Episode #691: Transitioning From Academia To Private Practice, feat. Dr. Sumi Raghava

Summary

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Abundant Practice Podcast: Episode #691

Transitioning From Academia To Private Practice

Featuring: Dr. Sumi Raghava
Host: Allison Puryear
Date: October 1, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Allison Puryear sits down with Dr. Sumi Raghava to explore her journey from a tenure-track academic position to running a full-time private psychotherapy practice. They delve into the motivations, fears, logistics, and emotional complexities of leaving academia, while offering actionable insights for therapists considering a similar leap. Sumi shares her authentic decision-making process, discusses how her clinical practice enriched her teaching, the realities of "niching," and offers practical advice on preparing for private practice—especially for clinicians currently straddling both worlds.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins of the Move: Why Start a Private Practice on the Side?

[02:20–04:14]

• Sumi shares her initial reasons for launching a part-time practice while in academia:
  • A desire for her teaching to be grounded in current clinical experience (“If I were like in music school, I would want my music teacher to actually play their instrument.” – Sumi, 02:40)
  • Academic job insecurity made private practice a smart backup in case her tenure-track path became unstable
  • Supplementary income from clinical work

2. How Clinical Practice Changes Teaching

[04:14–05:31]

• Sumi describes how active clinical work gave her credibility and deeper rapport with students
  • Students took her clinical advice more seriously, as it was informed by real-life experience
  • “It gave me a lot of credibility as someone who ran my own practice, which many of them ultimately wanted to do.” – Sumi, 04:46

3. The Tipping Point: Choosing Between Academia and Private Practice

[06:02–11:15]

• The COVID-19 crisis upended professional and personal routines; Sumi grapples with her career trajectory while pregnant and raising young children in a cramped NYC apartment
• Surge in demand for mental health services prompts her to question where she’s needed most
• Institutional changes and increasing expectations with tenure push Sumi to reconsider if academia aligns with her values and well-being
  • “Knowing that it was a one way door felt really scary.” – Sumi, 09:18
• Experiences professional burnout and recognizes parallel struggles in her high-achieving clientele
  • “I work a lot with burnout in my practice... and I think I felt a bit of that with tenure.” – Sumi, 09:54
• Sees private practice as an opportunity to serve needed populations and achieve personal balance

4. Facing Uncertainty & Emotional Fallout

[10:35–12:08]

• Despite clarity in retrospect, Sumi highlights how agonizing and risky the decision felt amid pandemic uncertainty
  • “As I describe it retrospectively, it feels like a neat narrative. But at the time, it felt risky.” – Sumi, 11:12
• No regrets, but acknowledges emotional loss from leaving teaching: “There’s certainly a sense of loss, but there’s not a sense of regret.” – Sumi, 11:56

5. Financial Planning and Privilege

[12:50–15:21]

• Sumi stresses the importance of financial clarity and honest conversation before quitting academia
  • Stable financial support from her partner played a key role in her ability to take the risk
  • “We sort of gamed it out, money-wise, of like, how many clients do you need for this to work for us?” – Sumi, 13:01
• Emphasizes that private practitioners are business owners and can’t ignore the business and marketing side

6. The Reality of Building a Caseload & Infrastructure

[15:53–18:25]

• Success in private practice isn’t automatic—requires sustained, intentional marketing and business planning
  • “You cannot just like, hope it works out.” – Sumi, 16:20
• Simple but essential infrastructure matters: having a website, a Psychology Today profile, and an office made expansion possible
  • Even a “small practice” (just 1 day/week, 4 clients) can be scaled if the basics are in place

7. Referral Streams & Transition Logistics

[17:32–18:25]

• Sumi did not receive referrals from her university job (due to role separation and ethics), so she needed independent community referral sources
  • Reinforces the need to build non-workplace referral streams before leaving academia

8. The “Niching” Dilemma: Both/And Approach

[18:33–26:45]

• Sumi dislikes the concept of niching; identifies as a generalist and resists boxed-in marketing
  • “I hate niching. I hate the concept of it... I think it does a disservice to the range of our skills and abilities.” – Sumi, 18:47
• Recognizes that clear, specific marketing helps clients connect, and carves out a compromise:
  • Highlights three broader clinical focuses: trauma, burnout (especially in high-demand professions), and culture/cross-cultural work
  • Carves out an ultra-specific niche: trauma-exposed journalists and media professionals, with specialized training from the Global Center for Journalism and Trauma
  • “If someone were to ask me, how did you niche down without niching down? I would say I have this super niche down area—trauma-exposed journalists... and then three very broad areas.” – Sumi, 24:23
• Her approach makes her stand out to specific populations while still allowing her to see a diverse caseload

