SUMMER GIFT POST: Choices, choices
How do you make the best decisions about your career path?
Greetings from my summer 2025 travels, dear PBP readers! This week I’m sharing another one of my top PBP posts of all time, which would normally be behind the archive paywall but is my little gift to you this week! Enjoy!
Goooooooooooood morning, afternoon, or evening, wherever you might happen to be!
I’m currently recovering from an illness that’s had me properly bedridden for 5 days, so please do forgive me for any typos or hallucinatory digressions that may appear in this week’s post. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of the former. Hopefully there’ll be less of the latter.
Before I get to this week’s V.I.P. (Very Important Post), I wanted to let you all know that I will be putting together an experimental Writing Camp for early on in the new year. This will be an opt-in, week-long online event for people looking to get their writing year off to a great start. There will be prompts. There will be guides. There will be tireless communal cheerleading (via an accountability thread). Huzzah!
I’ll let you know once it’s set up so that you can sign up via Substack to participate. In the meantime, if you think you might be interested in participating, please let me know in the comments section below so that I can adjust the camp parameters accordingly.
In the meantime, on to this week’s V.I.P.
This week’s PBP post is about making choices. More specifically, it’s about making choices about your career path.
I had to make a not-insignificant choice about my career path this past week.
I had known for some time that a Big Academic Post would be advertised soon, one of those posts that can put you in a position to change your field. It’s a job I’d been waiting for, and the timing couldn’t have been better: my CV has never been stronger, and I could have made a great case for being longlisted, at the very least. (In my view, longlisting is half the battle: it’s the moment when a search committee starts to take your application seriously.)
For years, I had planned to apply for this job. I talked about it with family and friends. All I had to do was wait for the job to come up. But in the end, when it did come up, I decided not to apply.
That word ‘decided’ is important. Because when you don’t do a thing, it can feel like you’re doing nothing. But I was very aware that my decision not to apply for this particular job wasn’t about me doing nothing: it was about me making a choice.
Choices come up all the time in life. But when it comes to choices related to our career paths, it can sometimes feel not only like the stakes are particularly high, but also like there are ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ choices. And in many cases, the supposed ‘right’-ness or ‘wrong’-ness has little to do with what we think and much more to do with what we fear other people will think.
A friend of mind faced precisely this dilemma not long after she and I had completed our PhDs. It was the first of many bleak job application seasons when advertised positions of any kind at all in our field were depressingly rare, but she had received an offer of a tenure-track position. However, it was an offer from an institution whose values were very much at odds with her own and whose location was far from ideal, given her personal situation. Her campus visit hadn’t gone particularly well, and she was reluctant to take the job. But her supervisor told her that she really had no choice: you simply did not turn down a tenure-track job.
My friend ended up taking the job, and, after a very rough few first years, I’m happy to say that it seems as though things have turned out all right. And of course, it’s nearly impossible to know how things will turn out when you make that kind of choice. But that episode has always stuck in my mind because of the lesson my friend was supposed to learn about which choice was right, and which choice was wrong.
Everybody has opinions. But when it comes to making choices related to the direction you want your career to go in, the most important opinion to listen to is your own.
These days, I find it inspiring to see how many young people are making choices about where they want to take their careers. I admire those who, upon seeing how incompatible the current state of academia is with their hopes for the future, are bold enough to say, No thanks, I’ll build my career somewhere else.
I don’t think that’s the kind of choice I made the other week (though it may turn out to be). My choice was based on my own sense of my personal and professional priorities right now. And I’m willing to bet that, because of that, it’s a choice I won’t regret making.
As ever, thanks for reading. This is a reader-supported publication, and the best way to support it is to become a paid subscriber (either at $6 per month or $60 per year).
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VB,
M
As always, both thoughtful and heartfelt, Mary. Thank you for PBP.