Traditional societies understood something about identity that modern institutions have forgotten: when a person’s role changes fundamentally, the person has to change too, and that inner change is dangerous to leave unmanaged. So they engineered it. The anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, studying these rituals a century ago, found the same three-part structure everywhere: separation from the old identity, a liminal in-between time, and formal incorporation into the new one. Rites of passage were not decoration. They were transition technology: a way of marking that who you were has ended, holding you through the disorienting middle, and telling you, publicly and unmistakably, who you now are. Academia, interestingly, has preserved just one of these in full working order. The doctoral defense is a true rite of passage, examiners as elders, the ordeal, the new title, the champagne, and it works: nobody leaves their defense unsure whether they are now a doctor.
And then comes the larger identity shift of a research career, the one from doing research to leading researchers, from bench scientist to principal investigator, and for this one academia provides: a contract, a budget code, a login to the grant portal. No ritual. No name for the in-between. No elder who says, out loud, that the person you have been for fifteen years is ending and that the disorientation you are about to feel is the process working, not you failing. The transition that most needs the technology gets none of it, and this article exists to hand you, at minimum, the map.
Table of Contents
- Daniel is still at the bench at eleven p.m.
- A change is not a transition
- The ending nobody marks
- The neutral zone: the part nobody helps with
- “Less lab and more management”: the moment the ending announces itself
- Crossing deliberately: four moves for the researcher in the middle
- A word for the coordinator who ritualises the wrong transition
Daniel is still at the bench at eleven p.m.
Daniel became a group leader eight months ago, and by every external measure the change went smoothly: the funding landed, the lab filled, two doctoral students and a postdoc now depend on him. It is eleven p.m. and Daniel is at the bench, rerunning an analysis one of his students already ran adequately, and if you asked him why, the real answer, beneath the plausible ones, is that this is the only part of the day where he still knows who he is. His days have become meetings, budgets, corrections, other people’s problems; competent, fraudulent-feeling, and strangely grief-coloured. He assumed the promotion was the hard part and that everything since should feel like arrival. Nobody told him that the letter was only the change, and that the change is the trivial half.
A change is not a transition
The distinction Daniel is missing comes from William Bridges, whose classic work on life transitions deserves to be required reading for every new group leader. A change, Bridges observed, is situational: the new title, the new office, the new budget line. A transition is psychological: the inner reorientation through which you actually let go of who you were and become the person the new situation requires. The two run on different clocks. The change happened to Daniel in a single afternoon; the transition takes months and does not start until something ends. And Bridges’ sharpest line names just what an institution produces when it administers the first while ignoring the second: “without a transition, a change is just a rearrangement of the furniture” [1]. A new PI with an unbegun transition is the furniture rearranged around a person still inwardly employed as a postdoc.
The ending nobody marks
Transitions, Bridges insists, begin with an ending, and this is the part research careers handle worst, because the ending in question is invisible and nobody schedules it. Somewhere in Daniel’s first year there will be a last experiment he truly runs himself, and he will not know it at the time; there is no last day at the bench the way there is a last day of a contract. What ends is not employment but identity: fifteen years of being the person whose own hands produce the result, whose excellence is personal, measurable, and felt at the end of a good day in a way a well-run meeting never quite is. Letting that go has the structure of grief, and researchers, trained to treat feelings as noise in the data, tend to misfile it: as guilt (“I should want this role more”), as fraudulence (“a real PI would enjoy budgets”), or as Daniel’s eleven p.m. analyses, which are not diligence at all but mourning, conducted at the only altar available. Bridges would say Daniel is doing something necessary in the wrong way: the old identity does have to be honoured. It just has to be honoured as something ending, not secretly continued.
The neutral zone: the part nobody helps with
Between the ending and the true new beginning, Bridges maps a middle territory he calls the neutral zone: the fallow, disoriented stretch where the old identity no longer fits and the new one has not yet formed, where, in his words, people are no longer quite sure who they are. Traditional rites held people through this deliberately, with elders, seclusion and structure, because the disorientation is the mechanism: it is where the reorientation actually happens. The new PI gets the same disorientation with none of the holding. And two things make the academic version harder than it needs to be. First, nobody has named it, so the new group leader reads a normal developmental fog as evidence of personal inadequacy, imposter feelings with a start date. Second, the transition itself consumes energy; Bridges is explicit that there is no way these inner reorientations do not take a toll on performance while they run, and your nervous system’s capacity for anything, change included, is finite. A new PI is therefore doing the most demanding identity work of their career while also learning grant administration, and wondering why they are exhausted. The exhaustion is not a verdict. It is the transition, metabolising. Bridges offers two questions as the neutral zone’s compass, and they are worth writing where you can see them: What is it time to let go of? And what is standing backstage, waiting to make its entrance?
“Less lab and more management”: the moment the ending announces itself
Participants in our trainings describe this very threshold, and one account, from a researcher who took Fast Forward during their second postdoc, names the whole arc with a clarity I have not improved on:
“Doing experiments is fun, but having accountability for a significant amount of money and supervising students is a different level. … There comes the point when you realize that staying in academia means less lab and more management. At this stage, you should take the course.”
