Can we inquire as to what capacity your several years in acamemia was spent?
Sure. I have an undergraduate bachelors degree in biology, with a minor in interdisciplinary science (where “interdisciplinary” really meant, “lots of geology with a smattering of oceanography, climatology, and other -ology classes mixed in”).
I have a master’s degree in Environmental Science. During my course of study, I was required to take various philosophy and economics courses dealing with worldview, environmental ethics, policy, etc. These were taught from a rather liberal perspective which, frankly, I did agree with at the time.
I began a doctoral program in geography, for which I received a fellowship, but did not complete it — by that time, I had realized that academic research was not really where I wanted to go. My talents were more in the administrative and teaching arena, and that — and my family — were what I decided to focus on instead of slogging through a dissertation.
I supported myself in grad school by working as a field botanist, and by doing habitat, land use, and environmental impact assessment work. Later, I worked professionally for some years at a university-based state research program, and most recently was the director of a federally funded national research organization whose members were universities and whose representatives were college professors representing various disciplines but whose research usually found common ground in the arena’s of geography, ecology, and environmental studies.
These days, though, I’m retired from the lobbying and the grant-writing and grant reviewing and the dealing with academia that came with my position and I am pleased to “just” be a stay at home mom.