Using Navigate To Transition Out Of Admin And Back To Faculty: Client Case Study With Anne Vo

Anne’s story is a powerful reminder that career transitions—whether leaving or returning to academic life—can be challenging but incredibly rewarding when supported with structure, community, and tools for success. Anne shares her personal insights on overcoming fears, setting boundaries, and reclaiming time for scholarly work.

If you’re considering a career shift or simply want to boost your productivity and reclaim your academic time, this conversation is a must-listen! Tune in and hear more about Anne’s journey and how the tools she learned in Navigate empowered her to thrive in her academic career.

Career Transitioning with Support

Anne highlights how moving from an admin position back to faculty required intentional steps, and Navigate provided both the structure and community support to help her get back into the scholarly headspace she had lost touch with during her time in administration.

Empowerment through Boundaries and Self-Care

One of the most transformative aspects of the program for Anne was learning to prioritize her own needs. She shares how the Navigate program taught her that it’s okay to say no and to carve out time for herself—ensuring her productivity is sustainable while balancing personal and professional commitments.

Re-enrollment and Community Impact

Anne discusses why she re-enrolled in a second round of Navigate, emphasizing the invaluable sense of community it offers. She also shares how the iterative nature of the program helped her continue building strong academic habits while finding mentorship and solidarity with fellow participants from diverse fields.

“The program really offered me a way of wetting my toes in the academic space, even though I hadn’t really left it. It was still within arms reach to me. It offered me a sense of community knowing that there are others who shared similar concerns, anxieties, and struggles – perhaps of a different flavor. Knowing that I am not doing this by myself, that there are different perspectives that I could lean on to make sense of my transition was really important.”

“One of the most valuable things of doing those exercises is forcing yourself to acknowledge that things take the time that they do. Time doesn’t expand, but those things that take time can. So the acknowledgement of that and being really honest with yourself about what I can reasonably do without jeopardizing or compromising myself because I need to take care of myself first in order to take care of other people.”

We’re receiving applications for our next cohort of Navigate: Your Writing Roadmap®. Check out the program details and start your application process here.

CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION:

1. Our 12-week Navigate: Your Writing Roadmap® program helps tenure-track womxn and nonbinary professors to publish their backlog of papers so that their voice can have the impact they know is possible. Apply here!
2. Cathy’s book, Making Time to Write: How to Resist the Patriarchy and Take Control of Your Academic Career Through Writing is available in print! Learn how to build your career around your writing practice while shattering the myths of writing every day, accountability, and motivation, doing mindset work that’s going to reshape your writing,and changing academic culture one womxn and nonbinary professor at a time. Get your print copy today or order it for a friend here!
3. If you would like to hear more from Cathy for free, please subscribe to the weekly newsletter, In the Pipeline, at scholarsvoice.org. It’s a newsletter that she personally writes that goes out once a week with writing and publication tips, strategies, inspiration, book reviews and more.

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