What is an academic?
The story of my early career researcher years and a crisis which ignited me to start writing a better story for the future.
Definition: a cultural script in academia is an unwritten, often unspoken expectation about how one should behave, think, or progress through an academic career.
In May this year I officially transitioned from being a postdoc to a lectureship - my first permanent academic position. I had secured the lectureship 2 years ago and negotiated a later start date, to allow me to see out the remainder of my Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. The following two year period of priming myself for this transition has been the most challenging, disorientating and ultimately transformational period of my academic career to date. This is the story of why things came to a head for me and how I see things differently on the other side.
2018-2022: from feeling like a failure to community validation
I obtained my PhD in Warwick in 2018. Looking back, I see that the accomplishments of my PhD were respectable. However for a host of complex reasons, I came out of my PhD feeling like a failure, convinced that everyone else thought the same and with a burning feeling that I had something to prove.
It had been my longstanding desire to become an academic. I first remember daydreaming about it as a teenager, although I didn’t consider it a realistic ambition until my masters. Upon receiving my doctorate, the obstacles which stood in the way of achieving this dream dawned on me and collided with my crippled self-esteem.
My first postdoc was the perfect springboard to overcome this feeling of despair and build the confidence I required. My postdoc advisor had lots of ideas and I found that I could recreate myself in a fresh environment where I felt anonymous. I knuckled down and got absorbed with lots of projects. I consciously modelled myself on the most compelling young role model for success that I had at the time, by focusing on having a high output and taking any opportunities that came my way.
This quickly paid off: my self-esteem rose and I landed another postdoc. The resulting confidence paved the way for the next phase of my postdoctoral career. After stressing so much about having “enough papers” during the first year of postdoccing, I was craving working on something that felt more personally meaningful. I wanted to have a go at nurturing my own ideas - while still trying to keep a regular publication rate, as the thought of having a lapse in publication and its potential ramifications still terrified me. During this time I had a very fulfilling and expansive collaborative experience. With another postdoc, we developed the framework to study some objects which appeared in the intersection of our fields and this would later serve as the basis for my fellowship proposal. More generally I gave myself the space to deep-dive for the first time, something I now know is crucial for my creativity. Opportunities felt bountiful and I started getting the first recognition for my work, and thereby started feeling like a valid member of the community. I finally stopped punishing myself for the failures of the past, such as having a slow start to my PhD, which up until then I had often been dwelling upon.
This still feels like a very magical time in my career. In the middle of this phase I had moved to the second postdoc at St Andrews, a place I was very fond of. However, after some time I started to feel a restless longing to achieve something bigger. Perhaps after years of feeling like a failure, I didn’t want to only feel valid, I wanted to dazzle in some way. So I moved the goalposts. At the time, “dazzling” for me meant mastering some difficult machinery. Back in 2014 as part of my masters dissertation I was introduced to some powerful techniques which were new to my field. Due to the sophistication of the techniques, there were only a few people who had employed them. I had considered these techniques to be the holy grail of my field ever since. And so now, years later, I set myself the goal of learning these techniques and finding a problem to apply them to.
2022-2023: a brief spell chasing the front-runners
The perfect opportunity to accomplish this goal fell into my lap in a way that felt fated. While attending a conference I heard about a famous problem with a rich history and big names associated to it. The problem concerned establishing the dimension of a certain fractal - a fractal which happened to be a two-dimensional example of the kind me and my friend had been developing a theory for. To solve the problem, I would have to master the “holy grail” techniques and adapt them to the setting which I had been nurturing. I already had some old notes which would be useful and I got started right away.
Someone else from the conference expressed an interest in working on this project and we linked up. He was already an expert in the techniques, so we agreed on a way to manage the project so that I could have the space to learn at my own pace.
