Why academe discourages a growth mindset

And how to find actual career progression outside higher ed

Thanks to all who responded to my poll about starting a virtual book club! It looks like there are more than enough of us to pull that off, so I’ll be back in touch when I’m ready to give it a try.

Today I’m rolling out a new feature: transcribed interviews. The podcast is attracting interest, but producing quality audio is a lot of work (I’m a one-man operation here), and I can only manage one of those episodes per month. If you read on the Substack iOS app, you can already listen to every article by clicking the headphones icon at the top of the post. But some of you would rather read the podcast transcript than listen to the audio, so I’m planning to rotate in more of these text-only conversations with an emphasis on recovering academics who have successfully transitioned to jobs in industry. I’m beginning to mount a serious job search myself, and so I’ll be learning right along with you.

My first guest in this series is Dr. Gabrielle Filip-Crawford. Gabrielle left a tenure-track position in psychology at St. Catherine’s University in St. Paul, Minnesota, one year shy of receiving tenure. She is now a research manager at Benefits Data Trust, a nonprofit organization that helps increase access to public benefits for people who are eligible for those resources but are not currently receiving them. She applies her background as a quantitative researcher to program evaluation: designing surveys, collecting data, and analyzing outcomes over time. Gabrielle is also one of the founders of a private LinkedIn community titled Recovering Academics (there are a lot of us, it seems). This is a group for people who are either preparing to transition from academe into industry or who have already left higher ed and are now looking for work.

If you’d prefer a more literary piece, pop over to

Inner Life

for my essay on reading C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia aloud to my children and the lingering questions I have about Lewis’s Eurocentrism and his subtle messages about gender and race.

A Conversation with Dr. Gabrielle Filip-Crawford

Joshua Doležal: I think it's helpful to start with when you knew you would leave academe? And sort of how you made that decision, how you came to peace with it. Because you were at St. Catherine's University in St. Paul, which strikes me as a lovely place to be. So tell me a little bit about that?

Gabrielle Filip-Crawford: Yeah. I mean, I think in some ways a lot of us had a similar experience with academia where we kind of loved it until we didn't. So I started the ’21-‘22 school year with no intention of leaving.

My university actually handled the pandemic quite well. We were online for a full year. When we came back, we came back with mandated vaccines and masking. So it did feel like they were taking our safety into account. But one thing that happened with this online year during the pandemic, because a lot of us really had our heads down and we're focused on teaching and just kind of getting through all the challenges that came with being online. And we weren't paying a whole lot attention to university operations. When we got back on campus, then it was okay, now we're attending operational updates again. Now we're here in person for our humanities, arts and sciences meetings. And a lot of information started to come out about plans to change things like general education requirements.

That was kind of where it started for me is we had a conversation about changing gen-ed requirements that would have, in my opinion, and the opinion of a lot of faculty, shifted us dramatically away from the liberal arts. And a colleague brought that up in a meeting and said, you know, This sounds like it's straying from our mission. And our provost said, We're not offering a liberal arts education, we're offering a liberal education.

Joshua Doležal: Was that in the present tense or in the future tense?

Gabrielle Filip-Crawford: In the present tense. So, you know, I very clearly remember at that point just thinking, well then what am I doing here? That's what I came here for. And she followed that up with who here can even define the liberal arts, which literally we have to do as part of our review process annually. And like, how are you supporting the liberal arts mission? So we all could give very articulate responses to that, right? And the proposed changes in and of themselves probably weren't enough to, to push me out, but what really happened is, in response to that, there were a lot of attempts by faculty to try to have conversations around this and be involved in the decision making.

And we were shut down at every turn. No ability to share thoughts. No, no attempt to take faculty perspectives into account in any of this. It kind of became an increasingly antagonistic relationship between administration and faculty throughout the whole year. I started the school year with no intention of leaving, but by the end of December I was saying I didn't want to come back the next fall. I started applying to jobs in January 2022. So ultimately nearly 10% of the faculty left at the end of that academic year.

Joshua Doležal: Wow. So you were still employed while you were applying for jobs, and so it wasn't a question of giving up the security for the unknown. Like you were definitely going to have a plan before you resigned – and yours was a tenure track position, correct?

Gabrielle Filip-Crawford: Tenure track, and I would've gone up for tenure this year. I left one year pre-tenure.

Joshua Doležal: Oh, so you were well on the way to that. So you made the decision based on how you were feeling in December and then it seems like you almost immediately took practical steps. Now that's a pretty fast turnaround. How long was it before you applied for something — in January, you said?