9. The Power and Pitfalls of Niching

[25:15–27:08]

• Ultra-specific niches, like journalists exposed to trauma, create reliable referral pipelines but aren't enough to fill a caseload alone
• Marketing broad topics like burnout can be effective—depends on social media algorithms and needs of the community
• Both Sumi and Allison acknowledge seeing clients outside their stated niches, and discuss the illusion that niching is an exclusion rather than amplification of expertise:
  • “The hope is that people see that expertise speaks to high levels of competence across the board.” – Sumi, 26:57

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “If I were in music school, I would want my music teacher to actually play their instrument.” – Sumi Raghava, [02:40]
• “It gave me a lot of credibility as someone who ran my own practice, which many of them ultimately wanted to do.” – Sumi Raghava, [04:46]
• “I work a lot with burnout in my practice...and I think I felt a bit of that with tenure.” – Sumi Raghava, [09:54]
• “Knowing that it was a one way door felt really scary.” – Sumi Raghava, [09:18]
• “We sort of gamed it out, money-wise, of like, how many clients do you need for this to work for us?” – Sumi Raghava, [13:01]
• “To be a successful solo practitioner, you cannot reject engaging with some aspects of business.” – Sumi Raghava, [15:17]
• “You cannot just like, hope it works out [marketing-wise].” – Sumi Raghava, [16:20]
• “I hate niching. I hate the concept of it... I think it does a disservice to the range of our skills and abilities.” – Sumi Raghava, [18:47]
• “Burnout is by design in a culture that equates worth with work...” – Sumi Raghava, [25:52]

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Practical Advice for Clinicians Considering the Leap

• Get financially clear: do the math on what you need for your household to be sustainable
• Don’t depend on referrals from academic or agency settings—build independent referral sources before you leave
• Even a very small practice can be scaled with the right infrastructure (website, office or telehealth setup, directory listings)
• Expect and plan for periods with fewer inquiries or slow caseload growth—marketing requires ongoing investment
• If niching feels restrictive, consider Sumi’s “both/and” model: promote what is specific and what feels authentic
• Recognize the broader transferable skills: business sense and marketing are essential, regardless of clinical excellence

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [02:20] – Sumi’s rationale for starting a side practice in academia
• [04:14] – Impact of clinical work on teaching
• [06:02] – COVID, parenting, burnout, and the decision point
• [11:15] – Weighing regret/loss after leaving academia
• [12:50] – Financial preparation and privilege
• [15:53] – The business side and marketing truths
• [17:32] – Referral source realities for transitioning clinicians
• [18:33] – Resistance to niching and creating a workable marketing plan
• [24:23] – Ultra-specific and broad niching strategies
• [25:52] – Systemic causes of burnout in American culture
• [27:38] – Final reflections and encouragement to others

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Tone & Style

The conversation is candid, validating, and practical, weaving personal anecdotes with systemic observations. Both Sumi and Allison demystify private practice realities, emphasizing both the challenges and freedoms that come with the transition out of academia. There’s warmth, respect for nuance, and a clear invitation for clinicians to design lives and practices that actually work for them.

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For further support on building your own private practice, visit abundancepracticebuilding.com or join Allison’s Abundance Party membership.

Transcript

[A]

Foreign.

[B]

Hi, welcome to the Abundant Practice Podcast. I'm Alison from Abundance Practice Building. I have a nearly diagnosable obsession with helping therapists build sustainable, joy filled private practices. Just like I've done for tens of thousands of therapists across the world. I'm excited to help you too. If you want to fill your practice with ideal clients, we have loads of free resources and paid support. Go to abundance practice building.com Links all right, onto the show. So I've talked about therapy notes on here for years. I could talk about the features and the benefits in my sleep. But there are a couple things I want you to know about therapy notes that doesn't typically make it into an ad script. First is that they actually care if you like their platform. They don't only make themselves available on the phone to troubleshoot so you don't pull your hair out when you get stuck. They also take member suggestions and implement those that there's client demand for. Like Therapy Search, an included listing service that helps clients find you internal and external secure messaging, clinical outcome measures to keep an eye on how your clients are progressing. A super smooth super bill process, real time eligibility to check on your client's insurance. In my conversations with the employees there at all levels, they all really believe in their product and they want you to love it too. Second, they are proudly independently owned. Why should you care about that? Because as soon as venture capital becomes involved, the focus shifts from making customers happy to making investors happy. Prices go way up. Innovation plateaus. Making more money with as little output as possible becomes the number one focus. With over 100,000 therapists using their platform, they've been able to stay incredibly successful and they don't have to sacrifice your experience to stay there. You can try two months [e-mail] with the coupon code Abundant. Welcome back to the Abundant Practice Podcast. I'm your host Alison Perior, founder of abundance practicebuilding.com and I am here with Sumi Raghavan and we are going to be talking about making the move from academia into private practice. Sumi has lived experience of this and is going to share all of it with us. Thank you so much for being here.

