Don’t be a “success disaster” in academe
Don’t be a “success disaster” in academe
Dr. Joe Stubenrauch on how to transition to an industry role
Today I continue my interview series with recovering academics who have transitioned to industry. Joe Stubenrauch is a former Associate Professor of History at Baylor University who now works as a UX Researcher at Amazon Web Services. He also offers academic career coaching and resources for transitioning from academe to industry on his website. Below, I’ve embedded a YouTube crowdcast that captures many of the highlights from Joe’s shift from a tenured faculty role into instructional design.
My conversation with Joe is too long for email, so you will need to click through to Substack to read the whole thing. But you’ll want to do that, because we dig into the nitty gritty of how to translate cumbersome academic CVs into industry resumes, how to leverage networking to identify realistic entry points for ourselves, and how to push our applications to the tipping point where a hiring manager sees us as an asset, rather than as a risk. Lots of good stuff.
Remember that if you’re missing the audio format, you can click on the headphones in the Substack app for text-to-speech narration.
I offer a long preview of our conversation for free subscribers, but this might also be a good time to consider upgrading, which you can do by clicking the button below. In addition to my interview series, I have more thought pieces coming your way, including a review of the AMC series Lucky Hank next Tuesday and original fiction next Friday.
A Conversation with Dr. Joe Stubenrauch
Joe Stubenrauch: It's strange how far away the academic world is starting to become after it had loomed so large and had taken up every corner of my adult life up until then. I joke that I recommend a midlife crisis to everyone. Or rather an opportunity to pause and reinvent your life or change the dials. If you could change anything, what would it be? If you designed your life from scratch, knowing what you know now, what would you set up for yourself? And then see what you can go for. Well, you can't get it all, but what can you go for?
Joshua Dolezal: Well, this sounds to me like pandemic disruption. And my theory is that the pandemic didn't suddenly create these new crises. It just intensified existential problems that had been going on for decades already in higher ed. And it pushed them to a breaking point. So, I don't know if you agree with that, but I’d like to start with that moment when you, as a highly successful faculty member, knew that you had to leave, and how much of that came from before the pandemic? How much of that was this acute crisis mentality that came from COVID?
Joe Stubenrauch: I would say the majority of it came before the pandemic. And I think you're right. If this is what you meant, I feel like the pandemic was a catalyst. It was something that, for me, really forced the decision or raised the stakes and made me feel like I had to make a decision, but it had been a decision that was very long time in the making. And so it's actually difficult for me to point to any one moment where I knew that I was going to leave even in the weeks between getting the job offer and accepting it. I wasn't a hundred percent sure.
So it began for me in a way that I assume most other academics experience. And it's not always a sign that you should leave or you are going to leave if you have doubts, even in graduate school, of is this the right path for me or not? I tended to view doubts as a weakness or a problem. This was my lack of confidence. This was my imposter syndrome. This was me coming up with reasons to try to avoid the hard work. It caused a lot of negative self-talk for me. You procrastinate too much. You are so flaky. Why are you not more productive? Why are you not more passionate? I often interpreted it in that framework of, ah, here's my flaw, here's my weakness coming up.
And same then on the tenure track – anytime there were doubts, I would find myself imagining another life. And I tended to see that as like, oh, that's my coping strategy. There's my little mental escape there. But it continued after tenure. And I think that's where I started to pay a little bit more attention. I had tenure. My department was a very nice department, wonderful colleagues. And yet when I was moving, I was going through some old notes and papers, and I found in a journal I wrote in 2017 – a year after getting tenure – “is there a way I could get a job at a big tech company on the West Coast? Is that possible?” And I'd totally forgotten about it.
Joshua Dolezal: I know from my own exit that there are wheels within wheels. Some of it is your discipline. Some of it is your institution, your employer. And some of it's just you, your personal disposition and what you're describing in terms of doubts. I think I was always constitutionally skeptical as a first-generation college student from rural Montana. I never really believed in academe. I just knew I was good at literature, I was good at research, and I was good at teaching. It was instinctive. It was natural. And so I thought of it more as a way of beating the system that I could do this thing that wasn't really work. I fell for that mythology of: you find the thing you love, you never work a day in your life. And I could have the summers, I could be flexible. All of those things that we tell ourselves are perks of academia and sometimes they're true. But my mindset as an academic was very anti-industry. I chose this thing where I didn't have to build a resume and conform to a company line. I didn't have to be a company man. And that really appealed to me, coming from wide open country out west. And what you're describing in terms of doubts, I think are symptoms of a totalizing institution that really does demand an even higher degree of conformity maybe than industry.
