Why I joined and left academia

I was 15 years old when I read Primal Fear, a novel about a person alleged to have multiple personalities—a condition now called dissociative identity disorder. The psychology depicted in the book impressed me so much that it started me on a decade-long study of the brain and found me, at 25 years old, a doctoral student at Harvard’s Department of Psychology.

But I’d grown disillusioned with the prospect of academic life and curious about other ways to make an impact on the world. A newly-minted psychology Ph.D. a year later, I walked into the Team Disney building at Walt…