What to do with my life

This is the big question. I have spent the last 9 years in college, what exactly is it that I want to do with this education? Stay home and have kids. I get a good laugh out of people when I say this, but it is honestly what I want to do the most. Not forever, I don't want ten kids of anything. A boy and girl is what I want and I think I'm willing to go to three to get them. I guess in a completely ideal world, I would finish my Ph.D., have my boy and girl, stay home with them until they are preschool age and then return to work full-time in a rewarding career.

Sounds nice doesn't it? Well, unfortunately in my field things just don't happen this way. If I want to stay in an academic setting and do research I will need to spend an additional 3-6 years in a postdoctoral position. This is similar to an internship, where you work incredibly hard, get paid very little (about $35,000/year) considering you have a PhD, and have no guarantee of actually finding a job in academia when you are done. There are very few academic research positions out there, and considering that there are so many new PhDs, it is VERY competitive, even at the state school level. And to be honest, assistant professors don't make all that much money, comparatively speaking of course. Even at a school like Berkeley, asst. profs just out of a postdoc will only make about $70,000/year. To some this may sound like a lot, but consider for a moment that this person has spent 10+ years in college and another 5 years getting paid dirt and just got hired at one of the top research universities in the world. And then there is the whole issue of getting tenure. You spend the next 7 years, again working your ass off, trying to get published, recruiting graduate students, writing grant applications, teaching and serving on a dozen or committees. After which you get hired or fired depending on how you did on the above list and how well the faculty in your dept likes you.

Now consider the above scenario and when to try to fit in having a family. "There is no good time" is a phrase that gets passed around a lot. It has been suggested by many that I have kids now, as this is the best time, given the situation. Take 6 weeks off, put the child in daycare, and return to lab. I know people who have done it. I just can't and won't ship my kid off to daycare as an infant. The cost alone for infant care is staggering, even if I didn't have a problem with someone else raising my child. And then the fact that it's hard to imagine working in this environment while pregnant. My stress level is SO high, not to mention the chemicals, radioative materials, etc. If I were to choose the above route, I would most likely think of having kids toward then end of my PhD, maybe when I'm getting ready to write my thesis, and have two kids back to back. Take a year or two off, and then try to get a decent postdoctoral position and enter into the game a little late.

There are several problems with this scenario. First, timing is everything and getting pregnant may not be as easy as stopping to take birth control. Things never seem to go according to plan. Secondly, it is not going to be easy to proceed with a postdoc after taking several years off. Science changes daily. Staying current is everything! Resume gaps are a career death sentence in science. As a professor, if you have the choice, you're not going to hire someone that has taken the last 3 years off to have kids (resume gap + family commitments...), over someone straight out of graduate school without children to distract them from lab work. This leaves me with a second-rate postdoc at best, which puts me at an even greater disadvantage when applying for a faculty position, an already intensively competitive field. Not to mention the pressure during a postdoc and asst professorship to get data and publish. This often takes long hours and incredible commitment. Something that is hard to do achieve when you have a family waiting for you at home.

No, this is not impossible. But it is, at best, difficult. And I've all but given up on the idea of going after an academic research position for that reason. And I'm not at all encouraged by the statistics either. There have been numerous studies done that show in black and white that women with children are HIGHLY disadvantaged when it comes to getting tenured faculty positions, especially when compared with men, whose chances of getting a tenured faculty position actually IMPROVE if they have a family. Life really isn't fair.

Unfortunately, I have to go right now. I have a lot more to say on this issue. So, tune in for Part 2 of "What to do with my life" coming soon to a blog near you.