The traps of Academia

The academic career is very tempting for a lot of people. For me it was about pursuing my main passion, to enter into a fascinating world and to learn how to contribute to my field through my research. This post is not to tell you why this is the best choice since it is personal. I could say that if you are about to choose this type of career only because you don't know what to do, then you are probably going to waste a crucial part of your life. However, I don't know you, I don't know your skills, your ability to adapt to a situation, your passions, therefore I can't say if one motivation is better than the other or, as too many people do, say if your motivation is "wrong".

This post is about a series of things that I would like to know a few years ago.

Behind the shiny walls of what seems to be the perfect job, there are some traps waiting for you down the road. Yes, it is a job that gives you a lot of freedom, you can wear comfortable clothes, you don't have a real time schedule, sometimes you can work from home, you will travel around the world, you will meet a lot of people (even brilliant one) from many different cultures and, most of all, you will do what you love.

The downsides to this perfect picture are not the obvious one. Yes, you will never be rich, but who cares. Yes, no time schedule very often is translated to working every day at every waking hour, compromising a lot of aspects of your personal life. But, again, this is very personal, regardless the type of research and colleagues, most of the factors that determine how much extra time you will dedicate to your job are up to you, they depend on who you are and what you really want to do.

However, many young researchers, from time to time, feel too weak to wake up in the morning, too weak to face their day, too weak to meet anyone, too weak to sit down and fight their research problem back. Why is that?

One reason could be that when they throw themselves in such an amazing adventure, many people underestimate how profoundly unstable will be their position. You will soon realize that the available positions for your next career step are not so many, that your contracts will almost always have an expiration date and for many people that expiration date is within 6 months. Keeping your academic career alive will mean to accept those contracts, no matter how scaring could it be to do it when you are in your thirties, to change country several times, leaving everything and everyone behind. 

Your friends will say that they are going to visit you, but it will be more and more difficult for them to follow you and, let's face it, some of them will not even try from the very beginning. Yes, it is again very personal, but I can say that it is an easy situation to be found in the experience of others.

On top of that, there is the research. The research is frustrating by definition, most of the time you will not understand what is going on, you will try harder and harder, but no, the results will not be good. In other words, you will feel miserably most of the time, but the reward, that warm feeling that hits you when you realize that you found something, it's so satisfying that you will completely forget about the sea of shit where you were swimming till the moment before and ask for more. Like a drug addiction.

All these emotions pile up in a young researcher experience and sometimes are translated in the so-called impostor syndrome. It is understandable to me why this can happen. You dedicate your everything (or at least the best of you, because what you do is beautiful) to the research, giving up to many normal aspects of human interaction, and you realize, very often too late, that to survive in the jungle of unstable positions you will most likely need a strong network of professional relationships rather than a strong scientific background. Therefore you may start wondering if you are obtaining your positions because you are good or because you met the right people. You start to fear that your toy can break down at any time and you will be in your late thirties, too qualified to do anything else, unable to pursue your dreams.

This is very depressing and depression is the reason why some young researchers do not face their day from time to time. But I'm not writing to discourage any future academic, I'm writing to remark that you have to care about networking since day one of your master's degree. Because we all want a world where scientific merit is all that matters but for the time being this is the game's rule. 

More importantly, I'm writing to tell you that you are not alone, that what you feel is perfectly normal and can be overcome. Not only because part of what I wrote regards something that I have experienced or I'm experiencing, but also because I've observed these things in almost everyone I've met in the academic world, from Ph.D. students to accomplished professors on top of their field. (yes, when you go to international conferences and you get drunk with accomplished professors, you find out that you are not that different from them, as expected).

Since the competition is very often brutal, no one is willing to show any bit of weakness. I think that sharing those feelings, at least admitting that they exist, is the way to face the systematic error that plagues one of the most innovative and visionary jobs. We do not have to underestimate how many valuable scientists are not doing research right now because they let their depression win, as well as we do not have to underestimate how many not so good scientists are surviving in the jungle of applications because they have cool friends. The High School should be over already.

In conclusion, I believe that if by sharing a common feeling we can make someone feel better about himself or herself, than it is worth sharing it. More generally, it is a problem that is damaging the research in many ways (as you can imagine, but I will dedicate a post on this issue), i.e. it is compromising the development of our understanding of nature.