What is a sabbatical?

For me, this go-round, it's like being a postdoc again but without any of the drawbacks

This post is a little more personal. Vacation is over, getting caught up after vacation is mostly over, and now I’m ready to roll. After I take it a little bit easy.

I’d just like to take a moment to observe what an extraordinary privilege it is to have a sabbatical whatsoever, and a year-long sabbatical is even more magical. I realize that nearly all other people don’t have this kind of opportunity, and even in academia, most folks don’t have access to sabbaticals. The hardest working folks among us don’t have this kind of support to further professional development, which they clearly deserve.

And at the moment, my liberty is compounded exponentially because I don’t really have parenting duties (with my only offspring away at college), I’ve reached a point in my career where I feel fully established and lots of cool opportunities regularly come my way (that I mostly need to turn down and refer to others), and I can, quite literally, do anything I want with this time. This is my third sabbatical but it’s the first one where I feel such freedom and am so excited to do the projects that I’ve planned.

I burnt my first sabbatical while switching jobs, so it was spent moving. (It was funded by my first tenure-track institution; I was awarded sabbatical and then a couple months later, the Dean orchestrated my tenure denial. So I took a full semester of sabbatical before moving up to my new position.) I was busy moving my household on short notice because of my spouse’s new job, caring for a toddler while attempting to find a good daycare with no advance notice (YIKES!), getting ready for a new faculty position, and somehow also running my ongoing grants as I was moving from one place to another. I’m ever so glad I didn’t have to teach that lame duck semester at my old gig because the atmosphere there was The Worst, but that sabbatical wasn’t a break or refresher of any kind.

The second sabbatical (eight years ago) was more refreshing. I was able to take a full year, and I had a bunch of stuff I wanted to do that I couldn’t have done without sabbatical. It mostly worked. I wrote a book, got mildly competent at R, wrote some papers, and developed a new collaborative project that yielded some very cool science and helped redirect my research agenda. But, at that point I was parenting a middle-schooler and that with my spouse’s non-mobile career, I didn’t really go anywhere except for some brief-ish visits here and there. It wasn’t so much a springboard as it was a respite.

This time, my sabbatical will be able to capture all of the awesome stuff of being a postdoc, but without any of the drawbacks. I am actively exploring what the next stage of my career will look like and I feel like I have lots of exciting options, but I get to do this at my speed from the security of a tenured full professorship. I’m still a parent but to an adult who doesn’t need me at home, as they won’t even be at home. My spouse’s career won’t let her disappear to a remote French village for a whole year, and my sabbatical project’s ideal host happens to be right at home, but I have the personal latitude to go wherever whenever I want, and she might choose to join me for the more fun stuff. I’ve been doing mostly administrative stuff for the past six years, and have accumulated a huge backlog of science that is at the all-but-published stage. I can do this at my own pace and pick and choose the stuff that is most exciting to me. Because I’ve been admin-ing for the past six years, I don’t have a lab full of people who I need to support and manage, and the scope of these mentoring and supervisory duties is just at the level that can work for the sabbatical. And also, I think ever since I turned 50 a couple years ago, I’ve taken steps to improve my mental health, and in many ways I think I have figured life far more clearly than I have before, so I’m going into this unburdened by anxiety or depression, and am super excited for the future like I haven’t been before.

To put it another way: Folks, I am psyched about this sabbatical, which starts this week.

What are my plans? Well, I’m entirely retooling my lab to work in a brand new direction that is highly compelling to me, so I’m going to be learning a whole new set of skills and theory. I’ll be writing a book. I’ll be traveling to some parts of the world I’ve always wanted to experience (which ones? I don’t know yet!) I suppose I’ll write some papers, and I’m also writing grants to grow the research area that I’m building up. It’s an emerging field and I don’t want to stake a flag and colonize it, but I’d like to build it collaboratively and openly so that nobody is able to claim this as their exclusive domain. And I’m going to be exploring leadership opportunities and over this year I’ll have formulated a clearer idea of how and where I’m best suited to make a difference for others.

It’s kind of amazing to have the opportunity take a big career leap but also to have that bungee cable connected at the same time. There were many aspects of grad school and postdocing that were amazing, but obviously the precariousness and low income make it really hard to just enjoy the ride. But this time, I get to enjoy the ride and steer at the same time. I realize that not everybody who is a few decades into their academic career has the luxury of this

So this next year, Science For Everyone will be my dispatches from sabbatical. I’m shooting for at least once a week, as I have for the past year. You might not even notice any difference, but I hope that as I’m doing new and cool things, that things will be more fresh and interesting.