Bio: Jennifer “Jaye” Preston is the Chair for the Counseling Department at Saybrook University. She grew up in Southern California and, after graduating from Whittier College with a degree in psychology, moved to Kansas City. She lived and worked there for 8 years, earning a master’s degree from Avila College in Counseling Psychology, along with an NCC certification and LPC. She spent 7 years in clinical work, focusing on diverse and socially marginalized individuals. The bulk of her clinical work was with women and/or children who experienced violence and trauma. After having her oldest child, she moved to Oregon to attend Oregon State University and where she earned a PhD in Counselor Education and Supervision. Upon graduation (and the birth of her second daughter), Jaye’s first faculty position took her to Minnesota. She spent 9 years teaching in the Counselor Education Department at Minnesota State University, Mankato, prior to joining the department at Saybrook. She currently resides in Winston-Salem, NC, with her wife and two rescue pups.

Her research, leadership, and teaching all have roots similar to her clinical focus. She has published in the areas of addiction treatment for women, LGBT ally development for K-12 schools, LGBT homeless youth, and women’s mentoring. She has tended towards qualitative research from a feminist and critical theory lens, often employing non-traditional research methodologies.

Introduction

The Higher Education Power and Control Wheel was an idea born out of the lived experience of members of a research team at a small online university, within the Department of Counseling. The research team included a faculty member, two PhD students, and one master’s student. The faculty lead has over 20 years of experience in higher education and has experienced many behaviors in an institution that paralleled her clinical work with victims of domestic violence. Due to the inherent structure of Higher Education and the use of power-based hierarchy, this system is highly susceptible to abusive behaviors. This hierarchical structure of power rooted within higher education; remains prevalent, as seen, for example, in the tenure process and faculty ranking systems. The team endeavored to create this wheel to expose the pervasive and abusive behaviors in this system and to establish a shared language. This framework allows individuals to validate their experiences and recognize them as both real and systemic, much like the original Power and Control Wheel did for victims of domestic violence.

Overview of the research

Developing the Higher Education Power and Control Wheel involved three years of work, two research studies, and two national conference presentations. The first research study was a survey design, where respondents were invited to respond to a list of 93 statements related to abusive behaviors. The survey scale range included the following items: “Personally experienced”, “Directly observed” “Personally experienced and observed” and “Have not experienced or observed”. The 93 statements were created after a review of the research on abuses and bullying within higher education. The specific behavior statements included items such as; My program faculty have communicated in a way that made me feel fearful and My program faculty have blocked me from completing work. This quantitative study gave the research team data to begin to develop our wheel, directly from the perspective of the abuse victims.

The next step of the research was to present our drafted wheel at a national conference, to engage the audience in a discussion about research findings and hear feedback around noticeable gaps. That presentation also yielded an additional eight survey respondents.

The final step in our research was to conduct a qualitative research study and fine-tune the wheel. This study allowed us to directly hear from people who had experienced abuses in their academic department. As part of the qualitative interview, we shared the draft of our wheel and asked participants to reflect on what felt correct, areas of improvement, or missing experiences. From there, we finalized the wheel and presented it at another National conference for additional feedback.

Due to widespread stigma, fear and risks around sharing experiences of abuse and the close environment of higher education, we opted to present the wheel at a conference for feedback instead of conducting traditional focus groups. This approach allowed us to reach a broader audience and increase response rates while allowing for anonymity; underscoring the very need for the wheel itself.

Overall findings

It is becoming more widely understood that the system of higher education is one rooted in hierarchy and control, with those in power committed to ensuring that they control the continued distribution of power. This system is steeped in colonization, white supremacy and patriarchy. Initially intended for white men to gain status within their communities, the embedded structures upholding higher education continue to perpetuate cycles of power and control. Like many large systems within our social and political structure, it was specifically designed to alienate those seen as “other” in an intentional power structure. As a result, our research found that those who are abused within this structure tend to be historically marginalized individuals – women, women of color, and disabled people. While it is essential to acknowledge that anyone can be affected by the hierarchy, based on the intersection of oppression and the groups to which one may belong, this particular set of studies did not include any male respondents, despite the research calls not excluding men. It could be that white men are not aware of the abusive hierarchy, but it could also be true that if they experience abusive behaviors, as a result of their position within a department, that abuse would be inherently different from women, women of color, and members of other multiply marginalized identity groups.

This historic and systemic oppression is connected to all aspects of abusive experiences. Our understanding of the deep connection between systemic oppression and the organizational culture of postsecondary institutions is how we came to describe the outer ring of the wheel as the Institutional Culture of Higher Education. The wedge pieces have a relationship to the origins of higher education that simply cannot be pulled apart. The entrenched nature of the abuse is reliant on an institutional culture that was historically and is structurally designed to privilege certain groups while marginalizing others. This

culture acts as a breeding ground where individual acts of oppression are not isolated incidents but are instead sustained and reinforced by institutional norms and historical inertia. This connection to white supremacist thinking and structures is likely why it is so difficult to create change within higher education. A bit like an open secret, many within the system understand how abusive it is, but to make changes may require a dismantling of the system itself, a scary proposition for most living and working within.

In addition to the outer ring of the wheel, the center labeling of Power and Control is intentional, and an intended consequence of the behaviors described on the wedges, not a symptom of abuse. The purpose of the abusive behavior is ultimately to keep people out of higher ranks within the academy while maintaining power and control. As with the original Power C Control wheel, the tactics presented in the adapted wheel are not mutually exclusive but instead reinforce one another to assert continued power and control. The women who participated in the development of the original Power and Control Wheel in Duluth, MN were clear that the power and control in the center of the wheel was not their abuser’s goal. What they did say is by using these tactics, he ended up with power and control over them. However, in this Higher Education Power and Control Wheel, the intention is to maintain power and control as learned from those who are subject to it.

Each wedge piece of the wheel helps to illuminate a range of behaviors and support further understanding of each abuse tactic. In reading the wheel, it is helpful to think of each item on the wheel as purposeful, intentional, and symptomatic of a larger problem. For example, the “gaslighting” wedge expands understanding around the ways in which faculty or students are left feeling confused or made to believe that the abusive behavior either did not happen or that their reactions to the abuse are problematic. Or that what is happening is not abuse but preparation and training for being allowed into this group.

Using the wheel

Our wheel aims to give language to the experience of abuse within higher education settings and to help those subject to these tactics be able to correctly identify and name abuse. Users of our wheel will note that there are no mentions of physical or sexual abuse within the wedges. While this is not to say that these abuses do not occur, our participants indicated abuse in this domain is most often based on psychological abuse tactics such as; emotional abuse, verbal abuse, or blocking of resources.

The wheel can also be used to support those in positions of power to better recognize abusive behaviors, create inclusive workspace cultures, and better understand the impact of this abuse on employees and students.

About the authors:

Jennifer Preston, PhD, NCC, LPC – Dr. Preston is a professor and Department Chair of a small online counseling department. She has over 20 years as a professor of counseling, and 7 years of clinical experience working within the family and domestic violence area. She is passionate about dismantling higher education as a system of oppression, with the hopes of creating more access for both students and faculty.

Nicole Xenos, PhD, LPC – Dr. Xenos is a counselor educator, supervisor and licensed counselor. Her work focuses on supporting survivors of Narcissistic and psychological abuse and religious trauma; particularly on how identity impacts these experiences. As a trained Gestalt counselor, Dr. Xenos applies their theory towards liberation practices, incorporating systems work, anti-racist, and decolonial emphasis in supporting healing and wholeness. Their practice, Painted One Healing, focuses on the use of cultural connections and bridging Western and Eastern modalities to create individualized care for each person.

Devan Livaudais, MA, LPCC – Devan is a mental health therapist, supervisor-in-training, and doctoral student in Counselor Education C Supervision. Their work centers queer and neurodivergent communities, integrating Relational Cultural Theory, narrative practices, and liberatory pedagogy across therapy, teaching, and supervision. In both private practice and academic settings, Devan is committed to creating accessible, relational, and culturally responsive spaces that support identity development, critical consciousness, and community care.

Jonobie Ford, MA, LMHCA – Jonobie is a therapist and coach dedicated to helping people feel more whole. With a background in tech and clinical mental health, she blends practical experience with humanistic, common-factors training. She holds an MS in Computer Science from UT Austin and an MA in Counseling from Saybrook University.

Clinically, she supports queer, neurodivergent, and polyamorous clients navigating trauma, self-worth, and identity development.