Gabrielle Filip-Crawford: Right away. End of January. Yeah. And then I ended up probably around that time I started posting on LinkedIn and I found out through that that several of my other colleagues were planning to leave and we kind of formed a group and started meeting weekly and just talking about our experiences and that was incredibly valuable.

I think there's a lot of gaslighting that happens in academia and a lot of misbehavior that gets normalized and having other people there to say no, that wasn't appropriate, what so and so said that in the meeting. Or, no, that's not normal. Yeah, it was really valuable to have that support from peers, and we all were applying for jobs and helping each other with the practical aspects of that, and we all left together.

Joshua Doležal: Wow. And was this the recovering academics group that you formed, or was that a later thing?

Gabrielle Filip-Crawford: Many of those people are in both, the former St. Kate’s folks. We still meet for happy hours and stuff just as our local thing, but many of them stayed in Recovering Academics, too. I ended up starting Recovering Academics because my challenge when I first started looking for a job was I didn't know anyone who'd left the tenure track.

I knew a lot of folks who had left because they couldn't get a tenure track position or went straight from grad school to industry. But there was really this strong perception out there that if you managed to land a tenure track job, you were staying. And as I kind of got more active on LinkedIn, it became clear that that wasn't true and that a lot of us were kind of operating in isolation and thinking we were the only ones in that position.

So I initially started the group for tenured and tenure track folks, but we've grown a lot since then.

Joshua Doležal: So it sounds like we've done very similar things just in different ways because I felt very alone when I was in the process of resigning. I knew a handful of other people at my institution that were doing the same, but I had no sense of the larger cohort at all. I felt very isolated in that. And when I began an independent writing life a little over a year ago, I pitched The Chronicle partly to see if there were others like me out there. And so I guess I did it in a very public way by writing “The Big Quit” – the feature that told that story. And then a series of others that I've put out. But there is power in knowing that you're not making it up, that you can trust how you feel, and that there are other people who've made a similar calculus and who aren't trying to convince themselves that something that doesn't feel right is their only option.

Gabrielle Filip-Crawford: Yeah. I think one thing that I didn't even really realize until forming that group is how similar people's experiences are across institutions. That this isn't a small school thing or a liberal arts school thing. It's not just contingent faculty. The group [Recovering Academics] has everyone from current grad students to department chairs at R1 universities. Everyone is being impacted by the same things. We've got people from very elite schools, highly paid. So it's not just the salary thing. Yeah. And they're all telling remarkably similar stories.

Joshua Doležal: Well, I want to back up a little bit to how you reinvent yourself as a nonacademic professional. I've been reading Matteo Tardelli's book Beyond Academia. I know there are several other books in that genre. So there are stages where you craft your LinkedIn profile in a certain way and change keywords and things like that. So can you at a granular level talk about how you began putting a different public face out there, and then other practical steps you took?

Gabrielle Filip-Crawford: Yeah. I had never really used LinkedIn before as an academic. I had a LinkedIn, but other than like updating it when my job changed, that was, that was all I did. So I started spending more time on the job board first, just casting a pretty broad net in terms of the searches I was running, just to try to figure out what even existed as options. And like you said, updating keywords, updating the about me section, updating job stuff, and all of that. And part of my early experience on there is I stumbled across Eric James Stephens’ content about leaving academia and his “Hire Higher Ed” platform and stuff, and his content on there is kind of what inspired me to start posting because I liked how he framed the approach to networking in general. A lot of people see LinkedIn just as, you know, what can I get from this? How can I find a job? How can I get what I need from people? And he framed it in terms of how can I build relationships, how can I help other people? Posting on there ended up connecting me more with people local to me as well as this broader group. So there's the LinkedIn process, a lot of job ad browsing just to try to figure out what direction to go.

I was strongly considering going into instructional design – the ed tech direction. But honestly, my decision to focus in a research direction was more driven by, which is the quickest path out which requires the least upskilling. Moving into instructional design would've meant at least some training and some new software and learning some new processes and honestly what I like, the part of teaching I like least, is probably online teaching and crafting those materials. So I thought maybe that's not the best fit. I narrowed my job search down by what I didn't want to do as, as I kind of was digging around in things. I really, I literally started with research as my key word. And I started tacking onto the end of that, what I didn't want to do. So not UX, not customer insights, not marketing…

Joshua Doležal: What is UX, if you can explain it to me?

