Yesterday marked 25 years since I entered the private sector at Princeton Consultants after walking away from a post-doc at Columbia's Harriman Institute. The post-doc basically paid me (albeit not that much money) to do nothing more than polish my dissertation to make it a publishable book -- which I wasn't even doing as I focused primarily on finding a next job. So leaving seemed like a foolish thing to do from one perspective.
But Natalie was well on her way at the time. Mary was about seven months pregnant and Natalie joined the family exactly two months later, joining Leslie and also Mary and me (who were married on that day) as a member of the June 7 club. So it made sense for me to get started early so that I'd know shit from shinola before my paternity leave kicked in a couple of months hence.
As I have discovered, the business world is not all wine and roses. But net net, I'm pretty sure I've learned more by leaving academia then I would have by staying in it. Who knows? It's not really a fruitful line of inquiry. I'm here. I'm doing fine.
No comments:
Post a Comment