I did one year of a postdoc in the neuroscience/endocrinology of stress and trauma. I dragged my wife and daughter from Ohio to NY, not quite NYC but close enough to feel the pain of its cost of living, and nearly ruined my marriage trying to support the three of us on the stipend. I wrote a grant proposal about nine months in, but I was so stressed out over everything (fitting for the research, no?) that I already decided I was done with the whole thing before I even submitted it. We moved back to Ohio, and I did a couple of semesters as an adjunct prof, after which I swore never to do it again.

I interviewed for other fellowships prior to that one; one lab, a very well-regarded lab at Michigan focusing on functional MRI and affective neurophysiology, stood out to me because none of the seven postdocs the lab already had had authored a single paper even after having been there for years. The two PIs running the lab, a husband and wife team, collaborated so much with other labs that they never gave their postdocs any opportunities to work on their most pivotal, high-profile projects. After I interviewed, one of them took me aside and said that it would not be a good opportunity for that reason, and that his experience in academia was not an isolated one. The others ranged from being similarly jaded to… idk, having some kind of Stockholm syndrome.

Between these experiences and the long chats I’d have with my similarly disenchanted labmate from grad school, I gave up on all of it and looked for alternatives. I’ve been working as a sci-comms writer in the pharma industry, in the agency setting, for almost five years now and I’m way better off. Being in academia for a year after defending just straight-up murdered my idealistic outlook on research. I’m not in love with the job I have now, but I’m in a mindset anyway where I don’t want to be defined by my career, it’s just something that pays the bills, but it does it very well.