After years dwelling in the now deserted corridors of academia, I’ve come to realise that describing the academic experience in university life requires navigating a landscape as varied as it is contradictory. Like a coastal path that winds between sun-drenched peaks and shadowed valleys, it’s a profession that simultaneously offers profound intellectual satisfaction and deep frustration, meaningful human connection and isolating loneliness, prestigious opportunities and mundane bureaucratic struggles that would test the patience of saints.

The rewards of academic life are genuinely significant and shouldn’t be understated, like wildflowers blooming unexpectedly in rocky soil. There’s something deeply fulfilling about conducting research that matters, about pushing the boundaries of knowledge in your field and knowing that your work contributes to humanity’s understanding of the world. Each insight, however small, feels like adding a stone to the great cathedral of human knowledge. When you publish alongside brilliant colleagues, there’s a collaborative energy that crackles like electricity in the air, genuinely exciting and invigorating. The peer review process, despite its flaws and occasional frustrations, creates a community of scholars engaged in rigorous intellectual dialogue, a conversation that spans continents and generations with its slow inching forward.

Those moments when a research project comes together feel almost mystical. When the data reveals something unexpected, or when months of theoretical wrestling suddenly crystallises into clarity, or when a paper gets accepted at a respected journal, these experiences provide a sense of accomplishment that few other professions can match. It’s like watching sunrise after a long night of uncertainty, illuminating landscapes you never knew existed.

The travel opportunities are remarkable, painting your life with colours you never anticipated. Academic conferences take you to cities and countries you might never have visited otherwise, and there’s something genuinely special about presenting your work to international audiences, engaging with scholars from different cultural backgrounds, and seeing how your research fits into global conversations that span time zones and languages. The intellectual stimulation of these gatherings pulses with an invigorating energy. The late-night discussions over dinner, where wine loosens tongues and ideas flow like rivers meeting the sea, the serendipitous conversations that spark new research directions, all of this creates a sense of belonging to something larger than yourself, a global community of minds united by curiosity.

Perhaps most rewarding is the profound impact on students, watching minds unfold like flowers reaching towards light. Whether it’s undergraduate students whose eyes suddenly light up when they finally grasp a complex concept, that magical moment when confusion transforms into understanding, or PhD students who develop from nervous beginners into confident researchers finding their own scholarly voices. Witnessing intellectual growth is genuinely moving. Supervising doctoral candidates through their research journeys, watching them develop their own scholarly chops like musicians learning to compose their own symphonies, and eventually seeing them launch their own careers, there’s something deeply satisfying about being part of that transformation, knowing you’ve helped kindle flames that will burn long after you’re gone.

Yet for all these rewards, the challenges of academic life are equally real and increasingly difficult to ignore, shadows that lengthen as the day progresses. The isolation is perhaps the most underestimated aspect of this work, creeping in like fog over a harbour. Academic research is fundamentally solitary work. You spend hours, days, weeks working alone with texts, data, and ideas, your only companions the voices of long-dead theorists and the whisper of mountainous texts on a screen, with endless drafts that never ever seem to end. The romantic image of the scholar in their study, surrounded by leather-bound books and golden lamplight, doesn’t capture the loneliness that comes with such extended periods of individual work. Regular human contact becomes precious precisely because it’s so limited, like cool drops in desert heat.

The administrative systems within universities have become labyrinthine and often contradictory, bureaucratic mazes that would challenge Theseus himself, and you can’t even identify the Minotaur. You find yourself navigating processes that seem designed more for institutional protection than academic productivity, swimming upstream against currents of justified red tape. Forms that don’t quite fit your circumstances, like clothing tailored for someone else’s body, policies that change without adequate notice like unstable sands beneath your feet, and procedures that somehow take weeks to accomplish what should be simple tasks. It’s exhausting to constantly decode institutional expectations while trying to maintain focus on research and teaching, like trying to write poetry while someone hammers nails nearby.

The processes around leadership positions and promotions often feel disturbingly opaque and partial, decisions made behind closed doors like smoke-filled rooms from another era. Despite rhetoric about fairness and merit, there’s an uncomfortable sense that networking, politics, and favouritism play roles that are never officially acknowledged, invisible hands shaping visible outcomes, and nothing is said or can be said. Watching less productive candidates advance while productive colleagues remain overlooked creates cynicism that settles in your chest like winter cold, hard to shake once it takes hold.

In the classroom, the growing trend of student absenteeism is disheartening, like speaking to an audience that slowly melts away. When significant numbers of enrolled students simply never appear, their desks standing empty like missing teeth in a smile, it raises troubling questions about engagement, expectations, and the value students place on their education. Teaching to a mostly empty room becomes demoralising, particularly when you’ve spent considerable time preparing engaging content that now feels like songs sung to an empty hall.

Perhaps most frustrating are the unspoken expectations that permeate academic life like humidity in summer that sticks. There’s a constant sense that you should be doing more, publishing more, networking more, but exactly what constitutes “enough” remains mysteriously undefined, a moving target in perpetual twilight. These implicit pressures create a background anxiety that’s difficult to address because the expectations themselves are never clearly articulated but remain voices in your head that you take home.

The publishing process has become increasingly brutal, a gauntlet that tests endurance as much as intellect. Journals are overwhelmed with submissions like harbours clogged with ships, review processes drag on for months while your career clock keeps ticking, and rejection rates have climbed to discouraging levels. The energy required to navigate multiple rounds of reviews, revisions, and rejections while maintaining research momentum is genuinely exhausting, like climbing a mountain only to discover it’s the first of many peaks.

Finally, there’s the issue of work boundaries, or rather their complete absence. Academic work doesn’t fit neatly into traditional schedules (just ask partners). Research ideas strike at odd hours like lightning, conferences happen on weekends when families gather, and the pressure to be constantly productive means that work seeps into every corner of domestic life like water finding cracks in stone. The flexibility that initially seems like a benefit becomes a burden when you can never truly switch off, when home and office blur together like watercolours in rain.

I remain in academia for now because the intellectual rewards and potential to make significant contributions still outweigh the frustrations, because the music is still more beautiful than the discord. But I’ve learned to acknowledge both sides of this complex profession, recognising that the academic life is neither the romantic ideal nor the unending struggle that various narratives suggest, but rather something more complicated, an intangible but glorious beast that demands everything yet offers glimpses of something approaching immortality.

 

7/8/2025