[A]

Thanks for having me. I'm excited. Yeah.

[B]

So kind of talk us through. You're in an academic position, you're working that life. What made you start practice on the side?

[A]

Yeah, thanks for asking. I was in the very fortunate and rare position to receive to get an offer for a tenure track position after grad school and when I started I was not even fully licensed Yet And I thought, I am going to be teaching about clinical work. I'm going to be teaching about diagnosis, assessment, treatment. And then later I would go on. When I moved into faculty of the graduate program, I was teaching clinical skills. And I thought two things. One is like, if I were like in music school, I would want my music teacher to actually play their instrument. If I think of it that way, I want to be a professor that is able to talk about clinical work in the present rather than down the line. Be like 10 years ago when I saw patients X. Right. So I really wanted to know what I was doing and teaching while I was doing it. The other part of it was very pragmatic because I was tuned into the fact that academia can be unstable, unreliable, that I wasn't sure that I would want to do it forever, so to speak. I thought this is a backup that I could always jump into and if it gets to be too much, I can always stop.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

I love that the last piece of it, to be honest, was money. Right. It's a source of income on the side.

[B]

Yeah. Okay, so. And I love that you're like, I need to know what I'm talking about when I'm teaching people things. And did you find that that changed how you taught clinical skills as you did more and therapy?

[A]

Yes, it really did. And I, I really felt like when students asked me about practice they liked, they, I think they felt a greater confidence in what I was sharing because it was based on present and past experience. And I think that it gave me a lot of credibility as someone who ran my own practice, which many of them ultimately wanted to do. Right. And so I think those two pieces were helpful for just like the rapport with students that buy in and their sort of confidence in my. What I was delivering. I think I also felt like the things I was saying when I talked about building the therapeutic relationship, when I talked about not just different treatment modalities, but like understanding experiences that clients have, like grief and loss. I really felt like I was talking about it from a place of direct current content knowledge, not just rehashing things that I had learned in school.

[B]

Right?

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

And so now you're working two jobs at this stage. Right. You've got your part time practice, you've got full time tenure track work or not tenured track. Tenured work.

[A]

Yeah. In the beginning tenure track. Yeah. Before I got tenured. Yeah, yeah.

[B]

So you've got a lot of work you're doing and what becomes the point for you where you're Like, I want to do more therapy and less professor work.

[A]

So in the peak of COVID like.

[B]

Life shattering for so many of us. I'm like, wait, what am I doing with my life?

[A]

What a privilege that. My primary crisis in Covid was professional, right? I was pregnant with my second child. I was. We were cramped into our apartment in New York City with our toddler and working from home, teaching online, doing therapy online. And it became really, I mean, we were all experiencing a mass global trauma. We were, and we were experiencing it differently, but it was profound. And the need for mental health services was profound. And the state of New York had like a volunteer hotline for if you were a mental health practitioner and you wanted to volunteer for, like crisis. I reached out to them to volunteer. They ended up not calling on me, but I was like, I can like supervise volunteers if you want to. Like, I'm a New York State licensed psychologist. I started feeling like everyone was struggling and I wanted to be able to serve more people clinically. I really love teaching and I felt very conflicted about it, about the idea of leaving, particularly when I knew I'd be going up for tenure. But I think I started just feeling like I knew that people would really need support to process everything that we were experiencing on a global scale. And so I thought if there was a time to pivot, maybe this terrible mass trauma presents a business opportunity. And that combined with the fact that, you know, a little bit facilitated by Covid. There's been a crisis in higher education and the nature of my job was going to change, partially result of financial challenges at my institution. And with tenure would come certain increased expectations of leadership teaching. Things were changing structurally in a way where I was starting to wonder whether I could even maintain a small practice. And so it felt like a choice moment where I was like, okay, either I'm going to go all in on academia and I'm going to take tenure, which is what I've been working for, what I thought I was wanted. And I'm going to do this, but this is going to be it. And I may need to step away from practice while I'm balancing these increased demands and go back to it later, right? Or. Or I walk out what is for sure a one way door and I expand the practice. I gamble on the fact that people are going to want and need therapy in the coming years and that perhaps virtual life will lead more people to reach out in a different way. And I was balancing those two things. And then personally, I had my second child. I felt really Overwhelmed. I was like, I'm doing too much. And it's an interesting thing. I work a lot with burnout in my practice. I work with a lot of high achievers who have high demand professions and who become disillusioned because they work so hard and it turns out not to be what they thought it would be. And I think I felt a bit of that with tenure. I was like, wow, I should be so excited. I should feel so proud of myself. I should feel so good. And I instead felt anxious. And I was like, I don't know if this is what I want. And knowing that it was a one way door felt really scary because you don't walk away from tenure and then go back and get another 200 direct job. It's not common. Right. But I felt like there was going to be a need for clinicians. There was going to be a need for clinicians who understood trauma, who could work cross culturally, who, you know, are available, like have availability. I could do that. So maybe this is the time.

