Motivations for Academia

Status, meaning, and the academic calendar

I’m in a clinical psych PhD program that’s heavily research-oriented. As such, a lot of my fellow grad students are laser focused on churning out peer-reviewed journal articles, giving talks at academic conferences, and forming research partnerships with more established figures in their subfields of interest. It’s a real grind, especially on top of clinical training, coursework, and added part-time duties (e.g., teaching) that justify tuition remission as well as your meager grad school stipend.

Before pivoting to this field, I worked in finance and consulting, so I’ve been around people who work hard before. But I’ve never been around people who have worked harder for, to my mind, less ultimate payoff than clinical psychology graduate students aiming to secure professorships at R1 universities.[1]

Fig. 1: What my graduate cohort looks like. I totally drew this myself btw.

Sometimes I see their late night and early morning emails, peer over at their terrifying to-do lists or track their ever-growing google scholar pages, and wonder: what on Earth is driving these people?

I’ve been puzzled, so here are a couple potential sources of motivations for these folks (non-mutually exclusive):

1. Desire to help combat mental illness: We are all in this field largely because we want to help people out of very dark times. Most clinical psychologists—even around 70% of those who go through clinical science programs—ultimately find that the best way to satisfy this drive is to go primarily into clinical work. However, we also need leading lights in the field to develop better interventions to prevent and treat mental illness and its effects. For those who hold both (1) an extreme ambition to help as many people as possible and (2) an extreme trust in the power of academic scholarship to facilitate (1), academia is a natural path. I could say many things to cut against (2), but it would be nothing you haven’t already heard. Also, for all the issues with academia, consider that Aaron Beck and Marsha Linehan were both academics, and both made gigantic impacts on the way we do therapy today.

2. Desire to mentor the next generation of clinical psychologists: I don’t think this is a large driver, because there are many other roads to becoming a mentor in this field (e.g., being a clinical supervisor). But I bet as a professor’s career goes on, this can be a pretty rewarding experience. I also imagine it can be frustrating at times, particularly when the mentee who you’ve poured so much time into ends up foregoing academia and/or letting you down in terms of the amount of work they can manage. I was pretty frank with my advisor early on that I see myself going towards the clinical route; he is a great guy, and I hope I haven’t disappointed him too much.

3. Desire to teach the next generation of undergrad psychology majors: This is really and truly not a driver for the real gunners, but may stand as a supplemental form of meaning if the grant funding dries up. For me, it’s rewarding as long as the students can bring themselves to class… so it’s occasionally rewarding.

4. Curiosity Satiation: This seems like a really great motivator for a burgeoning academic to have. An intense interest in a topic will yield high quality scholarship, and ultimately a better picture of reality, which will ultimately help us help more people. Curiosity is particularly useful because it can allow one to hold at arm’s length what might otherwise be an intensely human questions; compassion is likewise a forceful motivator, but it may generate too much emotion for reliably good science. I find these more curious types are especially active in doing basic research on the nature of psychopathology (e.g., the HiTOPers). Although much of the work that these basic scientists will produce over their careers will have limited measurable impact in terms of people helped, their work is critical in forming the groundwork for future refinements and revolutions in the ways we diagnose and treat people. If this all sounds too theoretical: imagine trying to help someone with schizoaffective disorder, comorbid obsessive-compulsive disorder, and some patterns of antisocial personality. Already not an easy ride. Now imagine trying to help that person without having “schizoaffective disorder” and “obsessive-compulsive disorder,” and “antisocial personality disorder” as part of your conceptual repertoire. My guess: it’d be a complete mess.

5. Job Security: Tenure seems relatively secure, as long as you don’t get yourself canceled somehow and are happy occasionally acceding to inane institutional practices. And once you have tenure, it’s entirely possible, at least at present, to coast your way through the latter half of your career, even at R1 institutions. Indeed, I have heard tales of academics who, upon receiving tenure, start clocking a solid 5 to 10-hour weeks for the rest of their careers, (and this is on top of having summers off—wild). However, the coasting academic seems relatively rare phenomenon, and I doubt most workaholic graduate students have this ultimate end in mind. Getting through the gauntlet of the tenure track process seems like you’re doing an awful lot of work just to not do a lot of work.