Gabrielle Filip-Crawford: User experience research. So it tends to be more qualitatively oriented and I'm a quantitative researcher. I will say I had some misconceptions at the time about what it was. I have a lot of friends who went into user experience research who work at Meta and Microsoft and Google and the tech industry didn't appeal to me. I didn't really realize how much user experience research happens outside of that context.

Now I'm on a team with user experience researchers. So it happens even at the nonprofits. But at the time my perception was like, that's more of a big tech area. And so user experience research tends to be a lot more internally focused on like product development more than external facing work, which I'm more interested in.

Joshua Doležal: What I'm hearing you say is partly self-exploration. You know, what do I want? What do I not want? But there is an urgent need to explain what is it that I offer. And there's a kind of stigma I think about academics that there is no practical translation into industry. That's obviously not true for you in the social sciences because of your quantitative background. And so data analysis or, you know, research methods that involve human populations clearly have value in industry. So I assume, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, that that was not terribly difficult for you to articulate or figure out how to frame. The question that you may not be able to answer is whether such a professional makeover is possible for someone in the humanities or the arts, where communication skills are sort of abstract. You can mention leadership if you've held, as I have, many high-profile director or chair positions – there's a story about leadership that translates. But the disciplinary expertise of literary research or longform journalism, to me, is a much harder translation. Am I wrong about that?

Gabrielle Filip-Crawford: No, I don't think you're wrong. I think it is harder to tell that story. It happens, definitely. I have a former colleague from English who's doing communications for a nonprofit. Yeah, and I know a lot of folks who are looking for sort of content strategy type positions where there is definitely a lot of, “how do I frame these complex topics to communicate them to a lay audience.” Which I think is a skill that we tend to undersell coming from academia because you're surrounded by people who are translating complicated topics to undergrads every day. It's like [we think], well of course people can do that. But they can't necessarily. So it can be hard to market that in job interviews or on a resume, but I think it's a very valuable skill of just being able to translate complicated things for the public.

Joshua Doležal: Well, what you just said about content strategy is not a term that anybody with a PhD in English knows automatically. So some of the challenge, I think, is discovering these categories that are sometimes deep wells of opportunity. You know, one of them for me is “Project Manager” and the correlation there between directing a first year seminar, as I did. You know, where there's a common read, there are convocation events, there is collaboration with librarians and student development staff, and there are 25 to 30 instructors all teaching the same course, trying to navigate common elements and autonomy. All of that, I think, can translate into something like a project manager position. But it's something that until recently, I was completely unaware existed. So there's kind of a literacy curve there.

Gabrielle Filip-Crawford: Yeah, I think good advice that I've seen in terms of conducting informational interviews to try to get a sense for what's out there is, if you find a job area that looks interesting, find somebody you can chat with within that area. Ask them what other job titles you should be considering, and if there are other folks in related fields that they would recommend you talk to. Because, yeah, you don't know what you don't know, right? Like I didn't know instructional design existed as a field because my university was so small. There are a lot of jobs that I'm still hearing about – jobs where I'm like, oh, people do that. So I think that's an important part of the networking process is just asking people, what do I need to know? They can help fill in some of those empty spaces.

Joshua Doležal: Do you think that's kind of counter to our instincts as academics, too? We're supposed to be experts in our fields, and we don't typically ask other people what we should know.

Gabrielle Filip-Crawford: Yeah. I think it can be counter to our instincts and it also plays into stereotypes of us as academics that we want to walk in and be the expert in the room and we're going to have an attitude and we're not going to be open to learning new things. And I think those of us who transitioned successfully have been able to frame ourselves as learners, as “what I'm really good at as a PhD is learning new things.” Making it clear that you realize there are a lot of things you still need to learn. I think it's challenging in creating job materials. We're used to CVs that are just like, here are the amazing things that I personally on my own have done, rather than framing ourselves as collaborators. Because I will say my perception of collaboration as an academic was like wildly off base for what collaboration looks like outside.

Joshua Doležal: I don't have a lot of experience outside of academe, but I know what you're saying from with working with editors, for instance, through The Chronicle, which is very different from publishing a peer reviewed article. You don't have control over everything in the end.

Gabrielle Filip-Crawford: I think you can frame it as like, you don't have control over all the pieces and you can frame it as, you don't have to do all the pieces. I like that. You know, you get to say, this is the piece I'm really good at. Somebody else is really good at this other piece and I can rely on their expertise for that. Somebody else is really good at this piece. I'm going to bring them in for their expertise. And it's a lot less stressful to get things done when it's truly balanced, for sure.

Joshua Doležal: Did you do some informational interviews yourself then?

