Hadas Kotek » Blog »
I am a recovered academic
Sep 28, 2025
In a recent one-on-one meeting with a person I didn’t know, the person mentioned reading and enjoying my blog (love the feedback!) and that she, too, was a recovering academic. I’ve written about my misadventures in academia a lot in the past, and have referred to myself as a recovering academic often.
That got me thinking: I think I may be basically fully recovered. This past May marked 10 years since the traumatic job cycle that almost prematurely ended my career, and while it still hurts, I think it’s the first year that the anniversary came and went without me even noticing. I’m not happy about it and think I’d still need to turn around and walk out of a room if I ever ran into That One Person again, but that aside, I don’t think I’ve spent any time thinking about it in a long time. I’ve come around to the decisive conclusion that as far as academia is concerned, it was 100% your loss, loser.
I still have a foot in academia in a sense – I maintain my affiliation with MIT, which is nice and convenient for various reasons. I do discipline-wide service for things I care about, I go to conferences, I publish (but not in my old academic fields), I do some minimal amount of reviewing. I offer a Careers workshop about once a year and try to teach a seminar once a year, both of which I find very fulfilling. I haven’t advised a student in a long time, but for now I’m ok spending my efforts on actions that have a broader impact than 1:1 advising. I do have two mentees I meet with on a regular basis and one I technically wrapped up mentoring but we still talk once in a while as needed. And, of course, I do a lot of informational interview, probably 2-3 a month, which is how this post came to be.
So, yeah, I may have crossed the line from recovering to recovered academic, and that’s a happy thought.