Stories from Beyond Academia #7: Elizabeth Haswell
PhD in Biochemistry
This story from beyond academia contains a tenure-track position, a recent paper in Science, and then a resignation…
Yes, you heard right. And yes, this might sound surprising if you’re familiar with academia. After all, a strong academic track record - a portfolio of quality publications and awarded grant funding, measured relative to time in research - is a key contributor to success in academia. A strong track record is a prerequisite for the ‘holy grail’ for many academics: a tenure-track position, an academic role that’s pretty much for life.
Given an academic track record tends to build based on time spent in a particular research area, we think it’s unsurprising that PhD students feel pressure to pick the ‘right’ PhD topic - if you do pursue an academic career path, you may well be studying some variant of this topic from PhD student to Professor!
And given the understanding PhDs students have of track records, we think it’s unsurprising that the process of considering a non-academic post-PhD career also includes a feeling of pressure to pick the ‘right’ non-academic career path - as though the first non-academic role is going to be the equivalent of a non-academic tenure-track position.
But this has certainly not been the case for either of us. Instead we’ve found the non-academic equivalent of building a track record is building evidence of skills accrued through different roles and different experiences, as well as formal and informal training. And we see the PhD as one means to provide evidence of possessing skills that are relevant beyond academia.
And all this was just one topic of discussion we covered (among many!) when we recently caught up with Dr Elizabeth Haswell to hear her story from beyond academia.
Elizabeth is a Professor of Biology at Washington University in Saint Louis. She is currently in her last summer as a tenured academic, having recently resigned to pursue her next career, beyond academia. Elizabeth runs her own substack called ‘Unprofessoring’. And it’s been fascinating to hear a bit in this conversation, and to read more in ‘Unprofessoring’, about her reasons for seeking a change, some challenges she sees with the kind of academic metrics that comprise an academic track record, and the surprising freedom that can come with being able to ‘dabble’ in a few different non-academic roles - accruing skills and experience while you ‘find what works’.
Jonathan McGuire: Hi Elizabeth, thanks for joining us, really appreciate you dialing in from the other side of the globe! I've been reading your amazing newsletter ‘Unprofessoring’ and there have been some posts in there that have really spoken to my soul. But before we get to that, could you tell us a bit about your academic career and the research you were doing?
Elizabeth Haswell: Thank you for your kind words about the newsletter, it’s definitely a passion project for me and it’s lovely to hear feedback! So I am a plant biologist, and my area of expertise is mechanobiology. My lab group studies how plants sense and respond to mechanical forces like gravity and osmotic pressure. And I'm a biochemist so we have mostly focused on a class of proteins called mechanosensitive channels. Animal biologists will be familiar with the Piezo channel, which just got the Nobel Prize a couple of years ago, and it mediates pain perception in animals and humans, and we studied that exact same channel and other related channels in plants.
JM: I immediately feel the need to check here if you get asked a lot ‘Does that mean plants feel pain’?
EH: I do! I get asked ‘Can plants feel pain?’, ‘Can plants hear music?’ and also ‘Should we eat plants if they can feel us eating?’ And the answer is that, as far as we know, plants don't have a central nervous system. So they probably don't feel pain.
JM: I’m reminded of a high school science experiment where I played classical music to one group of seedlings and death metal to another group of seedlings and the classical group grew slightly bigger. Probably happenstance, but if it's not, it doesn't bode well for me because I tend to listen to heavy music. Maybe I'm stunting my growth or something.
EH: I mean I think plants do respond to vibration - there's a lot of really cool research going on now, that we've helped with a little bit, studying how plants respond to just the sound of a caterpillar chewing. So in Heidi Appel’s and Jack Schultz’s lab, they make these tiny little transmitters and they put them on the surface of a leaf and it just plays to the plant the vibration, and the plant will upregulate all of its disease resistance pathways. Then they're sort of primed when they do actually get bitten, they have already upregulated their defenses. So plants do hear, but it's hard to believe that they have the same aesthetic choices and tastes as we do. I love all that sort of plant phenomenology - plant neurobiology is a very contentious topic among plant biologists and I like following along from the outside, but we're very conventional electrophysiologists and so we don't we don't really dabble in that. But I like to watch on as a viewer not a participant. It's a cool topic!
Anyway, my background is that I grew up in Washington State in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and I went to college at University of Washington in Seattle, where I got my Bachelor's degree in biochemistry. I took a year off to do a bit of traveling, which I think Australians can understand. And then I did my PhD, also in biochemistry at University of California in San Francisco. From there, I moved just farther south, down the West Coast of the US to Caltech where I switched into working on plants at that time, and did a postdoctoral fellowship there, a very long one, a seven year postdoc. And then I took a permanent, independent position, a tenure-track position at Washington University in St. Louis, which is in Missouri in the middle of the country (not in Washington State, like you might think). And I've been there ever since. But this is my last summer working there. I've just resigned my position effective at the end of August. So that’s my academic career in a nutshell.