Gabrielle Filip-Crawford: I did. I didn't do a whole lot. But I started talking to folks that I already knew. I mentioned I had a lot of friends working in tech industry, so I talked to them. I wasn't necessarily interested in their jobs, but they knew other people who'd left academia and were working in areas that I was interested in. And so they were able to make some connections. My approach was kind of start with my immediate network and then they made connections to their network for me. I didn't message strangers on LinkedIn asking for informational interviews, which probably retrospectively would've been good.

Joshua Doležal: Are you now in the first role that you had after you moved on? Please tell us a little bit about your position now?

Gabrielle Filip-Crawford: So I work at a nonprofit where the mission is to close the benefits access gap. So there are a lot of people eligible for public benefits who do not receive them. We work with state partners, healthcare organizations, other nonprofits and higher ed institutions to do outreach to people who are potentially eligible but not enrolled in things like SNAP or Medicaid. And we have call centers in seven states, I think. So about half of the staff at our organization, our call center staff, work directly with potential clients through the application process, submit applications on their behalf, all of that. And then about three years ago now the organization had done some partnership with academics to do some program evaluation of the effectiveness of their outreach. And it occurred to them a few years back that it would be good to have that in-house. So they started a research team of one person, my boss, and she brought one more person on. And then I'm the, the third member of the program evaluation piece of our team. And then we have two user experience researchers who are more internally focused. Most of what I'm doing is designing evaluations for our various partners. What that might look like is, maybe we're interested in testing some different phrasing of our messaging to see whether, for example, framing something as providing the dollar amount of a benefit versus here's what this might pay for in terms of groceries or meals or whatever it might be, making it more concrete, which kind of messaging works better.

So we might design a study where we're randomly sending one message to this group, one message to that group, and then we're tracking outcomes over time. So those are the kind of projects that I work on and I'm the only one on the team whose background is completely quantitative. So that's my focus is the data analysis and quantitative design pieces.

Joshua Doležal: Well, it sounds like a small team, which I assume makes it a close knit team?

Gabrielle Filip-Crawford: Definitely. The organization was in-person pre-pandemic and then pivoted and people liked it, so they stayed remote. They're based in Philadelphia and my other teammates are all there. And I'm in Minnesota. But yeah, we work really closely together. We're very collaborative. And we are pretty well integrated with a lot of the other teams. So there's a whole separate data team that we work very closely with. We have our engagement team that works directly with our partners, so we're working with them all of the time and negotiating those relationships and figuring out how to include evaluation. So yeah, there's a lot of back and forth, a lot of conversation. And I'm also on a team with other people with PhD backgrounds. That I think helped me get the job because I think my boss was able to kind of read between the lines a little bit and knew, oh, this is what it means to have a PhD. This is what kind of training. The more of us who leave academia, the easier it is for other folks to leave because you're more likely to encounter other ex-academics out there.

Joshua Doležal: Oh good. So kind of like herd immunity.

Gabrielle Filip-Crawford: Eventually we'll get people used to what PhDs are and can do. Yeah.

Joshua Doležal: Well, what are some of the things you love most about your life now? Biggest changes in work life, personal life, if you're comfortable sharing.

Gabrielle Filip-Crawford: Well, there is actually work life balance. I work during work hours and if things don't get done during those hours, then they happen the next day or the next week, if it's Friday. You know, even if something is going wrong with the project, it still ends at five and I don't have to think about it the rest of the time. And I think the not thinking about it outside of work is honestly the biggest change, because when I was an academic it was hard to really have downtime. You're like, “I've scheduled this time to relax,” and your brain's going, “You should be grading, you should be writing. Did you do that peer review yet?” You know? Or taking experiences as input for projects rather than just experiencing what you're doing. Yeah. That has been a very nice change.

I work more regular hours now than I did, so it was definitely more of a shift to roughly like the nine to five schedule. But if I need to move things around, that's fine. My work's on East Coast time, so it would be eight to four for me, but I have a child who have to drop off at preschool. So I said, is it okay if I don't start until nine my time? My boss was like, oh, sure, fine. Just block it off on your calendar. So there's a lot more flexibility than I expected in some ways, because I think that's a myth we get told about academia is that it's a wonderful flexible schedule. You have autonomy over your scheduling. You don't work summers. Big, big myths.

