People ask, often, how my career happened. They want a story with a shape to it: a goal set early, steps taken deliberately, a destination reached on schedule. I can’t give them that story, because it isn’t true. What actually happened involved a lot of guessing, a few accidents, and a habit I picked up from chess long before I set foot in a university.
What I actually wanted
Before my doctorate, I didn’t know what I wanted. So much for academic career planning. I’m not sure anyone does, not really, before they’ve walked far enough down a path to see what’s actually there. At one point I left academia for industry, just to find out what I’d be missing. I found out fast. Less freedom. The same modest pay. None of the openness I’d taken for granted at the university. I went back.
That freedom is the theme running under everything I’ve done since. Academic freedom sounds like a right you’re handed on arrival. It isn’t. You build it yourself, deliberately, or you never get to use it.
I reached financial security early, well before any professorship, and I want to be honest about what that bought me. Not comfort for its own sake. Room to follow curiosity into psychology, education, business, computer science, without needing any of it to pay off in a specific job. I never had a plan for the professorship. The fit was right when it appeared. I hadn’t engineered any of it.
The chess mistake
People assume good chess players calculate many moves ahead. It’s a durable myth, and the research on expertise bears that out. Strong players build flexible structures instead. They can’t predict what the opponent will do, so they stop trying. They arrange their position so that whatever happens next, they still have options.
I played a lot of chess as a kid. I’ve carried that lesson into a career I never planned in any conventional sense. I built structures instead: savings, skills, an interdisciplinary base that gave me room to move when the situation changed, which it always did, unpredictably, the way an opponent’s move always does.
Luck, stated plainly
Funding panels are a lottery. The people who run them say so themselves. Academic hiring runs on the same logic. A handful of open slots, a stack of qualified applicants, outcomes that hinge on timing and taste more than anyone likes to admit.
Saying this plainly used to feel like giving up on merit. Now I think it’s the opposite. If luck decides most of the outcome, a missed position stops being proof you weren’t good enough, and a won position stops being proof you planned correctly. What stays inside your control is the structure you bring to the lottery, not the draw itself. Believing that does something for a researcher’s wellbeing that no career strategy can.
The transition nobody warns you about
I finished my bachelor’s, the first cohort in Austria to run through that program, in five semesters, and found out only after handing in my thesis that no master’s program existed to follow it. Most international deadlines had already passed. I ended up in the Netherlands. I hadn’t chosen it from a shortlist; it was what remained once the obvious doors had shut.
I’d like to say later transitions went better because I’d learned to plan. Maybe they went slightly better. I doubt planning was really the mechanism. Context builds up around you and eventually does most of the deciding on your behalf. The task isn’t to out-plan that process. It’s to stay open to weak signals about where a path is heading, and follow them when they show up.
Success, defined openly
The career centers that study this for a living favor deliberately open definitions of academic success, and I think that’s the right instinct. Fixing on one job title, one institution, sets almost everyone up to read their own path as failure, because the visible endpoint is narrow and the actual range of good outcomes is wide.
I once heard a colleague, a full professor at twenty-six at one of the best universities in his field, describe himself as already finished. He wasn’t proud of it. He’d organized his entire ambition around reaching that point and never once asked what came after arriving. That’s what happens when the goal is a title instead of a reason.
Values need translating
Wellbeing. Financial security. Work-life balance. These words get repeated in every career conversation I have, and on their own they do almost no work. What does wellbeing look like for you, in practice, on an ordinary Tuesday? Until you can answer that, the word is a placeholder, not a goal.
In my coaching work, one gap shows up more than any other. People have the talent. They have the opportunity. They don’t know what they’re actually looking for. They take a position out of fear that the same opportunity won’t return for twenty years, often a realistic fear given how the market works, and skip the harder question of whether the position fits what they want.
The current wave of departures from academia into industry tells a version of the same story in reverse. People leave and explain it afterward by pointing at the salary difference. Academia was never going to compete with industry on salary, and anyone chasing money would have known that on day one. The money story usually gets written after the fact. It explains the exit without answering the harder question: what did you actually want from this path before you left it.
Listening instead of deciding in academic career planning
If I have one piece of advice, it isn’t to plan better. It’s to get better at recognizing a good decision once it shows up, which means building the kind of self-knowledge that lets you assess a fit instead of defaulting to fear or to an old plan that stopped applying years ago.
Treat any single role, in industry or in a university, as provisional. The real question is never which job to take, framed as a final choice. It’s which elements of the work you actually value: the research, the teaching, the mentoring, the autonomy, and how you might keep getting those elements wherever you land next.