[B]

It's so interesting how everything just aligned, I mean, in retrospect, very clearly in order to make this decision. But I'm sure in the moment it was wrenching, right?

[A]

I mean, and it was such an uncertain time. If, you know, you remember, like, what is going to happen with COVID How long are we dealing with some level of this? Will anyone ever be back in the office? Five days a week? Are people going to want virtual therapy long term? I, you know, these were all uncertainties. Will I be able to scale up? I don't know. Like, yeah, but as I describe it retrospectively, it feels like a neat narrative. But at the time it was a lot. It felt like risky.

[B]

Yeah. So every academic listening right now with a small private practice is wondering, like, do you regret the choice? Was it clearly the right choice? How do you feel about it now?

[A]

No, I don't regret it is the short and easy answer. I miss teaching. The first year that I wasn't teaching, I used to get that feeling in my body in late August, early September of like, oh, wait, like I'm not. Nothing has changed for me. Or like these moments where I really wanted to be in the classroom. And I really do miss that. And the more time passes, the more I'm aware that that part of my life is in the past. And so there's some. There's certainly a sense of loss, but there's not a sense of regret.

[B]

Okay, good. Yeah. I mean, there's a grief when you love doing a thing and it's not available to you every day the way it was before? Certainly. Yeah, there's grief there. And it sounds like you're in a less overwhelming position now than you once were. Yeah, it sounds too. Like I talk a lot about making your priorities your actual priorities, which is not something most Americans do. You know, we put so many things in front of the people and life that we care about. We always put work first as Americans. And I feel like private practice gives you the opportunity to shift that.

[A]

Yeah, that has certainly been the case for me. But I, you know, I have to check my privilege on this in that when I made this transition, I. I'm married, my partner has a steady and reliable income. We talked about, we sort of gamed it out, money wise of like, how many clients do you need for this to work for us? And like, it is a risk. I mean, you talk about this is like what you talk about all the time is like, people don't fill up their practices. People don't always get steady streams of referral. There are great, great clinicians. It is a hustle to do this work individually in a different way. Once you, I think, get in the rhythm and get the hang of has. It's. It can be so self driven and directed and make. You can make space in the ways you want. I have found.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But I recognize that that's not how it shakes out for everyone. And it's hard to make that happen.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, you have to be committed to the marketing. And typically if you're committed to the marketing and you're doing it right, you.

[A]

Will get, you will get something.

[B]

But it's, it's never as fast as any of us want. And sometimes, you know, you get bad information and you're doing the wrong thing for a long time and that can really wear on your confidence. Yeah, yeah. And I love that y' all had the conversation like you did the math. You didn't just kind of talk around it. And a lot of people get in bad situations because they're like, yeah, I mean, I think I probably need about this many clients. But they don't actually do the math because therapists aren't really known to be mathy either, you know?

[A]

Right.

[B]

I mean, I don't, but I think.

[A]

We had, we've had to. I mean, like we have two kids and there was this sort of like, okay, well, what's your, what's your business plan? And I do think a lot of therapists don't think of themselves as business people or as people who run a business. But we are. If you are a private, like solo practitioner running a private practice. If you're in a group, you're in a business, you cannot say, well, I just have no business sense. Like that won't work for you. Yeah. This is not. To be a successful solo practitioner, you cannot reject engaging with some aspects of business.

