Oliver Bogler, Chief Executive Officer of Night Science Institute and Strategic Advisor at Barnacle Labs, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“Nobody prepares you for mid-career.
Early career has a structure. There are milestones, mentors, a rough script. Get the PhD. Land the postdoc. Secure the faculty position. The system is demanding, but at least it’s legible.
Mid-career doesn’t have a script.
You have the lab. You have students depending on you. You have grants you fought hard to get. And somewhere in the process of building all of it, the work that originally drew you to science started to feel like weight rather than momentum.
You’re not struggling because you’re weak. You’re not failing because you can’t manage your time. You’re navigating a stage of academic science that the system never trained you for and doesn’t particularly acknowledge.
Early career is hard because you don’t know if you’ll make it.
Mid-career is hard because you did make it — and now there’s no finish line.
The questions change. They stop being ‘What do I need to do?’ and start being ‘Who am I becoming? Is this still what I want? How long can I sustain this?’
Those are not questions that another publication can answer.
What does mid-career actually look like for you right now? I’m genuinely curious what’s landing hardest at this stage.”
More posts featuring Oliver Bogler.