6. Financial interests: Like any career, academia is a place in which you can make money. Not mind-blowing amount, mind you, but certainly enough to live reasonably well on in most areas of the US. As a full professor at an R1, you’re looking at ~$125K, all in, not counting any clients you might see during the weekends. At the upper upper upper end, I think you might be looking more at the $250k range, but I would reserve this for just a few folks who are real giants in their field. Once you get there, it’s not bad at all. But there’s no way it’s a significant driver for these students.

7. Status Seeking: This is the elephant in the room for the bona fide proto academics grinding through our program. You get to stand up there and lecture to several hundred students. You get to call Yourself a professor. You get to present Your work at conferences, and develop different measures and theories that bear Your Name. You can vie for Distinguished Early Career Awards in Your Early Career, Eminent Scholar Middle Career Awards in Your Middle Career, and Late Career Lifetime Achievement Awards in Your Late Career! You get to publish heaps of articles and books (You’re an author, Harry!) and, if You’re really prolific, You get to see Your Name cited all over the place whenever you read a journal articles (Myself et al., 2022; Myself et al., 2023; Myself et al., 2024).

Fig 2. Me at a recent conference. I also drew this.

The funny thing is, I’ve been ensconced in other fields where I’ve found individuals have been extremely motivated by status (“Did you hear that Patrick is working at Goldman this summer?” “Meaghan is starting at Point72—I hear her signing bonus was six figures”; “get this—Garrett has been taking client calls from the Hamptons all summer!”). It’s just that in the world of high-powered, white-collar work, your accumulation of status markers tracks pretty well with your accumulation of personal income and wealth. It has been a bit of a culture shock to learn that in this field, prestige and income are generally inversely correlated. A cultural outsider might think us inane for vying so intensely for status markers, but at the end of the day, SOMEONE has to win that 2024 Mississauga State Embryonic Scholars Funding Award ($25), and I’ll be DAMNED if it goes to anyone other than Myself et al. (2024)!

In truth, much of my graduate school experience has been an exercise in being honest with myself about my intentions and then trying hard to forego the more self-seeking aspects of my psychology in favor of more ultimately useful pursuits. Almost everyone—even tenured academics at R1 research institutions—would probably agree that accruing publications, awards, and citations for their own sake is a poor way to spend one’s graduate school career, let alone one’s life. But in my case, we need not imagine Sisyphus happy; I could stop rolling the boulder if only I found the internal strength to stop chasing external markers of clinical expertise (e.g., Myself et al., 2023; Myself et al., 2024), and focus instead on reading, learning, and practicing the therapeutic techniques that characterize true clinical expertise. Speaking only for myself, that process requires a good deal of self-awareness, because opting out of status marker games can itself be a status marker.

The Buddhists are right to note that intention matters; I guess change really can’t come from anywhere externally; it’s got to come from inside the self. But Buddhists also hold that there is no self. But what’s this? An apparent paradox? A gap in the existing psychospiritual research literature perhaps? An opportunity for another publication? Another line on the CV?

Indeed, I am writing up a manuscript on this very issue, which I intend to submit for peer review post haste (Myself et al., in preparation)…

…That is, if I manage to find a way to truncate these troublesome clinical training hours.

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[1] That’s actually not true. I spent half of one summer working as a landscaper, and the undocumented immigrants who I was working with were the hardest working people I’ve ever met. One guy—who also worked a night shift cleaning up office buildings—quit for another landscaping crew because the foreman only had us working six days per week. I’d imagine stories like this might abound in the developing world, where life can be unimaginably harder (see: Behind the Beautiful Forevers).