While visiting Zurich 9 months into the project, I heard about another group - also comprised of early-mid career people - who had been working on solving the same problem with the same techniques. In fact, they were aiming for an even more general result. I initially felt OK about it - this wasn’t an uncommon occurrence and I was aware of how this had been handled in other situations. Perhaps naively, I assumed everything would just sort itself out and I didn’t put much thought into what my needs were within the situation. My collaborator started expressing uncertainty about continuing with our project and eventually pulled out. When I met the other group at a conference a few weeks later, there seemed to be an atmosphere of anxiety around the coincidence of our work and attempts were made to figure out how we could distinguish our approaches. They told me when they planned to submit their paper, which was a month or two away, and we agreed to keep in touch.
I now considered their expected submission date to effectively be a due date for the submission of my own paper. This worried me because there was still a lot to do and given the rate at which I’d been progressing, I wasn’t expecting to be finished so soon. I felt terrified that I would have nothing to show for the year I’d spent working on this project, especially since this was meant to be counting towards my fellowship. However, the pressure of the situation activated something within me and I managed to finish the arguments on time.
Winter-Spring 2024: burnout
Submitting that paper felt very relieving. I did not feel pride or satisfaction but rather relief that the time that I’d put into the project would not “go to waste” in terms of my credentials. What had started off as an exciting and ambitious challenge in pushing my technical prowess to its limits had transformed into a situation in which erasure felt like a lurking threat and I had begun to resent it. I had been placing certain types of trendy, pioneering research on a pedestal but now I had a taste of what it was like to be in the overpopulated, fast-paced front lines and I didn’t like it. Superficially I’d achieved the goals I’d set out to, but the process had felt too pressured and unsatisfying.
I had lost pleasure in doing mathematics and I needed to find myself again. Fortunately, by this point I had already secured my lectureship and negotiated a later start date, which gave me a much needed buffer period to reorient and start on a new path.
In deciding how to spend this reorientation phase, I was largely inspired by a friend who had been preaching more idealised ways of working for years. His arguments were compelling and he also walked the walk, which looked unconventional and intriguing. Above all he had a relentless mathematical curiosity and a very grounded clarity about what was important and what was not, something I was lacking.
My friend would often challenge the scientific justification for why I was working on whatever I was working on, particularly over the last year. I would give the usual answers that would satisfy others. Instead he would dig deeper, questioning my justification at a deeper level until I ran out of convincing answers. Let me mention that I recognise that the practicalities of modern day research can make it difficult to ground into the motivation and context for a problem in a very radical way. Nonetheless, I found it deeply distressing to realise that I didn’t have enough of my own personal justification for the work I was doing. This questioning even brought me to tears once 🤣. It made me uncomfortable to see that I was parroting community narratives that I hadn’t put the time into properly making my own.
Following his example, I decided I would not immediately jump back onto the publishing treadmill and would instead take some time to ground into the history of developments of my field, develop a more big picture view of my interests and learn some new maths. I fantasised about getting absorbed in a new problem for which I had a very solid grounding and a proper appreciation of its significance; maybe something that would define my niche in the community.
At the very least I assumed, given my recent achievements, that once I gave myself the permission to not publish for some time, it would be easy to go back into undergraduate mode and relish in learning. I was wrong.
I had a plan. I was organised. I had a list of topics to learn about. I had collected resources. But whenever I sat down to learn, my energy and ability to focus completely disappeared. I tried to engage with many different topics but nothing worked. I would often encounter resistance in the form of nagging questions reflecting my self-doubt. Is this worth it? Is this problem interesting enough? Will this avenue lead me anywhere I can actually contribute? Is this a waste of time?
Weeks went by and things weren’t changing. I started feeling more desperate. On the one hand, there was no turning back. I had seen the cracks in how I used to do things and I couldn’t un-see them. There was no way I was diving into a new project with nothing more than superficial justification. But on the other hand, this new path I’d chosen clearly wasn’t working for me. My vitality was nowhere to be found. I felt like I was flushing away time. I felt increasingly ashamed - I’d shared my plans with some colleagues and felt like I’d created something to live up to. I again felt uneasy about all the time that was going by and about having nothing to show for it.
Spring-Summer 2024: unconditioning
At the time, I was committing a lot of time to inner work in order to work through some patterns in my internal world, which had become quite disruptive to my life. I had got absorbed in viewing psychology and somatics from the perspective of conditioning. This was a framing which made sense to me and was helping me have more agency and make progress on my personal issues.
