it’s your Friday good news

by Alison Green on November 3, 2023

It’s your Friday good news!

1.  “An email I thought I’d never get to send! I’ve been reading your site for years now, ever since I was a struggling recent grad trying to navigate my first “once in a lifetime” recession. That was a sticky, underemployed wicket, but I credit both your posts and the comments from others in keeping my normal-meter more or less calibrated, and teaching me the right things to do when my workplaces only provided me with object lessons in how not to behave.

It was a long struggle — about a decade — of being underemployed and doing the kind of front-line, surface-acting, customer-service stuff that leaves me drained at the end of the day. My performance was definitely slipping and I redoubled a job search to get me out of the front line and hopefully into a position with room for growth. Had a lot of bait-and-switch, then a couple really good interviews, then made it to the second round for a job doing accounting in the nonprofit sector.

That was the job that seemed like the perfect fit, so I went through the archives and took a couple pages worth of notes for the interview. I also looked hard at the interactions and only saw green flags — they were transparent, honest, and repeatedly encouraged me to evaluate them as a fit for my goals rather than it being a one-way process. I crushed that interview and the final in-person one with the full team, then went back to the archives to craft the perfect follow-up email.

It was an anxious few days, but I got the job offer the Friday after my Tuesday interview, and the hiring manager specifically mentioned that he appreciated my email. I had a great background for the role but I think it would have been a more difficult decision for them if I hadn’t done the reading and taken the time to prepare. I start next Thursday and I am really looking forward to it. It’s a good agency with healthy boundaries, and better yet, they’re specifically hiring to promote the person in my role to either finance director, or another director-level position depending on how the agency evolves. I genuinely didn’t think this was possible and I am thrilled to be wrong.”

2.  “I started reading your blog when I entered the workforce in 2009 after being a stay-at-home mom for 14 years. It’s been so helpful in figuring out workplace norms and you’ve been an electronic mentor to me in dealing with many tricky work situations. I stayed at that first company until 2022.

In 2021, I realized that the company was not as stable as I would like and since I was now the main breadwinner and the person who carried the benefits, I was concerned. There had been several rounds of layoffs and the company was struggling. My friend recommended a job at another huge company so I applied. After 6 months and 6 interviews, I started in May 2022 but quickly realized that this was not the job for me. The people were nice and management was great, but the 50% in office requirement and hot desking in an open office was terrible. In addition, I wasn’t busy enough to fill my day so being in the office was even worse and I was bored with the work.

In June 2023, I was contacted by a company I had interviewed with in 2020 but decided to withdraw when my previous company gave me a promotion. I was impressed with the company then and jumped at the chance now. Based on your resume and interview tips, including the magic question, I aced the interviews and got the job.

I am super happy here! The work is interesting, the people are fantastic, I only have to go into the office one day a week, and I have my own assigned desk when I am there. I feel like I fit so well with the team and I’ve made significant contributions to the department and company in my first couple of months. During my salary negotiations, I was able to negotiate a good raise from what I had been making.”

3.  “I have been reading your website (and posts on other sites too) for approximately a year now and they have proven invaluable. I am in academia and have been very keen to transition out, but have no experience in the corporate world. This made for a high degree of anxiety around culture, adapting to having a manager, how to settle into an office, how to start a job, and interviewing. Delighted to say that with your advice on interviewing and cover letters I have received an offer from a fantastic company that I’m very excited to join! It’s in a similar area topic-wise. Really appreciate all of the advice you make available, it made such a difference.

If you have any advice for making this transition it’d be much appreciated. My time in academia has been largely independent, with little senior oversight and full control over my workload and deadlines. Whilst I’m comfortable with the idea of starting somewhere new in academia (because I’m familiar with the type of work, how I’d go about starting), that’s not the case and I’d really like to not mess it up. It is likely imposter syndrome, but I’m convinced they’re going to find me to be a fraud within 3 months. I’m quite nervous about how to settle in, particularly the first couple of weeks of ‘getting to grips’ with the work.”

I’d be happy to throw that question out to readers who have made the academia-to-corporate transition themselves!

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{ 40 comments }

{ 40 comments… read them below }

  1. Former academic*

    LW3, congratulations! I’m an ex-ac behavioral scientist (~10 yrs in a TT role at an R2, 4 years in a small R&D firm).

