About 2 years into my Ph.D., I began to realize that I couldn't imagine my life as a researcher in 5 years' time and to wonder why that might be. Why wasn't I enthusiastic about where my first, second, or even third postdoc would be and into which new and fascinating areas of oceanography they would lead me?
It wasn't that I didn't enjoy my particular area of research. I did. I still do. But I had begun to realize that my heart (and perhaps my skills) lay outside academic research. I felt like I wanted to be a communicator of leading-edge science but not necessarily a doer of it myself. Could I admit that and still say I had a passion for science?