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Science, Vol.357, No.6348, 326-326, 2017
The call of the wild
"Would you like to move to Atlanta?" asked the voice on the phone. Just a few months earlier, I had earned tenure-my primary goal for decades-at Utah State University. But rather than basking in my promotion, I was thinking, "So, this is what I do for the rest of my career?" Lecturing to huge auditoriums of freshman nonmajors exhausted me. Encouraging my graduate students to publish, only to send them into a dismal job market, felt duplicitous. Because my university's administration seemed to value funding more than publications, I found myself pursuing easy-to-get grants, sometimes on topics of only marginal interest to me. My tenure committee had pushed me to articulate a single central research theme, while I wanted to explore broadly in my area of amphibian and reptile studies. I was experiencing academic burnout.