Recently I shared my email to my colleagues about my new position. The other day a friend said after reading that blog post, she was left hanging, waiting for the part where I explained why we decided to move. I promise I will get to that eventually, but for today, I’m going to share some (relatively random/disorganized, which reflects the current chaos of my life pretty well) challenges we went through as a family in making this decision.

Recently (before I announced my new position), someone walked a colleague to my door saying, “I always ask Eva, she’s been here forever.” At times I still feel like the deer-in-headlights assistant professor I started as. But more and more frequently, I am at meetings where I have been here longer than anyone else. When I tally, I have 7 non-retired colleagues who have been here longer than I (half of them deans/directors), and 24 who have arrived since me. I would be 7 years away from my 25 year chair. I have generally imagined staying here my entire career, and realizing I’m not is strange and a bit disconcerting still. Even stranger is imagining being somewhere unfamiliar, where I’m the newest person, and do not know the rules and regulations, the historical narrative and traditions.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that being Graduate Professor-in-Charge (PIC) has been my favorite job of my life. I won’t pretend it’s all been positive and pleasant – there have been plenty of headaches. But much more than the headaches, and more than any other administrative or committee activity I’ve done, I’ve recognized tangible contributions. The first three times (different years) I was asked to be Undergraduate PIC I said no, but I could see myself being Grad PIC some day. The fourth time I said yes, but only if I had first right of refusal for Grad PIC. Two years later I became Grad PIC and have enjoyed it as much as I expected. Saying goodbye to this position in particular is incredibly hard. There have been so many interactions in this role in recent months where I felt efficacious and wondered if leaving was a huge mistake. I feel as though I’m abandoning many students who put trust in me, even though the rational side of me knows that things will be completely fine, maybe even better, with the next Grad PIC.
 
I confess I’m at times superstitious, and over the past couple of months, there have been many signs one way or the other – the Connecticut property completely bankrupting my daughter in Monopoly. Beautiful weather the two times I’ve visited UCONN. Waking my child in the morning, and realizing he was hugging a stuffed husky… and also a stuffed lion.  My husband joked that if UCONN won the women’s basketball championship, it would be a sign that we should move there.
 
I’m not a secretive person, and that has been one of the hardest things for me over the past few months. I tend to be an open book, and so when I told people I was going out of town and people asked where, being vague was challenging (I should be more like my 9 year old daughter who said that when a friend’s mother asked why we were going to Connecticut she calmly said, “’for my mom’s work and to visit family.’ – that’s not a lie Mama.”).  In the weeks that the professional development grad seminar I teach focused on job interviews, and I had to disguise examples from my recent interview as other people’s stories or pretend they happened to me 18 years ago, I felt very uncomfortable. The last week in the same seminar I allow students to ask me anything they want about professional development, ethics, and careers. One student essentially asked, “How does one accept a job knowing they’ll be there the rest of their life? How did you decide to stay at Penn State forever?” It felt like a test somehow. But I eventually told the class that no one has to stay at a job forever, and other opportunities will come if you choose to pursue them. Most recently, as the academic year drew to a close, and people talked about various Fall semester endeavors, I would avert my gaze or mumble a reply. I kept my office door closed more the past few weeks than ever before.
 
It’s hard to express how much I agonized over this decision. Unless you’re someone I spoke to incessantly, and then you know how much I agonized over this decision (thank you for listening!). I am an amazing sleeper (my son likes to tell people that I fell asleep during Stomp) but have had intense insomnia for months. I have needed to listen to audiobooks on my walk to and from work so that I didn’t spend all my time ruminating. My annual conference this year was particularly challenging. In 1998 after I interviewed at Penn State but before I had an offer, SRA was awkward because there were Penn Staters everywhere. But at the time I had no ambivalence – I was finishing grad school and wanted a job at Penn State. This year, I bumped into UCONN people, Penn State people, and Penn State alums everywhere, and at points I hid in my hotel room. In fact, all of my previous career decisions were always about choosing between multiple options that involved change. This career transition is the first real decision that involved deciding between keeping what I have, which is essentially great, and choosing a completely new path, and that made this one by far the hardest. 
 