    My biggest shift was redefining the goalpoasts. For close to 2 decades in my academic career (counting grad school) the most important metric was publications (and later, grants). Now, publications are a nice-to-have, not the central focus of my role, and I’m writing proposals in a totally different ecosystem where the expectations look very different. Focus on figuring out what the most important wins in your new job are, and a lot of the rest will follow.

    Also– academic expertise is constantly defined in a really drill down way so that you can say I am THE leading expert on X. (E.g., not just “a biologist”, but the leading expert on the social development of alpacas– and if someone asked you about geriatric llamas, you’d of course say, oh, that’s not really my area.) That is largely the opposite of how “industry” works. While I was in grad school I did an internship at one of the world’s largest companies (you almost certainly have some kind of product they make somewhere in your house). Continuing my biology example, imagine I had just finished a dissertation in a [large mammal biology] program on [alpaca social development] and was now working on a project about [horse grooming] in the product development division. I told my boss, I can do my best, but I’m really an [alpaca developmentalist], I’m not an expert in [horses]. He told me, listen. There are 120,000 employees of this company worldwide. 10 of them have PhDs in [large mammal biology]. 7 of those work in [the petting zoo]. You’re one of the other 3. Which, in fact, means you ARE an expert in [horses].

    1. Former Student Affairs*

      +1 to all of this, from a researcher perspective and non-research. I made the jump almost 2 years ago from student affairs/academic program management to corporate program management at a company that’s a tad…Peculiar. And enormous.

      The biggest part for me was getting a handle on my reporting cadence and what what important to report in the first place in my organization. Once I had that, I could use those as my guideposts for my day to day, and a lot of my existing skills and competencies could kick in. Congrats and good luck on the new role!

    3. DefinitiveAnn*

      In a non-academic setting, I got the same advice from a fellow developer: If you are the only person in the company who knows anything about X, you are our expert in X.

    4. Cedrus Libani*

      On the subject of “wins” and what they look like, keep in mind that you’re optimizing over a very different set of constraints. In academia, you may be used to thinking of your time as practically free, while money is difficult to come by; in industry, your time might well be the most limited resource, so they’ll happily throw money at anything that slows you down. In academia, the most valuable ideas are novel, transformative, and otherwise clearly the product of a brilliant visionary; in industry, you want simple, reliable, maintainable, and otherwise as low-risk as possible.

      I’ve told this story on here before, but I was once a 20-year-old intern on my first day in an industry lab. My boss led me to my workbench, and he asked me to produce a simple chocolate tea cup. This was a test, of course. My workbench had the appropriate tools…and a five-gallon jug of chocolate syrup. Oh no. But I wasn’t about to show weakness, so I agreed and got to work.

      A week and a half later, I led my boss back to my workbench. I showed him my cup, as well as the chocolate syrup fractionator that I’d built from spare parts. “Okay, I’m impressed. But how do you know enough to build THAT, yet it didn’t occur to you to just use modeling chocolate?” “Obviously, if I’d had modeling chocolate, I’d have been done in an hour. But all I had was this jug of syrup.”

      I was used to lab classes, where your station will have all the supplies you’re allowed to use, and it’s meant to be an intellectual challenge that you solve by yourself. Also there’s a tight budget, so luxury items like premade modeling chocolate are out of the question. This was…not that. The boss wanted to get me started with something simple. He’d forgotten to show me the supply room, which contained enough modeling chocolate to sculpt a life sized elephant.

      Lesson one: time is money. The cost of having me faff around converting the wrong stuff into the right stuff, even at an intern’s salary, was far in excess of the cost of simply buying the right stuff. I was allowed to buy stuff that would make my life easier. Lesson two: it’s better to ask a stupid question than make a stupid mistake. Relatedly, when you ask stupid questions, you should provide context so that the other person realizes they need to step in and save you from yourself. I did spend that week and a half talking to my new co-workers, including asking for parts for my contraption, but at no point did I say “because I’m trying to turn this syrup into modeling chocolate”. Had I done so, they would have immediately led me to the elephant-sized pile that was free for the taking.

      No, that was not the only time I tripped over my own context blindness and made a total noob of myself, but I learned quick and didn’t make the same mistake twice. (I worked for a few years, did a PhD, then high-tailed it back to industry where I belong.)

