Full Professor is one of those academic milestones that can quietly expose a strange question—Okay, I climbed this mountain, now what? The answer doesn’t have to be another mountain.

I am 44 years old, starting my twelfth year as a professor, and I feel like I haven’t stopped moving since I was an undergraduate. I was a first-generation college student and a transfer student in the early 2000s, which meant I entered academia without much of a roadmap. Back then, transfer students were largely left to figure things out on their own, and college came with a huge learning curve. There were rules I didn’t know, opportunities I didn’t know I should be looking for, and an entire language of higher education I had to learn as I went. But I did it.

And somewhere along the way, I found a mentor who changed the trajectory of my life. He saw something in me before I really knew how to see it in myself. He helped me recognize that I was capable of more than I thought I was, and I followed him into my master’s program. That doesn’t mean the road suddenly became easy.

Graduate school taught me some painful lessons about what happens when you are young, green, and haven’t yet learned to trust your own abilities. I encountered people who made me question whether I belonged there at all. But I also started learning one of the lessons that would become central to my career: sometimes the path forward requires a pivot.

My PhD advisor taught me how to be an academic. He taught me to love learning for the sake of learning—to follow questions because they were interesting, not simply because they produced something measurable. My postdoc was another crash course in I am definitely not smart enough to be here. But it also gave me a microscope. It taught me how to look closely, how to pull questions apart, and, eventually, how to figure out which questions were actually mine.

Then I became an assistant professor, struggling again in the pre-tenure life. Five years of wondering if I was going to have a job at the end of it. And once again, I had to find my footing. I came into my academic home from a somewhat different intellectual tradition than many of the people around me. Sometimes that difference was celebrated; sometimes it made belonging more complicated. I learned to navigate it. I built collaborations. I taught. I published. I mentored students. I earned tenure.

Then there was a pandemic. The world closed. I took naps that week while we figured out what to do—probably the best gift I could have gotten post-tenure. But then reality hit, and my workload grew. For a while, I taught more than I thought I was capable of teaching and worked more than I thought I was capable of working. And still, I kept climbing.

Six years later, I made it to the last stop, the last promotion. I made it to Full Professor.

All along the way, as I took the path forward, something unexpected happened. I found Florence.

Florence didn’t interrupt my climb. In many ways, it gave me the strength to make it through the last few hurdles. I was still working, still publishing, still teaching, still saying yes to too much. But somewhere along those cobblestone streets, Florence began teaching me something I had never been particularly good at: how to live while still climbing.

It taught me to savor my food and linger at dinner. To walk without needing to get somewhere. To sit in a piazza and simply watch the world move around me. To appreciate the beauty without needing to turn it into something productive. And the most amazing thing happened: I felt happier, my health improved, and I became more creative.

I haven’t come home less ambitious. I come home after each summer understanding that ambition and living don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Florence taught me how to climb better, and when I reached Full, I realized Florence had been quietly teaching me what to do when I got here.

Stop looking for the next mountain. Look around. And enjoy and grow what you have.

There is something freeing about being an academic who finally gets to say: I have learned a lot, and now I get to share what I know. I get to return to what I loved about graduate school—dreaming, thinking, exploring simply for the sake of knowing more, and maybe moving the world forward one tiny piece at a time.

And so, this is my first blog post. I have no idea where this crazy life will take me next, but I think that’s the point. I spent a long time learning how to climb. Now, let’s see what happens as I learn to look around.

© 2026 Jenny Roche. All rights reserved.