NAME IT FIRST

Workbook

The Academic's Professional Identity

Publish or Perish, Tenure or Leave, and the Career Nobody Prepared You For

Your curiosity belongs to you, not the institution that was supposed to confer it.

This is for:

For the academic who built an identity around the professoriate and is now facing a reality where the institution cannot or will not hold that identity as promised.

You'll produce:your Your Academic Identity Charter

The Name It First Experience

You built an identity around the academy — the research, the teaching, the peer community. The institution may be unstable, inaccessible, or no longer your path. This workbook separates your intellectual identity from the institutional one and builds a professional self that belongs to you. The output is not a CV. It is Your Academic Identity Charter — a stress-tested and signed declaration of who you are as a scholar regardless of appointment.

You can opt into 30-, 60-, and 90-day check-ins from your account. We recommend you do — the point is to see what changed.

Sample questions

  1. What part of your professional identity lives in the institution — and what part is actually yours?
  2. What has the academic path cost you that you didn't fully count when you started?
  3. What would you do with your intellectual work if the professoriate were no longer an option?

Research basis

Ibarra on working identity in institutional transitions / Austin on the changing academic workforce / Kezar and Maxey on contingent faculty identity.

Choose your format.

Every format asks the same questions and produces the same document.

Print Paperbackpersonalize

A real book and a pen. Write in the margins. The most permanent version of you on a page.

$22.99

eBook + journal

The full guide on any screen, with a companion journal to write your answers by hand.

Not available

Audiobook

We read every question and every scenario aloud. For the commute, the walk, the dishes.

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Hardcoverpersonalize

The keepsake edition — sewn, ribboned, made to sit on a shelf and be returned to.

Not available

Digital Fill + membership+membership

Answer on screen. Your responses save as you go and assemble into your finished document.

$12.99

Hands-Free Interactive + membership+membership

Listen to each question and speak your answer. We capture it. You never touch a keyboard.

Not available

Everything packages

The Paperback Everything Package

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The Hardcover Everything Package

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The Premium Hardcover Everything Package

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Choose your pace.

The Essential path takes you to your finished document by the questions that matter most. The Full-depth path walks every question, every scenario, every angle. Both produce the same signed document — one just goes deeper on the way there.

Essential path

Shorter sessions. The questions that go directly to the document.

Full depth

Every question. Every scenario, every angle.

Paper doesn’t change its mind.

Thoughts change. Documents don’t. The answers you write are there when you return — unchanged by memory or mood.

You won’t just feel clearer — you’ll have written proof of what you decided.

Writing is the mechanism by which internal clarity becomes external evidence. Evidence you can return to, share, and hold someone — including yourself — accountable to.

Every question is answerable by everyone.

Every question in every title is answerable by the person for whom the assumed experience is true and by the person for whom it is not. No reader is excluded by how a question is built.

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