Preparing for retirement is a multifaceted endeavor, varying according to individual and experience. In my particular case, I did not develop a specific retirement strategy which I can articulate today as the Prestage Plan for “how a female political science professor can fade into oblivion after 48 years in the profession.” Rather, What Was Planned—that is, the content of my remarks today—can best be described as What Happened. For me, what can be labeled as “Strategy” for the purposes of this roundtable is an ex post facto matter. That is, I must try to recall and reconstruct the retirement experience as it happened, and put some logical order to it, or try to.

As I do, it seems that my retirement strategy, or scheme, had four basic facets or areas of concern: (1) family, (2) emotional/transitional adjustments, (3) physical and intellectual isolation, and (4) financial transition.

As a woman with a large immediate and extended family, “family” in a theoretical and realistic, interactive sense has always been a special concern. My husband—a long-term academician who has been a biology professor, departmental chair(s), dean, vice president for academic affairs, vice president of a university system, assistant coordinator for a statewide higher education system, acting university president, and chancellor, among other positions—is now retired. After two stints in the U.S. Navy and nearly four decades in academia, he wants nothing more than to stay retired. We are the natural parents of five children, now adults, and have eight grandchildren located across the country. In addition, I have two sisters and three brothers. How to introduce the retirement issue to them was the first concern, and how to respond to their reaction was the next. As a very close-knit family, what they felt about my retirement was important to me.

At last! What are you going to do now? How does one divide one's time now that one has time that was once spent with work? What priority does family get on that time? What will be the locus of the sharing of time together? If you are a very close family, these questions are important.

Another profound aspect of my retirement has been the emotional transition and adjustment. How does one move from a structured day-to-day schedule of classes, class preparation, conferences, and involvement with people not related to you by blood for most of your waking hours, four to five days per week, for four decades, to an unstructured schedule of one-on-one with your spouse or other persons related to you by blood, 24/7?

Life after retirement is enjoyable and more relaxed, but different. You must work out how you will handle time, the activities, the other people, the leisure, the visits, and the research you put off until you had post-retirement time.

If you have been engaged in program- and institution-building there is concern about the future of those endeavors as one leaves active service. Will the programs to which you have dedicated so much of your academic life survive? This is an especially critical concern if one has had elongated tenure in one or two institutions.

On the other hand, when are you going to really give up the academic side of your life? I am retired, but I am in Philadelphia today [at the APSA Annual Meeting] with no university financial support. I am still involved in providing letters of recommendation, doing evaluations for tenure, and reviewing articles for journals. All are part of what we do and want to keep doing, researching, and writing. When do we really give it up? I have a feeling that the answer is “really never” or “never really.”

At the same time, retirement results in a certain level of physical and intellectual isolation from former departmental colleagues and friends. Hedging against isolation is a definite strategy. When done in conjunction with mentoring, the pleasure is double, the reward is mutual, it is a win-win situation. One can never project with accuracy how any particular action can impact future personal or professional relations. However, I have tried especially hard to develop the type of relationship with my students and colleagues in political science and related fields that invites them to come by, call, exchange information, and share their work, with the hope that these relationships will carry over into retirement. This is true in the case of both younger scholars and scholars who are themselves approaching retirement.

Finally there is financial transition. No one needs to be reminded that post-retirement financial strategy is a very personal matter, closely related to the kind of academic career one has experienced, in addition to the usual financial planning we all need to do. In any case, early on I made a commitment to a professional career in Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). That commitment has had certain inherent rewards for me as a professional political scientist. However, high salaries were not usually among the rewards that accrue to those committed to careers with HBCUs. Therefore, planning my retirement became highly problematic.

After three decades at one HBCU, I inadvertently encountered an opportunity to retire and move to another HBCU to teach political science in an Honors College, the first full Honors College at a Historically Black Institution of higher education in the United States. I later served as dean of that Honors College for eight years. The Honors College was an innovative and successful experiment in increasing enrollment of African Americans in graduate and professional school in the sciences and engineering fields as well as in the liberal arts. I also became a participant in that institution's retirement system.

In the final analysis, what you can do depends on “how you are.” I have found that the final monitor of your retirement program might well be your physical and mental health. Without sounding like the proverbial athletic coach, I would conclude by saying, listen to your bodies. Heed their instructions. Ignore them at your own peril!