Preston, J., Xenos, N., Livaudais D. C Ford, J. (2025)

?uestions about the Higher Education Power and Control Wheel can be sent to Dr. Jennifer Preston @ jenniferjayepreston@gmail.com

Many of you reading this are entirely qualified to pursue either route–entrepreneur/small business owner or founder. You have skills and knowledge that the world needs. I think you’ll find Travis’s story illuminating. KK

C. Travis Webb, PhD, has over 30 years of experience owning, operating, and selling personal service businesses across a range of disciplines, including tutoring centers, martial arts studios, yoga, and music schools. That firsthand experience as a multi-vertical business owner shapes everything about the software he builds today.

Webb has taught at the university level and is a published author, with works appearing through Routledge, Oxford University Press, and most recently Intellect, Ltd. He is former assistant editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. He holds a PhD in Religion from Claremont Graduate University, and his academic background gives him an unusual vantage point in the software industry, one grounded in how people actually learn, move, create, and grow within community-based organizations.

He is the founder and CEO of Yo-Do Software, a business management platform purpose-built for personal service businesses and Xenia, a digital front door for small towns with big tourism. Yo-Do serves studios, wellness practices, and arts organizations with tools designed around the real operational complexity those businesses face.

Before we talk about how to transition from academic frustration to entrepreneurial frustration, we should probably talk about the why. Why would you want to sign up for long days, endless to-do lists, the indignity of pitching, the indignity of sales, and the likelihood that whatever you’re working on is also being worked on by scores of other people who have more money and a larger network than you do? 

Fortunately for you, the answer to that is right in Karen’s blog. Using Rage to Stay Motivated, Part Two from 2011 lays out exactly what you need to understand to answer that question. And what you need to understand is this: the hero’s journey isn’t just an anachronistic tool for deciphering Star Wars plots or soothing your bruised ego after another brutal round of dissertation revisions. It is the reason you do anything really hard. You have something to say or do that no one else can say or do but you. And that’s that. 

I read Karen’s blog back in 2012 right after I’d decided to go back to grad school and take my PhD. I’d spent a couple of years poking away at a Master’s Degree in English Lit, and decided that I really, really wanted to figure out what was going on with religious abjurations of the body in the sacred canons that are sometimes called the “World Religions.” And it was inspirational. 

No one else was working on my problem. I mean, no one. Which, as you all know, isn’t a great thing in the academy. Newish is great. New-new for a young scholar, not so much. But that didn’t matter to me. I forged ahead. My project changed, of course. I “pivoted,” in founder speak, but it was a closely related problem, and still way outside the bounds of the current academic job market. So three-and-a-half years later, PhD in hand, I had a dilemma. Do I enter the scrum for tenure track jobs and take whatever I can get to keep my dim hopes of landing a 2/2 with regular sabbaticals and R1 resources alive, or do I do something else? 

By the title you already know the answer. 

What Does It Mean to be a Founder? 

Being a founder is a little different than just being an entrepreneur. All founders are entrepreneurs, but not all entrepreneurs are founders. If you want to be a founder you need other people along for the ride. You can’t do it alone. You’re establishing something beyond your sole capacity to manage. This informal schema isn’t static, however; sometimes entrepreneurs morph into founders. Their labor grows into something semi-autonomous. It takes on “a life of its own,” if you don’t mind the cliché. And they need others to keep it going. 

Being a founder means that you have to convince other people your vision is worth struggling for. Of course, if you have enough money that they don’t have to struggle, you can skip this part, and people will tell you what you want to hear so you keep signing the paychecks. But the point stands. Being a founder means that you need to manage people. It’s not a free solo kind of thing, no matter what Steve Jobs said. 

Step One: Have an Idea 

That’s it. That’s the step. Nothing else to add. If you don’t have an idea, you don’t have anything. Go get one. 

Step Two: Is There a Market? 

This one is pretty straightforward for someone who is sufficiently professionalized. There are a variety of ways to understand professionalization, but one of them certainly has to be market savvy. Where do I fit in, and how can I show others that I do? It’s the process by which you learn the social skills necessary to identify niches within the academic marketplace and fill them.  

Probably sixty or seventy years ago this was easier. The postwar college boom meant there were enough jobs for people who really liked Matthew Arnold and didn’t want to spend too much time publishing to survive. But those days are long gone. You’ve got to know your market, or you’re not going anywhere. That’s true of founding too.  

You can have the best idea in the world, and if there isn’t a market for it, it’s not going to land. There are any number of books, online references, and AI tools to help you identify if there’s a market. And you’ve got to spend some time researching it. Something that you’re probably going to be very comfortable with. 

I can’t stress that enough. You need to figure out your market. Sincerely. It’s far more important than step one, even though I put it first. In fact, you can use your market research to back into an idea. Let me illustrate. 

Hotels aren’t new. They’ve been around a long, long time. If you Google it, you’re going to find that Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan in Japan is the oldest hotel (or inn) in the world, established in 705 AD. But that’s wrong. The Egyptians had inns, and so did the Sumerians too. They’ve got Nishiyama beat by about 3,500 years give or take. My point is, as a business, this isn’t a new idea. But that doesn’t matter. The question is, is there a market for it? 

If you find a community with sufficient density or industry, and there aren’t enough places for people to stay when they’re visiting, that’s going to be a great business. Literally, if you build it, they will come. It doesn’t get any better than that—from a marketing perspective. 

Step Three: Does Your Product or Service Fit Your Market? 

This one is a little more nuanced, and probably the hardest to be objective about. You’re going to be a believer in your service or product, or you wouldn’t be hawking your service or product. So how do you evaluate whether your belief is going to be validated by experience? 

Unfortunately, there’s only one tried and true way to figure this out. You have to build it. That’s the only real way to figure it out. You can do market research, of course.  

“Would you use a hair conditioner that also exfoliated your hands and prevented wrinkles?”  

“How much would you pay for this conditioner? 10% more than your current conditioner? 20?” 

But market research is a mixed bag. It can only show you what you think to ask. The marketplace is much larger than even the most sophisticated model can predict. And balance sheets the world over are littered with the red ink of products that were successfully researched before they failed epically. Think Coca-cola’s release of “New Coke” in 1985. A complete disaster for the company that led them to restore the original formula in less than three months. 

And this leads us to our final step, money. 

Step Four: You’re Going to Need Some Money  

This is again a difference between a solo entrepreneur and a founder. If you’re solo, you can sweat out the early stages of a new venture. Put your head down, watch less TV, go to fewer social gatherings, and hustle until you have something that can sustain itself. 

But when you found something, like a software company, you’re going to need some capital to get things going. If you have access to larger financial networks, or you have family with resources, you’ll want to try tap into them. You can also go the route of pitching to VCs. I haven’t had a lot of success with this, personally—mostly because I hate it—but I know people who have. 

You might not need a lot of money to figure out if your idea has legs. Different businesses have different needs. But you’ll at least need enough to take care of yourself while you get going, unless you’re going to hold down a job while you’re hustling to get your idea off the ground. But that’s just for starters. In my case I needed money for software infrastructure, and attorneys, and contractors to do the work I didn’t have the time or skillset for. 

We raised the capital we needed from a variety of sources. One, prior to founding Yo-Do, my wife and I were entrepreneur-entrepreneurs. We’d built a music teaching school in Orange County, CA from a handful of students to over 300 and employed about 25 part-time teachers. We sold that business in 2023 to a national chain and used that capital to take care of us while we built Yo-Do.  

The development came from the professional network I’d established while building our music school. We partnered with a tremendously talented team in Poland called ARP Ideas, and traded equity in the new corporation for their expertise and labor. We got an additional infusion of capital from an old friend who’d followed his own path to entrepreneurial success, enough to hire a (very) small team and begin to build and support our client base. 

We’re considered a boot-strapped start-up. We don’t have a lot of runway, but I believe in our software, and our company, and I have a fantastic team, and great partners. I don’t know if we’re going to make it. The competition for service business management software is plentiful, well-funded, fierce, and experienced. But there’s only one person who can do what I’m doing. Small businesses need our help. Big businesses need our guidance. We must save the day. 

It’s been delightful. And completely consuming.

Anyway, this week we address a moment that makes many people deeply uncomfortable: Talking about what you do, in a way that doesn’t send your non-academic listener directly a) to sleep, b) into a rage spiral.

Because, most PhDs do not have a problem speaking about what we do. We LOVE to talk about what we do. But we do have a problem translating. When asked what we do, we default to academic language that is narrow, abstract, tedious, or self-involved. Or we trail off helplessly.

