5 ms·

The title "Leaving Academia" made me expect the author to have been in academia for some time, and not as a student, and to have decided to move on to something

The title "Leaving Academia" made me expect the author to have been in academia for some time, and not as a student, and to have decided to move on to something else. The article is not about leaving academia, but about not joining academia.

dalke 12y ago
I think your perception is miscalibrated. The writer did join academia, just not for very long. If I were to get a job at Google, work there for a week, and quit, I think it would just fine to write an essay about "Leaving Google". How long do you think you need to be working at X before you can write that you are leaving X? Or rather, when do you think you actually join academia? Is a 6th year graduate student, pre-defense, still not yet part of academia?
- rdc12 12y ago
  And if you left Google after a week and wrote about it, most people would probably dismiss it
  - dalke 12y ago
    I agree with you, and I see that you agree with me in that it's inappropriate to conclude that "Leaving X" implies that a person was at X 'for some time.'
jakobegger 12y ago
This attitude is exactly what made me leave. I've spent more than seven years at university, three of them paid to do research, and then I get told 'you're not really part of the club yet, you're just a student'.
- tspiteri 12y ago
  I had not read your article properly, and I got the impression that you were still considering whether to join the PhD programme. Now I have reread it and you said you had already started the programme, so you are right, apologies. But then why do you imply, in the conclusion, that leaving academia is like stopping educating yourself? If what you were doing was mainly educating yourself (which was not the case), then you would have been exactly "just a student".
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]