, I anticipated some people would have questions. I wrote the blog post to avoid having the same conversation over and over again. Recently, a few people have started asking me how I have been doing since I left. So, as a complement to my previous piece, I present to you My Contribution to the Quit-Lit 2: Electric Boogaloo .  I had initially intended the "Why I Am Leaving Academia" post to be brief and impersonal, a dry PR statement officialising my conscious uncoupling from my hopes and dreams. But in the end, I produced something quite intimate. It felt good to write that way, and my words resonated. In the first 24 hours after I published it, tens of thousands of people read and shared the article.  In the days that followed, I received dozens of ...

Not long after I handed in my PhD thesis, one of my aunts asked me the dreaded question: “What now?”. I remember floating the idea that I might leave academia and being met with incredulity: “After all this? But… you’ve done  all this… ”. I understood where she was coming from. For years, my family and friends had watched me grind away at a thesis that almost no one would read. Surely, they thought, once the PhD was done, the hardest would be behind me and I would finally get to experience the glitz and glamour of being a university lecturer. As anyone who has worked in research already knows, they were seriously mistaken.  Today, almost a year after I officially became Dr. Herring, I resigned from my postdoc at Ghent University. There are several reasons that motivated this decision but the main one is that I no longer enjoy the work enough to justify how demanding it is. I already felt this way during my PhD. As a grad student, I could not take a weekend off without experien...