Thursday, February 19, 2009

Okay, on with the introductions

Yay, how exciting! People already came to visit me! :-) Okay, so I guess that means I better go ahead and introduce myself...in an anonymous sense. As the blog description says, I am a 4th year PhD student in [Life Science] at [Excellent U]. And as implied by the pseudonym, I very much want to "have it all" in the sense of both a happy family and a sucessful career in scientific research. I should clarify that I am not yet a mommy (or expecting), nor a full-blown scientist, although at some level, I feel ready on both fronts.

On the baby front, I have always heard that there is simply "no good time" for kids in an academic career, and that you should "just do it when you're ready." Well, Hubby and I have been married almost 3 years; we own a 3 bedroom house in a nice suburb with good schools; we've practiced our parenting skills by raising 2 dogs; we've never been partiers or had much in the way of social lives that we wouldn't be ready to give up; our friends (not counting my fellow grad students) are having babies; and if careers weren't an issue, we would probably already have a baby.

However, despite my excitement about the possibility of becoming a mother, I'm terrified of doing it during grad school. I guess mainly this is because the two women in my program who have had kids during grad school are not doing so well academically. I really don't see myself in either one of them (they don't seem very self-motivated, which I am), so I think I may have better chances of working it out, but it's just not comforting. So part of my motivation in starting this blog is to seek out new role models and advice about this question of whether it's a reasonable choice to have a baby during grad school. There's so much more I could say about my conflicting feelings about everything, but I think you get the gist, so I'll leave it at that. I'm open to any and all opinions or tidbits of wisdom you'd like to share.

Blogging

Okay, so I'm new to this blogging thing, so I realize I haven't had time to say anything interesting yet. Thankfully, I'm sure no one is listening yet. How do you get readers anyway? Well, meanwhile, I just wanted to mention that this list rocks, and has been my inspiration for starting my own blog. I intend to add almost all of these to my "blogroll"...whatever that means.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

New Blog

I'm starting this new anonymous blog to vent...but I should really be at work now...er...should have been there an hour and a half ago...so I'll introduce myself later.