Leaving MIT

To: <name>

Subject: My role going forward

Effective immediately, I will be resigning from my position at MIT.

Kindly,

Kelli

I stared at the cursor on my phone. What if I hit Send?

Cocooned in my hotel room, I could imagine it. The first time I drafted a resignation letter, a few weeks back, I panicked and deleted it. The next time, I got closer to finishing, even debating how to sign it. “Warmest Regards” or “Best”? Each time I wrote these emails, I felt some relief from the pain in my chest, a pain that had intensified since the recent and sudden death of a dear friend.

My phone’s alarm went off. I should be heading down to the conference. I should be looking forward to seeing my fluid dynamics colleagues. But the last thing I wanted was to step into my role as a research engineer at MIT.

I deleted the draft. When I looked up at the hotel room mirror, my reflection stared back in disgust. Chicken.

This was November 2018.

When I look back, I understand that grief was driving my experience. By trying to “move on” after my friend’s death, I was trying to return to the status quo — to a job I no longer wanted.

From the outside looking in, my career seemed strategic and planned. I had defended my Ph.D. thesis 36 hours before giving birth to my second child. I’d had my first child two years earlier, before MIT had maternity leave for graduate students.

When I tell people this, they’re usually impressed. They admire that I didn’t put my family planning on hold while finishing my thesis, and that I defended my thesis so close to childbirth.

After my second unofficial maternity leave, I finished my thesis edits and turned my attention to my new role of research engineer at MIT as a mom to a 4-month-old and 2-year-old. In the following years, I mommed. I wifed. I worked. I gave my time and energy to a non-tenure-track research role, helping students in our lab develop into researchers and supporting the PI.

Work in academia is like a gas. It will fill whatever space you give it, and I gave a vast amount of space to my job.

Fast-forward to that morning in the conference hotel. Wandering through the convention center, it dawned on me that 14 years had passed and I was still in the same job, doing the same things with the same people. While I poured energy into my job and family, my career had stagnated.

As we grew up, Gen-X women were told that we could have it all — career and family — and that we should do it with poise and perfection. The advertising tagline “Never let them see you sweat” epitomized this pressure. For 14 years, I had put on emotional armor at work and spent the commute home trying to take it off. For 14 years, I focused on the immediate work because it was all I could manage. And for 14 years, the professional aspirations I had when I started the job had gotten lost while I tried to stay afloat.

Over those years, I ignored comments about how challenging it was that I was unavailable after 4 p.m. so I could pick up my children. I deflected suggestions to apply for tenure-track jobs. I internalized the feedback that I wouldn’t be successful in academia, especially as a tenure-track faculty member, because I wouldn’t sacrifice time with family.

For weeks after that conference, I felt shame and anger. Why can’t I both raise a family and build a career? It felt as if I had failed the women before me who made it possible for Gen-X women to have it all. Then the guilt turned inward. Why aren’t I satisfied with what I have accomplished? Isn’t my family worth any sacrifice?

Finally, my counselor asked a pointed question. “How do you move forward?”

“From this grief pit?”

“If that’s where you want to start, sure.”

Something inside me cracked open. Sure, I could choose to move forward from my grief. Sure, I could choose to move forward in my career. It was, simply put, my choice to make.

After that, I found it easier to focus on a new question. What do I want to do now? As an academic by training, I naturally turned this into a research project. I formulated a hypothesis. There must be a career path that I would find fulfilling. My task became to gather data, test possibilities, and analyze results. I delved into resources like the book Designing Your Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, and career coaching programs like Beyond the Professoriate.

