Switching fields mid-career within academia

March 10, 2020 12:50 AM

I'm a middle aged woman in academia, looking for information on how to change academic fields with as little fuss as possible. For the sake of my family I'd like to remain in the same city and possibly the same university, though I'm open to working outside a university.

I'm an Associate Professor position in a social science department. Over the last year or two I've lost interest in the research area that I've spent most of my career working on. It's hard to get interested in things I used to care about deeply, and I've abandoned quite a lot of projects lately. I haven't stopped working though, I'm spending all my time on new projects that are in more of a computer science area. I like this new area a lot. I've set it up so that my teaching has shifted from social science classes to programming classes, and I like that. In fact, I've managed to build up a pretty strong reputation in this new area, even despite my inexperience in that field. So I'd like to find a way to spend more of my time there if I can.

I guess the thing is that these career changes feel like they're part of a mid-life crisis. My kids are getting old enough that I have a little more free time than I used to and my partner now earns more than me. I think it's these two things that have given me the freedom to seriously consider changing things up at work: until now I couldn't really afford to take any risks because we had young kids and I was the only one with any real job security. So now I find myself asking myself all these hard questions about what I want to do at my work and the short answer seems to be "yes I want something different, but I'm scared of change". My personal life has been turbulent for the last few years so the thought of following through on these changes I want to make at work is scary. A part of me really doesn't want to change but the thought of doing more of the same is depressing and fills me with dread.

I realise this is a little open ended, partly because I'm not entirely sure what I'm trying to do. I *think* what I'm looking for here is advice on how to manage this kind of career change. How do I handle colleagues who expect me to keep doing the same thing that I used to? How do I wind down involvement with projects that I have no enthusiasm for? If I start trying to assert my own needs more at work, what traps do I need to be aware of? Should I leave the university? That kind of thing.

posted by snippet to Work & Money (14 answers total)

If your work would be more at home in another department, and they're amenable, you can negotiate with the administration for a joint appointment or even an outright move (although the latter may be complicated by your terminal degree). Joint appointments can be tricky--the departments have to agree on your service obligations, for example, and if promotion depends on the approval of both departments, your life can become very complicated--but they would certainly open up space for you to pursue new interests.

Less drastically, because I assume that whoever does the scheduling for your department knows what you're doing, you can work out a new balance of course assignments. One former colleague whose interests changed radically would occasionally show up in the rotation for service courses in his original field that couldn't easily be done by someone else, but otherwise was still scheduled in according to his new field.
posted by thomas j wise at 2:06 AM on March 10, 2020 [3 favorites]

This is a partial answer at best, but I’ve seen faculty use a sabbatical year to respecialize: they arrange a visiting post somewhere for a semester or a year and start up some collaborations that way. It doesn’t sound like you really need to convince external people that you know what you’re doing here, but maybe an interlude like this could help the transition feel more real to your colleagues down the hall? And new collaborations are invigorating anyway. Good luck to you -- this sounds like an exciting place to be!

(And I don’t know the details, so I could be wrong, but my guess is you can keep a lot of goodwill in your department if you’re willing to keep teaching computer science inflected classes in your major, because those could generate butts in seats for your department. $$$!)
posted by eirias at 4:38 AM on March 10, 2020 [4 favorites]

You have tenure! Just change up what you're doing and stay put.
The flexibility you have in your position will be great when your kids are teens.
Apply for a sabbatical to get a little breather.
posted by k8t at 4:59 AM on March 10, 2020 [3 favorites]

How are your data analysis/statistics skills? You could transfer to an institutional research analyst type role.
posted by Young Kullervo at 5:51 AM on March 10, 2020 [1 favorite]

Ask nicely for a joint appointment, then get a job offer elsewhere and ask less nicely, is what I've seen work in one case. But, it was a less significant change.
posted by eotvos at 5:57 AM on March 10, 2020

If you're moving to CS that's a conference-heavy culture. If you submit to conferences you could be going to those and meeting in-person several times a year with colleagues in your new field from different institutions.

Also a joint or courtesy faculty appointment In a new school/dept (is your next move). And ignore your colleagues who cares what they think if you're tenured? My professors did all kinds of passion projects and crazy shit once they got tenure.

