Hello everyone! We hope that you are safe and healthy, and able to enjoy the holidays in some way or another.
It’s been almost a year since we started Exit, Pursuing Career. From the beginning, our goal was to share the whys, hows, and whats of our career transformations out of academia and into other professional pursuits. We had individually and together helped numerous humanities ABDs and PhDs make the leap by informally sharing our experiences and insights. Many of these same people encouraged us to get that information “out there”, and we thought “hmm, why not? It would certainly be more efficient than one phone call/email/cup of coffee at a time.” A fuller rationale is here: https://exeunt.substack.com/p/why-are-we-doing-this. We hope that what we’ve written, and what our guest authors have shared with you, has been interesting and useful.
You may have noticed that we haven’t published anything recently. Between a new job (Patrick), an old job being especially busy (Brendon), pandemic burnout/ennui, and holiday staycationing, we’ve both been swamped. That’s also meant much less time for writing. With the dumpster fire of 2020 now in the rear view mirror, it seems like a good time to take stock of what we’ve done, and to try to find out if this project of ours is working, if it ought to change, and even if it ought to continue.
One thing that we’ve noticed is that while there are various helpful resources out there, and although we are covering some of the major questions that come up, we are both still doing just as many 1:1 calls as we used to do, if not more. Perhaps our content is pertinent, but people actually really want or need that phone call or Zoom session to ask questions or hear the news from the horse’s mouth. Would you like a 1.5 hour Zoom Q&A thing every few weeks? Once a month? Never?
Or perhaps there are other forces at work that we don’t understand or can’t imagine.
So, dear reader, we’d be hugely grateful for a few minutes of your time to tell us what you think here (link to survey). Or, if you’re saying to yourself, “ugh, not another damn survey,” feel free to shoot one or both of us an email. Tell us what you like/don’t like, what you want, what you need. Oh, and if you’ve got a particularly favorite recipe or something, include that, too. Brendon: brendonreay@gmail.com. Patrick: pwoodu@gmail.com