From Waiting for Tenure to Building on Her Own Terms: A Postdoc’s Career Reinvention
When Sarah first reached out, she had everything that looked like progress on paper. Three years into her postdoc at a well-regarded European research institution, she had publications, a growing network, and a supervisor who respected her work. By most external measures, she was doing well.
But in our first session, she said something I'd heard before, though it never gets easier to hear: "I'm waiting for tenure. I feel stuck." Every time someone says it, the same quiet resignation comes through — the sense of someone who has handed the steering wheel of their career to a system that was never built to hand it back.