Could you take on consulting project with a programming bent in your area of specialty?

Also changing department entirely seems pretty extreme to me. I assume you don't want to go up for tenure again in 6 years. But what you could do is start a joint degree or even certificate through your own dept-- maybe a digital humanities type thing? My mom is in finance but helped start a Healthcare Finance PhD program at her school med school once she started to do work in that area. She found it very rewarding
posted by shaademaan at 6:10 AM on March 10, 2020 [3 favorites]

Would you be eligible for one of the Mellon New Directions Fellowships? I have known a couple of social scientists who have got these to spend a year training in another discipline.

"New Directions Fellowships assist faculty members in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who seek to acquire systematic training outside their own areas of special interest. The program is intended to enable scholars in the humanities to work on problems that interest them most, at an appropriately advanced level of sophistication. In addition to facilitating the work of individual faculty members, these awards should benefit scholarship in the humanities more generally by encouraging the highest standards in cross-disciplinary research."
posted by EllaEm at 6:48 AM on March 10, 2020 [3 favorites]

The advice in the above answers is great. Maybe think about the scope of what you want the change to be? If you want to teach classes in your new field, seek a joint appointment. After you've established yourself in the CS department, there may be the opportunity for you to switch down the road (one of our faculty did exactly this). If it is the research specifically that you're bored of and want to change, just do it. As tenured faculty I cannot think of a reason why you shouldn't do whatever research you want to do. Keep establishing collaborators in the new field. CS is known at my uni for being a very flexible field; we have two faculty are highly interdisciplinary and frankly they are both superstars! Follow your research passions.
posted by DTMFA at 6:50 AM on March 10, 2020

This is the reason tenure exists. This is part of your intellectual and scholarly development. Present it that way to your university. You can get an affiliate appointment in CS first, then after you get to know people there ask the chair to help you transfer your FTE. This is not bad, this is a sign that you are growing and not stagnating, and especially bc universities put more resources into CS than they put into the humanities these days, this direction of movement should be supported by the admin.
posted by nantucket at 8:04 AM on March 10, 2020 [1 favorite]

At my university CS has a hard time recruiting and keeping faculty because they can earn so much more in non-academic settings. This may be the case at your university, which puts you in a good place. If the CS stuff you're doing is relevant for research in the sciences and social sciences stay where you are and develop and propose a CS course and get it cross listed in relevant departments.
posted by mareli at 8:58 AM on March 10, 2020 [2 favorites]

I haven't stopped working though, I'm spending all my time on new projects that are in more of a computer science area. I like this new area a lot. I've set it up so that my teaching has shifted from social science classes to programming classes, and I like that. In fact, I've managed to build up a pretty strong reputation in this new area, even despite my inexperience in that field. So I'd like to find a way to spend more of my time there if I can.

I'm also midcareer and I've seen lots of people do something like what you're asking about, it is really, really normal (I'm saying this because reading between the lines it seems that you might doubt this). In my case, my work shifted partly computational somewhat before tenure and that was fine too -- but I work in a department / research area where this may be more natural. Honestly, based on my experience and others it sounds to me from the quoted text like you've already made the change, and the question is really about managing messaging / expectations; for many people I think shifting teaching can be the most tricky point, especially around service classes. (I've made some abortive attempts to shift my core subject area class more computational and this has had only mixed success, going to try again this fall. Luckily I don't teach any big service classes that I wanted to ax.) Here are some ideas, all of which have been useful to me:

• Do a really thorough pass on your academic website to convey your new identity. I recently did this (where my website had been creaking along with mostly 10-year-old structure, and I rebuilt it from the ground) and I was shocked by how good it felt.
• If you're not already, apply for some grants in your new computational research; it could well be more fundable than your old area and if money is coming in this will quell (at least in public) a certain amount of skepticism. Maybe even try to apply for something like a training grant.
• Consider a computational spin on your old research projects. IME most of us at this career stage are utterly sick of at least some things we've been doing at this point, and you may not be considering them from this angle because of this. But it can be refreshing to try to approach them in a completely different way.
• Co-teach with computer science collaborators -- this (again IME) gets you access to a different pool of students which can be pretty interesting. (Submitting grants with them also can have this effect.)
• See if you can contribute to some kind of computational track within your program -- there's a huge amount of institutional interest in this kind of thing these days, even if some of your colleagues might have doubts. So odds are this will make deans/etc happy. And this can cement your public identity as a "computational person" without having to do much to say it directly.

