A look back at a very dramatic year.

2023 started with my resignation from all the positions I held at my university: group leader, coordinator of a research focus programme, and designated successor to the role of Student Coordinator for the Faculty of Biology.

It is almost impossible to convey quite how shattering a decision this was for me. It has been my goal to be not just a scientist but very specifically an academic ever since childhood, from the moment I stopped wanting to be an astronaut. I have always been the most ideologically committed of all my friends, and I have never wavered – and still don’t – in my belief in the importance of academia and the role it should play in society. To choose to walk away from this, to feel that I had no good option left but to walk away, is something that will stay with me forever.

Unavoidably, there will always be a bit of my brain that will label me a failure for my group not getting traction in research terms, that will label me a quitter for walking away, and will grieve for the loss of a childhood dream. So be it.

Conversely, it’s also hard to overstate the feeling of lightness and relief I experienced after choosing to leave academia, and that I found myself looking to the future with a genuine sense of curiosity and optimism for the first time in years. 2022 had been an exhausting and unsustainable time. From its inception in 2015 my research group had been 100% self-funded, which included raising 100% of my salary and acting as the group’s leader, lab manager, technician, and postdoc, with no PhD students and only a wonderful but always transient revolving cast of Bachelor and Master’s students as group members. Funding for the group was cut at the end of 2021, and the department’s solution was to give me the two additional coordinator positions mentioned above, each paying 50%. 

Consequently, I spent 2022 doing 3 jobs in parallel, including doing what I thought of as my real job – lecturing, mentoring students, doing research, running practical classes – now wholly for free. This solution was a well-meaning one on the part of the department and certainly prevented me becoming abruptly and painfully unemployed at the end of 2021, but also illustrates a lot of what’s unsatisfactory with contemporary academia: the lack of departmental funds for junior faculty positions, the lack of permanent positions, and the way that the vocational commitment to academic work so easily ends up translating into enormous and backbreaking workloads. I had noted in my year-end retrospective that it felt as though things were unsustainable, and indeed they were. 

Parenting and my partner’s career were also key factors in the decision to resign. In theory, I could – as many have done – simply have closed the lab and moved somewhere else to start anew (thanks again to the people out there who highlighted possible openings!). But I didn’t want to relocate my kids just so I could roll the career dice one more time and anyway, my spouse has her own career so why presume to uproot everything just because things hadn’t worked out for me?

Inevitably, the existential aspect of my resignation and the need to work through my own feelings resulted in a series of much more personal postings, which characterised the bulk of 2023’s output and seemed to strike a chord with many of you out there (although there were also complaints that the tone had become bitter, self-pitying, and repetitive; a fair criticism that I will do my best to mitigate).

TIR has been going for 8 years now, and due mainly to all the upheaval caused by my exit from academia, 2023 had the fewest number of postings ever (only 20). Despite that, it was paradoxically also the second-most-successful year on record, with >30,000 page views and almost 20,000 visitors. Obviously these are not massive numbers in the grand scheme of things, but given that TIR is a one-person part-time operation it’s still way ahead of even my most optimistic expectations when I started. 

The HowTo postings on improving scientists’ soft skills remain the foundation of the blog’s traffic, with those on writing postdoc approach emails, writing figure legends, and explaining the difference between technical replicates, biological replicates and independent experiments being perennial favourites. In 2023 I added articles on writing Results sections, and how not to start a research group (which drew on lessons learned from my own experience, hopefully to good effect).

Alongside that, there were postings on how walking away is a means of asserting your own value, how the production of young scientists should be viewed as academia’s main societal output, and a plea to reduce the focus on first-author publications in assessment of young scientists’ careers. There was also a commentary piece on the 2023 Lindau Nobel laureate meeting scandal, and belated publication of a wonderful interview with Bruno Lemaitre on the topic of narcissism in science.

I was unemployed from May until the end of August, but only in a contractual sense. In reality, I was still working on academic matters for around 4 hours every day: Master’s evaluations, Master’s defences, PhD thesis committee meetings, student references, proofreading PhD theses, preparation (and publication!) of manuscripts, and more. It was a real eye-opener in terms of the unbelievable number of unpaid overtime hours that academics voluntarily give to their working lives because of that strong sense of vocational commitment. That work continues; I can see this slow disentanglement from academia filling up all of 2024 at least, which means my writing time will continue to be correspondingly squeezed. Apologies in advance if TIR postings don’t arrive as often as I would like.

A new theme for 2024 will be commentary on how science is practised in industry (biotech/pharma) compared to academia. What makes me newly-qualified to talk about this? Well, since September I’ve been working in the Medical Communications (MedComms) sector. I can already confirm that the transition to the private sector has been a delight, and the fact that my “jobseeker” status lasted only two weeks in total is a real signal that there are openings for academics – even mid-career ones – in industry. Those of you out there who are unhappy and not sure if you can go on: take a look on the other side of the wall; you will probably like what you find there.

So that’s it! As always, a massive thanks to all of you for reading, sharing, liking, and commenting on TIR’s output. It is a daily blessing to see how these reflections seem to be valued by so many of you, and I will do everything I can to keep giving you food for thought. 

You keep reading, I’ll keep reflecting.

Brooke Morriswood

January 2024