[B]

Absolutely. Yeah. And I hear it like, I'm not a marketer. Guess what? Now you are. You're learning. You're learning marketing, you're learning business. And it's not even like the advanced forms of business or marketing. We're really lucky in that respect that our business model is not very complex. Yeah. So. Yeah, yeah. So, okay. I'm hearing we. For anybody in a similar position, you need to get really clear on the financial side of things before making the leap full time.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

You need to know what you're doing marketing wise so that you're able to continue to get clients in the door.

[A]

Yeah. I think you need to have a plan. I mean, nothing's foolproof. Right? Right. Like, I've, I've been lucky to have a fairly steady stream of referrals. I don't have long periods where I'm like below my count. But it certainly happens, it happens to everyone where sometimes a couple of people graduate and terminate treatment and you've got openings for longer than you thought you would and you get like an abundance of inquiries. And so I do think you have to have a plan around marketing. You cannot just like, hope it works out. Right. Right.

[B]

Yeah. I think if we treat our marketing plans like we treat our clients, you don't just hop in there, you think about them, you review notes, you have a treatment plan. You, you know, you're going to provide much better care if you're doing these things. And you're going to get far more results in your practice if you bring that same intentionality.

[A]

I think also, you know, you mentioned you, you have a lot of academics who listen to your practice. Maybe where I was a few years ago, if you have a small practice and really I had a small practice, like it was one day a week. Sometimes the most clients I had was four. But the infrastructure for expansion was in place. And what is that infrastructure? I had a website, I had an office, I had a Psych Today profile. That's it.

[B]

Got it. Yeah.

[A]

And I expanded all of that.

[B]

Your connections with the university, did they give you like, were you getting referrals from people you knew there?

[A]

No.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

That wasn't, that wasn't where I got clients.

[B]

So that's important for people to know. Like, if right now you've got a small practice and people are sending you, like, from your current workplace, they're sending you people, you need to build other referral sources before you leap.

[A]

Yeah, that was true for me. Yeah. I mean, because my role at the university was as a professor and a researcher, not a clinician. And so I couldn't get referrals from, like, I couldn't take students. There's a potential conflict of interest. Right. Some of my colleagues in my department would send me referrals because they knew me as colleagues. But those are not large sources of referrals for me.

[B]

Yeah. And you can still nurture those relationships when you're gone, and they'll still do. Yeah.

[A]

And I still. And I send people to them. Huh.

[B]

Another thing you did is, like, the way that you niched. Can we talk about that?

[A]

Yeah. Oh, can I also just ignore, like, I hate niching. I hate the concept of it.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. What do you hate about it? Because I know you're not the only one.

[A]

I don't think I am. I almost, like, I hate the word, like, when people say it, I'm like, that gives me the ick. I hate it because I'm a generalist, and I think that a lot of clinicians are generalists, and we can do a lot of things. And so I think in some ways, it does a disservice to the range of our skills and abilities to suggest that we do one thing. I also know how affirming and meaningful it is for clients to see on a website or on a profile. This person specializes in, like, chronic medical illness or something. Like, when they see that, they're like, oh, that's me. I know how meaningful that is for clients. But I. I really tried to walk a line. I also am like a. I'm a little bit of some. A little bit of a commitment phobe. I mean, part of what I loved about academia is I didn't have. I have to pay. I didn't have to pick. Like, I could teach, I could do research, I could do practice. I could see a couple of clients. I did not have to, like, choose a lane entirely. And so with niching, I was sort of like, I don't want to say I do one thing. I work with a lot of different, like, populations. I'm interested in a lot of different things, and I'm skilled in a lot of different areas. And so I really thought about, you know, how do you get clients, though, as a general Marketer. What the marketing advice people tell you is you have to niche, particularly if you're using social media because the algorithms drive traffic based on specific content. And if your content is all over the place, it confuses that, right? So I thought about these things. I thought about what I was doing and how I wanted to market myself. And so I tried to pick because I couldn't pick one thing. I just couldn't. I was like, all right, what are the things that you're really passionate about, care about and are like common threads through your training, through your academic work? One of those is cultural and cross cultural work. I've always worked with bipoc populations I'm interested in and I'm also interested in the idea that everyone has a culture. And looking at cultural history, you don't just have to be a visible minority to have a cultural history. And so I thought, okay, I'm going to talk about that, I'm going to put it, make sure that that is on my website. I'm going to make sure that that is infused into how I even talk about other things on social media. The other thing I thought about was the idea that I work with a lot of people in high demand professions who are struggling with burnout, struggling with overwhelm, anxiety, balancing all of the demands both personally and professionally. And I can talk about that. And that's a solid niche for social media. The sort of social media universe is not saturated with people talking about burnout. It is saturated with people talking about parenting, for example. But like I work with a lot of parents, I am a parent, I'm interested in parenting. I don't talk about that on my website. I rarely talk about it on my social. It's not a niche that I advertise. And that was a choice that I made because I was just like, I can't just like say every single thing I do right? And there's a lot of people who say they do parenting. So let me say I do burnout because I do. Let me talk about culture because I think it's important for people to know that for a client who is seeking a culturally competent therapist, they want that flagged. And then the other common thread of what I work with is trauma. I have studied trauma, I did my master's in dissertation research in trauma. I work with trauma. And trauma is quite general, as you know, in that many, many clients have some exposure to her experience with trauma. So I'm going to talk about that. And so I picked these three areas to highlight on my website. And on my social media. But I also have sort of these couple of areas of work that are very, very niche, which is in the, in the category of trauma. I work with journalists and media professionals who are trauma exposed through their work. So think about folks who news people who are covering, you know, mass shootings, who are covering violent crime, who are covering really, really trauma facing things. And they are often some of the first people on the scene. They are talking to the survivors, they are bearing witness with their own eyes of the kind of direct aftermath. A lot of journalists that are covering like climate disaster, right. They're seeing and they're asked and tasked by the work that they do to maintain a level of distance and objectivity. And yet they are carrying those things with them. I received training from what was formerly the DART center for Journalism and Trauma. It's now the Global center for Journalism and Trauma. And this is a very specific area of work that I call out on my website. But I receive referrals from that because it's so specific.

