Most of us thought we’d spend our whole lives in academia. So when it turns out we won’t — whether we learn that we don’t want to, don’t get a job that actually pays the bills, or hit a roadbump along the way — it feels particularly craptastic. This is true even if we’re planning to stay but are having to rethink our relationship to academia. So this is a space for talking about the kinds of things that come up for people and how we can move past them.

Extended adolescence on line 1

It’s so easy, when you’re in graduate school, to fall into the assumption that you’re not really a grownup yet. Most of us weren’t buying houses, or having kids, or even getting married – all things that mark adulthood in our culture.

Worse, graduate school can often look like an extension of college: Classes and bars and parties and late nights and very little responsibility outside of showing up to teach your own classes. It never did inspire me to feel like I hadn’t moved beyond my life at 19.

But it makes sense. If (felt) adulthood is roughly correlated (in this culture) with leaving school and getting a real, paying job, then those of us who went to graduate school delayed adulthood by five to ten years.

The apprenticeship model only makes it worse

Under the apprenticeship model of academia (there’s a lot to critique about said model, but work with me for a minute), you really aren’t a full grownup until you become a Master. (In some times and places, it was customary to delay marriage until you were a Master and thus could support a family.)

Since academia is only sort of an apprenticeship model, we don’t actually have a mark for when that happens. Graduation with a PhD? Achievement of a tenure-track job? Tenure? Full professorship? It’s all of these and none of them.

Little good comes of it

Because we often don’t feel like grownups, because we often don’t carry the trappings of grownuphood (and no, unbearable student loans don’t quite count), it’s easy for us to assume that we aren’t grownups – and that therefore we also don’t have the authority to make decisions for our lives.

What we want – and what we sometimes desperately want – is for someone else to take out their magic adulthood crystal ball and tell us what to do next. We’ve existed for so long in a world that has clear pathways as well as people who shepherd us down those pathways that the idea of finding a new path, an unmarked and perhaps unauthorized path, is daunting.

Yes, part of the daunting is about how the hell we learn a new set of skills around exploring the world of work. But part of it is about daring to take responsibility for our own lives, to claim ourselves as adults who get to decide what’s best for us regardless of what the authority figures think is best.

This, then, is what it really means to be an adult

To take responsibility for your own life and your own happiness, no matter what the authority figures think is the right, appropriate, or responsible choice. What is right, appropriate, and responsible is something only you can decide for yourself.

I say none of this dismissively or contemptuously. We can be (and often are) some of the most responsible, thoughtful people around while still feeling like little kids playing dressup, like someone is going to come along at any minute and put us in the corner for time out.

I say all of this because I so often see us (me included) hoping and waiting for someone else to tell  us what to do, for the real grownup to step out and make the pronouncement that will decide what the right choice is.

The reality is that there is never only one right choice. There are better and worse choices at every juncture, but we can’t even necessarily know which is which until much later.

The reality is that our lives are only what we make of them, and there’s no secret blueprint telling us what we’re supposed to be doing. What we’re supposed to be doing is making the best choices for ourselves and for the life we want to be living.

So go ahead. Take a look at your real options. Put away the voices in your head that are labeling those options as responsible or not, right or not, appropriate or not. Look at your real options and ask yourself what your wisest self would tell you about them. Then choose.

If you’d like help figuring out what your real options are, Jo VanEvery and I are teaching a 6-session telecourse about strategies for expanding your sense of career possibilities. You can find out more by clicking here.