Navigating Academia

So many of us in SEPP have found employment in higher education institutions. And while we might have been keen to be sport or exercise psychologists when we entered our own education, we wind up as educators and/or researchers. These are entirely different career paths from applied work. As such, these are accompanied by different competencies, values, prerequisites, and social environments. And while there might be performance psychology skills that we can draw from (e.g., goal setting or team dynamics), we are left to fend for ourselves in navigating professional life in academia. For those of us who might be freshly out of graduate school and contemplating a full career in higher education (or at least, to satisfy the immediate need for employment), or for those of us already entrenched in academia and looking for strategies to boost motivation and work efficiency, we present this chapter on “navigating academia.”