Do you regret leaving academia?

Is it worth making the switch?

I don’t regret leaving academia for a second. For me, it was worth leaving on a number of counts, which I’ll go into below. Before I do, I should preface all this by saying I have a great fondness for much of academia and its heroes both celebrated and unsung, while I also recognize its many faults. What follows comes out of my own experience first in academia and then in business, so it is probably not everyone’s experience, but I hope it will offer a sense of the reasons I am glad I made the switch.

I’ll tackle the uncomfortable topic first: money. It's by no means the only reason I left, but I make more money. This always seemed hard to admit when I was planning to leave academia: would I really cast aside the noble calling of shaping the minds of future generations and contributing to the world’s knowledge for (cringe) money? That’s like asking Plato to become a used car salesman! Who needs money anyway?

Well, we all do, actually, and the reality is more complex than the traditional dichotomy of “noble scholar vs. money-grubbing weasel” would have you believe. To make matters more complicated, the relationship between money and happiness is neither wholly direct (money can't buy you happiness) nor entirely absent (it does pretty well at buying a lot of everything else).

It seems to me that there is an important difference between having more money, and earning more money. It sounds like it's just semantics, but it matters. Being in possession of more money doesn’t in itself make anyone happier, because in fact many of the very best things life offers us are in the form of gifts, not purchases. But having more money is a factor in happiness because it allows for a greater range of choices (where and how to live, etc.), and more importantly because it reduces the burden of worry from questions like “will I ever retire, and if I do, how much will I have to live on, and for how long?” In the end, however, more money doesn't matter much unless you know what it makes possible: in my case, it's more choice, and less worry, which in turn reduces interference and distractions so that I can enjoy the experiences that actually make me happier.

Earning more money is slightly different from just having more money, and depending on your outlook and situation, it might really matter to you. What you earn, ultimately, is a reflection of how your work and contributions are literally valued, and it can be a source of personal satisfaction to know that the product of your smarts is most often worth more in a business than the sweat of your researcher's brow was in academia. I've also found, since I was lucky enough to join two companies with relatively healthy cultures, that it's much less lonely work: in business you get paid for your contributions to a company's efforts to grow or thrive, and if it's well run, there are clear goals everyone works towards; the business has a plan, and everyone plays their part in making it happen. In academia, I gained some solitary satisfaction from getting a paper accepted for a conference or publication, but I was essentially contributing to a shapeless void at the bottom of which we all trusted was a valuable growing pile of human knowledge. Making a greater contribution meant holing up somewhere, starting to write earlier and finishing later, and while my CV got a little longer as a result, it was hard to see how the world, or even my university, was tangibly getting any better because of my efforts.

Money aside, my colleagues and clients have been more diverse, or to put it more accurately, more varied in their diversity. I had diverse students and colleagues in academia, but they weren't that different, because you could pretty much count on everyone having or getting a college or graduate education. By comparison, it's almost shocking to think of the vast diversity I've encountered in people and their experiences since I've left the academic world: career nurses with no college education who have cared for people with every known disease, a former pastry chef, a software engineer who lived for weeks in a cave, an executive whose hobby is being an acrobat, CIA operatives, generals at the Pentagon, you name it. And that's not even looking beyond superficial descriptions: one of my former colleagues in finance wrote a dark comedy and optioned it to a movie studio, while another, I discovered at work one day, had memorized the entire Mozart Requiem choral bass part, words and all. We are all queer fish, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said.

As I think about it, though, it's not that the business world is more diverse. Rather, it's that the academic world is so much less so, since it's both small and very selective. Despite embracing other kinds of diversity, academia is — almost by definition — intellectually pretty homogeneous. How different, really, was I as a professor from professors in other fields? Sure, I probably read more Marxist theory than your average biology professor, but we both have PhDs from one of a cluster of schools, we are both judged on work reviewed by our peers, and we both teach more or less the same amount and in the same way. By contrast, how much do I have in common with the CFO of a global financial data company? Or with a Navy Intelligence officer? Or a nurse manager in a community hospital? Not that much. And for me, that's a chance to learn: not just to learn from them, how they think, how they approach things, but also to learn about them and the experiences that have shaped them so differently from me.

I say these interactions in the business world are a chance to learn, and it seems ironic to have found more opportunities to do so outside of academia, but that's because of the nature of the interactions. In academia people might tell you what they are working on, but there are very few instances when you would, for example, put a schoolteacher, a screenwriter, an astrophysicist, a professor, and an engineer in the same room and ask them to work on a problem none of them had encountered before (true story). If that effort is well run, everyone is working towards the same goal. By comparison, as a professor, we all had the same goal, each — publish more — but very seldom any true need to work together on anything.

That's not to say that the business world doesn't have plenty of negative aspects, and it can be stressful and irritating in many ways academia isn't. People can work long and hard with no recognition, only to watch lazy morons be promoted so as to extend the unfortunate reach and impact of their stupidity. Does it make me regret leaving? Not at all. That's true even though a mediocre day in academia is probably pretty enjoyable — I'm picturing a good ratio of grateful to apathetic students and some non-zero amount of time to write — while a crappy day in business is genuinely crappy. But I wouldn't trade them, and I think the reason is that even on a bad day, in business there is an open-ended future: even if the bottom falls out of my business, I can build it again differently, or build a new one. What that boils down to is that even when things are crappy, there are opportunities to learn, or grow, or develop, and that means I can always say, "I'm not done yet."

My thoughts on this have, naturally, been shaped by my experiences over the past few years, and there are doubtless others who will have less positive things to say, but I am convinced that for anyone, with the right approach and some networking, there are a lot of choices, and with a lot of choice comes a lot of freedom. And that's hard to regret.