This perspective has emerged from several different disciplines, but in a nutshell I would describe it as below.
Theory of conditioning
We all inherit a conditioning via socialisation (e.g. upbringing, community, society) and individual trauma. This provides us with scripts to follow which say “if I do X, I’ll be safe”.
While these scripts can be very effective in navigating early part of life, eventually they become a problem. The problem is these scripts are typically not aligned with our deeper, more authentic needs. For example, you may have been conditioned to be accommodating of others to feel safe, but eventually this will cause unavoidable conflict with your need to express your more authentic self.
This disalignment starts creating issues in our lives via cognitive dissonance, being “triggered”, increasing fragmentation of our lives, loss of wellbeing, dis-ease, lack of flow etc.
The solution is theoretically simple and it is not about learning more stuff, instead it is about unlearning the conditioning to access our deeper self. But the real difficulty lies in the practise of this. While a degree of control may come from identifying the content or source of our conditioning, we all know this is not the same as being free of it.
Instead, the most effective solutions are through increasing one’s embodiment. This means sitting with uncomfortable feelings rather than trying to manage them. The idea is that this increases nervous system capacity over time, and can even eradicate triggers. The long term goal is to create enough nervous system regulation to allow connection with a deeper embodied wisdom.
I started realising that I could apply this framing to address the issues I was facing in my working life. So, instead of trying to fight the loss of energy I was experiencing or urgently make a plan for how to force myself “back on track”, I simply worked on accepting my new circumstances and facing the deeply uncomfortable feelings that arose from not being productive.
The darkest parts of this liminal period lasted around 6 months, which at the time felt unbearably long. I struggled to speak honestly with other mathematicians about what I was going through. Instead I found the support I needed in online communities, largely made up of businessy-type people like entrepreneurs and execs, who had come to view work and the pursuit of accomplishment through the frame of conditioning and self-discovery. I started making sense of my experience through reading about a well-known phenomenon which describes the existential crisis which gets triggered when someone fulfils their “success needs” (whatever goals they’d put on a pedestal, such as building a company or - for me - working on a high-profile problem) and this doesn’t bring the change in wellbeing that they’d expected. Reading others’ similar experiences gave me the confidence to stick through this emotionally turbulent time and trust in there being a light at the end of the tunnel.
Sitting with my emotions was initially very hard and counter to everything I’d been doing up until that point. However, over time I started hearing more and more of the scripts which I’d been running on autopilot as I navigated the postdoctoral years of my career. For example, a recurring script which caused me significant distress was “If I don’t finish a new piece of work I’ll have to repeat a talk and people will judge me”.
Over time as I gave myself the space to feel more, and started understanding the signals of my body in a more nuanced way, two distinct energetic signatures started becoming clear:
a louder, reactive energy of urgency,
a quieter, open, relaxed energy of curiosity.
When I had been on autopilot, the loud, reactive energy of urgency had been running the show, taking me from one task to the next and leaving very limited space for the quieter energy of curiosity.
But the more I let myself experience the raw feeling of urgency without reacting, the less power it had over me. And very slowly, I started creating more space for the more authentic me to come through. I started giving myself permission to do things differently. I started teaching in a way which emphasised the “soft” ways in which I related to the material, without worrying I was coming across “too feminine”. Supervising students in a way which was trusting of their creative instincts rather than sticking only to strategies and problems I knew “enough” about. Being more open ended with my mathematical inquiries by looking into areas without worrying about where the finish line was. And I was getting increasingly fascinated by “softer” aspects of academia, such as metascientific inquiries and the mathematician’s creative process.
Gradually my work became two things: increasing my capacity to hold feelings of urgency without reacting to them and learning to trust in the softer energy, wherever it was flowing to.
