Before you leave...
Take 20% off your first order
20% off
Enter the code below at checkout to get 20% off your first order
Discover summer reading lists for all ages & interests!
Find Your Next Read

What nobody honestly explains during your PhD or postdoc is this: there isn't one "real" academic career. There are dozens-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-because specific places make universal patterns vivid-and grounded in real conversations with hundreds of researchers, educators, and clinicians worldwide.
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:
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.
Thanks for subscribing!
This email has been registered!
Take 20% off your first order
Enter the code below at checkout to get 20% off your first order