Joshua Doležal: I have three kids, and I'm remembering how many weekends I had to carve out four-hour blocks to plow through two full sections’ worth of papers. In English we were getting these long essays that I really couldn't grade in any less than 20 minutes each. Usually more like 30 minutes each. And I mean, you multiply that out by like fifty students, and that's real time. That only happens on your weekend. What you're saying about flexibility with kids is a question I've had. What happens with sick days if you're a remote worker and your kid's sick at school and you've got to go pick them up?

Gabrielle Filip-Crawford: We had an experience a month or two back where my son had a cold that went downhill rapidly and we ended up in the ER and then hospitalized for two nights. No fun. But what that meant was I had to instantly cancel everything on my calendar for a few days and it was fine. Everybody at my work was like, okay, we'll move things around. I can take the meeting you were supposed to take. And a lot of understanding that people have lives outside. And if something happens like that, then yeah, we move things around. And my husband and I try to balance if there's days preschool is closed or sick days or something, we try to trade off as best we can. There's definitely a lot of empathy for working parents out there.

Joshua Doležal: That's great to hear. I did want to ask you about identity issues because you've been vocal about queer issues on LinkedIn and this may be another myth that academe is sort of the sanctuary for communities that are historically oppressed or marginalized. Did you feel like you gave up a platform to teach about those things by leaving academe? Do you feel like you're still able to advocate for them?

Gabrielle Filip-Crawford: I think it's mixed. I do not have the same platform to teach as in-depth as I did. I taught a course on the psychology of sexual orientation. I was the only one with the background to teach it. I created the course, I taught it the whole time I was there. It's gone now that I'm gone. Losing that as a way to connect directly with students, that's definitely difficult.

There's a lot of conversation around people leaving teaching in general about, you know, you’ve got to stay for the students, what are they going to do without us there to provide this support or provide this safe space, or whatever that might be. But honestly, I think a lot of the policies in higher ed and a lot of the decisions that administrators are making are actively harming students in marginalized groups. And yeah, I can provide support from within for some students. Absolutely. But am I also enabling this harmful system to continue making, you know, decisions that are harming people on a broader scale? Also yes.

One of my friends who left made the analogy of buying a pet from a pet store where, you know, you've now saved that pet [from its] crappy situation. You're giving it a good home, you're taking care of it, but you're not dealing with the system that was mistreating all of these other animals. So are you helping this one individual? Yes. Are you changing the system? No. I'm not working in an organization that's focused on LGBT issues. I am working in an organization that's very supportive of the LGBT community and of their employees. So there's definitely a lot of internal awareness and support. There's an employee resource group for LGBT employees. It feels like a safe place to work. Definitely. But I'm part of campaigns where, you know, 5,000 people have food to eat that they didn't before, you know? Am I the individual who is responsible for it? No, but I'm part of this broader collaboration that had this huge impact, you know? So it's a very different way of making an impact and thinking about things.

Joshua Doležal: Well, what you're saying reminds me of a term that Ginger Lockhart used in one of her posts about Matteo Tardelli's book. Her term is “overthinkitis,” which is a diagnosis of many academics. And when we're talking about systems reforms or our complicity in ethical externalities or things like that, I wonder if we sometimes fall prey to overthinkitis. Because I was writing in a comments thread with another colleague who's leaving a position, a tenured position, and she was worrying about taking her child out of a school system, right? So all of their tax money is then going to another school. They're depriving the collective in that way. Her son is trans and so she's thinking also about moving to a safe environment for him. But also *not* choosing to fight for progress in the environment she felt was harmful to him. I mean, those are valid questions to have, but I don't think most people struggle with them at the same level as academics, and you can kind of magnify your personal responsibility for all those things. And yeah, there are still ways of knowing that you're making a difference or bringing good into the world, but you don't have to be personally responsible for the whole system.

Gabrielle Filip-Crawford: Yeah, yeah. It's okay to do your piece of it. And you also can't do any of it if you're so burnt out that you're not functioning. So if staying and trying to better that terrible system means that you are going to be burnt out and you can only do that for a year rather than being somewhere else and being able to contribute a little bit for the long term, you have to weigh that too. A lot of us got to a point [in academe] where we just weren't particularly functional. We weren't as helpful to our students as we could be. And we weren't making the difference that I think we thought we were or hoped we would.

Joshua Doležal: Well I think we've covered a lot of ground and I'm really grateful. Are there any parting insights for someone who's on that precipice of leaving academe and just beginning the process that you've gone through?

