A change of plan: why I switched from academia to a non-profit
At the start of 2022, I decided to leave academia and work in a non-profit; I now work as a global health & development researcher at Founders Pledge. When I talk to academics, I get a lot of questions about this transition– so this is my attempt to write about it.
Being an academic was a dream of mine, for a long time. I love the ideals of academia: lifelong learning, a chance to create new knowledge, and to pass that knowledge down to the next generation of scholars. It is for these reasons that I pursued a (long, American) PhD, that I slogged through my papers, that I pulled the all-nighters– a necessary step to fulfill these ambitions. I’m still grateful to everyone who supported me in that ambition.
I am also quite a goal-oriented person, who will hold out for a long time before admitting that something isn’t quite right for me. Consequently, I spent the last year of my PhD stubbornly telling myself that I was extremely happy and living my dream. It felt like being underwater, just swimming and swimming and blocking out a nagging feeling that I was going the wrong way.
Then my PhD finished, and I let myself surface. In my home country for the first time in 2 years, I wondered: why was I doing this?
I looked up, and I saw stressed out professors. I looked to the side, and I saw stressed out graduate students. I looked ahead and well, I realized that I probably wouldn’t be very happy as a professor. I value my work-life balance too much, I want stability and the ability to live where I want to (London), and I couldn’t shake the feeling that all the work I was doing was a bit useless. All this struggle and I wasn’t helping anyone.1 Hell, I was sitting in a pandemic and spending all my time thinking about my thesis (which approximately 3 people would read).
This brought me back full-circle, to a debate I’ve been having since I left university. As a hopelessly idealistic sort of person—is it better to spend your time pursuing knowledge, or trying to do good in the world? Personally, I originally hedged on the ‘knowledge’ side. This is partially because I figured that I would be a lot better at academic research than work that focuses upon trying to do good. Translation: I was an anxious but straight-A student, unsure I’d be good at anything other than academics. Secondly, I felt very morally clueless; humans have built up knowledge over thousands of years, but goodness? We still don’t even agree on what ‘good’ is, and so I felt more productive focusing on knowledge.
However, I don’t agree with either of these arguments anymore. Partly because I realized that I have skills that are needed in the non-profit world. And then because I clicked that even without a moral framework that is completely cohesive (I’m not a fully-fledged utilitarian, or deontologist, or virtue ethicist, or any other -ist that I’m aware of), there are still areas that are obvious bets to do good and impactful work within. I care about people’s wellbeing, happiness and basic freedoms; this seems like a reasonable framework to anchor a working concept of ‘good’ within. I’d now rather do work that is impactful than theoretically interesting– although of course, it’s nice to do work that is both.
This overthinking is essentially a moot point anyway, for a key reason; I am a lot happier working in the non-profit world than I am in academia. This is due to all the reasons that everyone has already said about academia, that a quick search on ‘quit lit’ will bring up. I hated the politics, the overwork, and the deeply flawed incentive systems of academia. I was also fed up of the instability: after working for 6 years across 2 states in the US, I didn’t want to move somewhere else for a postdoc for a couple years, then probably somewhere else for another postdoc, before I might be lucky enough move somewhere else to take up a ‘permanent’ real job around my mid-thirties (that could dismiss me after 7 years, if I didn’t get tenure). And of course, I was tired of just scraping by financially2– I found it embarrassing when I had to apply for emergency funding to pay for some urgent dental treatment, and when the only basement studio I could afford didn’t have its own front door (cue an unexpected visit from a confused/ lost older lady at 3am one morning)3.
I was also starting to doubt my academic motivations anyway– was I really motivated by knowledge, or had ideas about prestige and what was expected of me snuck in there?
So I changed course, and began applying for applied research jobs. I got very lucky that my current job popped up at the right time;4 basically, I try to work out where philanthropic donations can do the most good within the field of global health. For instance, is it better to prioritize funding anti-malarial bednets, or directly sending cash transfers to the world’s poorest people? Will a given intervention likely work, given current research on it? What impactful funding opportunities are we currently missing? How can we contrast interventions that aim to save lives, versus those that focus on the wellbeing of current people5 And so on. I find this work hugely rewarding, and really enjoy working with my colleagues. I’m very happy to talk to anyone who is interested in this, or who is thinking about a career shift themselves.
As well as feeling more fulfilled, I also think that I am doing better work compared to my time in graduate school– namely because I am better rested. I now work a 40 hour week, and I have around six weeks of holiday per year. This has affected me in ways that have really surprised me. First, I became curious again. I started wanting to read popular science books and watch documentaries, which I had been too fried to care about during most of graduate school. I stopped needing to motivate myself via guilt and self-flagellation, because my internal motivation came back. I started having a lot more ideas, and I realized that these ideas often come to me during moments of rest. And the migraines which had affected me through my last 3 years of graduate school? They abruptly stopped, despite me going completely off my anti-migraine medication.
I’m still happy that I did my PhD. I’m proud of the papers I wrote, and the (small, but still!) contributions that I made to the field of cognitive evolution. I still find cognitive evolution and theory of mind fascinating, and will keenly follow new breakthroughs in the years to come– but I’m content for it to be demoted (promoted?) to an interest of mine rather than my career. I also think that my PhD prepared me well for my current job.
But I’m very happy to now be focused on global health and development, and I no longer have a nagging sense that ‘I am not doing what is right for me’, that crept up during the last couple of years of my PhD. Making the decision to change career felt so difficult at the time, and even harder to decisively act upon. But at least in my experience, the decisions that I’ve agonised over have tended to be the ones that appear most obvious in hindsight; my big gamble (I had to turn down postdocs before having a non-academic job offer, since I only made the decision to switch career after finishing my PhD) was stressful, and it was also the correct call. Five months later –and three months into my current job– and I haven’t doubted those decisions.
I don’t know if this post will strike a chord with anyone or not. But I hope that sharing some aspects of my story might help other PhD students or post-docs who are feeling disillusioned with academia— there are plenty of other jobs out there, even if you don’t have it all figured out yet.
[1] Note that I wouldn’t make this judgement about other researchers’ work, and I do believe in the value of fundamental research. But for me personally, I felt like I could be more impactful in a different career.
[2] And note that my graduate program stipend was relatively generous, at $28,000. I have no idea how people on $14,000 stipends get through their PhD, especially for long programs (the average US Anthropology PhD is around 7 years) and given that international students can’t take up side jobs. There is a list of stipend amounts here.
[3] This really happened, I was er slightly startled to awake to her standing at the foot of my bed (!)
Most of my time in grad school I lived in group houses, but for the final 6 months I knew I needed to live alone to get my writing done… namely because I become the World’s Most Sociable Person if I am procrastinating. I lived in a basement studio directly below a bed and breakfast, where I assume that she came from. She was nice though, just lost!
[4] Shout out to the 80,000 hours job board, where I found this job
[5] Did you know that some of the more cost-effective charities can increase people’s happiness by one point (on a 1-10 scale, for one year) for less than $200, or can save a life for around $4000? If you are interested in giving effectively towards global health/ development initiatives, check out this link and this link. The advantage to giving to a fund (rather than donating directly towards highly effective charity, such as theAgainst Malaria Foundation– which is another strong option) is that the money can then be utilized towards opportunities that are time-sensitive: fund managers work to ensure that they money goes to the most effective opportunity. There’s a lot of information about the research that goes into this on Givewell’s website, if you are interested.
Rosie Bettle 
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