Read the middle sentence slowly, because it is a Bridges ending, witnessed in the wild: there comes the point when you realize. Not a promotion date, a realisation, the moment the old identity’s lease quietly expires. What moves me about this account is its sequencing: this researcher saw the transition coming, named what was ending (the lab), named what was arriving (accountability, money, other people), and then, at that very stage, went and acquired the skills of the incoming identity, deliberately, before the role demanded them. That is what crossing the neutral zone with a map looks like. They even dated their own window, the second postdoc, and called the timing excellent. Compare Daniel, who received the change first and is reconstructing the transition backwards at eleven p.m. Same crossing. One had a map.
Crossing deliberately: four moves for the researcher in the middle
The transition cannot be skipped, and rushing it, Bridges warns, only aborts it. But it can be crossed deliberately rather than endured blindly, and four moves do most of the work.
Name the ending, and mark it. Say it in words, to yourself and ideally to someone else: the era of my hands producing the results is ending. If that sentence stings, good; the sting is the grief being filed correctly at last. Some new PIs mark it deliberately, a last experiment chosen and savoured rather than stumbled past, which is a private rite of passage, and it works for the same reason the public ones did.
Treat the fog as the process, not the verdict. When you feel like neither a researcher nor a real PI, you are not failing; you are in the neutral zone, on schedule. Budget energy for it the way you would budget for any second job, because it is one, and hold Bridges’ two questions open rather than grabbing the first exit: what is it time to let go of, and what is waiting in the wings?
Redefine where the craftsman’s satisfaction comes from. The bench gave you a daily, tactile form of excellence, and the incoming identity has its own, but it is slower and lives in other people: the student who can suddenly structure their own project, the postdoc you watched become independent. The transition completes on the day someone else’s result gives you the feeling your own used to. You can accelerate that day by deliberately looking for it.
Acquire the incoming identity’s skills on purpose. Leading, supervising, planning at group scale: these are crafts, as learnable as the ones you are leaving, and learning them is itself incorporation, the third phase of every rite of passage. The supervisor’s situational toolkit is one I outline in my article on situational leadership in academia, and the companion pieces to this one complete the cluster: my article on how to supervise PhD students when nobody trained you and my post on protecting your research time in an interrupt-driven role.
A word for the coordinator who ritualises the wrong transition
And if you in charge of training at your institute, notice the asymmetry you have inherited, because it is sharp: your institution stages a full rite of passage, examiners, ordeal, title, champagne, for the doctorate, and hands its larger identity transition a budget code and a portal login. Then it watches new group leaders struggle, supervise erratically, and burn out their first students, and files each case as an individual’s growing pains rather than what it is: a predictable, systemic, unsupported transition, arriving on schedule for every single person you promote. The fix is the old technology, updated: name the passage in your onboarding, so the fog arrives pre-labelled as process; give new PIs a held middle, peer circles of people in the same zone, a mentor who has crossed; and treat leadership and supervision skills as the incorporation phase, trained deliberately in the window the participant above identified, late postdoc to early PI, when the realisation has landed and the bandwidth still exists. That window is where our trainings meet people: Fast Forward, our project management and personal productivity training, for the project-and-people craft of the incoming role, with over 1,500 individuals trained across our trainings at more than 30 institutions, and a conversation about your new-PI provision as the concrete first step. Traditional societies would find our arrangement truly strange: all that ceremony for the credential, and silence for the becoming. The defense made them doctors. Somebody should mark what makes them leaders.
FAQ
Why is becoming a PI so hard?
Because it is two events wearing one name. The change, title, budget, lab, happens in an afternoon. The transition, letting go of the researcher identity your hands built over fifteen years and becoming someone whose results live in other people, is psychological, takes months, and consumes real energy while it runs. Institutions administer the change and ignore the transition, so most new PIs cross the harder half alone and read the disorientation as personal inadequacy. It is not. It is the process.
Why do I miss the bench so much as a new PI?
Because something really ended, and nobody marked it. The bench provided daily, tactile, personal excellence; leadership’s satisfactions are slower and live in other people. Missing it has the structure of grief, and grief misfiled shows up as guilt, imposter feelings, or redoing your students’ work at night. Name the ending plainly, even mark it deliberately, and the mourning can complete instead of leaking.
When should I prepare for the transition from postdoc to PI?
Before the role arrives, in the window one of our participants dated for us: the later postdoc years, when you first realise that staying in academia means less lab and more management. At that stage you still have the bandwidth to learn the incoming identity’s crafts, leading, supervising, planning at group scale, deliberately rather than under fire. The realisation is the starting gun, not the alarm.
What should institutions do for new PIs?
Apply the old transition technology: name the passage explicitly in onboarding so the disorientation arrives pre-labelled as normal; hold the middle with peer circles of new group leaders and mentors who have crossed; and train the incoming role’s skills, supervision, leadership, group-scale planning, as deliberately as the doctorate was examined. An institution that ritualises the credential and ignores the becoming is choosing its most predictable leadership failure on purpose.
References
1. Bridges, W. (2004). Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes (2nd ed.). Da Capo Press.
Last Updated on August 5, 2026 by Dr Nadine Sinclair
Dr Nadine Sinclair
Dr. Nadine Sinclair is a molecular biologist, strategy consultant and co-founder of Mind Matters. A scientist by training and at heart, she conducted her doctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry. She has 30,000+ hours of hands-on project management experience, built across 18 years as a strategy consultant at McKinsey and as an independent consultant, working with research institutions, foundations, pharmaceutical and biotech companies and governments. She is the co-creator of the Personal Resilience Indicator and the author of On Track. Since 2018, over 1,500 researchers from more than 30 institutions have trained with Mind Matters.