Summer 2024: rewriting my scripts
By the summer of 2024 I had become very deeply accustomed to my inner world. I’d been very disciplined in diving into anything that arose in my consciousness which felt off. In this way I had exposed lots of conditioning and scripts and was starting to see how issues I had within my working life were in fact professional faces of the same issues I was encountering in other parts of life. For the first few months this felt like an exhilarating journey with offered a precious new insight on every corner, but by the summer this started to plateau and there seemed to be nothing major on the horizon to surrender to. My life was feeling less and less fragmented. The revelation of the interconnectedness of my issues had made way for me to realise how various academic and non-academic interests of mine were all connected; the clarity this provided felt exhilarating.
However, my energy levels were still very inconsistent and mathematically I still felt a bit stuck. I was still struggling to trust my mathematical pulls, because I was always second-guessing whether I was getting drawn in for the “right reasons”. After everything I’d sacrificed and put myself through, I wanted to land on a mathematical area in which I could feel complete certainty. To be completely honest, there was a part of me that hoped that once I’d done enough inner work, some mathematical ideas would magically appear and illuminate a specific path for me to follow, just like inner work was guiding other parts of my life. But I was starting to accept that it wasn’t going to be so easy.
Around this time I read Pathless Path. Partly an autobiography, Paul Millerd describes the evolution of his career path, from chasing traditional forms of success, to developing health issues and eventually embarking on a more uncertain and emergent way of life and work, which is characterised by prioritising his wellbeing, energy flow and personal beliefs around work and success. Although he has a corporate background rather than an academic one, I found his story very empowering. Importantly it helped me realise that the energy shutdowns I was experiencing were not a failing of mine and that I could feel dignified in prioritising my health and wellbeing. It also made me realise that I did not need to wait to have everything figured out before embarking on a new way of doing things within my academic career. The book helped me accept that maybe I would not suddenly regain energy and magically find an area in which I experienced instant certainty, but at least I could figure out how to ensure my wellbeing and fulfilment.
This final lack of grasping must have alleviated something in me because shortly afterwards I had a realisation which was transformational. It was a summers day. I was experiencing a more severe energy crash and was finally allowing myself to have guilt-free downtime. As I sat around my flat doing nothing, it suddenly struck me that deep down I was harbouring a life-sucking limiting belief that I, especially within my identity as a pure mathematician, could not “contribute” to the world around me. This limiting belief was zapping my creative zest before I could even access it.
In that moment a lot clicked into place. I hadn’t realised how important it was to me to feel like I was contributing. In fact, if someone had asked me I would have guessed the opposite. In the recent years I had been avoiding taking on extra responsibilities, had felt allergic to power hierarchies and open competition and cringed about the idea of sharing my achievements to the extent that I didn’t even send any personal updates to our school newsletter. I thought I was being modest, but I now saw a fragile part of me that was trying to avoid situations which could shed light on whether anything I did actually mattered or not.
This realisation felt like discovering a “root script” and shone a floodlight on various awkward behaviours of mine which were rooted in my push and pull relationship with the themes of contribution, value and power. Specifically, the desire I had for these things and the fear that I was incapable of them.
I saw that I needed to relax the identity I held of a pure mathematician and validate new forms of academic expression for myself. Following an exercise suggested by the book, I wrote myself new scripts and redefined what success meant for me. Making these new scripts tangible felt very grounding - it helped me realise what I stand for as an academic, which in itself cut back a lot of time and energy that I was wasting on decision making, trying to prioritise tasks and generally wondering whether I was doing things “right”. I started viewing my career in a more longitudinal sense. It also liberated me to pay more attention to forms of academic expression in which I could feel my vitality, even if these were things others overlooked.
I am human, nothing human is alien to me — Terence.
I’m a mathematician but I’m also a big picture thinker who finds the process of doing mathematics just as fascinating as the mathematics itself.
I’ve always been a very introspective person, sometimes to my detriment, and I’m fascinated by people. All people. I’m fascinated by your motivations, why you’re interested in what you’re interested in and what’s going on behind the mask.
As a consequence, I’m open to appreciating all mathematics. In the past, this openness made me feel insecure about lacking mathematical identity. Not anymore. If there is a human being with genuine interest in a problem, then I have deep trust in that curiosity and I want a slice of that passion. Passionate people are my fuel and my guides.
