Career pivots become more common

Even older, successful workers are reinventing themselves

On a Monday, Jim Miller argued a case against the U.S. Department of Agriculture in federal appeals court. The next day, he took his biostatistics exam at Johns Hopkins University.

He won the appeal. He did not win the midterm exam — nor was his professor sympathetic that he been cramming to prepare for oral arguments in court, Miller said. But Miller was exhilarated by this dramatic career pivot, one that saw him walk away from decades of specialized legal work and enroll in school for the first time since the 1970s to earn a master’s degree in public health.

Like many people at various points in their careers — even the most successful — he had asked the question: Can I reinvent myself?

People in their 20s can switch majors, transfer, apply seamlessly to graduate schools as their interests evolve. They’re less likely to be tied to a job, a mortgage, a family — all the things that make dramatic change seem daunting.

“The younger you are, the easier it is, always,” said Patricia Rose, director of career services at the University of Pennsylvania.

But advances in technology have changed the calculation for older workers, leading some back to school on a new path in life.

“The speed of change is so rapid now that the kind of work that people do will be continuously reinvented,” said Steven Laymon, interim dean of continuing and professional studies at the University of Virginia. “Digital technology, the ubiquity of data and the globalization of work will be these evolutionary drivers that change people’s jobs on an ongoing basis.”

Sometimes those can be changes of lane or acceleration. And sometimes it will be a complete, gut-wrenching U-turn. The turn could be spurred by the market, a diagnosis, a lifelong dream, a conversation at a cocktail party, a revelation — one that could have profound impact far beyond a single person.

What drove Miller was a growing fascination with the science of the legal cases he was arguing, many involving pharmaceutical companies and the Food and Drug Administration. He felt he needed to know more. At 58, he took an entry-level biostatistics course. “It was a revelation,” he said.

He told his partners, who were dumbfounded, that he had been accepted at Hopkins and was leaving the firm. While his wife continued working, he found himself studying alongside people from all over the world, a young and idealistic group whom he found inspiring and refreshing after so many years in Washington.

It happened to Andrew Feinberg, too. Feinberg, a professor of medicine at Hopkins since 1994, was standing on Charles Darwin’s grave in Westminster Abbey a few years ago when an idea “just came flying into my head.”

Feinberg had just looked at a plaque honoring the physicist Paul Dirac, one of the founders of quantum theory, when he had the insight: That there might be, in biology, a builtin variability that’s a little like quantum theory. He immediately sensed that could explain something that he had long been trying to understand. It could, perhaps, help predict who would get cancer or other diseases.

It was an electrifying idea. But he needed to know more to explore it.

So he went back to school for a year. He took graduate classes in systems biology, and physics, and engineering and biostatistics and computing, doing the homework and taking the tests, with the other students in the class staring at him wondering, he said, “What’s with this — this — geriatric person?”

For Pauline Lubens, the desire to pivot came from an unexpected grief. She had been following an Army sergeant after his return from Iraq, taking photographs documenting months of intense, emotional recovery from a traumatic brain injury. Suddenly, during routine surgery, the man died.

Lubens felt lost, no longer sure that the work she did as a photographer mattered. She wanted to help families affected by war in a way that was more direct. So she took a GRE test-prep course and, at 53, applied to Hopkins to get a master’s in public health. She quit her job, accessed some retirement money and took out student loans.

“If you live long enough, you fail at a lot of things,” she said. “Or else you’re not really trying.”