Why share all of this, when it makes me look vulnerable, neurotic, or not happy enough about the decision I’ve made? So many times on Facebook, twitter, and blogs, people write about new positions, describing the amazing opportunity ahead, with a sentence about how they will miss their colleagues. People rarely share the struggle at mid-career over shaking things up for oneself and one’s family. Perhaps others have no turmoil, but I suspect the reality is often much more conflicted. I want to be honest about how hard career transition can be, when you aren’t leaving a bad situation. As a colleague said, you’ve heard of first world problems? This is an R1, tenured faculty world problem. Which sounds ridiculous. I have agonized over two terrific options. But it doesn’t really make it any easier when you are shaping the next 5+ years of your career, your spouse’s career, and your family’s life.
 
The fact that I did struggle so much with the decision, that I was not escaping a bad situation, shows how appealing the new position actually is. I promise to address this aspect soon.

"The post Moving institutions, part 2: The challenge of leaving first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz's blog on May 13, 2016."

My husband and I recently accepted new positions at another university. In making this decision, I didn't find many resources about this type of mid-career move that felt "real." My goal in the coming weeks is to do my best to honestly share what this process was like for me. To begin, the email I sent go my colleagues and students as a faculty member and grad director.

Dear HDFS community,
 
I spent the first 18 years of my life in Connecticut, and the last 18 in Pennsylvania (there may have been a couple of years in between). I literally grew up in CT, from birth to college launch. And I grew up as a professional from 2 months post-PhD assistant professor to full professor and Grad PIC in Penn State HDFS.
 
It is at this symmetrical crossroads that I had to make the most difficult decision of my career. This summer, I will be leaving Penn State to become the HDFS department head at UCONN. Eric will be joining the faculty of the Measurement, Evaluation, and Assessment group in the College of Education.
 
It’s challenging to put in words how much Penn State, and the HDFS department in particular, have meant to me, and still mean to me. I cannot imagine a better set of colleagues and students or a more collegial and welcoming place. As a junior faculty member, I had abundant support. Throughout my career, I’ve had excellent collaborators, intelligent and, even more valuable, thoughtful and funny graduate students, and staff who provide extensive support while also reminding me that I sometimes need a vacation. Trying to explain the HDFS culture of comprehensive support, Follies, and fruit bandits to anyone outside HDFS is like explaining life on earth to martians; it’s natural to us, but foreign to others. Penn State, and Penn State HDFS, gave me an amazing career, nurtured me as a scholar and researcher, as an instructor and adviser, and as an administrator. Penn State, and Penn State HDFS, literally gave me my husband, and by extension, my children.
 
I feel incredibly fortunate to have had role models of leaders in and from the department who manage to be excellent leaders and productive scholars as well. I know that I won’t be able to be match them, but I sure as hell will try.
 
The idea of leaving this place – HDFS, Penn State, and State College, the students, colleagues, and friends I have known for two decades, is the main thing that has kept me from sleeping much for the past three months.  We have created family in happy valley, and moving away from this family after 18 years is even harder than it was for me when I first left Connecticut for college.
 
I would have liked to deliver this news to people in person, and I apologize to anyone I did not have a chance to. Know that this process has been difficult, and that I hope to get to talk to all of you and say proper, in person goodbyes before I leave.  
 
Penn State, and Penn State HDFS, will always be an enormous part of my identity, more than any institution I’ve spent time at. Thank you, to all of you, for your support and kindness. I am very grateful to have had it for these 2 decades. I’m grateful to have spent one year of my career in a brand new building, which I may never get to experience again. I look forward to being one of those 2-degrees-of-separation people who walks up to student posters at conferences and says, you’re at Penn State HDFS? I worked there. It’s an amazing place. 
 
Eva

"The post Moving Institutions: Part 1, The Goodbye first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz's blog on May 6, 2016"