I think a lot of people sort of woke up in the middle of the night during the pandemic thinking ‘What am I doing with my time? Is this what I really want to be spending 80 hours a week doing?’
JM: Wow! So what led to that decision to resign from your position?
EH: That's such a complicated question. I'm never quite sure how to answer it other than to say that there were a lot of different factors. Part of it was getting more and more disgruntled with what I was spending my time on. More time spent on judging other people's work, and less time doing the research that I love. And by judging other people's work I mean teaching classes and grading students but also evaluating graduate students, evaluating junior faculty members, I was doing a lot of editing for scientific journals, so I was always judging other people's stuff and that started to feel very heavy, but there's not really any way to get out of that. That's kind of your job as a Professor. I also was finding that fewer and fewer people were interested in working in my lab group, so my lab group was getting smaller and smaller.
I think the pandemic had a little bit to do with it. I think a lot of people sort of woke up in the middle of the night during the pandemic thinking ‘What am I doing with my time? Is this what I really want to be spending 80 hours a week doing?’ And because my husband and I are from the West Coast, we had just spent 15 years living away from our family, and several members of our family had health crises during the pandemic and we couldn't be there. And so I really wanted to move back home but I couldn't find a tenure-track job there. And then, as you can tell, it was just like a straw on the proverbial camel's back. And I think one of the breaking straws is that I have a transgender son, and you may or may not know that the United States is in the midst of this terrible turmoil about how to treat transgender individuals and especially transgender children. And it was very clear where Missouri was going to go. And it felt like a great time to not be in Missouri anymore, to move somewhere where there would be, at least at the level of the law, more support for whatever he needs in the future.
JM: Yeah, at least from the outside, it’s looking tough for trans and gender diverse kids in the US right now.
EH: Yeah, some states have passed protective laws. The state we live in isn’t one of those states, but they’ve tried to do it. But Washington state, for instance, actually have laws on the books that specifically protect transgender-based healthcare and gender-affirming care. So that was part of it too, but it’s all one big thing.
JM: You've been unpacking some of these reasons in the aforementioned newsletter ‘Unprofessoring’ – and what a glorious title! And you've also been doing a really interesting series using that concept of conscious uncoupling that was made so famous by Gwyneth Paltrow many years ago, talking about that as a values-based and intentional framework for decoupling from academia. I'd love it if you could tell us a bit about the newsletter.
EH: So I came up with the general idea of the newsletter probably a year and a half ago. I’m an older, senior faculty member, I've been around for a long time and I feel like I believe a lot of things that the academic industrial complex tells us. And I was trying to figure out: do I actually believe that science is going to save the world? Do I believe that efficiency is important? A lot of things about the way that we run academia in general, I wondered how much I really agreed with. And then I started to wonder about all the things I told myself about what made me a valuable person, which was how many papers I could get, how many talks I could give, how many lines I could get on my CV. Did I really think that was real or not anymore? And so I think of ‘Unprofessoring’ as the process of untangling what I agree with and what I don't agree with. I still love so much of academic science and so much of academia, so it's a complicated, nuanced process. And as I was thinking about it, I did start to think about it in terms of a relationship. Obviously, academia doesn't really have a relationship to me, but I have a relationship to it. And I started to feel like I was getting a divorce from my job and my previous identity and so that was when I thought like a kinder, gentler divorce, like Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin where they promoted this sort of intentional, values-based, thoughtful and slow process. There's a book out there that describes this process, and I thought, well, this is a great way to sort of start my own process, but also like a framework for talking about it in the newsletter.
So the newsletter is on Substack, which I think is like the new podcast, but it's a really great environment and there's so much great writing happening there. I feel like there's not a lot of science happening there, there’s only a few science-y newsletters which is probably where I came across you guys, but it's growing every day. So I started it back in May and I've been pretty regular about it and it's been a nice place to connect with other people who are going through the same thing, and it's also been important to me to hold space for people who want to stay in academia but just want to sort of renegotiate what their relationship to their job is, so I've been trying to make that part of what ‘Unprofessoring’ can be: it can be just detaching a little bit, deciding a little bit more for yourself what your agreement with academia is.
JM: You had a really interesting post recently about whether publications have to be the currency of science. And I was thinking back to when I was in academia – I studied moral cognition, so how people make moral decisions, and that's the sort of thing that can get picked up and get a bit of popular science press. What I saw was an incentive structure for people working in my field to publish really flashy stuff that would get picked up in the popular press, rather than to do the slow, careful stuff that would be another brick in the wall, that incremental building of human knowledge. So that post really stuck with me because I thought, as you so eloquently pointed out in that post, the thing that is rewarded in science isn't necessarily contributing to knowledge.