  2. ExAcademia*

    Also transitioned out of academia, and here are the biggest differences for me (besides the reduced toxicity) were these:
    (1) It’s a marathon, not a series of sprints. Pace yourself. If you treat every day like the back half of a semester, you will burn out in a hurry.
    (2) You do not have to be a hero all the time or work in isolation. A halfway decent team will, in fact, function like a team. You can lean on each other. Do that. It’s delightful!
    (3) Some things move much faster and some things move much slower. Be prepared to “show your work” all over the place. In academia, the focus is on end results: publications, student evaluations. And in corporate world, that definitely matters too, but so does showing your manager the work that you’re doing to get there.

  3. Dasein9 (he/him)*

    Congratulations, all three!

    LW3, I’m a former academic who’s now in corporate. The differences between university and corporate work are myriad. The biggest for me are having a manager, not being responsible for everything, and not having a sense of “mission.”

    A good manager is there to support your success. (If you get a bad one, well, you probably have the skills to handle that, thanks to department politics.)

    If you have a manager, you’re not going to be the person who has to solve every problem, as many academics do. You will get to pass that buck to the next person in the hierarchy a fair amount. It’s such a relief!

    You may need to make your own sense of mission or purpose. Your family may fill that place in your life, or maybe you will take up making art or volunteering. Give yourself some time to decompress before rushing into the next big thing.

    1. Zarniwoop*

      Change in sense of mission depends on the corporate job. I get more sense of mission from helping keep planes from crashing and power plants from blowing up than I can imagine getting from publishing journal articles.

      1. Cedrus Libani*

        It was a whole lot easier to *explain* my mission when I was in academia. Saving the world, curing cancer, etc. Now I work on a niche product that most people have never heard of. But my product is out there, quietly doing its job, because it’s cheap and reliable enough to use at scale. It takes a lot of work to go from a research prototype held together by duct tape and grad student tears to a field-deployable, customer-resistant, real world product, but somebody’s got to do that work, or the research will never matter to anyone but a handful of cloistered nerds.

        The mission stuff is for dinner parties and the first two slides of your seminar. On a day to day basis, you’re way too deep in the weeds to think about that stuff. Honestly, the weeds are my happy place; I like solving puzzles, and I’m good at it. Don’t want to write grants, don’t want to sell my vision, just give me Diet Coke and a nice quiet cubicle and I’ll figure out why your whatchamacallit isn’t working properly.

      2. Dasein9 (he/him)*

        And I found more sense of mission in building educational excellence in an otherwise under-served population and helping to transform lives of people I got to know than I do helping to make someone else richer. Guess it’s a matter of perspective.

  4. TheGirlInTheAfternoon*

    re: transitioning from academia to corporate – My experience isn’t an exact corollary because I went from traditional academia to a much more corporate part of the academic world, but here are a few things I personally found helpful:

    – Address the concerns you have about working with supervision with your manager! They know you don’t have a corporate background, so don’t be afraid to mention it to your manager – something like “One thing I think might be a challenge for a while is that I’ve mostly worked autonomously in the past, with control over my own workflow and deadlines. Can we go through how you prefer to receive updates on my workload, progress reports, etc.? Are there certain items that will always be the priority, even if they’re less urgent? What sort of oversight structure do you find most helpful for people in this kind of role?”
    – When it comes to culture, I usually start by observing how people decorate their offices. For me, this has been a pretty solid barometer of whether individual coworkers, as well as the office as a whole, are more/less formal, chatty/quiet, collaborative/individual, etc.
    – Imposter syndrome is so real. If your time in traditional academia was anything like mine, you may be approaching your new role with the mindset that the standard is perfection, and anything less indicates not merely that your work is imperfect (most work is) but that you yourself are a failure in the role. This is simply not the case in a healthy work environment! (At my first performance review with First Real Boss, I rated myself as “meets expectations” at a couple of categories he’d given me pointed praise for. When he questioned that, I said aloud the actual words, “But the expectation is that you do it perfectly.” He spent literal years training me out of that mindset and I am so thankful every day that he did.)
    – You are likely to mess things up/misunderstand instructions/not hear the unspoken assumptions other people are operating with, and that is okay as long as you take ownership of your mistakes, thank others for helping you get through them, and learn from them. In taking ownership of mistakes, I think it’s particularly useful to pay attention to whether a mistake is something you directly caused (aka, your fault) or something that was able to happen at least in part because of something you did/didn’t do (aka, not technically your fault but a thing that you can play a role in preventing in the future). I have worked very, very hard to be a conscientious coworker, and a big way I have been able to do that is by looking at those second-order mistakes, acknowledging them, and working to prevent them happening again.

