I Purposefully Misled My Boss. The Lie Is Catching Up to Me.
Good Job is Slate’s advice column on work. Have a workplace problem big or small? Send it to Laura Helmuth and Doree Shafrir here. (It’s anonymous!)
I started my job in academia and gave my boss or “mentor,” as they see it, a false impression.
I made it seem like I was in this role for the long haul. Typically, someone stays in my position for a good amount of years, about four or five, before moving on to a professorship.
But the thing is, this is never what I really wanted! I always wanted to find a job outside of the academic space in order to start making more and have a better work-life balance. But when I took my role a year ago, this was all I could find, and I went with it. I’ve led my boss to believe this is what I wanted, even though I’ve been searching for other jobs this entire time. I really like him and value all his guidance, but I’ve recently started making it further into the interview process elsewhere, and I’m starting to worry about how to break the news to him when the time comes. I don’t want him to feel like I lied to and tricked him—and I want to have him in my corner for the future, I just really don’t want to do this job anymore. How do I come clean?
Dear Haven’t Been Honest,
You don’t have to apologize for leaving academia. Most people in academia leave academia. It’s a bit of a pyramid scheme, anyway. Graduate students compete for a smaller number of postdoctoral positions; postdocs compete for a smaller number of professorships, and professors compete for a vanishingly small number of tenured professorships. The ones who succeed mentor additional junior people who build the base of the pyramid. To choose a less dismal metaphor, academic relationships are also a kind of symbiosis. Established and junior academics help build one another’s reputations and networks through mentorship and collaboration, and together they contribute to their scholarly field. I say all this to help people who haven’t done time in academia understand that your situation isn’t as simple as it might sound.
At its core, though, your question is about how to leave a job, which is a good thing for people in any profession to think about. There are two general strategies, and either one has its risks. The first one is what I would typically recommend: Get a different job, then give your current boss two weeks’ notice, or longer if you can hold off on starting the next job. Give notice graciously, and thank your boss for specific opportunities and things you learned from him. The risk is that he’ll be furious you left abruptly, but this sort of departure is routine, and people get fired with less notice all the time.
The other option, given the slower pace of academia and the nature of a good mentoring relationship, is to talk to your boss now. Tell him you value his guidance and you’ve learned a lot thanks to his mentorship, but you’ve decided against pursuing an academic career. Don’t plan a whole big speech; keep it short and let him respond. You don’t have to admit that you had doubts from the start. You must be early in your career, and nobody really knows what they want to do until they try it. The risk for this strategy is that your seemingly nice boss will turn into a jerk when inconvenienced and fire you before you find another job. But I suspect he’ll want to continue mentoring you and might even help you find a job. He surely knows people who have left academic positions like yours to work in related fields. He might help you make connections or think about career options. As long as you’ve been doing meaningful work for your salary, you haven’t been cheating him. And he will probably want to maintain a professional relationship, or even an informal mentorship. Good mentors, in academia or beyond, often advise their trainees throughout their careers. Soon you’ll build new non-academic networks and might be able to reciprocate in the symbiosis by informing his scholarship or helping his future trainees succeed.
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