Mari Mikkola

Dear Sister,

I wish someone had told me early on in my career that… 

…being a professor involves various kinds of tasks that we as academics/ philosophers are not particularly well equipped to do, and that it may be helpful earlier on to get training for this.

I think the most important decision that determined my academic life has been… 
…willingness to move and take up positions in different countries as this has opened completely new worlds of philosophy to me. And it turns out to be really nice to live in different places.

If I had to do it all over again, I would… 
…not stress out about things that are relatively minor, quite as much as I did. I would have given myself more time earlier on in my career, rather than sacrificing much of my personal time in order to proceed.

For future academia, I wish for… 
…first of all obviously that academic positions were more equitably and justly distributed. I also wish that there were more interactions with the wider society. At the moment, academia feels like a ‘strange lifestyle’ that some of us end up living and then there is the rest of the world. I wish that we could find ways to live more in the world and not so much in academic bubbles.

Don’t you ever…
…stop fighting the good fight!