This may cut against the grain, but after three decades in the public and private sectors, returning to academia for a PhD feels less like leaving the real world and more like a reckoning, and, unexpectedly, like coming home.

I want to start there, because it matters. Having recently completed my first year, I recognise I’m still very early in the journey. Still finding my feet, at times firing on all cylinders, other times fumbling along, asking inane questions (much to the vexation of my esteemed supervisors) as I continue to learn how this world works. Yet despite the unrelenting pile of papers to parse, the intellectual gymnastics, and the imposter syndrome diatribe murmuring in the background, I’m grateful to be here because it’s the ideal environment for someone who’s constantly curious and ambitious.

Still, at the same time, I’ve become gradually aware of something else: a familiar tension in my body. A low-level alertness. A sense of bracing for ‘something’, not from looming lectures or supervision meetings, but for something primal from earlier chapters of my life. And that’s surprised me.

Over a 35-year career, I’ve moved through several very different worlds. I began in the military, spent two decades in corporate environments such as Telstra, News Corp, and Clemenger, went on to build and run startups, and now find myself back in a university setting as an ingénue PhD researcher. Each transition demanded adjustment. Each carried its own pressures.

But this time around is different in an unexpected way.

Not because academia is necessarily “harder” than previous environments, it is and isn’t. What has caught me off guard is how subtly it recreated some of the same internal stress patterns I associate with previous high-pressure work, yet without the obvious markers that usually tell you when you’re under ‘under the gun’, so to speak. Stress does not need to be loud, visible, or dangerous to be real.

There are no warning sirens here. No clear moment when you’re told to stand down.

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