Gabrielle Filip-Crawford: It seems to me one of the first kind of realizations that is helpful to people when they're going through this process is that it isn't them, right? It's coping with this ingrained teaching in academia that if you leave, you've failed. That if you were successful in academia, you would be staying, and the only reason you're leaving is you couldn't hack it, and that isn't true. It isn't true if you're an adjunct. It isn't true if you're a tenured professor. One of my friends in the group in a contingent faculty position shared her frustration at the narrative right now of like even the tenured people are leaving, you know, as though it were natural for contingent faculty to leave but not tenured. And she said, I'll tell you, it doesn't feel any more natural for me to leave than for someone with tenure. She's just as committed. She cares just as much about her subject matter. She cares just as much about her students. It’s not a game of who's more marginalized among the faculty. I think we can all recognize simultaneously that contingent faculty get the short end of the stick and everybody's being treated really poorly. I think a lot of these problems are problems across the board. And does academia still work for some as a career path? Yeah, I do know people who are in that, who genuinely love it and are, are doing well and are happy. Great. But for the vast majority, it just seems like it's not a, it's not sustainable.

And the further I get from it, the stranger some of the practices and norms seem. Academics get caught up in this overthinking what their first role out of academia will be because they're used to thinking of tenure, right? Like, I'm looking for my job that I'm going to stay in forever. It isn't your job that you're going to stay in forever. There's actual genuine career progression outside the academy. Or you can go somewhere, learn what you want to learn from there, and move into a different role or a different company. They don't have to think that it's all or nothing in this first position?

Joshua Doležal: What you're saying is so ironic and I've thought so much about this. It's very difficult to have a growth mindset within academe. It's almost entirely a fear mindset. It's a fear of “what if” – it's a fear of losing guaranteed earnings. It's a fear of demographic changes. What's going to happen with enrollment? Can we survive? And because autonomy is so restricted, the growth is stunted. You can't take ownership of risks and just see how they play out. You're forced into this helpless-feeling role where you're just going to have to, I guess, do what administrators are telling you. It doesn't seem like there's the same ownership of your life that you're describing. Because in the industry you might have an employer, but you could get another employer. If you're treated poorly, you're not stuck. And tenure has that kind of Janus face of security, but entrapment, you know, which is it?

Gabrielle Filip-Crawford: The golden handcuffs, right? I think that was kind of mind blowing for me to realize: I can go be at my job and as much as I love people there, I don't think I'll be there forever. I think I'll be there a few years. I'll learn a ton of great stuff and then I'll move into another position. Ultimately, I'd prefer to work in a hybrid role rather than fully remote. There are some fantastic places around here locally that I'd love to work. There are opportunities out there and I think right away, coming out of academia, that's kind of terrifying. You want to be like, what is my path? But ultimately it's comforting to have those options. And the further I get from it, the more I think the career progression is bizarre in academia. Unless you go into administration, you get two promotions ever, and both of them are just, you're not getting fired. You can keep your job and continue doing the same thing.

Joshua Doležal: I hadn't, I hadn't thought of it that way, but you're absolutely right. And then if you go quickly through the second promotion and you reach full rank at 40-something, you think, all right, so I've got 20 more years of plateau, I guess. There wouldn't be any sort of challenges that would just be built into that growth arc. So that's weird.

I don't want to lose track of this. So you have this Recovering Academics group on LinkedIn? Is that open to anyone?

Gabrielle Filip-Crawford: The group has Zoom meetings and a Slack space and basically joining involves, reaching out to me or one of the other group administrators. And we have a membership form, but this is not a way of like keeping people out of the group. The membership form is really, so we, as the group grows, we know who's in it and we have people explicitly agreeing to the group norms, the group guidelines, which are basically, this is a safe space and we don't share anything about who is in the group or what people say outside the group because a lot of people are conducting secret job searches, essentially, and leaving very toxic environments and they don't want current colleagues to know what's going on. We've never had any issues with that. People are very very respectful. And you know, one of the things I like best about this group is just people are incredibly kind and compassionate with each other, while simultaneously giving useful feedback on things. Like we, we will say like, Hey, I'm going to apply in for this job here. Can you guys help me tweak my resume? You know, and people will give constructive feedback. But it's very, very supportive and encouraging. So there's a lot of yeah, a lot of camaraderie in the group, and a lot of of us have been there from the beginning of it, so we consider each other friends at this point.

We're not we're not selling anything. We're not offering, you know, resume services or saying we have job search expertise or anything. It's all about sharing experiences and, and providing that peer support. It's really a lot about just like, Nope, you're not crazy. I've been there. That sounds like what I went through. Here's how I dealt with it.

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Thanks for reading! If you’d like to contact Gabrielle, you can find her on LinkedIn.