Return of the Professor
Executive summary: We have made a decision as a family for my husband to return to academia (he will be a professor at Stanford starting fall 2025), and we are ready to put down roots after 18 years of repeatedly moving around. Academia comes with a set of challenges, but also holds many advantages for our family. We are so excited and grateful to begin this new chapter together!
Life update alert! My husband the genius (see more background on that here) has decided to return to academia after a 4-year hiatus. The first time around, he was a professor of computer science at Princeton … which we bid farewell to when we decided to return to California during the peak of COVID. We desperately needed family help with our then-1yo while we were working full-time without childcare. He resigned from Princeton and joined an industry research lab* in the Bay Area so that we could make the move quickly (whereas academic hiring can take literally years). It’s been everything that was promised – which was a lot! – but my husband is an academic at his core. After speaking to a few mentors last summer, he decided to apply for professor positions in California before he ages out and is deemed “too senior” (that’s a generalization, and there’s a whole explanation of how hiring works in academia, but that’s beyond the scope of today’s post). After an intense 6-month long application and interview process, we are beyond thrilled that my husband received offers from Caltech and Stanford, and he has chosen to join the latter beginning fall 2025. I’ve heard it said that landing a tenure-track professorship at a top university is the ivory tower equivalent of being an A-list movie star or a pro athlete. You have to be excellent, dedicated, lucky, and willing to make sacrifices to chase your dreams.
From Stanford PhD to Stanford professor, who woulda thunk?
We believe this is the right (literal and figurative) move for our family, for a few main reasons (I have to list three, as a former McKinsey consultant):
My husband’s strength is in research, and he might not be a great fit for a “normal” tech job if his current gig at the research lab ever vanished. At a research university, he is guaranteed (short of apocalypse or revolution) to be able to keep doing research for as long as his brain can handle it. His current company has given their researchers (largely former professors) total flexibility in conducting fundamental research of their choosing, but who knows if that will be the case in 5, 10, or 20 years? What if the head of their lab retires and is replaced by someone who starts dictating what research topics everyone must study? Or the company decides it only wants to fund research that will help its top line or market positioning? These are the types of scenarios that could come to pass in a profit-driven business, for better or for worse.
At this point in our lives, with a 1yo and 5yo, we are looking for maximum stability. Industry labs have been shut down overnight before (e.g., Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley), scattering their researchers to the wind. At a university, he has a forever job (such a rarity and privilege, we know!), so we can finally commit to staying somewhere long enough to see our kids through high school graduation. Based on our own experiences growing up, we’d prefer to not move the kids past late elementary school, to give them stable friend groups and community roots. It’ll also be nice for us to finally stay in one place after living in 7 cities over the 18 years since we left for college (so moving every 2.5 years on average).
We will all benefit from the autonomy my husband will have. On the one hand, he’ll have more responsibilities and less day-to-day flexibility between teaching class, holding office hours, serving on committees, traveling to conferences, giving talks, applying for grants, writing papers, etc. But on the other, he’ll set his own schedule, determine his own goals, make his own decisions about what to attend and where to travel, etc. His current company has given him amazing flexibility too (unlimited PTO! Come to the office or don’t!) but they do apply pressure to attend certain corporate events and set certain metrics that my husband wouldn’t pursue as a pure academic (e.g., filing patents). And there is the perennial question of whether they’ll change their policies somewhere down the road. We are risk-averse people who like certainty — academia can offer that in a way that no company (subject to profit margins and changes in leadership priorities) ever could.
We are grateful that we can finally make the Bay Area our “indefinite home,” where our journey together started 18 years ago.
Those are the reasons why returning to academia is appealing to our family. But as with any job, there are drawbacks to being a professor (and to being married to one):
Let’s start with an obvious factor: the pay. It’s ok at a top university like Stanford (especially for a field like computer science with tech jobs as competition), but it doesn’t compare to industry. My husband will literally be cutting his salary in half. Couple that with the fact that we’ll still be in an area with extremely high costs of living, and … ouch. Remember I said this takes dedication and sacrifices?
What about my potential career prospects? The flip side of stability is being stuck: we won’t be able to go anywhere if I want to make a move for my career. When my husband was at Princeton, I felt extremely constrained in the jobs I could take — it was quite a commute to my McKinsey office as it was (Princeton felt isolated from everything). And if I left McKinsey, pretty much the only companies in the vicinity were pharma, which is not an industry I have experience in. It’s so hard to have a dual-career relationship with a professor that it has a name in academia: the “two body problem.” This is less of a concern for me in the Bay Area, as I feel there are far more opportunities here, but it’s an issue in general with having a spouse in academia.
Academia is flexible in a lot of ways, but it’s also quite restrictive being tied to the academic calendar. My husband won’t have to teach every quarter, but during the ones he does, he can’t go anywhere. When he was at Princeton, his spring break was so early that it was winter still in a lot of places we traveled. No taking advantage of the “shoulder seasons” that everyone recommends, which is when school is in session. And with kids, their K-12 breaks might not align with my husband’s, so then what do we do? I know this is a more minor point, but it still merits consideration because it affects our family, and it’s another way in which my husband’s career dictates the options available to us.
All factors considered, we still think that a return to academia is the best next step for our family. We have spent countless hours hashing out this topic, even before my husband resigned from Princeton, actually. I always felt a little guilty about that — I was the one who pushed really hard to return to California (although he agrees that it’s been really nice having the grandparents a couple hours away instead of on the opposite coast). Even though my husband is a star in his field, it was far from certain that he’d be able to secure a top professorship in California. With this imminent return to Stanford, I am redeemed. We have plenty of time to prep for our move, as my husband asked for a 1 year deferral (super common in academia) to wrap things up and to give us a head start on researching daycares, schools, housing, etc. It’s an exciting time for our family, and I will eventually have a whole new place to share on this blog (obviously the most important deciding factor of them all)!
* Industry research lab = A privately funded place to conduct fundamental research, and thus subject to the budgets and priorities of corporate management. Well-known examples include AT&T Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, IBM Research, and Microsoft Research. I might add that it’s notable how many of these labs have been shaken up, sold off, shut down, or redirected to conduct more “profitable R&D” instead of remaining committed to basic academic research.