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Sometimes women choose to postpone their academic careers until after they start a family. Some of my best friends have had success doing that. It's not necessa
by whyenot 7y ago
Sometimes women choose to postpone their academic careers until after they start a family. Some of my best friends have had success doing that. It's not necessarily a bad life choice.
You know what can be a bad life choice? Trying to get through grad school, and then finding a job, and then getting through tenure, all while your biological clock is ticking, ticking, ticking, waiting for that day when you can settled down and have kids, a day that in the end may never come.
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoBut as a single mom or dad? I can see doing grad school on my own or maybe with a kid and the support of a partner, but not with a kid and no supporting partner.
- NotSammyHagar 7y agoLife comes at you and you have to deal with it. However I can say CS grad school was really hard just with me. I don't know how I would have handled a kid. We should support each other in life whenever possible.
- ethbro 7y agoA few of my female friends were in similar situations. Don't discount the drive that caring for a child you love can provide. (They're all superheroes, and I live in awe of the load they've carried, but I think their child definitely helped them get through some rough times)
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoMy kid has required more effort than my PhD ever did. I enjoy it, but I can’t imagine having to do both.
- watwut 7y agoIf the partner was not supportive, his existence can make no or negative difference.
- dekhn 7y agoMy Postdoc advisor at Berkeley was a single mom raising 3 kids as a grad student at UCSC. It definitely wasn't easy, but she lived in Faculty/Student Housing (subsidized) and managed to make it work (later, she worked on the industrial version of the human genome project and eventually become a prof at Berkeley). This was in mid-90s, at a time when Santa Cruz was already getting expensive (the story in the article is nothing new!) I remember living in a house in Santa Cruz in '93 and seeing how much the owners paid for it- $250K, which seemed absurd (houses where I grew up were $100K). Now that house would sell for $1.5M.
- Zalprt2020 7y agoShe failed to start a family though?
- ethbro 7y agoAnywhere there's love and more than one person, there's a family.
- swiley 7y agoMeh, grad school is not a long thing. A good number of my friends are finishing/finished it by the time they’re ~24.