I know this because it’s how I started blogging at The Professor is In, until Kel (a communications expert) showed me how to communicate without defaulting to academic obscurity, multi-syllabic words, and endless caveats and “prefatory remarks,” lol.

This matters more than you might realize.

Because, you will be asked some version of this question repeatedly:

• What do you do?
• Tell me about your work.
• How would you describe your background?

Followed by:

• What are you looking for next?

If you cannot answer these clearly, you create confusion. And confusion does not lead to opportunity.

So the goal this week:  write a 90 second “career pitch.”

This is not meant to be a script for memorization, but rather a working statement that clarifies who you are professionally and what you are moving toward, in intelligent but accessible language.

As always, set aside thirty minutes to an hour. Open a blank document.

Now, enter three headings in the document:

• what you do
• what you have done
• what you are moving toward

Tackle these in any order, and expect to workshop all parts for a good long while. (Meaning, don’t expect it to be finished in this first sit-down). As you find new and better words for one part, each of the other parts will likely evolve as well.

First: what you do.

As in previous weeks, this is not your job title. It is the work itself. Use the language you identified when you were benchmarking your skills. Focus on competencies.

For example, instead of saying you are a historian, you might write that you “analyze complex qualitative data and communicate findings to diverse audiences.” Instead of saying “I am a lecturer,” you might write that you design and deliver learning experiences that help people make sense of complex information.”

You’ve already tackled this in previous weeks, so you should have lots of prompts to work from.

Second: what you have done.

Here, give one or two concrete examples that demonstrate those competencies. This is where you briefly anchor your claims in experience.

You might describe leading a research project, managing a grant, developing a curriculum, analyzing a dataset, or coordinating a multi stakeholder initiative. But remember: a lot of what academics do is opaque and obscure to non-academics, so you might need to spend a lot of time translating those examples.

And above all: Keep it concise. The goal is credibility, not a full narrative. Verbosity is the single greatest enemy in post-academic communication.

Third: what you are moving toward.

This is where many PhDs will hesitate. There are many reasons: you don’t know what you’re moving toward, first of all! Also, you don’t want to prematurely limit yourself, or you are unsure what is possible. The result is a vague and generic “intentions,” or goals divorced from reality.

You need a directional statement.

For example, you might say that “you are looking for policy roles focused on education and workforce systems.” Or that “you are moving toward program management roles in nonprofit or research organizations.” Or that “you are exploring roles in data analysis where you can apply your research and analytical skills.”

Do you see how these work? They don’t lock you into a single outcome but they DO give the listener something to work with. Imagine the hiring manager launching into an interview with you. “I see here that you are looking at roles in data analysis… tell me more about how you see that connecting to our posted job?”  See how you’ve provided a launch point for a conversation? These are conversation openers, not closers.

When you have these three elements, and you combine them, voilá, you have a clear and usable pitch.

Once you have a draft, read out loud. It should take about ninety seconds. If it is longer, cut. If it feels vague, sharpen the language. If it sounds like a dissertation abstract, rewrite it.

Then, test it out! Find some willing listeners, and deliver it. See what they think. Take their suggestions, to a degree, especially if they have experience in corporate or non-profit settings.

LinkedIn, as always, is a wonderful research data repository of potential phrasing and vocabulary. How do others with similar background thread this needle? There is no need to reinvent any wheels here.

Remember too, you are not claiming or performing “expertise” the way that is required in academia. The goal here is to demonstrate aptitudes/skills, some level of experience, and a forward looking orientation toward a future in a particular sphere of work.

This pitch will be useful for you not just in networking events, but any and every interaction where someone needs to understand/categorize you quickly. Hallway conversations, brief phone calls, informational interviews, casual chats, emails, introductions, even interviews themselves.

There is another benefit to writing this.

Clarity creates confidence.

When you can articulate what you do and where you are going, you stop second guessing every conversation. You stop defaulting to apology or over explanation. You begin to engage as a professional with a defined set of skills.

Your pitch will definitely evolve. It should! As you learn more about the roles you are targeting, you will refine the language. That is expected. And as you learn what words seem to “hit,” and which seem to cause your listeners’ eyes to glaze over or their brows to furrow, you continually reword, and refine.

For now, your task is simple.

Write the draft. Say it out loud. Adjust it until it sounds like something a “regular person” can understand without effort. Deliver it to anyone who will listen, and take their reactions seriously. Revise continuously (but without urgency–this WILL take time!)

Next week we will begin the process of bringing your pitch to the real world by using it in informational interviews and professional conversations.

But for now, get the words on the page.

Well comrades, we have reached the moment of rebound.

If you have been following these steps (sorting, noticing, defining,etc), basically doing all the things and even seeing regular progress, it is very likely that there are things you are STILL not doing.

This is usually where the old story comes back. (i.e. the rebound)

You know the narrative: I am lazy. I have no discipline. I just need to push harder.

Can we just not?

No one wants to listen to bullshit. And calling anyone who has worked as hard as you have for so long as you have “lazy,” is spewing some major bullshit. You aren’t lazy. You are misaligned.

Laziness is a moral judgment. Misalignment is a structural problem.

When you are aligned with a piece of work, even if it is difficult, you can find a point of engagement. It may require time and effort, and maybe even outside support, but there is a pathway in.

When you are misaligned, the pathway disappears.

This is why we can be extremely productive in some areas of their life and completely stuck in others. It is not that they suddenly forgot how to work. It is that one set of tasks is aligned and the other is not.

As you are fully aware, you can force yourself through the thicket for short periods (Deadlines will do that!) but it is not sustainable. The moment the pressure lifts, your energy drops out again. It is a pattern.

What I want you to wire in is that this pattern is not a character flaw. It is a signal.*

Perhaps you are being asked to produce something you do not believe in, or to participate in a system in a way that feels off. You can comply, but it costs you more each time. (Remember projects and values change over time. You may have started in a place that you no longer inhabit.)

You can realign the work. This might mean changing the scope, redefining done, or adjusting how you approach it so that it better fits your current reality.

Perhaps the effort required no longer matches your current capacity. You may have agreed to it when you had more time and energy or when you were less in touch with your tendency to over promise!. Your life has changed, but the commitment has not.

You can contain the work. If it is required but misaligned, you set clear boundaries around how much time and energy it receives. You do it to the defined standard and no more.

Perhaps the work no longer matches your identity. You have shifted fields, changed priorities, or simply become a different version of yourself. The project belongs to a past self, and continuing it feels like wearing clothes that no longer fit.

You can release the work. If it is not required and no longer aligned, you let it go. Not someday. Not after you have suffered through it. Close the loop by removing it from your list.

And finally, perhaps the work was never aligned to begin with. You said yes because you felt you should. Because it would look good. Because someone asked. Because it’s easier for you to say yes than it is to deal with saying no.

You can “un-yes.” It’s true. You are always at choice. Of course there are consequences with every choice, but it is still a choice.

Each of these options requires honesty. Honesty can feel destabilizing if you have built your identity around being someone who can push through anything.

And here we are back at the consequence of misalignment.

If you have ever dealt with a misalignment in a moving system (think bike chains) you know the result is friction. With Works In Progress, when that friction builds up, we tend to interpret the drag as a force that needs to be overcome. We have been trained by capitalism to discipline ourselves into compliance. But, like I said, “discipline” does not solve misalignment. It just temporarily overrides it. (And beats you further into submission.)

As with most coaching advice I give, the goal of this step is not to eliminate all misalignment. That is not realistic. We work inside systems that require us to do at least some work that does not perfectly fit. No matter what the magic fix books try to sell us, life is not fully customizable.

What I am challenging you to do is to reduce unnecessary misalignment and to stop blaming yourself for the parts that remain. Work that remains may still be hard, but hopefully you’ll know why you are doing it.

So the next time you catch yourself thinking that you are lazy, pause. Look at the work in front of you. Ask where the misalignment is. More often than not, the problem is that you are trying to make yourself do something that doesn’t fit and your system is trying to get your attention.

*Side note: Everything that you have done so far has shone a light on potential misalignment:

• Your minus list is full of misalignment.
• Your avoidance is often pointing directly at misalignment.
• Your undefined version of done may be hiding misalignment by making the work feel infinite.
• Your reliance on external definitions of success may be pulling you toward work that no longer fits.
• And your fading motivation may be a response to investing energy in outcomes you cannot control.

The client:  wut

They went on: “I was shaking when I walked into that office! But I said to myself, ‘Self, you have to do it!’ And, I did, and everything you said would happen actually came true!”