If I were to write a report on my self-research project, I would mention two pivotal moments. The first was creating a two-column list about my role as a research engineer at MIT. This wasn’t a list of pros and cons about staying or leaving; I had already decided to go. Rather, I had to determine what I wanted to take with me. In one column, I listed what energized me; in the other, what sapped my energy:

• Love: mentoring and advising students, engaging with people about research, helping people create their careers, collaborating with colleagues
• Hate: lacking autonomy, receiving little recognition for accomplishments, dealing with academic bureaucracy

The second pivotal moment came when I tried to envision leaving academic-level research — and couldn’t do it. In my two-column list, I had overlooked how exhilarating it was to plot data, watch it align, and confirm hypotheses. It wasn’t until I had forced myself to picture life without research that I realized I still had a passion for it.

My self-research project unearthed the raw elements of a career that would let me move forward. Element 1: I needed to leave MIT, but I didn’t need to leave research. Element 2: I needed to help people build successful, fulfilling careers.

When I shared these results with colleagues, I received supportive responses. On the surface, these elements sounded like a tenure-track position. What I wanted was different, and as I put my plan into action by pursuing a coaching certification and looking for academic jobs outside MIT, that support turned into warnings:

“You won’t have time to breathe if you try to do both.”

“Don’t tell anyone you’re coaching. You don’t want them to think you’re not serious about research.”

“Why would you leave MIT?”

Their reactions left me feeling bruised. Our community thrives on outside-the-box thinking to solve hard problems, but not when it comes to our own careers.

Conventional wisdom says there’s a well-worn path to success — B.S., M.S., Ph.D., postdoc. Then the path forks. Choose industry, and you’re seen as less focused on research, and destined never to return to academia. Choose academia, and you’re locked into climbing the rickety tenure-track ladder to full professor, and maybe to university administration. Despite our creativity, we struggle to understand those who deviate from these paths.

My outside-the-box solution to my dilemma was to create a portfolio career, balancing multiple roles that aligned with my passions. Despite the well-intentioned advice to keep my coaching quiet, I openly embraced it, launching a graduate student coaching program at MIT. I also started a private coaching practice focused on helping women in STEM create fulfilling careers.

I left MIT in 2024. The University of North Carolina helped me create a part-time research associate professor position that gives me the autonomy and space to pursue research and coaching. What I needed wasn’t to quit, but to create a career that reflected who I am.

With that understanding, here’s what I would have told myself at various points in my career:

At the start of my job as a mom of young children: Do what you need to do to survive, without shame.

Sometimes, the path of least resistance is the right path. I chose safety and flexibility over autonomy and risk, prioritizing being present for my family given my fixed capacity.

I stayed in a job that allowed me to be “the parent with the flexible schedule” so I could stay home with sick kids and manage after-school activities. It also afforded me the opportunity to work at a top-tier research institution in a field I love and mentor amazing people. Don’t let the perceived or actual judgment of others deter you.

But don’t forget to periodically ask yourself, “Is this still the direction I want?” We’re scientists. Our careers should be iterative.

When I had internalized that I couldn’t become a tenure-track faculty member because of my choices for my family: Set your own metrics for success.

We are the only subject-matter experts on our lives, so we should decide what success means. In the absence of metrics we define for ourselves, external metrics — peer review, promotions, grant submissions — can become the driving force in our careers.

Just as you shouldn’t let others’ judgments deter you, don’t let them define your metrics of success. We can’t control whether we live up to others’ expectations, but we can control whether we live up to our own.

When I felt a need to shift my career: Don’t be afraid to make a change.

Well before my career crisis in 2018, I wanted more than my role as a research engineer. In 2009, I asked to continue my role outside Massachusetts to enable my husband to pursue a job opportunity. In the years after, I flirted with the idea of finding a new job, in or beyond academia. But I never committed to it because I was afraid — of failing, yes, but even more, of disrupting my family’s stability. Unfortunately, it took the death of a friend to make me face this fear.

If we see our careers as an ongoing process, then change is something not to fear, but to embrace.

I’m uncertain how the next iterations of my career will unfold. Will I continue to pursue research at my current pace? Will I decide to develop my coaching practice? I don’t know, but I’ll follow the path that feels right. Through self-evaluation and action, I’ve developed the perspective and skills to create a fulfilling and successful career — by my own definition.