EH: It's so true, but it's so easy to get off track and to really value the publication more than the job that the publication is supposed to do. I don't know that we have a better solution to disseminating knowledge, I think it's a complicated point because it is important for the work that we do as scientists to be explained and made available to everybody. That’s a no brainer, but how that happens in a way that's productive, I just don't think the answer is the system we have now. But it's like so many things, where you can get sort of caught up over the actual content or meaning of what you're doing. You want to have great teaching evaluations, but shouldn't you just want to teach well? So it's very complicated, and I think it's just part of human nature. But I think publication in particular, partly because there's this huge profit-making venture at the center of a lot of it, where these for-profit journals are making like insane amounts of money, basically off grants (like the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation in the US and then all the grant providers across Europe and everywhere else in the world). And we've all bought into it. It’s said that for every paper you submit, you should review three other papers. But if I just spent $4,000 to publish that paper, I formatted it, I advertised it, I wrote a small blurb, I wrote a big blurb, I made a graphical abstract, I did a podcast, do I really now also have to volunteer to review other papers too? It’s just a lot!
JM: So you’re undergoing your ‘Unprofessoring’ experience, and we're advocating for the transferability of academic skills in non-academic contexts. But you also have an interest in talking to those people who are staying in academia and about improving academia from the inside. I think some of our readers might read these interviews and say, ‘Actually, I'm gonna stay in academia, and so we want things to get better and fairer’.
I think that there's so much value that academia gives to the world but I think it's also so toxic for so many people that each person has to decide for themselves whether staying or leaving is the best decision.
EH: Yes, absolutely. And I think there are a lot of opportunities to make things better from the inside. When I started to tell people that I was leaving, the most common response was, “Oh, you're so brave. It's so courageous of you to leave” and I think part of that stems from how old I am, you get really entrenched and people find it hard to imagine that you would leave. Also, I was reasonably successful, we just had a paper published in Science, so people saw me as successful and doing well and so then the courage seems to be not just jumping into the unknown but also leaving behind a tenured position where I could have that job till I was 65 or 70 or whatever. But I think that the courageous people are the people who stay and try to change a system from the inside. People who say, ‘I hate the way that we are teaching undergraduates to memorise stuff, and I'm going to fight to have an undergraduate biology class that teaches critical thinking’ or ‘I hate the way our publication system works and I'm going to fight for preprints to be accepted on grant applications’, or whatever it is. I'm not advocating that people do this, but I think it's very courageous to say ‘I don't agree with the way things are happening, but I'm going to stay here and change it’.
I think that there's so much value that academia gives to the world but I think it's also so toxic for so many people that each person has to decide for themselves whether staying or leaving is the best decision. And as we were talking earlier, I think as an older person I take responsibility for at least maintaining a lot of those toxic systems. I have an example in one of my newsletters of something that I did which was, early on, to only take on undergraduate researchers who had really high GPAs. I thought that this was super smart because I would only get the really sharp kids, and the people in my laboratory, the graduate students and postdocs that were training those undergraduates, would have an easier time because they'd have these really smart kids. I mean that's dumb in so many ways, but I think the worst way is perpetuating privilege and taking kids who are already doing well and just helping them move up the ladder easily instead of picking out kids who actually are interested in the research we're doing, who are curious or who ask questions. It's a little bit harder to do that, but for many years I thought that the best thing to do was to pick these really weird metrics about undergraduates as the deciding factor on whether they would be in my lab.
So part of my personal ‘Unprofessoring’ journey, part of the process that I'm going through now, is really acknowledging the ways that I helped keep systems in place that I now fervently disagree with. And so maybe the newsletter will be helpful to people who want to stay but want to see examples of things they realise they’re doing too and they might want to stop, or so that they can show this newsletter to their colleague who's doing that and then they can stop, or something like that.
JM: There’s a parallel there with the publishing thing, I think, where to compare students on a “fair” scale they’re reduced to a GPA; to compare academics on a “fair” scale it’s number of citations or the impact factor of the journals that they publish in or total dollars of grant money awarded. And so these are potentially useful metrics, but when they become reified, and they become the only representation of that person's value, then it leads to these really skewed behaviors.
EH: Yeah, I've seen people in meetings counting papers on a CV. But also who has time to read all those papers and understand the field enough to know what they really mean? So it's very complicated.
JM: Our personal position on CVs is that they should be one page only if you’re going for a non-academic job similar to the ones that we’re in. And we raise this in talks and workshops we deliver and we see people with many, many publications react very strongly to our position. But of course the conventions are so different between the sectors. In another recent post, you wrote about identity and how your work becomes part of your self-concept. And how, when you are no longer doing that work, there's a blow to the self-concept. It makes it really hard to answer the default question ‘What do you do?’ So in the spirit of that post, I'm interested in what you are working on now, aside from the newsletter?