My client ended: “Honestly, Karen, at this point if you told me to kill a chicken and drink its blood I would, because everything you have ever told me to do has worked!”

I share this story for a few reasons. The first is, it’s one of the highlights of my work at The Professor Is In to hear the successful outcomes of my advice.  Sitting on my sofa as I do, day after day, typing away (or sitting on the other end of a zoom meeting) I rarely get to hear what actually happens out there in the world! I was beyond grateful the client shared this anecdote, which allows me to test in real time whether my advice remains accurate and useful. Because if not, I want to change it, stat.

Second, this story speaks to the power of words. Just a few words. Nothing fancy. But carefully, carefully considered. Scripted. And practiced. Because nothing about professional life comes “naturally” to those who operate outside circles of privilege. Everything needs to be considered, and taught, and studied, and practiced. This is literally why I created The Professor Is In in 2010. To de-mystify unspoken cultural and linguistic norms of academia. For those who enter it without a previous knowledge base.

As my client said, “KAREN, I DIDN’T KNOW WHAT I DIDN’T KNOW!”

And third, to share something more subtle, and harder to articulate. Which is, that not every negative occurrence is necessarily the result of conscious malfeasance or persecution. Yes, there is malfeasance and persecution. There is abuse and exploitation. But there is also just… distracted and overworked department chairs. Overloaded schedules. The right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. One bad actor in the department who throws up road blocks… but (and this is important) who the other faculty are committed to circumventing. And so on. Sometimes a meeting and a few words, or an email, or a call, are all that is needed to radically shift outcomes. Because while sometimes there ARE huge entrenched obstacles to change, sometimes you’re just dealing with distraction, disorganization, poor, broken, or non-existent processes, or forgetfulness. If you escalate prematurely, you run right over the chance to effect change in a calm, collegial way.

But effecting change in this way does require actual conscious directed action.

I spend a lot of time working with women in particular, but honestly any academic who struggles with confidence and self-worth, to construct and utilize language that effectively advocates for their interests. It’s not instinctive, or effortless to do this, but it’s also not impossible. It’s entirely doable. It’s not rocket science. It is, though, unbelievably difficult for anyone who has been steeped in messages of unworthiness or disrespect – which usually predate their time in academia.

Abused people gravitate to the abusive norms of academia.

So, yes, you might need the help of a mentor or coach to get launched. You might need to write it out, and workshop it, and edit it, and then practice it 100 times. Your hands and your voice might shake when you have to deliver it. But you can do it.

And eventually you’ll be able to do it yourself. And that’s my goal. To remind you that you deserve to be treated with respect, and to help you find the words to demand that.

Yes, reader, I am talking about LinkedIn.

Admit it: You hate the thought of LinkedIn. If, that is, you think about it at all. You think LinkedIn is something the business school students are obsessed with, and something incalculably alien* to your life and your professional pursuits.

If you even have a profile, and you probably don’t, you made it years ago, added your education, listed your academic position, and never looked at it again. Basically, you avoid the platform entirely because it feels corporate, unfamiliar, and uncomfortable.

This is a mistake.

LinkedIn is not simply a networking site. It is the primary professional database used by recruiters, hiring managers, collaborators, and organizations trying to understand who does what work. When someone hears your name, when you send an email, when you apply for a position, the first thing many people do is search for you there.

What they see matters.

Your LinkedIn page (or the absence of one) IS telling a story about you. There are good LI pages, and bad ones. Post-ac PhDs have your own special set of challenges in making LI work for you, because your work history, profile, and skills don’t map seamlessly and effortlessly into the “lingua franca” of the realm.

And so, this week you are going to make or update your LinkedIn profile. You are going to really take charge of it. Put effort and thought into it. And approach it (as with so many other elements of this transition) as a research project. The great thing about LI is that everyone else’s pages are visible!  And networks are large and active. Find one post-ac PhD in your general area, and their network will lead you to countless others. Follow that trail into the forest!

The goal of this LI revision? To make your page reflect all of the competencies you have identified in our earlier weeks together in this 52-week project.

You’re going to highlight tangible, transferable skills, and not a series of obsolete or opaque academic roles.

First, set aside one hour.  One real uninterrupted hour, like you would for any of your regular professional tasks.

Open your profile. Look at it as if you were an employer encountering you for the first time.

What does it communicate?

Most academic profiles list degrees, dissertation titles, publications, awards, fellowships, conferences, and course titles.

None of those things clearly signal what problems you solve or what skills you bring to an organization.

I was asked to look at a resume this past week for a PhD seeking a professional staff job on campus.  It was a very corporate-sounding job ad. The person is very well qualified, but gave me a resume that simply listed course after course after course of university teaching. The job was not a teaching job, in any way shape or form. So how could listing teaching help? It couldn’t. I explained the need to summarize relevant skills mobilized within the overarching teaching career (without getting bogged down in individual class names) and how to translate those using the keywords of the job ad.

To be sure, your task is not to erase your academic background. Your task is to translate it.

Start with the headline. The default LinkedIn headline is usually your current job title or institutional affiliation. For many academics that means something like doctoral candidate, lecturer, or assistant professor. Those titles do not tell an employer much about what you actually do, because remember: nobody understands these terms outside of academia.

Instead, your headline should describe your expertise and the type of work you perform, using action verbs and role descriptions that have currency broadly in the industry, corporate, non-profit etc realm you are targeting. (Don’t know what those are? Then you need to set aside an hour for research first!)

Someone who studies policy might write “policy researcher and analyst focused on higher education and workforce systems.” Someone who teaches writing and communication might describe themselves as “communication specialist and writing trainer focused on translating complex ideas to non-specialist audiences.” Someone who works with data might frame their experience as “research analyst and data storyteller.”

Again, don’t reinvent the wheel here, at first. Dive deeply into others’ examples. Maybe even make a file or database of example language you like. Borrow liberally, and then rework to make your won.

The goal is clarity. When someone reads the headline they should immediately understand what kind of professional you are.

Next look at your experience section. This is where translation becomes most important.

Academic CV language often focuses on one-off achievements such as taught courses, conducted research, presented papers, or service on committees. While those achievements are real, they do not communicate transferrable competencies to employers outside academia.

Rewrite your descriptions so that they emphasize the skills you benchmarked earlier in the series. If you managed a research project, say that you “led a multi-year research initiative involving data collection, analysis, and reporting on [broadly comprehensible topic] in collaboration with wide range of stakeholders.” If you supervised teaching assistants, say that you” supervised and mentored staff members responsible for instructional delivery.” If you coordinated conferences or workshops, describe the event planning, stakeholder coordination, and logistical management involved.

This is not in any way unethical or dishonest. All of it is accurate description of the true scope of your labor and background, just using language the labor market understands.

You may notice something as you rewrite these sections. Work that once felt narrowly academic begins to look like project management, communication, leadership, data analysis, or program development. That’s what you want! That means your eyes are finally starting to open, and your vision widening from those academic blinders. You DO have the competencies organizations seek! That’s what I’ve been telling you!!

After updating your experience entries, review your skills section. LinkedIn allows you to list specific competencies and many recruiters search profiles using those keywords. Add the skills that appeared repeatedly in the job postings you analyzed earlier. Project management, policy analysis, qualitative research, stakeholder communication, data analysis, or strategic planning are common examples.

As you do this work of aligning your profile with the language employers use, you’ll feel awkward and hesitant. That’s ok. But don’t stop. Keep digging until you have a healthy list of real transferable skills reflected on your page. (Slightly more advanced: you can seek endorsement of those skills from collaborators.)

Finally, read through the entire profile as a coherent narrative. Does it communicate what you actually do and what problems you are equipped to solve? If someone unfamiliar with academia read it, would they understand the value you bring?

If the answer is yes, the profile is doing its job.

Updating your LinkedIn profile does not guarantee job offers. Nothing in a labor market can promise that. What it does do is make your work legible. It allows people outside your department or discipline to recognize your competencies and imagine how those competencies might function in their organization.

Visibility matters more than many academics realize.

Next week we will build on this visibility by reaching outward and identifying the professional communities where people doing your target roles gather and exchange information.

