I failed in academia | The unexplored steps to academic failure! Leaving academia

Academic failure, in this account, wasn’t caused by a lack of effort or even by bad science. It came from a slow realization that universities run on a “game” of incentives—publish fast, stay visible, and bring in money—and from the personal traps that kept one researcher playing long after the rules stopped matching what they wanted.

The story begins with a mismatch between expectations and reality. During a PhD, success felt straightforward: show up, do the work, and the thesis follows. But the horizon never ends. Papers lead to the next paper, and the next. Over time, the system’s priorities became clearer: academia is less about producing the best science and more about gaming metrics—publishing in the right journals quickly enough, meeting the “publish or perish” pressure, and maintaining “visible or vanish” relevance to the public. Promotion and institutional reputation matter because universities compete for students, researchers, and funding. In early career—roughly within five years after a PhD—falling behind can happen quickly, and the treadmill accelerates.

A key turning point was learning that output targets were treated as quantity rather than quality. A supervisor’s benchmark of “five papers a year” wasn’t about producing great ones; it was about absorbing enough publications to keep the group moving. The researcher describes being good at the softer side of the game—communicating results, building confidence in meetings, and “spinning” findings into a compelling narrative—so the career kept moving even as the underlying incentives felt increasingly wrong. Funding also became part of the loop: after a post-PhD position, about $60,000 arrived via a South Australian “catalyst grant,” reinforcing the idea that money and papers were the currency of approval.

The second step toward failure was the sunk cost fallacy: identity and time investment made leaving feel impossible. Science communication offered a genuine alternative—writing, radio appearances, and public engagement—but it also didn’t pay like academia. When industry briefly looked better, the work still felt like being “a cog,” and the researcher returned to academia, partly because quitting would make them feel like an “idiot” for reversing course. Meanwhile, contracts dried up and opportunities narrowed, leaving them in “no man’s limbo land”: good enough to keep getting chances, not good enough to become an academic in their own right.

The final step was fear turning into anger. Short-term contracts and leadership-driven cultures that demanded money created a climate where staying felt both trapped and pointless. Instead of making a clean exit, the researcher describes acting out—trying to provoke consequences—so the decision to leave would come from outside. That culminated in an unpaid internship opportunity at Cosmos magazine, triggered by a supervisor’s refusal to grant time off, effectively forcing the departure.

After leaving, the researcher frames failure as non-permanent: the real cost was delaying the leap. The central lesson is to stop trying to control what can’t be controlled, recognize the game early, and choose work that feels worth doing—before fear and anger take over and make the exit harder than it needs to be.