What happens when the career you worked so hard for no longer fits the life you want?
I'm Emily Macgillivray, PhD—a historian, writer, educator, and former professor— exploring work, academia, and the complicated question of what comes next for mid-career humanities scholars.
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Who Aren't Sure What Comes Next
Maybe you don't know if you want to leave academia.
But you know something needs to change.
You might still love teaching. Research. Your students. The intellectual life. The campus community. Maybe even your job on a good day.
And you might also be wondering how long you can keep doing it like this.
Maybe you want different boundaries. A different institution. A different relationship with your work. A life that isn't dictated by where the next academic job happens to be.
Or maybe you're beginning to wonder what else you could do—and you have absolutely no idea what that would look like.
You don't need to know the answer before you start asking better questions.
Are you burnt out, stressed, and tired from being pulled in multiple directions by the demands of teaching, research, writing, service, and your own life?
Then something needs to change. Even if you don't know what changes to makes.
Learn More About How I Can Help You TakeThe Next Step
Writing
My thoughts on academia, work, identity, and building a life around more than your CV.
Coaching
I work 1:1 with stressed out academics who aren't sure if they want to stay or leave.
Something Needs to Change
My FREE 5-Day Reset for Stressed Academics
Learn More About Me
My academic career, why I left, and how I've created a life that actually works for me.
Writing
Notes on academia, work, identity, and building a life around what actually matters to you--not your CV.
I write about the questions that don't always have tidy answers: what we owe our work, what happens when a career stops fitting, the strange identity work of imagining something else, and how to experiment with change before you know exactly where you're going.
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Building Business Relationships
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Career Planning 101
-Develop a personalized roadmap for career success.
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Coaching
You don't have to figure this out alone.
I work 1:1 with academics who aren't sure they want to stay in academia—but aren't sure they want to leave, either.
Together, we look at what's working, what's not, what you want your life and work to make possible, and what you can learn by making changes and exploring realistic alternatives.
The goal isn't to convince you to leave academia.
It's to help you make a more intentional decision about whether—and how—you want academia to fit into your life.
About Emily
Hi, I'm Emily.
I spent years training for and working in academia. There were parts of my job I loved, but I was always stressed.
Teaching and service overwhelmed me during the Fall and Winter Semesters, and then summers felt like a rush to both recuperate and get writing done.
Then, I lost my tenured position. And I started questioning a premise I'd never been brave enough to before: Did my career get to determine what the rest of my life looked like?
When I began exploring what might come next, I didn't start by choosing a new career from a list of jobs historians could supposedly do. I started with my non-negotiables.
Where did I want to live? What parts of academic work did I want to keep? What did I want work to leave room for? What wasn't I willing to keep sacrificing?
Those questions eventually led me toward a working life that looks very different from the academic career I once imagined—and they're part of why I'm interested in helping other academics explore their own answers.
You don't need to know what's next.
You just need somewhere to start.
If you know you can't keep doing exactly what you're doing—but aren't sure what you want instead—Something Needs to Change is a free five-day reset to help you begin sorting through it.