EH: I'm doing a couple of different things. The newsletter definitely takes up a lot of my passion, and I'm also working on a book proposal on the same topic. I took a class this spring in creative nonfiction, and I'm going to be starting what's called a master's writing program – you don’t get a Master’s degree but it's a one year writing program where the goal is to have a proposal in hand by the end of the year, or maybe even a draft - we'll see how fast I can write! So I've been spending a fair bit of time writing. And then I have been working a little bit as a consultant for a local company called BioStudio that does really interesting work, making 3D models and animations for clients, in particular for pharmaceutical companies that are in litigation. We work with a team of lawyers to help them craft their argument to the judge or to the jury about patent infringement and that kind of thing. And that's been just fascinating. I don't know a lot of pharmacology, but I do know biology and I also know how to represent complex scientific concepts simply and in a stepwise fashion, which is what's called for, so that's been pretty fun.
And then I am also still winding down my lab. We're still getting the last papers out, and we’ve been working on donating all of our seed stocks to a big stock center so that people can have access to all the recombinant seed that we generated over the last years and that kind of thing. So that's the main work that I've been doing this summer. I am looking for something a little more permanent, but I may end up cobbling together some editing, some teaching, some BioStudio work, we'll see what ends up being the case. But right now I'm kind of enjoying the dabbling a little bit, and just seeing what sticks. And having been around as long as I have I do know a lot of folks in a lot of different areas. One thing I have noticed is how friendly everybody outside of academia is - I'm not saying people in academia aren’t friendly - but people always seem so willing to chat for half an hour about their trajectory, how they got there, connect you to somebody else. And that has been a nice surprise to me.
JM: There’s something great about a good dabble. One of the things that people have said to us, with some anxiety, is that they feel that if they’re going to go into a non-academic career, they’ve got to pick the right one and land on the dream path straight away – almost like the non-academic version of the tenure path. And our perspective on that is it’s not what’s needed at all. We’ve had jobs that we did not particularly like, and we learned important things about what we don’t like through those experiences.
EH: I was talking to a friend of mine who works in science communication just yesterday and she was saying almost the same thing. You just need to get the first couple positions in hand, people in industry change positions all the time compared to academics. And so you get in there, you meet people, you learn what you have to learn, and then if you want to move on, you move on and that’s it. There's just this whole sort of anxiety around picking the right PhD lab, the right postdoctoral position, the right tenure-track position, and that's all gone because there's just no pressure there. You just move along, if you see fit. That is very reassuring, for sure.
JM: Yeah, I think there's this thing in academia where you'd better pick the right PhD topic because that sets the tone for what you're going to be studying when you're 65.
EH: Yes, exactly!
JM: And I'm not going to pretend it's not frictionless to shift industries or role type or whatever, but outside academia there is much more flexibility to go ‘Well I was a business analyst and I’ve retrained a little bit and now I'm going to be a product manager’ and that's totally doable, and no one particularly bats an eyelid. Whereas if you went from studying plant biology to studying moral cognition, people might be a wee bit confused about your academic career.
EH: Yes, you’d sure have to field a lot of questions about whether plants have morals or not!
JM: You can look forward to getting a bunch of emails about whether plants know right from wrong now! So a final question, and we've covered this a little bit, but I'm wondering if there's any particular advice you'd give to someone who's considering a career switch out of academia into non-academic work?
EH: I guess the thing that I've realised is how much of our PhD skills are really translatable. Like this work that I've been doing with BioStudio, I thought, ‘I don't know pharmacology. I don't know the law. I can't help you,’ but then I realised I have exactly the skill set they need: I know exactly how to look up stuff if I don't know it. And I also know how to represent things really clearly. I think I would just encourage anybody thinking about making the jump to feel – and this is very common advice, but it's really true – that so much of what you've learned to do is translatable. And It's the skills, not the specific knowledge that's translatable. Nobody in the outside world gives a sh**t about Piezo channels and plants. They don't care. But they do care about all the skills I used, and my lab group use, to get to the answers about mechanosensitive channels in plants. So I think that would be my advice.
JM: I hear you – you definitely can’t just type ‘moral decision making’ into a job search website and get any hits at all.
EH: You can't type ‘basic plant biology’ in there either, so I did paint myself into a corner a little bit with respect to research topic, but I have all these other skills that, I truly believe, will stand me in good stead.
And with that, we thank Elizabeth for sharing her story, and we’ll be following along via Unprofessoring!
In the meantime, if you are a PhD who has moved beyond academia and you are interested in sharing your story, please get in touch with us via our LinkedIn pages - Sam, Jonathan - we’d love to hear from you.
Interviews have been edited for length and clarity. Views, thoughts, and opinions expressed by persons interviewed in this series are solely that of the persons interviewed and do not reflect the views, opinions, or position of Sam, Jonathan or Sequitur Consulting.