How to avoid a midlife crisis as an academic

The other day I discovered that, as a 43-year-old, I am not even halfway through my working life. Including my PhD, I have now worked for 19 years, but I have at least 24 more to go; and perhaps many more as the retirement age continues to shift.

And yet, I already feel old in science. Perhaps because I am surrounded by so many young people: students, of course, but also PhD students and postdocs. In most of the meetings I have weekly, I am the oldest.

They will deny it, but I suspect there are quite a few older academics who feel like they have been doing the same trick for years. Teaching, writing research proposals, supervising PhD students, a bit of committee work. Rinse and repeat every September. 

This could quite well trigger a midlife crisis. Do I have to do this same work for so much longer? 

Indeed, some colleagues change to do something else halfway through their academic careers. They go into politics or become deans or rectors. Fine for them to do that, important work. But we can't all become rector. 

I took a different approach. I dived into a totally different research field. When my dean asked me three years ago to get involved in public engagement and science communication, I jumped at the chance to do research in that field too. 

However, I had never taken a course on science communication and had not written a single article on the subject. So first, during a three-month sabbatical, I read my way through a stack of over seventy articles and books. 

Then, with my team of a PhD student, postdocs and a bunch of Master's students, I just started doing research. The first few articles we submitted were rejected outright. But with the help of colleagues like Ionica Smeets and Madelijn Strick, we slowly got the hang of the field. At least now our articles are sent out for review, and sometimes even accepted.

And oh, how much fun it is! How wonderful it is to learn something totally new again. To see how social scientists write completely different kinds of articles than how I was trained as a physicist, with far fewer figures and far more tables. To discover how a theory in communication science is a totally different concept than in physics. 

I sincerely hope that soon everyone will be Professor, but that is no reason to become complacent. As academics, we need to keep innovating and developing ourselves. So my tip for the new academic year is: dive into another field, as an arrived academic. It is very refreshing to start from scratch again.