My biggest fear as an academic

Academia was always on my radar.

It’s one of the reasons I decided to pursue a doctoral degree in the first place.

So when the opportunity arose to become faculty, I was beyond excited. I know that’s a cliché thing to say, but I genuinely don’t think I could put into words how excited I was.

I loved being a student.

I had professors who challenged me, invested in me, and helped shape the clinician I would become. Getting the chance to play even a small role in someone else’s occupational therapy journey felt like a privilege.

What surprised me, though, was realizing how much of academia has nothing to do with teaching. (But that’s a conversation for another day.)

My biggest fear as an academic was failing my students.

And “failing” was a pretty broad category.

Maybe I wouldn’t teach enough.

Maybe I wouldn’t go deep enough into a topic.

Maybe I wouldn’t answer a question correctly.

Maybe I’d somehow become the reason someone made a social media post five years from now about how their professor prepared them for nothing.

As an Academic Fieldwork Coordinator, those fears followed me there too.

What if students felt unsupported?

What if they thought I wasn’t involved enough?

What if I missed something important?

Whether those fears were realistic didn’t really matter. They felt real.

Within my first year of teaching, I learned something unexpected.

I was going to disappoint students.

Not because I wasn’t trying.

Not because I didn’t care.

But because every student has different expectations of what learning should look like.

Some want more structure.

Some want more discussion.

Some want more clinical application.

Some want more depth.

It would be impossible to meet every expectation for every student in every course.

And oddly enough, realizing that was freeing.

My fear slowly shifted.

Instead of worrying that I wasn’t doing enough, I started realizing something else:

I can’t know everything.

Which is funny, because that’s exactly what I tell new graduates all the time.

You aren’t expected to know everything.

No one does.

Yet somehow I held myself to a different standard.

One of the courses I teach covers a huge range of diagnoses outside of neurorehabilitation. We cover a lot.

But we don’t cover everything.

We can’t.

And I’m certainly not an expert in every diagnosis that exists.

For a long time, when students asked questions I couldn’t immediately answer, I interpreted that as failure.

Now it’s one of my favorite parts of teaching.

Because the questions are good.

Really good.

They’re rarely simple recall questions.

They’re application questions.

Clinical reasoning questions.

Questions that require us to pull back another layer and think deeper.

Sometimes I know the answer.

Sometimes I partially know the answer.

And sometimes I genuinely don’t know.

Learning to say “I don’t know” has probably been one of the biggest areas of growth for me as an educator.

Because somewhere along the way, I started equating “I don’t know” with failure.

But they’re not the same thing.

Not knowing doesn’t make someone a bad educator.

Just like it doesn’t make someone a bad clinician.

If anything, it creates an opportunity to model exactly what we hope our future practitioners will do.

Be curious.

Go to the literature.

Look at the evidence.

Ask questions.

Stay resourceful.

Keep learning.

And to be so clear, none of these fears came from my students.

They were expectations I placed on myself.

Because when you care deeply about something, you want to do it well.

You want to make a difference.

You want to help.

You want to leave people better than you found them.

But I’ve learned that being a good educator isn’t about having every answer.

It’s about showing students what to do when you don’t.

And if you’re new to academia, or considering it someday, and you carry similar fears, I see you.

You’re probably doing better than you think.

And your students are likely more grateful than you realize.

TK