This week marks five years since I 'risked' leaving academia.

Five years ago, I took what many people around me considered a massive risk: I quit my full-time tenured associate professor position at the University of Minnesota to go full-time into marketing in digital strategy.

Although I see their point – it’s risky leaving a job that you technically can’t be fired from (and that you're good at and fairly comfortable doing) – I had a hard time imagining myself not taking a leap. I loved teaching and engaging with students, but my experience in academia had been tough, honestly. From the time I was in my Ph.D. program to the time I got tenure, it felt like a constant struggle to defend my research (critical, qualitative, feminist and studying adolescent girls and digital media) as worthy of consideration -- in job talks, in academic journals and even at some of the bigger academic conferences. Every research presentation and every narrative always had to contain a defense statement up front to explain its importance to an imagined (though very real) social scientist who would inevitably wonder (aloud) why we should care about adolescent girls and how I could get any significant results from such a small cohort of participants. After more than 10 years of doing that, it had become exhausting.

The academic politics were often brutal. Yes, all offices have politics of sorts, but academia is infamous for good reason. So much of what you do is judged anonymously. From blind peer reviews to course reviews, the feedback is almost entirely written, anonymous and not given to your face. Non-academics usually don’t realize that non-tenured faculty get reviewed and voted on by their senior faculty members annually, and those votes and comments are anonymous. If you don’t get renewed, you have to find a new job. If you don’t get tenure, you have to find a new job (and most likely, you won’t find another tenure track professor job after being rejected, so you have to find a new career). When I went up for tenure, my department (bless them) voted unanimously in favor of awarding me tenure, and the College of Liberal Arts tenure committee returned with a split decision, which they said hinged primarily on a letter from a professor from another university who thought I’d "under-theorized" a chapter in my book about teen girls and Elvis. (You can’t make this stuff up.) That was three days before Christmas in 2013. I'd gone back to work to do the final edits on said book only three weeks after giving birth to my second child on March 2013 so that I could make sure I was set for tenure review. It took until May 2014 to learn the acting dean had decided to award me tenure as the tie-breaker on the split decision.

Fortunately, the waiting gave me a lot of time to think about how miserable the process had made me, and think about my strengths and experience -- and imagine a different future for myself and my family.

I realized that even if I got tenure and stayed in my position, I would risk being miserable. Ultimately, it was an easy choice. Not at all a risk. And I was right: The past five years of my career have been so fulfilling, and in fact, more fulfilling than the life I was leading as a college professor. I’m much happier doing strategic work in faster-paced environments. I’m much happier and more productive when I’m in a creative role and collaborating with others on problem solving. In my role as a professor, I spent a lot of time studying audiences on digital media and analyzing audience data, which I enjoyed, but it’s been so much more fulfilling to go beyond studying and actually develop and carry out strategies to better engage those audiences. I'm also much better compensated -- and yes, I work at a nonprofit organization now. (One thing I miss: Teaching. Especially the classes with fewer than 100 students where I could really get to know them. I now try to serve as a mentor/adviser to people whom I manage, and that kind of scratches the itch, but I might eventually try to teach again.)

In the past five years, I also learned what I think a lot of Twin Cities job seekers might know: People here are incredibly giving of their time when it comes to helping others navigate career change. In the year leading up to leaving academia, I met with and benefited from the wisdom of so many amazing people. I decided to see if I could remember them all, and I wound up creating a list of nearly 40 people who spent time talking to me about their work, inspiring me and ultimately, connecting me with other amazing people. Creating this list has been a lesson in gratitude and humility, and I’d like to thank all of them publicly; I'll try to tag them when I share this post.

To everyone who talked to me about leaving academia 5-6 years ago: You truly helped me see that what some people considered to be a risk was in fact, a path to personal happiness and gratification, and I like to think that your encouragement and advice also enabled me to become an outstanding digital marketer/content/social media strategist, a stronger leader and a better citizen in general. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I hope I can buy you coffee again in the coming few years! 

To those of you who are thinking about taking a risk and leaving a job that you thought was going to be more fulfilling than it turned out to be: Give yourself space to really consider an alternative future. Like me, you might learn that leaving is not the biggest risk, or really, much of a risk at all.