Why I Left Academia (and Why I Still Teach).

I did not leave academia because I was tired of students.

I left because I could see, with increasing clarity, the distance between what I was teaching and what the students in front of me would actually need. Not in ten years. In ten months. After graduation.

That distance is the problem. And for a long time, I could not say that out loud.

The Leveraged Room

There is a physics to classrooms that people outside them rarely appreciate.

When a teacher stands in front of thirty students and changes how they think about one thing — one framework, one interpretation of a data point, one way of reading a job description — the effect does not stay in that room. It walks out in thirty different bodies, into thirty different careers, into companies and hospitals and research labs across the country.

That is extraordinary leverage. The kind that most professions would consider remarkable.

The reason it does not feel that way — the reason teachers are underpaid, undervalued, and increasingly underutilised — is not that the classroom is powerless. It is that the curriculum has been slowly disconnected from the world the students are walking into.

What I Taught vs. What They Needed

I was teaching pharmacology, pharmaceutics, pharmaceutical management — subjects I genuinely loved and still do. My students were sharp, curious, often more capable than the syllabi gave them credit for.

But the syllabus was not asking me to help them build careers. It was asking me to prepare them for examinations. And examinations, in the Indian higher education system, are a measurement of memory, not capability.

So I would stand in a classroom and explain a concept — drug delivery systems, regulatory pathways, GMP compliance — that had direct, practical application in the industry. And then I would watch students write it down in the exact phrasing most likely to score marks on a university paper.

The knowledge was real. The translation was broken.

Meanwhile, outside the classroom, companies were posting job descriptions that bore almost no resemblance to what we were teaching. HR executives were screening for keywords that our curriculum had never used. Recruiters were filtering out candidates whose resumes did not speak the language of industry — a language nobody had taught them, because nobody in the institution was required to learn it either.

Why I Left

It was not a dramatic moment. There is rarely a single moment.

It was an accumulation. A student I knew — genuinely excellent, the kind of mind that makes teaching worthwhile — who could not get past the first round of campus placements because his resume read like a transcript instead of a professional document. An industry conversation where a hiring manager told me, without embarrassment, that he had stopped looking at pharma college resumes altogether because “they all look the same.” A curriculum review meeting where the question on the table was how to align the syllabus to examination patterns, not to employment outcomes.

I left because I realised I was being asked to optimise for the wrong variable. And that the institution — for reasons I do not entirely blame it for — was not going to change that equation quickly enough for the students already in front of me.

Why I Still Teach

This is the part that surprises people.

I still teach. Every week. In conversations, in workshops, in the consulting work I do through EduRecru, in the frameworks I build for students navigating study abroad decisions, career transitions, and placement cycles.

The act of teaching is not the same as the institution of academia. I conflated the two for longer than I should have. When I left the formal system, I thought I was leaving teaching. I was not. I was leaving a particular container and taking the contents with me.

What I teach now is different in one important way: it is indexed to outcomes. Not examination scores. Not grade point averages. But actual, measurable things — whether a student gets shortlisted, whether a professional’s profile generates inbound interest, whether a family makes a study abroad decision they feel confident about rather than simply hopeful.

The curriculum I was not allowed to teach inside the institution, I now teach outside it.

What Leaving Taught Me About Teaching

The most honest thing I can say is this: I understand teaching better now than I did when I was employed to do it full-time.

Because I have had to earn the attention of every person I teach. There is no mandatory attendance, no examination pressure, no institutional authority ensuring that anyone sits in my metaphorical classroom. If what I am teaching does not translate into something useful within a short, visible timeframe, the conversation ends.

That accountability — the kind that formal academia rarely imposes on its instructors — has made me a better teacher. It has forced me to close the distance between concept and application that I spent years watching widen inside the lecture hall.

The classroom is still one of the most leveraged rooms in the country. I believe that now more than I did when I was standing in one every day.

The problem was never the room. It was what we had decided to put inside it, and what we had quietly agreed to leave out.