Lessons learned from a sabbatical

Sabbatical is over. A year ago, I shared that I was heading out on sabbatical. Now I'm back, and I'd like to share some things I learned with you.

I'm back deep in the thick of university stuff. My schedule is the most dense and rigid than I've had in a while. This academic year I'm serving as the chair of my university's Academic Senate, which is not a small thing. (Depending on how you count, it's 75% of my workload, and there are a lot of meetings, and believe it or not, these meetings actually are useful and things happen). Because we're at an institutional moment somewhere between instability and crisis, as budgets are a bigger problem than usual and our administrative turnstile is back to its default rotational state. I say this because it's rather head-spinning to jump into this after having a whole year to focus on my own professional development. The whiplash make it clear how fricking good my sabbatical was. What made it so good is that my research is able to advance even as I'm neck deep in the other stuff.

This was my third sabbatical, and I think I've finally figured out how to do it right.

My first sabbatical was at my first tenure-track job. I had big plans that involved living in Western Australia for the whole time, and learning how to do some new cool science. But instead, I used that sabbatical to move to a new position. The most difficult thing I accomplished in my first sabbatical was finding a good daycare/preschool for my toddler on short notice!

My second sabbatical, which was eight years ago, was about me doing some retooling to avoid becoming a fossil. I put in time to learn basic competency in R, to get a book contract and write a book that I'd long been thinking the world needed, and get a backlog of pubs off of my laptop and into the literature. It all kinda sorta happened but the real success of my sabbatical was accomplishing the more vague goal of discovering a new purpose and trajectory for my work. That definitely happened. (In the coming months I'll revisit the R training I gave myself back then.)

This time around, notwithstanding a list of things I wanted to do, there was One Thing at the center: I was going to retrain myself and rebuild my laboratory to do entirely new and different science than I was doing before. I had found a thing that I was excited and passionate about, that I think has real consequences for biodiversity, climate resilience, people, and use-inspired design, and I wanted to shift everything around so I could do that thing. And you know what? I have!! It worked!

I first got excited about this field of research when I read a paper about it that kinda blew my mind. This work was well out of my skill set and I had no idea where to start. I contacted a few people, read a few more things, but it was just something in the back of my head while I was trying to get everything else done. Then a few years later, while visiting another university, I was introduced to a lab who was doing very similar work and they wanted to meet me because of my expertise in ants. I got excited! I was ready to pursue collaboration! But I never committed enough to even take one real step, because I was doing so many things.

A few years passed, and I had the epiphany that if I was going to accomplish everything in the next year that I was hoping or planning to, it would require maybe 10 copies of me, maybe more. So I got drastic and I cut out most things, a lot of which was choosing to not let them occupy my mind. I decided that narrowly focusing on something for a while was the way to go. At the same time, I had the extraordinary fortune of recruiting a postdoc in my lab who had a dissertation chapter involving the very specific thing that I was excited about working on. We build a project together in this direction. By the time she moved on to further her own career, my lab was well positioned for me to head in this new direction on my own.

But I needed more instrumentation, more understanding how to use that instrumentation, better understanding of theory, get my head around the new vocabulary, learn how to train others in this work, and get projects rolling. It was like going to grad school all over again in a new subfield. My sabbatical was all about putting myself in the learner's seat, accepting my ignorance, working with the best collaborators who had the patience to help me grow. My sabbatical is over, and wow, I feel like I've genuinely fledged.

I haven't told you what this new thing is because, for the purpose of my message here, it doesn't really matter. It could be about me doing anything new. But of course I'll let you in on it.

I'm now working on the ecology, evolution, and function of infrared reflectivity of animal surfaces. When animals are exposed to the sun, about half of the heat arrives in near-infrared wavelengths. Some creatures are masters at bouncing away that radiation to prevent from heating up, and some absorb a lot of it and heat up as a result. We still are very much in the discovery phase of this phenomenon. There are a few other folks working in this area (some of whom have welcomed me heartily and been more generous than I could ever have expected), and they're doing exciting work, and there's for us to learn by asking different kinds of questions about this phenomenon. I'm looking at this from the perspective of macroecology, climate resilience, functional morphology, and more. I could go on and on, but I'll spare you. My point is that I started my sabbatical as a person interested in this stuff starting out on some collaborations, but I've emerged from my sabbatical with a suite of the best collaborators, a small lab with talented students working on this stuff, fully instrumented to do this work, and with the capacity to grow further and make a bunch of discoveries. We'll have papers coming out soon enough. My sabbatical wasn't about publishing, it was about building the capacity to get the work done. And I feel capacitated!

If you look around on the internets about how other academics handle their sabbaticals, you'll find a bunch of reflections. A lot of them sound like when I was writing about my earlier sabbaticals. They were good, I was refreshed, I got stuff done, etc., but also with an amorphous lamenting that it could have been better, that somehow it wasn't everything it could have been. I'm finding that this is not how I feel this time at all – and I think it's because I wasn't trying to use my sabbatical to extend what I was doing. I was in training to do something entirely new to me. I feel like I just did a whole graduate program in this area.

I don't know how my experience may or may not be applicable to the experience of others. I do suspect, just a little bit, that you might find your sabbatical to be more fruitful or productive if you make a point to dive into something entirely new. Let go of the guilt of using sabbatical to try to accomplish all the stuff that you normally don't have the time or energy for. Being able to sleep in or travel or pick up your kids from school everyday or setting your auto-reply to "See you in a 15 months" isn't necessarily a recipe for thriving. It's a pleasure and a privilege to be able to do this, of course. But also, just maybe, if you plan on doing something radically new and different that you're excited about, you're less likely to have that vague feeling of a sabbatical that was mildly squandered?