Name: Katie Pratt
Job: Communications Director for the Deep Carbon Observatory
Source: SciLingual [original post from April 2013]
Excerpt:
I decided to leave academia in 2010. I was 5 and a half years into my PhD program and I was not loving it, but at that level of commitment I felt like I needed to finish. At the time, I didn’t realize it would take me another 18 months to defend, but that’s another story. In a nutshell, I was disheartened by the process. I’m a creative person, and sure, designing experiments is creative, thinking about science is creative, but the everyday grind of doing science is not. It is rigid and repetitive and precise. Having decided academia wasn’t for me, the next question was “what is?”. Moreover, I wanted to make sure that having spent so much time and energy on my education that I used it.
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