I’m very sensitive to lack of authenticity - in myself and others. I notice everything and I can’t help it. When I can’t be myself, I crumble. When things don’t feel right I can intuit the source of the issue and used to instinctively feel compelled to ease it. I’m tuned into the way that emotions and interpersonal dynamics can derail collaboration, fragment communities and curtail the natural mathematical creative process. As such, I’m fiercely passionate about research culture. On the individual level, I place high value on being in integrity with one’s authentic needs and beliefs and I strongly believe that this personal alignment brings a unique form of empowerment. I believe that the next major transformation in mathematics will not come from any particular mathematical discovery but from collectively recognising that an awareness of the emotional and relational field is critical to the sustainable stewardship of a future mathematics that is meaningful.
I’m fascinated by intuition. Sometimes it amuses me that we’re so normalised to this mystical phenomenon, one which is so integral to the mathematician’s creative process, that we don’t put more effort into figuring out how to get more access to it. Can we characterise the role that intuition could optimally play in the mathematician’s process? Is it possible to create the conditions in our process to cultivate more of it and on more refined levels? I believe so.
I have always been a pencil-and-paper woman (and at heart probably always will be) but this has been changing recently, especially since observing how a friend has been leveraging digital technology to manage projects within his bio-tech startup. Modern digital technology is becoming increasingly biomimetic in its design. For example, second brain software, like Notion and Obsidian, allows us to cultivate an ecosystem of our research interests in a way which supports big picture thinking, pattern recognition and a more “nonlinear” creative process (in contrast to the strictly linear workflow of “work on paper → submit for publication → work on new paper → submit for publication”).
I think we’re living through a uniquely fascinating time. AI is allowing us to create more with less effort, launching us from a knowledge economy to a wisdom economy. It’s no longer about how much you know but how you choose to synthesise that. No longer about quantity but taste and discernment. The horizons for human potential are rapidly growing and no doubt the horizons for mathematical potential are also growing. However, ask most pure mathematicians how they feel about AI and you’ll get everything from disbelief (”are you joking me, I couldn’t even get it to do this high school level problem for me correctly!”) to distaste or unease. And the occasional enthusiast like me - I’m excited! I sense that a lot of thought is required around characterising the mathematical creative process - and learning the art of prompt engineering - so that we see the possibilities for using AI in a way that is supportive, empowering and respectful of our own precious creative process rather than it being overwhelming and stripping of beauty. We’re on the verge of discovering what it really means to be human; what aspects of the creative process cannot be emulated by a machine; what it means for a piece of mathematics to have soul.
2025: integrating the inner work
My path has been far from linear since summer 2024. It took time to see how to start integrating my ideas into new ways of being. It took time to trade the safety I felt in conforming to the things I thought were expected of me, for revealing my opinions and authentic desires. My confidence mathematically is what took the longest to rebuild. It took time to trust again that my draw to problems was coming from a virtuous place and not from superficial desires. I found that in the process of building big-picture vision, I lost confidence in my technical abilities and recovering from this has been quite interesting. It was also nice to find that eventually I could reconnect with the problems I had been interested in previously, now from a new vantage point. Despite the challenges, I haven’t looked back. I generally feel a lot more equanimous, welcoming of challenges and very excited about new pursuits.
Although it hasn’t been easy, I found it important to share these experiences publicly. This is partly because the commitment to being open about it forces me to relieve myself of any remnants of shame around it. I also hope that this writing might help those who can relate to my experience. Sometimes it feels that as academics we’re meant to to have an unwavering passion for our subject - this is what made it especially hard to talk to others when I went through a period of feeling uninspired. However I think what’s overlooked is that the scripts for success that we pick up while navigating the uncertain academic trajectory can result in us getting in the way of ourselves along the way and to lose connection with the authentic nature of that passion. So if telling my story is what it takes to help someone feel like they can be a little more themselves, then it’s worth it.
If there is one thing I take away from this experience, it is that there is no “right” or “best” way to be an academic. What an academic is, is precisely the beliefs and values that we bring to the role. Consciously or not, each of us is choosing what is meaningful here and I believe it is important to recognise both the freedom and responsibility in that.