    Congratulations on your new role!

  5. Goddess47*

    For LW #3 — Sit back for a minute (week, month) and see what the ‘business cycle’ is like. Academia largely focuses on the ‘semester’ so August/September and January/February are peak work times. That’s going to be very different in the corporate world.

    I used to work in Academia and we’d get the occasional corporate person who would regularly start anything they had to impart with ‘In my old job, we did this…’ It gets old, fast, especially if you’re working with folk who have been around for any length of time. Doesn’t mean you don’t have good insights to share, just think about that wording! ;-)

    Good luck!

    1. Ama*

      That reminds me that my biggest adjustment when I left academic administration for the nonprofit world was learning how to carve out vacation time when there wasn’t a clear cut “summer vacation” period. I had to learn both how to think far enough ahead to set vacations before my calendar filled up and to identify which tasks/deadlines/etc. could be shifted a bit if I wanted to take PTO and which absolutely could not.

    2. Jam*

      Your last paragraph is what came to mind for me too! I was a historian who after a long struggle of unemployment and retail landed in a 9-5 at an NGO. When I started I was so self-conscious, there were so many things that just weren’t done the way I would have guessed, or I felt like I was expected to know when I had never encountered them before. I definitely made the mistake of trying to explain myself all the time. It boiled down to: “the reason I had to ask about that isn’t because I’m stupid, it’s because I am a competent person who has been working in a different environment – please please respect me.” But aside from being annoying it can come across as defensive, or like you’re hung up on your academic past.

      Now, having changed job in the outside world a couple of times I know that a lot of that uncertainty is just part of being at a new company! You can have lots of “real world” work experience and still need to adjust to the assumptions and practices of a new workplace. So don’t feel like you have to explain yourself all the time, just ask the questions, learn, and move on.

  7. Beth*

    Congrats OP3!

    When I moved out of academia, something I anticipated but still struggled with is the pace of work is often slower in the corporate world! In academia, it felt like there was always more to read, write, grade, prep, etc. Yes, my work was independent and I had a lot of control over it…but there was no end to the to do list. It always felt like someone else was working longer and doing more, and I felt a lot of pressure to work more to catch up and be seen as doing well.

    In the corporate world, in contrast, as long as I’m on top of my projects and available on slack and email, I’m seen as productive. My workload is designed to fit in roughly 40 hours a week–and a 40 hours that assumes little breaks here and there, not 40 hours of breakneck focus. I have my backlog of little side projects to work on when I’m having a quiet day, but there’s an end to that too. If I tried to work the long hours I used to feel pressured into, I would run out of things to do.

    I know that sounds like a good thing (and it is!) but I struggled with it at first. My manager was happy with my work and my onboarding progress, but I felt like I was moving very slowly and getting nothing done. I had to trust her judgment over my own feelings until I recalibrated my sense of ‘normal’.

    1. Dorothy Zpornak*

      This! I’m still in higher ed, but moved from an academic role to an administrative role. It’s been incredibly difficult struggling with the mental framework of “I have to challenge myself to be the best I can possibly be or else I’m failing.” Moving into a role where I had to contend with resource constraints that meant that no matter how hard I push myself I’m never going to be able to perform in a way that meets my own standards was incredibly difficult. As an academic, if I knew my research could be stronger I would just do more work and make it stronger. In my current role, if I know I could make my program better by spending $x, well… too bad, the institution is okay with the program as it is and is not interested in allocating more $. This idea of settling for “good enough” is really hard for me.

      The other big issue was figuring out what to do with a manager. I’m in a role where I have a great deal of autonomy, so I actually don’t get actively managed much. But while I probably would have bristled at being more actively supervised, in one way it would have been helpful. Having never had a manager, I took a long time to figure out what to do with one. We’d have these weekly check-ins, and I was like, what am I supposed to do here? Just list the things I’m doing so she knows what’s going on? Talk about outcomes so I justify that I’m doing a good job? I wish my manager had been more proactive in helping me understand what the goals of our interactions were, or how she could support me. But looking back now, I realize that if I had been more clued in, I could have asked what the purpose of those meetings were or what she would like to see from me that would allow her to evaluate my progress or support my work. I wish now I had understood more clearly what that transition meant. LW, it’s a good sign that you’re thinking about these issues and I would definitely have a frank conversation with your new manager about expectations and how to make your relationship a productive one.