Joe Stubenrauch: I'm still sifting through systemic issues, institutional issues, versus personal fit. And so part of the journey for me has been becoming a lot more self-compassionate, as cliched as that is. A moment of realizing, again, this was in the post-tenure moment when I was thinking about, okay, what was my experience on the tenure track?
And I was getting a lot of advice about, okay, you're an associate professor, now everyone's going to come and dump a bunch of service on you. It's also a moment where you feel like you can pause and be intentional about what you want this next phase of your career to look like. And I was thinking through, well, what work do I like? And I tended to have a negative way of describing it at first, which was, oh gosh, I really like just talking with other people and interacting with other people. I'm not very good at self-discipline if I'm just supposed to go and do something for a year and then show up with like a draft that then undergoes some revisions and I disappear for another year. I thrive under clear and shorter time timeframes. And why do I like feedback so much? Oh gosh, I just always want pats on the back. And you really don't get that in academia. At least not in the way I was craving. And there was some moment in there where it flipped for me, where I realized, wait, what I was seeing as a weakness in academia could be a strength elsewhere. Like there are other industries out there where talking with other people, having quick turnarounds, learning new skills all the time, being able to go broad sometimes instead of very deep is a strength. And so I began to imagine that other life.
There's a great phrase from the book Designing Your Life by Evans and Burnett. They call it success disaster, which is – you're in the field that is probably not the right fit for you, but you have enough success that you're never deterred out of it. And so you find yourself at mid-career in a tough spot. So I think that was correct. I was a success disaster. There were several moments where I should have been pushed out. I could have taken an exit ramp and I didn't. And I think in retrospect I should have.
I was also thinking about how my life choices were constrained as far as what I could do and where I could go. I led a semester abroad in St. Andrews, Scotland, which was one of the best experiences of my life. And coming back from it, I realized, oh, I can't like move there. I can't move to some place where I loved it. I can only move where I can get these few narrow jobs. I'm not a superstar, so lateral moves are going to be long shots for me, and a lateral move to some place where I actually really want to be is an even longer shot. You get tenure and you think, well this is it. This is what the next 30 or 35 years of my life look like. And then the pandemic comes along and, oh, you feel trapped.
Joshua Dolezal: To be an academic you have to go where the job is. And sometimes it's going to be in a state where you don't feel like you belong for the topography or the culture. I don't know if you have kids, but I have three kids and I was speaking with a scientist who just left a position at Washington University in St. Louis, and she has a trans son, and that was part of it. They left and went to Portland, Oregon. When you have kids, it's really clarifying, isn’t it?
Joe Stubenrauch: It is, yes. So I have a daughter and since leaving, and the changes that have happened in Texas, I'm glad that I did. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So all of those…feeling trapped, geography, politics, it all came together and there wasn't a single moment other than I messed around. I was always doing side projects and messing around. I was always doing what I shouldn't be. Oh, maybe I'll teach myself JavaScript. I'm always messing around with something on the side. And so I decided, let's turn that energy into…what if I created a new career?
Joshua Dolezal: And so I know that you started learning these things even before you left, and I really appreciate how you laid out that process for yourself. In one of your articles on your website, you talk about prototyping careers. And you don't have to jump off a cliff professionally to do that. So what is prototyping?
Joe Stubenrauch: Doing small experiments, and the experiments can look different ways. It can just be at the level of learning and reading and exploring. Imagine for a month that you are going to enter this new field. How does that feel, how does that sit with you? How does it feel to read blogs or follow people in that field? What does it feel like to start doing the work? Is it interesting? Find discrete ways to do more. Perhaps you can fit it into your current work, perhaps not. So my examples would be I felt like, well, programming, I should think about software development. And so in my evenings and early mornings I started teaching myself coding and I enjoyed it. But I hit a point where I realized that to become good enough to get hired at the type of company I wanted to be hired at and to do what I would want to do, would take years of work. And I think ultimately my own assessment was I would never be more than a mediocre programmer. You just have to hit the wall over and over again for a month or two months, and then eventually you get it.
And I began to think this will take too long for the timeframe I want and I'm not sure I'll have the success. Which I don't know if that's actually a good gauge for whether you should go for a career, because I think we do doubt ourselves too much. But I thought, let me try something else.
So I backed off of programming and I thought, well what am I actually good at as an academic? I felt like I was good at selling my research versus actually doing the research. And I don't mean to say that I was like amazing at selling my research, but compared to my actual work, my selling of it was always better than the work. So I thought, hey, if I'm an extrovert and I like pitching things and selling things why not align with something that gives me meaning and passion and really double down on those strengths.
