Dr. Nicole Papaioannou discusses her journey from academia, to full-time work in instructional design, and finally, to freelancing/consulting work in instructional design. She discusses the wellness gap in her life when she was an academic and how, in her first full-time post-ac job, she was able to finally not only meet her needs for meaningful and challenging work, but also satisfy her needs for financially secure and stable work. Nicole offers interesting tidbits about instructional design as a career and describes what she misses about academia. She also explains how today, her entrepreneurial work offers her freedom to strike a work-life balance--a type of freedom she believes she would not have had in academia.