  8. Chidi has a stomach ache*

    Coming out of academia, one of the things I’ve had to learn to do is understand who has stakes in my work. As a professor (humanities), my day to day stakeholders were pretty much just the students, and maybe my department chair who oversaw my tenure progress and course evaluations. But the kinds of projects I work on now affect many different people across my organization. Understanding those relationships, and how decision-making happens helped me see that success is rarely, if ever, solely on my shoulders. This is a good thing (less pressure), but also can be frustrating (if you have trouble getting buy-in for your parts of the project). Your manager should help you figure some of this out! Mine assigned me to 1:1s with a bunch of colleagues and gave me smaller, “figuring stuff out” assignments as part of my onboarding, which was really helpful for a company with 8k employees across hundreds of countries. If you have space for that in your onboarding, go for it.

    1. HumProf*

      Can I ask what you transitioned into? I’m a humanities prof but usually see stories of STEM people transitioning….

  9. Keymaster of Gozer (she/her)*

    3. Went from virology lab to corporate IT and it is quite different, but this was over 20 years ago so things may have changed.

    One thing is that unless you’re going to a monopoly or government office there is the atmosphere of competition- getting ahead of other companies vying for the same clients. So there’s a lot more focus on best value, best products, best profits. This was the biggest change for me, I’d been used to endless committee meetings to change anything and corporate was very much not inclined to wait around.

    It can be less political but much faster paced.

  10. Rook Thomas*

    Congrats to all three of you! Sorry, I don’t have any advice for #3 — but I appreciate everyone sharing their good news. Happy Friday!

  11. Sara without an H*

    Hi, LW#3: Congratulations on your escape! I have a couple of suggestions.

    1. You don’t say what your academic area is. Mine tended to value argumentation, i.e. you were expected to argue for your position, conclusions, etc. Non-academic organizations tend to set a high value on cooperation and teamwork. While it’s okay to advocate for your position, don’t overdo it and get a reputation as an argumentative pain-in-the-neck.

    2. Relationships are key. Some firms are more sociable than others, but try to be open to getting to know your colleagues. Coffee and lunch breaks are not time wasters.

    3. Your relationship with your own manager is key. Be sure to set up regular 1:1s with them and make sure you’re aligned on goals and expectations.

    I learned all of these by screwing them all up. Don’t be like me!

    Congratulations and good luck for the future!

  12. ZSD*

    OP 3 – I transitioned from academia to the non-academic (though also non-corporate) world. One thing comes to mind:

    In academia, when you give your point of view, you are speaking for yourself alone. Dr. Smith thinks A, but Dr. Jones thinks B, and it’s fine if they separately give their different perspectives to students/the media/the public/etc. Outside of academic, when you give your point of view, you are speaking for *your employer.* If you tell the media, “I think A,” what happens is that A is now your employer’s official public position. Be circumspect!

  13. higheredadmin*

    As someone who moved from corporate and now works in HE, my observation of academic management is that, well, there is often not a lot of management. I would suggest you consider what it will be like to be in a team, and to have a manager. The focus from the corporate organizational point of view is on the success of your area/product, not on your individual success. A classic example – only certain people are expected to pipe up in meetings in a corporate environment, depending on the meeting. There are chains of command that you will expected to follow (e.g. raise the issue with your manager, if no luck then with HR.) In many corporate environments skipping up a few rungs is very scandalous. Not the same as academia, where any faculty member in a meeting would be expected and able to contribute or ask pointed questions, and will quite often reach out to the President/Dean directly with concerns.

  14. Goldenrod*

    Congrats to you all!!

    To OP#2:
    “hot desking in an open office was terrible”

    Why, why, WHY??? do companies think that hot desking in an open office is a neato idea? I feel like this trend towards giving people such terrible work spaces is one of the main drivers towards WFH.

    So glad you got outta there!

    2. English Rose*

      Bit of a counter-point here. Our organisation recently moved to new offices and most of it is hot-desking and open plan. It was driven by hybrid working, not the other way around. Leadership (rightly in my view) couldn’t justify a desk for everyone if most people are working from home two or three days a week.
      We were all really worried about the switch to hot desking in particular. But it’s been thoughtfully worked out. There’s lots of private meeting space. The desking is well arranged. Excellent IT setup. A lot of thought was given to sound muffling so it isn’t too noisy.
      So this is just to say it can work, but needs a lot of thought. We were probably lucky that we were starting from scratch with a new building, not trying to change existing.

