Ten Lives: What Academic Careers Actually Look Like

What nobody honestly explains during your PhD or postdoc is this: there isn't one "real" academic career. There are dozens of them, and most of them are invisible.

You've absorbed a hidden curriculum without realizing it. Research beats teaching. Permanent beats temporary. Staying means success; leaving means failure. These unspoken rules shape how you evaluate your options and judge yourself.

But some of the most fulfilled academics have never held a tenure-track position. And some of the most miserable have achieved everything the standard path promised.

The problem isn't you. The problem is the map you were given.

This book offers a different map.

Ten fictional early-career academics. Ten different paths through the academic landscape. Set across seven Moroccan cities, this project is grounded in honest conversations with hundreds of researchers, educators, and clinicians worldwide, and it is based on specific places that make universal patterns vivid.

Why fiction? Because invented characters can be honest in ways real people, with reputations to protect, cannot. The characters are fictional. The patterns are real.

Inside, you'll meet:

· The teaching-focused academic who finds her deepest meaning in work that the metrics don't reward, and how she made peace with that trade-off.

· The clinician-educator building simulation programs between emergency shifts in a role that doesn't officially exist; and why he wouldn't trade it.

· The researcher watching his grant expire while questioning what discovery even means, and the simple framework that clarified his next move.

· The scientist who left academia for EdTech and discovered her skills traveled further than she imagined, and what she lost in the exchange.

· The policy-linked researcher translating evidence into legislation on timelines no journal comprehends—and the identity tension that never fully resolves.

This book won't tell you which path is right for you. That would be a lie; I don't know your values, your constraints, or your history. Only you can discover what fits.

But I can make the invisible paths visible. I can help you feel what different academic lives are actually like, not the CV version, but the Tuesday afternoon version, so you can try them on before you stake years on a direction you've never truly seen.

About the author: Nabil Zary has built an academic career across four countries and three continents—from Morocco to Sweden to Singapore to Dubai. Now Professor of Medical Education, he wrote this book after watching hundreds of early-career academics struggle with the same question he once faced: What kind of scholar do I actually want to become?

Ten Lives is the first book in the Designing Your Academic Life trilogy. Designed for use in faculty development programs and postdoc career workshops.

If you're a PhD student wondering what comes next... a postdoc on your third temporary contract... a clinician with teaching work no one recognizes... someone sensing there's more to the landscape than you've been shown...

You're not alone. And you're not broken for wanting something different.