How Your Learning Will Change After Leaving Academia

Learning to unlearn

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Today marked the first 9 months of getting (inadvertently) thrown out of academia. And honestly? A lot has changed but not all of them are bad so let’s talk about it.

For context, since graduating from my honours back in June 2024 I’ve positioned myself to bulldoze into a Ph.D. after I got my transcripts back. After six months of chatting with prospective supervisors, rubbing shoulders with faculty heads and writing up a proposal, my rejection letter paid me a visit on the 5th of December.

Naturally, a string of kicking and screaming followed the rejection. “Don’t they know how talented I am?!” I cursed the sky and vowed to find my own way, but once the initial sting wore off, my learning/reading habits started re-arranging in unexpected ways.

You know that 7 stages of grief thing? Yeah. It turned out that exiting academia has its own natural stages of working its way through you.

Stage 1: The Buffoon Stage

I felt like an absolute idiot during the first month following the rejection.

See, campus life (besides the horrible food, excessive caffeine use and alcoholic spurts) offers one thing that we struggle to find again after leaving it: a set-in-stone reward loop.

My learning was dictated by what the assignments demanded. Though I did do a lot of self-directed research, a lot of reading was still done for the dopamine rush after getting a good grade.

This doesn’t just apply to that kid named Jason with a bowl cut and glasses who complained about getting a 98% on an Organic Chemistry test (Shut up, Jason). It unconsciously applies to all of us. No matter how much of a baller class-skipper you think you are, some parts of your learning (hell, maybe all of it) are still influenced by the grading scheme.

So when that entire reward loop of learning for grades vanished overnight, I struggled to redefine learning for its own sake because I honestly didn’t have the opportunity to try it.

And here is the key characteristic of the Buffoon Stage: an extended reading/learning slump because this is the period where we have to redefine learning for ourselves outside of the reward loop to get good grades.

Stage 2: Hello Life

I’m far from the first person to report feeling happier a month or two after leaving university.

Last week, I caught up with my high school friends after a 4-year gap and most of them agreed that life gets more interesting after they’ve thrown their graduation caps high up in the sky.

Some of them are working full-time and some are finally getting back to what they’ve been putting off during their university years. For me, I got this inexplicable urge to drive after leaving university.

I’m 24 this year but I still don’t have my driver’s licence. Since getting my Learner’s when I was 16, I invented all sorts of crazy stories about why I’m different and how I could avoid driving a car for the rest of my life.

But with all that time on my hands with no university work, I bit the bullet and booked a few driving lessons followed by a driving test.

Just like that dopamine rush I used to get from submitting an assignment, clearing this challenge felt really good. I envisioned a future of going on a road trip with my girlfriend, blasting The Who while enduring judgemental stares from cows in their pens.

Naturally, this fantasy evolved into other things: building a home studio so I could create/write with ease, cooking a Gourmet Peking Duck from scratch and starting a record collection. Except in this case, I can do all that now.

And here’s the magic with Stage 2: a lot of what we’ve been putting off for the sake of pleasing academia starts to shine again. This marks an affirmative yes and optimism for a future untouched by academic pressure, but before long, we’ll plunge right into

Stage 3: What The Hell Is Going On?

As we start to explore life outside of the academy, a lot of things will confuse us.

How do I eat healthily? How do I deal with problematic friends and the grand boogieman of all: how the fuck do I file my taxes so that the ATO/IRS doesn’t come after me with machine guns?

Concerns that we used to dust off as beneath us start to bang on our doors. For me, the rude awakening happened after my tax agent sent me a bill of $7000 in taxes because apparently, self-employment exists in its own bracket.

What followed was a two-week hibernation period of developing a system of financial spreadsheets, listening to Ramit Sethi and cutting back on multiple streams of expenses. Since starting my business, I’ve neglected the administrative side in favour of just doing my art, man. It sure came back to bite me in the ass.

And here’s the bitter-sweet feeling of stage 3: life will start to throw unexpected challenges at us and leave us wondering: what the hell is going on? We start to see the limitations of learning abstract ideas from our education and start to look for solutions to our problems. This is where the next stage begins.

Stage 4: Learning As A Life-Long Practice

We can’t begin to seek solutions if we don’t know what the problem is and this is why a commitment to learning is always based on encountering problems/confusion posed in stage 3.

This stage marks a permanent shift from merely dealing with abstract concerns to seeing how theory fits into our lives conceptually and practically.

Though challenging, this is also the rite of passage into lifelong learning. We start to discover that life’s rewards don’t just come from grades, but from balancing a host of factors: relationships, finance, fitness and self-education. In order to get the results we want, we must learn a lot.

In the short term, my reading diet shifted from high-minded philosophy to personal finance and fitness. All the theories informed my daily actions and they made me appreciate the complexity of life. Nothing in life is beneath me. They’re just problems for which I currently lack solutions.

Moreover, I started to understand that what I’ve really learned from university was learning how to learn. It’s a superpower that turbocharged my ability to quickly master information in a given field followed by practical executions.

This isn’t to say that abstract learning doesn’t have its place, but now my motivation feels purer. A few hours of reading a philosophy book I like during my days off gave me a joy I thought I had lost forever, and this is the magic of stage 4:

Once we understand that learning is a powerful tool, we can find joy in practical learning and explore esoteric ideas at the same time.

It becomes a full-circle moment. We are still doing what we did in university: learning and reading, but now we know exactly why we’re reading something, how to read it and how to give ourselves the pleasure of exploring ideas.

And that is my two cents on how your learning will change after you leave university. Happy learning!

Until next week

Robin