[B]

Right, right.

[A]

If someone were to ask me, how did you niche down without niching down? I would say I have this super niche down area. I'm exposed journalists, something that I think a lot of people don't think about. And because it's so specific and because I was trained by an organization that works with, that has trained many clinicians to do this, I get referrals specific to that. And then I have these three very broad areas. Trauma, culture, verdict. And I know in my heart that I work with people dealing with a lot of things that are not any of that. But I can't possibly call all of that out. So I picked one super specific thing and three general things and I try to highlight that I do all of that.

[B]

Mm, yeah. And it's working well for you?

[A]

It's working for me. It's working.

[B]

And I think that you have finessed it in such a way because that is such a hyper specific niche that like, you know, you will always get referrals for that.

[A]

Yes, I know I will. But I also know that doesn't fill a practice because of how hyper specific it is.

[B]

And burnout. It's interesting because we are like you were talking about how it's not saturated. I think it also depends on your algorithm because I get more things about burnout in my feed than parenting at this point.

[A]

And I think you're right. It is the algo. Yeah.

[B]

So many people are burned out. Right. I mean, like we're in a culture that almost demands burnout. Just for like basic functioning.

[A]

That's right. Burnout is by design in a culture that equates worth with work and. Yeah, particularly for many, you know, sort of high achieving folks, it is by design. It's almost inevitable.

[B]

Yeah, absolutely. I like the way you wrangled the niche idea into something that works for you, it's palatable for you. It's not something you had to like that felt unaligned that you had to force.

[A]

Yeah. I think that it, it would have been hard for me to choose one thing. And even still I think about like, what if I want to? Like, burnout is what I sort of foreground on social media. But it's not all what I do. Like, what if I want to change that? And I, I've just sort of tried to settle in a space of like, what I really want is for people to know that I can do lots and lots of things and.

[B]

Yeah, and it sounds like you're getting people outside of your stated niches because. And that's one of the powers of a niche too, is it makes you look like an expert in something. So it makes you look more competent in general.

[A]

So that's the hope, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the fear is people worry that you can only do that, but the hope is that people see that expertise speaks to high levels of competence across the board.

[B]

Right, right. And that's what I see more in people when they niche. It's like, I mean, I've kept probably no more than 60% of my caseload on average has been my niche because I also don't want to just see one presenting concern all day long. So. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for talking with us, Sumi. I hope that some other academics out there who like juggling both have some clarity.

[A]

Yeah, I hope it's helpful. I know how hard that decision is and I feel grateful that I have that I had that to fall back on. I do think that it's a valuable skill, but I know it's a really hard decision.

[B]

Yeah, I mean, well, thank you so much. Have a great day.

[A]

This was such a great chat. Be well. You too.

[B]

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