Five Reasons Why I Chose to Pursue a Career in Academia

 When I entered graduate school in the Fall of 2006, I knew that I wanted to earn my masters and PhD degrees and then pursue a career as an academic faculty member.  Over the course of the 6.5 years that I was in graduate school (2 years to complete my masters degree and 4.5 years to complete my PhD), my goals and ambitions for what type of faculty position I wanted to pursue evolved and changed.  By the time I started the PhD phase of graduate school, I had decided that I wanted to pursue a faculty position where teaching was the primary focus.  After I graduated with my PhD in 2012, I spent about 2.5 years teaching as an adjunct faculty member, during which time I gained invaluable experience teaching a wide array of courses in the Exercise Sciences (my area of expertise).  In 2015, my professional goal became as reality when I earned a tenure track faculty position at Elon University, a mid-sized liberal arts university in Elon, NC.  Even better, my husband is also a faculty member at Elon University (he earned his tenure track faculty position there in 2008).  I was recently granted tenure and promotion to Associate Professor and my husband is now a tenured Full Professor.  I guess one could say that we solved the “two-body problem” once and for all!

Academia, like all professions, has its ups and downs, its good days and bad days, and its successes and shortcomings.  Recently, I have been thinking about why I was drawn to academia in the first place, and why I continue to be drawn to this profession.  I have distilled my reasons for choosing an academic faculty position into five major categories.  My hope is that they resonate with others, and maybe even provide some inspiration.

1.  I enjoy teaching.

I was fortunate to gain experience teaching first as a graduate student and then an adjunct faculty member before I became a full-time academic faculty member.  I have taught a wide range of courses in the Exercise Sciences over the years, but my primary areas of teaching expertise include Physiology, Pathophysiology, and Exercise Physiology coursework.  I enjoy the challenge of taking complex physiology concepts and figuring out how to best present them to my students.  I also enjoy the challenge of figuring out how to make course content accessible and engaging to a diverse group of learners.  And since I teach Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) students, I have the added challenge of making sure that I intentionally and explicitly draw connections between basic science concepts and their clinical relevance.  This latter point is something that I have spent many hours developing and refining over the past 5 years. 

Teaching is what I like most about my job, and I love that I can be my passionate, energetic, creative, and nerdy science self in front of my students.  The classroom is a place where I truly feel at home, and I look forward to my time there with students.  I love seeing the lightbulbs that go off when a student who has struggled with a prior concept finally “gets it.”  I feel true enthusiasm for the courses that I teach, and I love passing on that enthusiasm to my students, helping them develop their foundational and clinical knowledge as it relates to Physiology, Pathophysiology, and Exercise Physiology,

2.  I enjoy collaborating with others.

No matter whether the task relates to teaching, research, or service, I enjoy that academia is a collaborate field.  In the classroom, I have paired with colleagues who are orthopedic PT specialists, neurological PT specialists, and pediatric PT specialists to lead our DPT students through clinical case scenarios that blend neuromusculoskeletal physiology, pediatric physiology and PT practice applications.  I routinely pair with my anatomist colleague to co-teach cardiopulmonary and renal anatomy and physiology to our first year DPT students.  I have consulted with my PT colleagues to write many of the clinical case scenarios that I use in class.  As a researcher, there is no way that I could carry out any of my projects without my faculty and student colleagues, whether it is designing the research project, recruiting the participants, executing the data collection, analyzing and interpreting the data, or disseminating the results in presentation or publication form.  And by its nature, committee work is collaborative.  I have had the pleasure of collaborating with colleagues, both within my department and across campus, on numerous committees.  I enjoy the energy that surrounds collaboration and the inspiration that comes from rich discussion with colleagues.  It is this energy that helps to fuel my own excitement for the work that I do as an academic faculty member.

3.  I enjoy problem-solving.

With collaboration comes the opportunity to work with colleagues on initiatives that take a great deal of careful thought, planning, and execution. Research studies are definitely an exercise in problem solving, no matter whether it involves coming up with the best approach to investigate a research question, run the statistical analyses, or clearly explain the findings in a presentation or manuscript.  Committees are charged with working towards specific tasks and organizational initiatives. Sometimes these tasks and initiatives do involve finding solutions to issues that are truly problematic. Other times, these tasks and initiatives involve devising new, creative, and unique solutions to achieve an organizational goal, create a new program, or product.

One particularly salient problem-solving example from my own professional life involves the work that I have done over the past 2.5 years as the Chair of my program’s Curriculum Committee. When I joined that committee and became its Chair, I inherited the task of leading my department through the process of substantially revising our program’s curriculum.  Throughout the years, a number of programmatic issues had arisen for which it became evident that a revised curriculum was the necessary solution to rectifying these issues.  In leading my department through this process, not only did I have to learn about the various processes involved in curriculum design, approval, and implementation, but I also had to develop my own ability for building consensus among a diverse group of voices and interests.  It was one of the hardest, yet one of the most rewarding and transformative experiences of my professional life.  I am proud to say that our efforts were successful, our revised curriculum gained all the necessary university and accreditation approvals, and it was implemented this past January.

 4.  I appreciate having autonomy.

I appreciate that as an academic faculty member at my particular institution, I have the freedom to craft my own story when it comes to my teaching activities, research agenda, and service contributions.  While I do have a specific load of courses that I teach each year, I have the general freedom to decide how I deliver them, so long as I stay within the credit hours allotted for them and I cover the course objectives that are on record.  While one of the aspects that made me an attractive hire to my department is my background in exercise oncology research, I am not bound to that line of inquiry.  And I have had the opportunity to choose involvement in a number of committees and interest groups at the departmental, school, and university level, with focus areas ranging from curriculum to creation and design to evaluating student academic and professional concerns to community science outreach to coordinating religious and spiritual life activities on campus.  While university service participation can occasionally be tedious, it has also afforded me the ability to become involved in areas of university life that I’ve been curious about.  I am glad that I have a job that gives me the opportunity to pursue these interests with colleagues.

 5.  I appreciate having flexibility.

With professional autonomy comes the opportunity to have a generally flexible work schedule. As one would expect, the least flexible aspect of my job is my teaching schedule.  I do have to be present for my classes as they are scheduled, with everything else scheduled around them.  I am expected to be present for regular departmental, school, and university-wide faculty/staff meetings. But for most other job-related tasks, I have the flexibility to decide when and where I will work on those.  Certainly for tasks that require real-time communication with others (e.g. research meetings and data collections, meetings with students, committee meetings, etc.), I have a bit less flexibility regarding when those occur. But for independent work like prepping class, writing manuscripts, planning committee meetings, etc., I have a lot of flexibility.

As a person with children who is also married to an academic faculty member, I greatly appreciate that my husband and I have jobs that allows us this kind of flexibility.  It means that I can take my children to the pool on a summer afternoon.  It means that one of us can stay home with our children if they are ill.  It means that we have been able to do the majority of our work at home during this past year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the exception being when we returned to teaching classes in-person in the Fall of 2020.  Autonomy and flexibility are probably the aspects of my job for which I am the most thankful.

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As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, academia like all professions, has its ups and downs, its good days and bad days, and its successes and shortcomings.  While I don’t love my job every minute of every day, my experiences in academia over these past 15 years as a graduate student, an adjunct faculty member, and a tenure-track faculty member, have been largely positive and rewarding.  I feel fortunate that I have been able to successfully make my way as a now-tenured academic faculty member, and that I get to be a part of a profession that I truly enjoy.

 If you are an academic, or considering a job in academia, what draws you to this line of work?