Movement patterns in populations of early academics

Sometimes of the perks of academic life are also the most difficult parts – frequent travel opportunities mean you are also frequently away from friends and family (and spend too much time in airports). The nature of the university job market provides global opportunities for work, but also means that in reality opportunities and circumstances can constrain you to places you wouldn't have chosen otherwise. Your friends will cover the world, but you will rarely be in the same room together. The apprenticeship-like nature of early academic positions means that you will move, probably many times, before you find a permanent position (if you do). 

I have a friend who grew up with diplomat parents, which meant her family moved to a new place in the world every few years. The result was that she often felt like she didn’t have a strong connection to any one place or group of people. Academia isn’t quite so extreme, but you can understand why after moving to one place for undergrad, another for a Masters and/or PhD, one or two more for postdocs, your interactions and place in the world can feel rather impermanent. It also means that, for better or worse, your social circle includes other academics, and they are also shifting from place to place. When I tell non-academic friends and family (who mostly have settled in a single place) about upcoming moves, they are often more excited than I am about the opportunity to pick up and go. No doubt this is a grass-is-always-greener situation, but I often think that the most notable and difficult aspect of academic mobility is that you end up saying goodbye a lot.

I wonder whether some of the academic ambivalence expressed is aggravated by this early, necessary transience. Certainly there is lots of evidence that residential mobility (i.e. moving) relates to higher mortality and lowered health indicators, though some studies suggest that this effect may be more true for introverts than extroverts (presumably because extroverts form new friendships more easily). Academics share this phenomenon with groups like military families and third culture kids. The commonality is that, with every move it becomes harder to define home as a particular place – it is more like an intangible connection to multiple places and people. And maybe that's not so terrible - a good friend who was raised by an academic suggested that the key is to redefine your life and friendships as being global rather than local. And eventually professors settle down (I can think of a few people who have been at one university for 30+ years). But in the interim there is always the not-insignificant tension between the costs and benefits of uprooting yourself every few years, and the slow loss of individuals who are not capable of this mobility, from the academic pipeline.