Why not go into nonprofit development work, fundraising? So I started volunteering for a local nonprofit in my community that I cared about. And I walked into the director and I said, have you ever had anyone volunteer to do grant writing for you? Is that possible? And she said, I've been a director of this nonprofit for 19 years, and you are the first person to ever walk in the door and volunteer to write grants. And I was being apologetic because it's a nonprofit that helps infants and very young children who basically have brain damage due to stressful environments that they have experienced. And I said, I don't have the right skillset to help with the kids to volunteer – that's not me. But I could write. Do you have grants that you need help writing for? And she said, yes. So I got to see that world. I wrote grants for her for a bit. Maybe four or five. And we got significant enough ones. It felt really great. But I came to realize that I wasn't sure it would get me where I wanted to go. Like I should have been noble, like, oh, I'm doing this for the kids. What does pay matter? What does where I live matter? But that's the same trap as academia. And I was at that time really wanting to either get to the West Coast or to Europe. And I wasn't sure nonprofit work was the way to go. I started to doubt that, so I paused that experiment. Both of those were discreet, like two, three month experiments. And so, talking to people in the world, learning some of the skillsets, putting them in the practice, I was starting to make some little things. Front end web development with JavaScript. Or I was actually writing grants.
Joshua Dolezal: One thing I really love about your website and some of the resources you've shared is that you demystify the process. There's this e-portfolio that you created, these little artifacts that are proof that you had acquired these skills. One of them is just a simple thing that you coded for a PDF certificate of achievement. You designed a background. You even showed some cultural sensitivity by adjusting date formatting, so it wasn't defaulting to the U.S. month/day/year. So that was a fun one that I assume was not terribly complicated, but you have another more complicated one that is filled with industry jargon that is an ICU Soft Skills Tutorial. And that's the one that I'm really curious about. But I want to back up a little bit. You began this process of the portfolio and building some of these projects by learning from, I think it was Devlin Peck? So who is Devlin?
Joe Stubenrauch: Devlin is my, one of my patron saints. He was a freelance instructional designer and successful at it. And he was putting out content articles on his website, as well as some little videos on YouTube about “What is instructional design? How do you break in?” When I became interested in instructional design, I came across him fairly quickly. He has an article called “How to Become an Instructional Designer.” And to make this actionable to anyone following along, my advice is to become a known quantity, right? Part of networking is showing up. If something's not giving you value, stop. But I would start showing up to like, oh, someone's talking live on LinkedIn. Oh, someone's doing a conversation on YouTube. Oh, someone has a Slack channel. I'm going to become a regular, not maybe the loudest person, but like, I'm going to absorb what other people are saying and become maybe a little bit of a known quantity. And so at some point, Devlin sent out an email saying, Hey, I need 10 people to help test this tutorial I'm putting together for some programming for some under the hood JavaScript stuff for one of the tools used in instructional design. And I jumped on it. I said, yeah, I'll help you test this. So he creates the Slack channel and invites 10 people into it. I think half of them never really showed up, and there were maybe two or three of us who made it all the way through the tutorial, but I just turned on my professor hat and skills and started giving him very detailed feedback. Like, oh, this was unclear to me, oh, there's a typo here. We just hit it off. And it's hard sometimes when you're beginning and networking to find ways to give value to other people, but by showing up, being part of his audience, giving him feedback on things… We started talking on Slack and he ended up mentoring me. He helped a couple other people around the same time. And we all landed jobs at good companies and that caused him to then think, oh, I can actually help people.
So he started offering a very cheap bootcamp. It’s a hit. He offers it again. It's a hit. And now he's completely stopped freelancing and runs a very high ticket bootcamp for people who want to break into instructional design. I got lucky. I got everything for free as a friend.
This crowdcast highlights Joe’s collaboration with Devlin.
Devlin was really pushing me and now pushes his students. Your portfolio doesn't have to be exhaustive. You need a couple good pieces of evidence, and generally you really need one because the hiring manager is going fast. You make the first thing look like the thing they're looking for. So I have seen portfolios where like I have to scroll to about the fifth or sixth item to find the one that's actually relevant to what I'm wanting. Anyway, you put it first, you do a really good job.
Joshua Dolezal: Well, so the ICU Soft Skills Tutorial, how did you get the problem for that? Is that something you just came up with? You used all kinds of industry language for the method by which you proposed a solution. So there was a whole journey that you went on to create this artifact.
Joe Stubenrauch: I was looking for some examples that would not be purely academic. I didn't want it to be about the classroom. I didn't want it to be about the university. I wanted to find a real problem.