PhDs at Work

A Professional Network for PhDs across Industries

  • About
    • About PhDs At Work
    • Impact
    • Contact
  • Week in the Life
    • About Week in the Life
    • One Year Later
    • Explore Guest Bloggers
      • Company
      • Work Sector
      • Degree Field
      • Author
  • Podcast
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events
    • Event Albums
  • Opportunities

Adam Capitanio | One Year Later

September 1, 2014 By Adam Capitanio

It’s surprising that a year has passed since my first set of posts on PhDs at Work. On the one hand, it does feel like a long time ago that I wrote them. I’ve met lots of new people through PhDs at Work, all of them people with PhDs like me, all of them doing interesting and meaningful work outside of the confines of academia. It’s been both illuminating and inspiring to see so many people working in careers in the trenches outside the ivory tower.

Many of the colleagues, friends, and fellow bloggers I’ve met exited academia some time ago. Those like myself, for whom graduate school and dissertation writing is still a fresh memory, leaving the career path that you spent so much time and effort on can still feel like a fresh wound. I would hazard to guess that, for those for whom more time has passed, that wound has healed and scarred over, and that it still flares up in certain weather. But a fresh wound is still fresh, and meeting other PhDs who bear those scars helps bandage it. It has given me a sense of what’s possible with a PhD, after those many years thinking there was only one thing: the tenure track professorship.

On the other hand, it seems like time has flown. This September will mark two years at my current job at Berghahn Books, and it seems shocking when I say it out loud: “two years.” That’s been enough time to develop a taste for life and a career outside of academia: what it’s like to wake up every morning at the same time and undertake the same commute, to perform similar tasks every day, and to be more or less on the same schedule as everyone else. To those still on the academic track, or thinking about leaving, this might sound tedious. It often is. Like everything, however, there’s a tradeoff: I may not be able to go to the gym at two in the afternoon, or read at two in the morning, but I can divide my life from my work, live in the city I want to, and get paid a living wage. It was hard for a while to come to terms with this, but as time has passed and I’ve progressed in my job, the academic life seems to make less and less sense.

With more time at my job, I’ve gained more responsibility and more sense of purpose. I’ve become comfortable in my duties and better understand academic publishing, and the publishing industry more broadly. In the last year, I helped research and develop my company’s open access policy, defining our position in a larger debate within scholarly publishing that will surely continue as digital technology becomes more and more significant to the industry. I also revamped our system of tracking the editorial department’s finances, so that we can more easily deal with organizations that fund projects such as translations and negotiate for rights with foreign publishers. These projects have given me a much larger picture of the world of scholarly publishing in which I find myself than I perceived two years ago. As I worry less about executing the basic duties of my job successfully, I’ve been able to look at the larger picture. It’s like the system has slowly come into focus: once I grasped my function as one gear, I could see how the other gears fit and moved with my own, and eventually could begin to imagine the entire clockwork. I feel like I have started to reach that third stage, where I can start to see the clock that is the publishing industry.

So the healing process slowly begins. Getting that first job, once you’ve decided to leave academia, is hard; adjusting your life to the aftermath is also hard. But I’ve learned in the past year, by talking to other PhDs who are at work and by advancing in my new career job, that there are entire worlds I had no idea existed when I was slaving away at the university library. Sometimes I wonder if these worlds would have opened to me at all had I stayed in academia. Yet since I’ve only seen glimpses into them, I have to wonder what else is out there. A few years ago, when I was first contemplating escape from academia, I was faced with a conundrum: what else was there? Now that illusion has been shattered, and I am still not sure what I want to be when I grow up, but for much different reasons. There’s so much out there for a PhD to do!

Start from the beginning – Read Adam Capitanio’s “Week in the Life”

Adam Capitanio | Berghahn Books

Aviad Eilam (Fri)
Pallavi Phartiyal | Union of Concerned Scientists

Pay it forward. Share and help someone else find this resource!

  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Tumblr
  • Pinterest
  • Reddit
  • More
  • Pocket
  • Print
  • Email

Related

Questions? Share your thoughts! Cancel reply

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Google+
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter

Adam Capitanio, PhD

Editorial Associate
Berghahn Books


PhD, American Studies

The Electrical Transformation of the Public Sphere: Home Video, the Family, and the Limits of Privacy in the Digital Age

Michigan State University, 2012

Connect with Adam

Which is more important: luck, smarts, or know-how?

That depends on where you are in your career. If you're just starting out, luck - you need it to get those first few interviews. Once you have the job, smarts - if you're incompetent, you'll go nowhere. No matter what the situation, know(ing) how to network and make friends will take you places.

Adam's "Week in the Life"

  • PhDs 003: Open Access Publishing and Networking – with Adam Capitanio
  • Adam Capitanio | One Year Later
  • Adam Capitanio (Fri)
  • Adam Capitanio (Thurs)
  • Adam Capitanio (Wed)
  • Adam Capitanio (Tues)
  • Adam Capitanio (Mon)
  • Adam Capitanio | Berghahn Books

If I had to do it all over again, I would…

Sit paralyzed with indecision. I ask myself this question all the time, and I have yet to find an argument that totally convinces me one way or the other. On the one hand, I feel that doing a PhD robbed me of some really important life and career building years. On the other hand, who could pass up the opportunity to read books and talk about them with really smart people for 5+ years?

More Corporate Bloggers

  • Benjamin Levitt | Birkhäuser (Springer)
  • Nanette Fornabai | PwC
  • Peter A. Bacevice | HLW International
  • David Hardtke | LinkedIn
  • Aviad Eilam | Rosetta Stone
  • David Craig | CannonDesign
  • Maria Irchenhauser | DWPub
  • Alison Fisher | CloudBase Services
  • Kevin Eckerle | Accenture
  • Adam Capitanio | Berghahn Books
  • Chris Humphrey | Triodos Bank
  • Patricia Fann Bouteneff | Citi
  • Tse-Sung Wu | Genentech

Looking for something specific?

Copyright © 2011-2021 PhDs at Work, All Rights Reserved

loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.