For now, take the hour. Translate the work you have already done. Make your expertise visible.

~~~

*Can you tell I just went to see The Hail Mary Project?

TL;DR: Motivation grows in environments where effort leads to closure. When projects have edges, your nervous system can relax into the work because it knows the experience will end. When everything remains open indefinitely, motivation slowly erodes.

One of the things that the people who work with me in person learn pretty quickly is that the list I have them make of everything they are carrying around is not the heaviest part. The burden is actually the weight that comes from carrying it.

It is why I lean so heavily on a backpack metaphor. The shit you are carrying that you don’t even remember is there!

Unfinished work does not just sit peacefully in a its digital cubbyhole. It follows you around. It creeps over your shoulder when you are making dinner. It comes roaring into view when you open your freaking email. It shows up when someone, thinking they are being supportive, asks what you are working on.

The previous WIP posts in this series should have made it clear that every unfinished project carries an emotional charge, whether it is obligation, guilt, shame or…?

I have noticed that the academics I work with tend to compartmentalize their projects. Filing them in a way that makes it seem as if there in only one. And to be fair, one project is manageable. The imaginary 10 simultaneous responsibilities are uncomfortable but doable. The more accurate 50 simultaneous demands shape how you experience your entire life.

We underestimate the cost of both our denial about how many things are in our backpack and the emotional weight we carry about each of them.

So while we are over here clocking the hours we spend actively writing, teaching and responding to FREAKING emails, the unacknowledged/unfinished work is occupying mental space and sucking energy even when you are not working on it.

Last week I talked about identifying feedback loops that you had no control over and changing them to ones you can. The other thing about open loops is that they hold attention. Your brain tracks unfinished commitments whether you want it to or not. It keeps a unacknowledged ledger in the background. The more open loops you have, the more attention is tied up maintaining that ledger.

That is why the WIP list feels overwhelming even before you start doing anything on it. The list is a map of all the places your attention is already partially allocated. AND (this is an important addition) every item also represents a tiny check in with yourself. “I should get back to that.” “I really need to finish this.” “I cannot believe that is still sitting there.”

Over time those “check ins” (read badgering) accumulate into a low grade sense of failure. Not because you are actually failing, but because your attention is constantly brushing up against things that are incomplete.

This is one reason shame thrives around work in progress. The longer something sits unfinished, the more it starts to feel like evidence of a personal flaw rather than a simple mismatch between expectations and capacity.

And for the gzillionth time: The systems many of us work in make this worse.

Academic culture rewards accumulation. From the celebration of new ideas to the intense focus on new collaborations, new projects are constantly introduced. That in and of itself is very cool EXCEPT fewer and fewer structures exist to help scholars close loops or release work that no longer makes sense.

As you are all too aware, that culture creates a professional environment where carrying unfinished work becomes normal and walking around with a hundred open tabs in our minds is just a Tuesday.

But, consider this: There is a difference between normal and sustainable. And carrying unfinished work without a plan for closing the loop is absolutely unsustainable.

Need proof? Consider how your unfinished workload is showing up in ways you may not be noticing, or more importantly blaming on your own lack of motivation: You feel tired before you begin. You avoid looking at certain folders or email threads because they remind you of commitments you have not resolved. You hesitate to start because you already feel behind.

And while the behavioral impact is exhausting, I am more concerned, as a coach, with how the weight changes how you see yourself.

Instead of noticing everything you are actually doing, you see the backlog. You measure your effort against an imaginary version of completion that was never realistic to begin with.

This series exists because I think reducing that weight changes your relationship to work.

When you close a loop, a small bit of background noise is eliminated, but there is also a deeper shift that happens: You begin to rebuild trust with yourself.

When you define what completion looks like and then reach it, even in small ways, you begin to believe your own plans again. Your work stops feeling like an endless accumulation of obligations and starts feeling like a series of choices you can actually complete. This is one of the core goals of my Unstuck course. Rebuilding your integrity with yourself.

Look at your WIP list again. Not with judgment, but with curiosity. Notice which items feel heavy. Notice which ones you avoid even thinking about. Notice where your attention catches and tightens. Do you know what completion looks like for those?

Let me be clear: Closing a loop does not always mean finishing the project. Sometimes it means acknowledging that the project belonged to an earlier version of you and letting it go. What matters is that the loop is closed rather than carried indefinitely.

The goal of the WIP series is not perfect completion. The goal is reducing the invisible weight that unfinished work places on your life.

KK: Tell me your story of how you moved from the PhD into what you do now?

CG: Linguistics is not often thought of as a field with strong set of career options, either in academia or outside, unless you’re in the computational realm, which I was not.  I was doing theoretical linguistics, Chomskyan generative linguistics, and the writing was on the wall pretty early.

In 2008 I graduated from undergrad and directly went into a PhD program.  2008 was a very bad time to graduate from undergrad, as it turned out, but I had my little life raft of grad school. But it was really obvious that the tides were rising, the island was shrinking, and everyone was clawing at each other for the very few places that would remain. {laugh} I looked at people above me and how miserable they seemed, and I thought:  I don’t have the fight in me for this kind of life.

Fortunately my brother and my father both worked in tech, so that was always an option I knew existed. I saw how their lives were and they looked a lot better than what I was seeing in academia. Growing up I’d never explored programming, and through undergrad I stayed far away from it, but over time I came around and started playing with coding. I took every course I could in grad school that touched on computational work, even though it wasn’t my actual degree — statistics, computational methods for linguistics, things like that. I started to find it genuinely interesting. Actually, linguistics is a really good background for programming, especially theoretical linguistics, because programming languages and human languages are all variants of the same underlying system. So I threw myself into building my tech literacy over the latter half of my dissertation, and by the time I graduated in 2014 I’d already been doing some small programming projects.

KK: This really points to your entrepreneurialism right there which is unusual. What did your peers in grad school and your advisor think of this side project of yours?

CG: My advisors were wise to the realities on the ground and very supportive. The other grad students were more mixed: there’s something about being on a ship when someone starts inflating the life raft while everyone else is sipping wine {laugh}. Some were supportive, some were confused, but after a few years a lot of them were doing the same thing. I can think of at least two friends from grad school who’ve gone into tech, that same trajectory from linguistics into data analysis and then into other areas.

These are people with a lot of skills they don’t even realise they have. Once they finally do realise it, it tends to catch up with them.

KK: I want to ask you what skills you think PhD’s have.  But before I ask that I want to hear the rest of your story!

CG: So, I started doing side gigs, starting with data analysis projects, and that put me in a position to be working with usually either consultants or startups.

KK: Hang on, what did you do with the startups?

CG: They would hire me to add data analysis features to their software…

KK: I don’t think I know what data analysis means in your world.

CG: For example, one company I worked for was called Flaredown. They did chronic illness symptom tracking. You’d log your symptoms every day and the system would surface insights like, “Have you noticed your symptoms flare up every Monday?” My job was to write the tools that analysed that data. Largely exploratory data analysis.

KK: Did it require coding?

CG:  It required coding, but the code could then be wrapped into the program by the development team. I got more and more curious about what they were doing: how would I do that? I’d look over the developers’ shoulders, then go home and try it myself. Eventually I got comfortable enough to do it myself, and that’s where my career took me: straight-up software development, which I did for a fair few years.

KK:  Oh! I don’t think I knew that part! So you were making pretty decent money by then?

CG: Yeah, pretty decent money. The problem I found with software development was a disconnect. I enjoyed the intellectual challenge and it paid well, but my entire purpose had always been to focus on language, and now I was writing systems, for example, to help people schedule meeting room availability in government buildings. There was an itch I wasn’t scratching.

This was around the time of the pandemic, and there was an opportunity: a lot of people were at home and wanted things to do, and I wanted to do things {laugh}.  I wanted to use those linguistic muscles I hadn’t used for a few years. So I started doing informal courses online. These were linguistics courses, including one on language and thought, which was about how the language you speak shapes the thoughts you can think, which I just wrote about on Substack actually.

KK:  The great linguistic disciplinary question!  At least for anthropological linguists anyway… anthro was my area.

CG: Right! So there’s a lot of interesting research at the connection of linguistics and neuroscience, neurolinguistics. We were looking at the strong and weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and reviewing the evidence for that. So we had fun with that. My social media network at the time was half tech people, half academics — just the perfect mix. But the one course that really changed the trajectory for me was a course on Old English.

