“G”, a regular client of mine, expressed last month his concern that moving to an alt-path would through away several years of his life. This is no small matter, mind you, when you spend several thousand on your academic career from undergrad years on. However, when you change to an alt-path, you are not throwing away your career, you are doing something what businesses call “pivoting“.

A pivot during a tango.

Pivoting, in it’s most simplistic terms, is turning about and doing something different. You can pivot in any aspect of life from movement to business to relationships. It’s all about turning yourself mind, body, or heart in a slightly different direction, and taking off. It’s realigning yourself and moving from there to the next logical progression.

This concept can be applied to research fields just as well as business. The question then becomes how?

It starts with your mindset.

I had G recognise himself as an individual in charge of his own destiny. We all are. We make our own choices with what we have and strive forever forward to the end we wish. Pivoting is just changing our minds and aiming for a different ending. In G’s case, after two years of grad school, he decided he really didn’t want to do biomedical technology, but rather wanted to build robots. He simply finds more joy in it, but he didn’t think he could really make a living out of it.

Is biomedical technology really so different from building robots? Turns out that it doesn’t have to be. You can combine robotics for a great many things from assisted surgeries to rehabilitation to biomanipulations. He just wasn’t looking deep enough at the applications of his current study of sensors at grad school to see how they can be applied where he wants.

Armed with this knowledge, G approached his advisor and together they pivoted the project he was working on. The ultimate goal will now be to improve the sensors for a specific purpose related to using robots. They haven’t quite hammered out all the details yet, but eventually, they will. G’s personal business pivot is similar to PayPal’s was; he’s still doing the same thing, but he has refined it to be more in tune to what he wants and what will make him money.

G, like everyone else, has the potential to act like his own startup. He observed the various angles he could pivot at that moment, oriented himself towards a goal of combining biomedical technology with his beloved robotics, and then he acted on it. This ability to be agile and opportunistic at any stage of our careers is not something that most of us really think about. It just happens as we follow the grant money from one project to another. However, it’s in our nature to follow the lines of curiosity, find the next “big thing”, and then explore the area of study. By turning our research interests into a business we don’t have to follow the grant money, but rather follow our desires to get from where ever we are to where ever we want to be.

Now that your mind is set, you need to learn how to pivot. Doing so is actually easier than you can imagine since we do it all the time in academia when a project goes unexpected or wrong. We change our minds.

Use your experiences to pivot into success.

Most academics have had an experiment fail. If you haven’t, you’re doing it wrong. Somewhere along the line during your undergrad years you forlornly looked at the directions, knowing that the answer you be a specific something, but even after following through you end up with something completely different. Or maybe your undergrad years went smoothly, but your grad years showed you the true nature of life and that nothing is ever 100% predictable.

When it finally happened, you realised you had to change direction on something or tweak the process a little. That is what you’re going to do when you pivot your whole career to be something more aligned with your desires. Tom Morke’s did a great job of laying out the ways to use failures as a framework to pivoting, and I’m going to jump off that by extending it to the academic world pivoting here.

1.) Note what’s working for you… and what’s not.
Often times I find that academics start in a subject because they are very interested in it, but they aren’t passionate about it. It’s one element of their interests, but not the whole. Make a list for both what’s working and what isn’t, then look for a pattern. This is where you figure out exactly what parts of the field you enjoy are and which parts you need to stay away from.

Maybe, like me, you studied astrophysics because you like the stars and are fascinated by gravity. But when you got there and started studying just that you realised there was a lot of computer work to do, and the last thing you wanted to do was sit at a desk all day long. This could definitely make you unhappy and it’s time to take a critical look at how to pivot. Perhaps you’ll stay in the astrophysics field, but you might put more of an emphasis on taking kids out on field trips rather than work strictly for NASA looking for the next planet.

It’s always permissible to do a complete turnaround as well. It’s true, I started off in astrophysics (and mechanical engineering), but I got distracted. Somewhere along the way I took a geology class and became utterly fascinated with the way our own earth works. Indulge in your hobbies and creative sides, for you never know where they might take you.

2.) Define the steps needed to shift.
Maybe you can shift your new alignment in a few simple steps, like moving from one area of the field studying gravitational pulls between bodies in space. If this is the case, then you’re in luck because all it takes is a gentle two-step to shift. A good place to start is volunteering, clubs, or just talking with others that are doing what you’re interested in. This will help you find out if you really want to shift over or not, and if so, how.

Now, maybe you want to switch all together like I did. This isn’t as easy, but it’s doable. What it takes is very much the same: volunteer, talking to people, and getting more involved. Don’t worry about it too much, just take the opportunities to expand as you can, then make the full leap when you’re ready. Or, if you’re really creative, combine the two fields so you never have to.

3.) Reevaluate often.
No one ever said you will always have to stay with the same thing your entire life. Reevaluatewhenever you start feeling that particular feeling of dread that says “stop and take a look because something isn’t working”. Then, startover with steps one and two again.

This is the beauty in having the mindset of being an independent person that can do whatever they want. You can choose between being a librarian supporting your field, a computer guru, a technician, or any sub-discipline related to your interests. The key is all in your mindset and not being afraid to get involved when you need to pivot.

Your turn.

Have you transitioned in your career? Tell us about it in the comments, we’d love to learn from your experiences.

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