Oliver Bogler, Chief Executive Officer of Night Science Institute and Strategic Advisor at Barnacle Labs, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“There’s a line on my CV that feels like a gap.
Six years working in different states, away from my family. Two institutions. One involuntary transition I didn’t see coming. Another I engineered out of necessity.
The CV shows the appointments. It doesn’t show what those years cost.
It doesn’t show the decisions I made from exhaustion rather than clarity. The career-defining moments I navigated alone, in apartments that weren’t home, without the people who knew me best.
I’m not sharing this for sympathy. I’m sharing it because I work with mid-career scientists who are in versions of that place right now – and the thing I notice most is how invisible the real cost stays.
They’ll describe a funding crisis or a difficult department chair or a tenure clock running out. And somewhere in the middle of the conversation, something else surfaces. The version of the career they imagined when they started. The distance between that and where they are now.
That distance is real. It belongs in the conversation.
If you’re navigating mid-career in academia and something feels off that you can’t quite name – I’d be glad to talk.”
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