What would your advice be to a young woman who is considering grad school/ PhD program but also deeply wants a family and a large and fruitful domestic life? Do the studies take over both spheres? Have you found it possible to have a balance between the two?
Hi anon,
I’ll answer this the best I can, but I am single and childless (although I was in a serious relationship during part of grad school and am a proud dog mom, as far as that counts) so I may not be able to fully answer this from my own perspective. Other female grad students or graduates, please feel free to add your perspective!
So, grad school is a huge time and energy commitment- particularly clinical, since you’ve got to balance classwork, clinical training, research, and other activities (teaching, supervision, administration/leadership/service, etc), while other disciplines still include a lot of work but no clinical training. It’s not like a full time job or like college. You’ll work days and nights and weekends. You’’’ see your last client at 9pm and then be up for class at 8am. When you go to happy hour, you’ll talk about statistics and case conceptualization. You’ll spend your free time thinking and dreaming and talking about grad school. You’ll forget how to watch TV without having your laptop open to a paper on your lap, or how to maintain attention long enough to read a book or watch a movie. You’ll wake up at 3am and run to your computer because you finally thought of a way to phrase a tough sentence in your dissertation or account effectively for missingness in your analysis. Maybe you’ll even start a psychology blog ☺
So, it is hard to balance your personal and professional life, and it often means some amount of sacrifice on aspects of your personal life. In my experience (and what I saw of my friends and colleagues), it seemed to me that people picked 2-4 major personal life components to maintain during grad school, and many other things dropped off. Usually that included a social life (although often a less active one) and some kind of physical activity. For me it also included my dog and my blog (and I wasn’t always very consistent with physical activity outside of walking my dog).
But that doesn’t mean that people don’t successfully have families and quality relationships and time with their families. I know a number of women who came into grad school with children and/or had children during grad school. Some have more success with the balance than others- I have a friend who is an assistant professor now after having baby #1 as a postdoc, and recently had baby #2, while another friend loves being a mom but is now years behind her graduation timeline and openly frustrated about the difficulty of balancing. So it’s hard but it’s possible, especially if you have a supportive partner and/or family who will ease some of your burden. Having a supportive mentor and program is also incredibly helpful- my program was, and helped friends of mine take longer maternity breaks or do a lighter schedule for a year after having a child. One of my female grad school friends once talked about her choice to have a child in grad school and said that there really isn’t a “good time” to have a child if you go into grad school and academia, so you might as well just do it when it makes sense for the rest of your life and be prepared to take an extra year in grad school or be less high achieving than you planned (or just take longer to get there).
So I guess my advice is: think through what you want your timeline to be, be as organized in your work schedule as possible (the more you procrastinate, the less time you’ll have with your family), get a supportive personal and professional life team, prioritize carefully, and don’t give up on your dreams (personal AND professional).
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