KK: Amazing.

CG: I put out a poll on Twitter — I called it the Dead Language Society, which is where my Substack got its name — and asked people to choose a language from among several historical languages I had some experience with. Which did they want to learn? They chose Old English.

I worked up a course, and alongside the traditional grammar and readings I started thinking about second language acquisition research. What if I combined Old English with the methods the research actually said would work (which no one had done before)? That became my book Osweald Bera, a story-based approach to learning Old English. And that’s what led me to the Ancient Language Institute. They heard I was working on the book, published it through their arm, and invited me to teach. I’ve been there ever since.

KK:  I’m curious, when you developed those courses did you build your own platform or did you use one of the pre-existing platforms for giving courses?

CG:  There was a group on Twitter called Hyperlink Academy, they had a little pandemic-era course platform they’d built themselves. They seemed like nice people so I messaged them one day asking if they were interested in anything to do with linguistics. They said, “Yes, come teach on our platform.” So I didn’t have to build it myself; they took care of all that.

KK: How much do you teach at the Ancient Language Institute now?

CG: Right now I’m teaching three courses, and I also do administrative work as Dean of Students.

KK: I actually don’t know who they are, the Ancient Language Institute.

CG: They are not from academia at all; it was a marketing professional named Ryan and a Latin teacher named Jonathan and, actually, Ryan was Jonathan’s Latin student. Jonathan taught using the same kinds of methods that I used to teach Old English which is how we got in touch. But way back even before COVID Jonathan was teaching Ryan and Ryan said, “You know, this method is so good but no one knows about it. We should try and spin something up to get more people into it.” And they did and it ended up becoming a steady ongoing business. It’s all online; they do summer immersion in person programs every year but the vast majority of it is online because the audience is mainly working professional or people who retired, but from all over the world.

KK: This is fascinating! So, if you don’t mind my asking the awkward question about money (I always talk about money because I just feel like you can’t talk about careers without talking about money) but is the Substack your main financial thing now or is it the teaching or is it a combination?

CG:  It’s the teaching and administrative work that I do with the Ancient Language Institute that’s my main source of income now. The Substack started in earnest when I was doing the promotion for my book. I realized that I’d benefit from having a platform to bring people to the book. At the time, I had a Substack with maybe a few hundred people on it, and I decided, as part of the marketing push for Osweald Bera, that I was going to write on it seriously. So I did and for some reason I hit on something that resonated with people!

KK:  I can tell by the comments!  I can’t believe the number of comments you get!

CG: Yeah me neither!!  And on the most obscure posts!  It’s amazing!  Every time I post something, I think, “surely this one is going to be the one that breaks them” {laugh} but no, they keep coming back! It’s really interesting how, if you get the framing right, even quite obscure topics can bring people in and get them to engage with the ideas.

KK:  Well you’re also really really good! I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Professor Is In but I’ve been running it for 16 years, and it’s an all online business and the challenge is, what question do you ask that draws people in what makes them feel seen and heard. I often think just from a business perspective… one of the reasons I was so impressed with you was because I’ve coached and worked with many many PhD’s who have said I want to start a small business like akin to mine or maybe something more akin to yours, and then I talk to them about what is it you want to communicate and the things they want to communicate are these obscurities that they’re obsessed with, and I’m like well have you looked if there’s a market for that and they’re like no. I feel like people skip the step of going from their own internal obsessions too what people out in the world actually want. And so, I feel like that’s something you do really well! You make it quite entertaining but without dumbing it down.

CG: I never want to dumb it down. I think there is always a way into anything. It’s just how much patience you bring, how many words you need. Something that’s interesting to me is probably interesting to a lot of people, if they can get a bridge. Teaching has really helped me build those bridges. When I’m teaching Beowulf, which I do fairly often, every time I teach it I get another ‘at bat,’ another attempt to show people why a particular section is interesting. Over the years you learn the angles that work. You can feel a bit like a comedian: you’ve got your routine, you know which joke lands where. The challenge is keeping it fresh, but if you really love the material, that’s not so hard. Those are the muscles that transfer most directly to writing, to what they call public linguistics.

KK:  So, what’s your favorite translation of Beowulf?

CG: It’s one by Liuzza. It’s not well known, not a literary translation per se. He’s an Anglo-Saxonist. What Liuzza’s does is it doesn’t get in the way: it gives you a really clear view of the poem as close as you can get in modern English. Everyone likes Heaney and I like Heaney too, but his Beowulf is its own thing. He’s a great poet who put his own twist on it, which can be distracting if what you want is the best substitute for reading the original. I always say it’s the best second translation to read.

KK: I’ve read a more recent one that was by a woman whose name I’m forgetting just now…

CG: Ohh, Maria Dahvana Headley!

KK: Yeah! That one! I really enjoyed that one, but I’m curious what you thought about it.

CG: It’s a very controversial one! {laugh} But I think it’s great: whatever you can do to get people interested in something. Sometimes it takes a bold translation!

KK: “Bro”! That’s the first word, right?

CG: The first word is “bro,” yeah! That’s why it’s known as the “Bro Translation” {laugh}. It’s a real accomplishment to take a text that’s been translated so many times and bring something new out of it in a way that speaks to a lot of people. I thought it was a real accomplishment!

KK:  I really enjoyed it because I love the gendered element, you know – the signaling of the masculinist ethos of the original so overtly was really effective.  I mean, without being a specialist being able to judge the accuracy or anything.  I just love the vibes.

CG:  And I think this is the thing with a poem like Beowulf: it’s a poem that you can read so many different times. The challenge is getting people to realize how deep it is. So whatever the first translation that does that is great, because the key is that it’s a poem you come back to. This is what I always tell students when we go through it in Old English, where it’s very challenging in many parts. I say, “Beowulf is going to be there with you for the rest of your life if you’ve been bitten by the bug…  which, if you’re in the third semester of taking an Old English class reading Beowulf, I suspect you have been!” {laugh} So, don’t feel you have to get everything on this reading.  There are new things I see every time. It’s endlessly rewarding, like Homer or Milton or Shakespeare, so give it the space to breathe and you’ll be rewarded.

KK: I love it! So, now that I know more about you, I’m actually more mystified now or even more impressed!  Because I honestly thought from that one Substack post that you titled something like, “who knew Old English was a growth industry”?

CG: “Etymology is a growth industry” {laugh}

KK:  Yeah that one! From that I thought your Substack is your primary thing, and I didn’t realize the teaching is actually your primary thing. So now I want to know, how do you manage your time, because your pieces are long and they’re very closely edited! They’re not off the cuff –  you even have like footnotes I think right –  how do you manage your time?? This is, by the way, something people ask me all the time about how they should manage their time as they try to balance all the demands of a transition out of academia.

CG: It’s not easy. When I started the Substack, it was just to have a platform to help the eventual sequel to the book! And then it’s grown of its own momentum. I do have an editor who is fantastic — she is ex-BBC — and she gives me wonderful notes and really helps me with framing, which is a huge asset. So it’s demanded its fair share of time, but that’s an investment I’ve been very happy to make. It helps that it’s fun, and in service to the mission that I’m trying to accomplish, which is to help people understand this language of ours in a deeper way. But, between teaching, writing, and administrative work, it’s something of balancing act. That’s the honest answer.

KK: I appreciate it!  Does the book sell enough to be an income source?

CG: Yes!

KK:  WOW!

CG:  I know, I know, it’s very strange! {laugh}  I mean, I couldn’t live off of it, but I like to think in terms of a portfolio strategy. A portfolio of elements that make up my living. So what that means, is the book is one element in the portfolio that required a lot of investment up front, but now it sells and I just get royalty cheques.

KK: Yeah!

CG: And that’s the lovely thing of writing books.  The Substack is its own element in the portfolio and the teaching is another. But I like to have different sources of income because it makes me… well, I feel like, having graduated at the time that I did in 2008 and seeing everyone I knew have such a hard time and then myself going through a transition from academia into industry, I sort of have these memories of … getting by on ramen, you know?

KK: Absolutely.

CG: I’m always like, what if it happens again.

KK: Sure, it’s trauma, it’s like PTSD.

CG:  I wouldn’t necessarily say PTSD, but it’s a bit of a scar from the experience of difficulty in those times. And so, I like to have income sources that are not entirely correlated, or not the “all of your eggs in one basket” syndrome.

KK: I think that’s very wise for people who are starting out to think about their transition.

CG: It’s like asking whether you’d put all your money in one company. Probably not, even if you thought it was the greatest company in the world. Your time is also an investment. If all your income comes from exactly the same source, everything is always on the line, and that makes every decision harder. Multiple income streams let you start prioritising more clearly. The danger is splitting your attention, but you choose the problems you want to deal with.

KK:  That is tremendous advice, just that little nugget right there!