  15. BuffaloBuffaloBuffalo*

    Congrats to all, well done!

    LW#3: Ex-academic here in Corporate Land. There’s some great advice and comments above.

    YMMV based on company but my biggest three takeaways from the transition are:

    1. Enjoy the freedom that comes with not having to apply for grants, enjoy the freedom of not having to rationalize charging lunch to the company when traveling when theoretically you could have packed something, and enjoy the freedom of knowing that unlike a Dept Chair or a Dean having final say, there are many more checks-and-balances (I’ve found) in corporate land – for the better.

    2. Other folks (non academic) also deal with imposter syndrome – if you’re comfortable talking about it with future colleagues – do it… if not, don’t. You’re there to do a job but it’s not your life.

    3. If you have an advanced degree which I’m assuming (PhD?) just be ready to have a go-to response as some people (if they hear through the grapevine) will think it’s “so cool” and others will have less nice things to say. Practice it a few times and like-water-off-a-duck don’t dwell on others’ comments and work your 8-4 or 9-5 workday and put your work away at end of day.

    You got this!

  16. Justin*

    Yeah, the main difference between academia and other offices is, I find, what counts as success. That will also depend on your office, but I would do as much question-asking as possible, meet as many folks on other teams so you are not silo’d, and maybe recalibrate what your goals are from publication and so on to internal projects.

    Also if you ever miss anything academic, I still do some academic writing and adjuncting for fun, so you always have that option.

  18. NobodyHasTimeForThis*

    #3 – I think the hardest adjustment might be the timeline. Having moved the opposite direction I feel like academia makes decisions at a much slower pace (except when they make them instantly with no thought).

  19. Yet another former academic*

    Congrats! You’ve got this.

    Having done this myself and mentored others, here is the biggest mistake I see people make:

    not mentally shifting from “my work” to “our work”
    Taking ownership is good! But you don’t have to do most things alone. If you can’t meet a deadline, communicate early — don’t pull an all nighter (or hide and hide nobody notices). There are often ways some of the work can be redistributed.

  20. Cutesy Bootsie*

    LW3, a valuable resource for transitioning from academia to industry is The Professor Is Out.

  21. vombatus ursinus*

    Congrats to all LWs!

    Re: LW3, I went from my PhD to not-for-profits (so not really corporate, but not academic) in 2021 and have worked in two organisations since then.

    Firstly, LW3, I am so sure that you’re not a fraud! Being a researcher brings a LOT of broadly transferable skills like communication, problem-solving, and critical thinking, on top of your narrow expertise. And you’re clearly being thoughtful about the transition. You’ve got this!

    YMMV, but I actually don’t miss the independent, self-directed work culture of academia at all. One of the things I realised during my PhD was that I don’t have a lot of intrinsic motivation, but I’m really motivated by feeling like I’m helping others and contributing to a shared goal — whereas my PhD was kind of like, no one but me would realise or care if I was doing my work or not. Now I feel part of a team and I *know* that others do care and appreciate what I do. For me personally, that’s a better and more motivating work situation!

    You’ll probably lose some flexibility, but your work-life balance will probably also get a lot better! And you’ll probably be able to relax your own standards and expectations of yourself. IMO academic culture traps us into constantly pushing ourselves to our limits so that we can be the best in our field and get a shot at one of those scarce grants or permanent jobs or what have you. Both my non-academic jobs have seen me as accomplished, hard-working and valuable when I internally felt like I was slacking off compared to when I was in research.

    The downsides … the work I do now is not quite as intellectually stimulating, and I occasionally miss the “scholarly community” feeling. But it’s so worth it for the benefits!

    Re: how to approach your first few weeks, I’m pretty sure it’s actually advice I’ve seen here, but just keeping lines of communication about expectations clear is the way to go. Sit down with your manager to discuss what they see as the keys to success in your role and what they/the company hope you’ll achieve (or need you to achieve) within the first weeks/month/year. Make sure you ask about the systems and norms for workflow and communication. And just do your best! You’ll be fine :D

    1. vombatus ursinus*

      I should add, I’m not advocating for actually slacking off and I do not try to do that in my work! But it’s just the contrast with the academic culture of constantly operating at the edge of your abilities and energy level

  22. vombatus ursinus*

    I should add, I’m not advocating for actually slacking off and I do not try to do that in my work! But it’s just the contrast with the academic culture of constantly operating at the edge of your abilities and energy level

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