I can't really give great advice on whether changing departments will help or hurt, since my department is very suited for computational work relative to most departments in my research areas. However, one thing I can suggest is that if you don't have a directly relevant degree of some kind, it may be tricky to get your foot in to CS proper, if that's what you're interested in. If you can get a joint appointment now, that may help too (of course, getting your foot in the door for that is something where credentials may help too). I have an undergraduate degree in CS, and even having that, I can see really obvious differences in how CS people on average interact with me vs. others from time to time...obviously there's much variation in individual reaction on this issue. This can be entirely circumventable but I unfortunately can't tell you that you wouldn't face some credentialism. (And I'm male so I don't have firsthand experience but I would be shocked if credentialism works orthogonally to gender asymmetries in CS...)

Also, if you haven't already, I do recommend trying to figure out whether you would really want to be in an "engineering" culture, which CS departments can often have, and thinking of this in a way that is independent of research area. There may be sociological differences in e.g. how research groups are structured, how research is locked to conference submission cycles, the role of model evaluation in your research subarea, the role and types of funding, etc., that could be negative for you. I personally don't think I'd want to be properly in a CS department (or at least a typical one) for some of these reasons...better for me at least to just have a foot there of some kind and keep the more science-oriented culture of my home department.
posted by advil at 11:31 AM on March 10, 2020 [3 favorites]

(Also, in case it's useful for knowing how to compare, my PhD is in Linguistics, I'm in a Cognitive Science department, and despite the undergrad degree I did almost no computational research during my PhD up through my first several years on the tenure clock.)
posted by advil at 12:04 PM on March 10, 2020

Oh, and one more thing (then I'll stop posting, I promise): contributing to computational training in your department can potentially be a major factor for preparing students (both undergraduate and graduate at all levels) for non-academic jobs of all sorts. Again, this may be something that some (but not usually all) of your colleagues are skeptical of -- but if this is a topic that has any resonance with you, then during a career shift of this kind, it can be really helpful politically to play up with some varieties of colleagues as well as university admin, and something that could be genuinely helpful to a wide range of students.
posted by advil at 12:17 PM on March 10, 2020 [1 favorite]

Hmm... I think my advice is a little different than many people's here, primarily because of this point advil made:

Honestly, based on my experience and others it sounds to me from the quoted text like you've already made the change, and the question is really about managing messaging / expectations.

I agree: based on what you've written here, you've already done the two hardest things about making the changes you're talking about: getting your teaching to reflect your true interests, and establishing a reputation in your new area. You're also already primarily working on new projects that you like, and have abandoned old ones you're not interested in. In other words, you've already accomplished most of what you say you want to achieve. The rest is managing expectations and saying no, which is something everybody has to do and I think would be easier in your shoes since you have a clear reason for saying no that's not personal ("That project sounds cool but it's not really where I'm wanting to focus my research on nowadays").

All of which makes me think that either I'm misunderstanding the situation, or what you've written doesn't quite capture your dilemma. You say you're scared of change -- is it possible that what you really want is to make a bigger change than what's outlined here, but you're afraid of doing it and you're hoping that more minor tweaks will make you happy? What's your internal monologue when you read the responses above that suggest more of the same kinds of minor changes (e.g., affiliate positions, a new spin on old projects, new conferences)? Are you excited and energised, or do you still feel that same dread and despair?

I'd suggest that if it's the latter, you probably want a larger change: maybe a new academic institution where you're hired specifically to be the new you, or maybe industry, where the culture and expectations are more in line with your new values. Whether you take that larger change is up to you, but my experience (as somebody else in the middle of a midlife crisis) is that if you're really unhappy, putting off larger changes just draws the misery out and doesn't resolve anything, resulting in more life turmoil in the long run. Good luck!
posted by forza at 2:30 PM on March 10, 2020 [2 favorites]