But right now, I want to make an observation and then ask a question.  My observation is that you are remarkably –  or appear at least  – remarkably not conflicted about being a PhD working outside the academy. That is incredibly rare.  Is that accurate?  You’re at peace with it?

CG:  Now I am, yeah. For a few years after leaving, though, I wasn’t. Because I saw all these different people in my cohort moving on and doing different things in academia, and [wistfully] ohh….  There are some things you miss, right?

KK: Absolutely….

CG: But with time I found all of those things again, in different forms. It’s not all in one package, but it’s all there. It’s not a one-pot meal, it’s more like a…

KK: Like a traditional Japanese meal!

CG: Right, exactly! A One-pot meal versus a bento box, you know? {laugh}.  There’s nothing wrong with that; you just have to work a bit to find it.

KK:  I find the same thing –  I get to have all the joys of working with PhD’s and all the intellectual stimulation every day, and I also get to go all around the world giving talks which was the thing I loved about academia – the conferences and stuff  –  but I don’t have to do go to faculty meetings and I don’t have to grade!

CG: Or, like IRB forms… {laughs}

KK:  Exactly!  I mean there’s still things that are never replicated you know some delights of the academic job, but yeah no you can make up a lot of it. So my question is, if you were to distill your advice for some PhD who’s really still fairly heartbroken because they’re closer to that stage you were in years back—like, they really thought they wanted to be a professor but it’s not going to work out and they know they have to do something else, but the regular job market is shit too obviously… how would you advise them?

CG: My advice to someone in that position: it’s going to feel bad for a few years. Everyone I know who’s made this transition has gone through the same thing: friends who’ve gone from physics into data science, mathematics into software engineering. Each of them had a dark period even after they were employed and earning. They were either still pining for academia, or they wanted nothing to do with it at all.

KK:  The stages of grief  – the denial, the bargaining, anger, depression…

CG:  Yes! Until you eventually get to acceptance. But it’s totally nonlinear. So first, just accept that something like that is going to happen.

Then take an inventory of the skills you’ve acquired and realise how valuable they are — they just have different names. If you managed RAs, you understand project management. If you wrote grant applications — and you can write grants in the private sector too — you know how to present research to a specific audience in a compelling way. That’s marketing.

KK:  You know that’s actually how I teach grant writing! I really, literally say “this is PR and marketing,” but I never actually did it…

CG:  …the other way!

KK:  Yeah I never flipped it around!

CG: Yeah, it’s just that in academia you’re marketing to a very, very small audience.  These skills are transferable, but you haven’t had the vocabulary to talk about them, and you haven’t seen enough of the inside of companies to recognise them.

You also don’t know how bad it is out there. People who’ve been through academia have been beaten up by Reviewer 2, bruised by their committee, through a brutal job market, subjected to “more of a comment than a question” — all of it does a number on your self-esteem. So you slink away nursing your wounds, and when you think about the private sector you immediately think “I’m way down there in the rankings as an applicant.”

But that’s unlikely. In a lot of cases you are well above the level you need for many jobs. There are whole industries in which people are really not trying. {laugh} Think of your experience as a consumer trying to get service — it can be a disaster! Each of those experiences represents an opportunity for someone to do it better. You are likely better than the norm that’s currently operating.

My uncle once told me, “When you’re in undergrad surrounded by smart people, you think you’re the bottom of the barrel. Then you get into the working world and realise you’re not.” The same is true for PhDs. There’s no way out of that mindset except experience, so lean on friends who are already out there in industry, get a sense of how companies work, what skills are valued. A lot of it is just a mental transformation.

KK:  You’re saying exactly  – but much more eloquently – exactly what I spend my time saying in my talks! But it’s really hard to get it through.

So back to the portfolio thing, you might appreciate this:  I have a side hustle which is restoring and selling vintage rhinestone jewelry on eBay! It’s called Mad Bunny Vintage and I adore it; it’s my absolute joy, but it also very much feels like a part of a portfolio career like you spoke of. I’m 61 I don’t think I myself have lived trauma from financial disruptions, but my parents were depression kids and absolutely passed their trauma on to me, so I also have this thing of feeling like it could all collapse at any moment. So to have a tangible thing that I sell to actual people feels really good because having an entirely Internet based business feels a little scary.

CG:  Yes I agree and it’s good to hear someone else say it — it makes me feel like I’m not crazy.  Just the idea of maintaining something else that’s not correlated with other parts of your income. I mean, etymology is discretionary spending, right? {laugh} So the portfolio logic really does apply.

KK:  Well listen, on that note, I’ll tell you one other thing! My partner Kel is opening a bookstore! A brick and mortar bookstore a few blocks down the street. Taking it over from a guy who ran it for 35 years, a tiny little place.  It was already an alternative bookstore to a degree but it’s going to be called Outliers Books, and it’s going to be basically the queer, alternative abolitionist, anti racist bookstore in town, you know that whole thing. Kel has been running the Professor Is in business with me for about a decade now and we make decent money,  we could keep doing this all the way through retirement– we’d be OK. But she was like, I’m dying, I just can’t anymore… we’re in fascism, everything’s collapsing, the violence, the trauma is so overwhelming. And so she decided that she needs to be in a physical space seeing actual people and having a tangible books to mediate these conversations and build these community connections.  That’s how she’s going to survive this moment.

CG: That is really cool.

KK: Anyway, thank you so very much for your generosity in spending this time with me. You’ve been amazing, and I am really looking forward to posting this on the blog, and hopefully getting more people to your incredible Substack, and your book, and to learning Old English with you!

CG:  Thank you! It’s been fun!

*The O in Oswald is supposed to have a macron over it and did in the original Word mss of this interview; however, no matter how many different methods I tried to insert the macron into this WordPress version, it would not stick. I apologize for the inaccuracy.

At this point in the series you have already done several things that most PhDs skip when they are thinking about career transitions.

• You named the career you are trying to build.
• You audited where your time actually goes.
• You have built a bio
• You’ve defined your lane(s).
• You researched real job titles.
• You benchmarked the skills those roles require.

That is more strategic work than most people do in months of anxious job searching!

Now we address a quieter problem that derails even the best intentions.

Inconsistent action.

The pressures of the academy fuel a cycle that looks like this:

1. Burst of energy: You research careers, revise documents, read job postings, maybe even start applications.
2. Disruption: The semester intensifies, or life intervenes, or the work simply becomes emotionally heavy. Weeks pass. Nothing moves.

Once again we discover that the issue is not motivation; the issue is structure.

The structure is increasingly untenable workload. So, think about embedding the practice of  repeated small actions, not occasional heroic efforts. (This can apply to all your work, by the way, and even perhaps your domestic chores and free time pleasures, not just the career-seeking realm).

So, this week I am challenging you to do another thing that I personally hate, but I know is valuable: a weekly habits sheet.

The purpose of a weekly habits sheet is simple. It makes career work visible and trackable in the middle of everything else you are responsible for.

How to go about it?

First, set aside twenty minutes and open a new document or spreadsheet.

Across the top write the days of the week. Down the side list five to seven actions that directly support your career goals. These should be small enough that you can realistically complete them in a limited window of time, say 15 – 30 minutes. (FIFTEEN MINUTES is fine, by the way. You can change your life in 15 focused minutes a day, for real, which I say more about below.)

Examples might include researching job titles, reviewing job postings, networking with new people or organizations, revising resume language, learning a new tool or platform, or drafting application materials.

The key is that each item represents a concrete action rather than a vague intention. “Work on career stuff” is not trackable. “Send one informational interview request” is.

Your habits sheet is not a productivity competition. It is a visibility tool.

Each day you check off the actions you completed. If nothing gets checked one day, that is information rather than failure. You begin to see patterns. Certain days may consistently work better for career tasks. Others may be consumed by teaching, meetings, or caregiving responsibilities, or for downtime and mental health recharge!

This is why the sheet matters. It replaces vague anxiety with observable data.

By the way, there are pre-made versions of habit-trackers widely available! I quickly found this one on Etsy but there are many others!

The academy teaches you to believe you are making no progress if your steps are small and scattered.  You know those colleagues who brag about how they “wrote for 7 hours yesterday” (ugh). But when you track those steps you see something different. Progress accumulates.

You may already know this from your dissertation or other writing projects. You may have never applied it to this kind of more amorphous enterprise though.

This tool works for another reason as well.

Academia trains people to pursue large, ambiguous goals. Finish the dissertation. Publish the article. Write the grant. These projects are important but they stretch across months or years, which makes daily progress difficult to perceive. See Kel’s post on this.

But by contrast, career work benefits from the opposite approach. Small actions repeated regularly create momentum. One networking message each week becomes dozens over the course of a year. One job posting review per week becomes a clear understanding of how the market operates.

And more importantly, small actions create IDENTITY. Ie, “I am a person who…”

A small story. Years ago I used to swim every day. Even when I had young kids, I’d get to the university pool by 7:30 and swim for thirty minutes, shower and get dressed and then start my work day (looking back, I can’t believe I ever had that much energy… but I digress). I was not a good swimmer. My form never improved, despite my efforts. People passed me. One time I was passed by a guy with only one leg. I didn’t care. Or rather, I did vaguely care and was vaguely frustrated that I never seemed to improve. But the frustration was exceeded by my satisfaction that I did swim, that I did keep in shape, that I did do this thing for myself, and that I did feel a million times better every single time I finished.

There were days, though, that I did not get to the pool by 7:30. Some days I could only fit in 20 minutes of swimming. Some days, only 15. But I made myself a rule. If I could fit in 15 minutes of swimming, I’d swim. Why? Because then I could say, “I swam today.” And that was not because I thought the 15 minutes of swimming was meaningful AS EXERCISE. I didn’t really believe it was (although I think later science may be proving it was). I did it because the 15 minutes of swimming allowed me to say, “I swam today.” Ergo, I could still say, “I am a person who swims every day.” And that IDENTITY was important to me. It was giving myself a message of success, rather than failure (ie, ugh, I didn’t swim today). In turn, this maintained my morale, and kept me invested for the next day/week/month.

I did draw a line at 10 minutes, however, because I didn’t see the value of getting soaking wet and having to shower and dress, etc., for only 10 minutes. But that line is arbitrary. Another person might just jump in the damn water and get back out and say, I did it. Actually, now I recall, for years I used to say to myself, the moment I jumped into the water “the hard part is done, the rest is gravy”, and I believed it. Because for me, the hassle of making sure my swim bag was ready, getting to the pool, getting into my suit, etc etc, was honestly harder than swimming however many laps.

By the way, when I found myself considering getting trained to swim better, I instinctively knew that would be a mistake. Because the goal of swimming for me was NOT competition. It was not “performance.” It was just… a gift to myself. To do a thing that was DOABLE by me, as I was, within my crazy schedule. Which allowed me to do it with regularity.

OK, so this story ended up super long. But I wanted to spell it out because in my work with clients, and in this blog post series, I always focus on the mental/emotional work. The positive IDENTITY project. “I am a person who…”

By making your habits sheet, you are crafting this kind of positive identity: “I am a person who…

• is actively executing a career change
• is committed to daily action.
• is prioritizing my own career success…”

Any of those work, or any other version that works for you.

The updated 2026 edition of The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide to Turning Your PhD Into a Job is OUT! Entirely rewritten for our post-covid, MAGA-fied conditions; new chapters on academic harm, leaving academia, and strategies to make academia sustainable. Get yours now!

In fact, why not put that identity at the top of your sheet? And, I’d LOVE if you shared yours in comments below!

In any case, your habits sheet protects your actions from disappearing inside the chaos of academic life.

Keep it simple. A single page is enough. Five to seven actions is enough. The goal is consistency, not perfection.

At the end of each week take two minutes to review the sheet. Which actions happened regularly? Which never happened? If they didn’t happen, why not? Unrealistic? Or just not ideally scheduled?

Adjust the sheet if necessary. Remove actions that were too ambitious. Add ones that reflect what you learned from previous weeks.

What you’re doing is building a system that supports your goals, rather than relying on vague motivations that do ebb and flow with your feelings and energy levels.

Next week we will turn outward. We are going to tackle your LinkedIn profile! Do not fear–it’s not hard. And it’s going to reflect all the competencies you identified earlier in the series. And it’s going to reflect the positive new identity that you are forging through this work.

For now, create the sheet. Track the actions. Let small steps accumulate.

The updated 2026 edition of The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide to Turning Your PhD Into a Job is OUT! Entirely rewritten for our post-covid, MAGA-fied conditions; new chapters on academic harm, leaving academia, and strategies to make academia sustainable. Get yours now!

Last week I challenged you to take a look at your internal and external definitions of success. We named the tension between what feels aligned and what is legible to systems. This week I invite you into the place where that tension drains your energy. (Sounds fun, huh?)

Motivation dies when outcomes are out of your control.

Not because you are weak or you lack discipline, but because your nervous system is designed to respond to effort that leads somewhere predictable. Another way of thinking about it is that your brain is designed to solve small problems. No visible solution? No motivation.

Human beings are remarkably capable of sustained effort when there is a clear connection between action and result. If I study, I learn. If I practice, I improve. If I write, I produce words on a page. The feedback loop is visible. Effort makes sense.

But much of life in the current hellscape, especially in academia and creative work, depends on outcomes you cannot control.

You can write the article. You cannot control the reviewers.
You can submit the grant. You cannot control the funding priorities.
You can apply for the job. You cannot control the committee.
You can build the program. You cannot control institutional cuts.

When your definition of success rests primarily on these external outcomes, motivation becomes unstable. You are pouring energy into processes where the final result is determined by variables that have nothing to do with your effort, skill, or integrity.

You are very smart. Whether you have notice or not, you have been learning that payoff is inconsistent.

You have certainly noticed that you can do everything right and still lose. And even if you have been ignoring it by placing the blame on yourself instead of the system, your brain has notice that the goalposts keep moving. And quietly, without drama, it begins to conserve energy.

What looks like procrastination is often a rational response to a broken feedback loop.

If you tell yourself that the only meaningful success is acceptance, tenure, funding, promotion, or public recognition, then most of your work exists in a suspended state. You do the labor, but the validation is uncertain at best and more often than not, withheld. There is no guaranteed completion point, no reliable reward.

Your brain simply does not thrive in that environment.

This is why motivation spikes briefly around deadlines and then collapses again. Deadlines create temporary clarity. They reintroduce a short term feedback loop. Submit by Friday. Finish by the end of the month. Those are contained outcomes. The larger result, however, remains uncertain.

When people say they are burned out, what they often mean is that they are exhausted from investing energy in outcomes they cannot influence.

This is just about the point where I would expect a bit of despair. The human version of that wailing emoji or the gif of the kid lying in the puddle kicking and screaming. I get it. But the reality is that most of us cannot simply opt out.

What we can do is relocate where we place our sense of completion. (I understand that this comes off as annoying productivity speak, but it is actually a valuable exercise.)

While you cannot control whether a journal accepts your article, you can control whether you wrote the clearest version you were capable of at this stage. You cannot control whether you receive tenure, BUT you can control whether you met the stated requirements and made choices aligned with your values. You cannot control whether an institution recognizes your labor. (Seriously stop trying!) You can control whether you define the labor as complete when you have fulfilled your side of the agreement.

When motivation is tied only to uncontrollable outcomes, it becomes fragile. When it is tied to controllable processes, it becomes steadier.

This is not about lowering standards or pretending results do not matter. Results have real consequences. Funding changes what is possible. Jobs affect stability. Recognition opens doors. It would be naive to say otherwise.

The shift is more subtle.

It is about refusing to measure your effort solely by outcomes you do not command. It is about defining internal markers of completion that are within your authority. Did you show up? Did you meet your defined version of done? Did you act in alignment with your current definition of success?

Those are answers you can access immediately. They close loops rather than leaving them perpetually open.

There is also a political dimension here. Systems that rely on scarcity and competition benefit when you tie your self worth to unpredictable outcomes. If you are always waiting to see whether you have been chosen, you are easier to manage. Your motivation becomes dependent on approval.

Reclaiming process based completion is not disengagement. It is stabilizing your relationship to effort.

When you finish a draft and declare it complete according to the criteria you set, something settles. When you submit and consciously release the outcome, something steadies. You move from endless anticipation to defined action.

This does not eliminate disappointment. Rejection still stings. BUT your motivation no longer depends entirely on forces outside your control.

So, if you have noticed your energy fading around certain projects, ask yourself where you have placed the finish line. Is it located in someone else’s decision? Is it contingent on institutional approval? Is it dependent on market response?

If so, your body may be protecting you from investing more in a loop that offers no reliable return.

The work now is to redraw the line to define what completion means on your side.

One more thing: This is an ongoing process. Once you complete that thing on your side of the line and acknowledge that you did it (Yes, acknowledgement matters!)  you need to consciously decide whether you want to reenter the next uncontrollable phase.

At the risk of repeating myself and with the pedagogical knowledge that restatement can improve understanding, AKA once again for those of you in the back: Motivation is not a moral quality. It is a response to conditions. When conditions repeatedly disconnect effort from outcome, motivation dims. Your job is not to force it back through willpower. Your job is to rebuild conditions where your effort has meaning and a finish line you can actually reach.