My apologies to my readers (all six of you!) for my extended absence. The end of the semester caught up with me, then summer rolled around and there just wasn't very much to blog about. No undergrads, no controversy du jour. However, I do love campus in the summer. It's wonderfully quiet, almost eerily so at times.
And then, there is another life change that precluded blogging. To our joy and surprise my husband and I have learned that we are going to be parents. I should say, we ARE parents, because although it's too early to feel any kicks or movement, I am as sure as I have ever been of anything that what I have inside my womb is most indeed a person. :) Building a person is hard work, though - harder than expected. I've spent most of the summer happily sitting on the couch with my feet up. Fatigue has been the major hardship - thankfully I've been spared the misery of morning sickness.
So what does this mean for me exactly? Well, at the moment, I don't have any plans to quit my Ph.D. Although I'm sure many people out there in blogland would disagree with that choice, my husband and I have decided that we have too much invested in this to give up right away. I said we because this has definitely been a joint effort. He's made a lot of sacrifices so that I could come to ND and do grad school and I will always be grateful for that. Also, somewhat selfishly, I love my job and I love what I do. My advisor is so fantastic to work with and I feel this is really a once in a lifetime opportunity for me. Then again, so is a baby!
At the same time, I do realize a baby changes things. I'm trying my best to stay open to whatever path God may show me. I keep praying, and I know that if it becomes obvious that I need to quit for the good of my family, then that's what I'll do. My husband has his job back, thankfully, which means I can afford to take a few semesters off to stay home with baby while he or she is very small. After that, we'll see how things go.
Baby will be here in February, but until then, I'll try my best to keep up with the blog and all the goings-on around campus. Blessings to all!
Showing posts with label family life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label family life. Show all posts
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Monday, April 12, 2010
Grad student petition for improving ND policies on family life
Some anonymous soul left a drive-by link to this Petition for a Family-Friendlier Notre Dame on my previous post about grad student life at ND. (Anon, if you're out there still, I'd love to know who you are and how you found my humble blog. I violated my usual rule of not posting anonymous comments because I was intrigued by the link.) I like most of the proposals therein, although there are a few I might modify (but perhaps the authors of the petition are thinking big?) I thought they were overreaching themselves at first, but as I read I realized that what is being proposed is not radical - but simply policy changes that would bring ND up to par with the much-vaunted "peer institutions."
Although I've been thwarted in my hope that we might see real healthcare reform that lowers costs, instead of a massive federal government takeover, I think there is much ND could do to make sure its grad students get adequate healthcare. As much I admire the work of the Women's Care Center, I really think ND grad students shouldn't have to resort to charity in order to get maternity care. The latest WCC flyer I received in the mail told the story of an international graduate student whose wife unexpectedly became pregnant during his time at Notre Dame. They worried about not being able to afford the baby - and considered abortion. They were able to get the help they needed from the WCC, but the fact that ND grad students even have to think about abortion due to financial distress is sad to say the least. The situation for international graduate students is especially dire as their spouses are usually here on visas which don't allow them to seek gainful employment!
There are a host of other "quality of life" issues that are addressed in the petition. The condition of married student housing is one of them. Frankly I wouldn't live in any of the on-campus housing that's designated for married students, either with or without children. Apartments off-campus are a much better value for the price. I've heard that the apartments for married students with kids are aging and not really in good shape. The gouging on rent is especially heinous in light of the size of a grad student stipend. I'm lucky as an engineering student to receive about $20,000/year (ish...I'm not telling you how much I really make!) Students in Arts and Letters have to make do with much less. In my program's handbook we are told, in a tone of admonition, that the stipend is only intended to support one person. But that doesn't at all match up with reality - for international students whose spouses can't work, or even for American citizens whose spouses can't find a job in this recession. (Been there, done that!) Even a cost-of-living increase from year to year would help.
The University's trumpeting of its "pro-life" policies contrasts sharply with its shabby treatment of grad student families. I'm not sure if I'll be joining this group in front of the Dome - I'm not really the protesting type - but I fully support their efforts to improve conditions for graduate students and their families.
Although I've been thwarted in my hope that we might see real healthcare reform that lowers costs, instead of a massive federal government takeover, I think there is much ND could do to make sure its grad students get adequate healthcare. As much I admire the work of the Women's Care Center, I really think ND grad students shouldn't have to resort to charity in order to get maternity care. The latest WCC flyer I received in the mail told the story of an international graduate student whose wife unexpectedly became pregnant during his time at Notre Dame. They worried about not being able to afford the baby - and considered abortion. They were able to get the help they needed from the WCC, but the fact that ND grad students even have to think about abortion due to financial distress is sad to say the least. The situation for international graduate students is especially dire as their spouses are usually here on visas which don't allow them to seek gainful employment!
There are a host of other "quality of life" issues that are addressed in the petition. The condition of married student housing is one of them. Frankly I wouldn't live in any of the on-campus housing that's designated for married students, either with or without children. Apartments off-campus are a much better value for the price. I've heard that the apartments for married students with kids are aging and not really in good shape. The gouging on rent is especially heinous in light of the size of a grad student stipend. I'm lucky as an engineering student to receive about $20,000/year (ish...I'm not telling you how much I really make!) Students in Arts and Letters have to make do with much less. In my program's handbook we are told, in a tone of admonition, that the stipend is only intended to support one person. But that doesn't at all match up with reality - for international students whose spouses can't work, or even for American citizens whose spouses can't find a job in this recession. (Been there, done that!) Even a cost-of-living increase from year to year would help.
The University's trumpeting of its "pro-life" policies contrasts sharply with its shabby treatment of grad student families. I'm not sure if I'll be joining this group in front of the Dome - I'm not really the protesting type - but I fully support their efforts to improve conditions for graduate students and their families.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
A grad student speaks out
Today there was a letter to the editor in the Observer that was actually worth reading. Bravo, Mr. Klee! And it touched on a subject near and dear to my heart - quality of life for married grad students and grad students with families at ND. Read on, my friends: Family Life at Notre Dame
I don't know Mr. Klee personally, but we are most certainly on the same wavelength. He touches on a lot of the points I made in a previous post about women in academic life - the policy which allows grad student mothers a bare six weeks at home with their newborns and the lack of child care on campus for children younger than two years of age. He also brings out a point I had missed - the cost of grad student insurance for spouses. I had originally planned to put my husband on my insurance when he lost his job, but thanks to COBRA he can keep his US Steel insurance for a fraction of what it would have cost me to buy it from ND. Our stipends are small enough already, and insurance payments are a significant expense.
To my great surprise, Mr. Klee points out the family policies that benefit grad students at schools like Yale, Cornell, and the UC system school. I won't repeat what he wrote in his letter, but the plans they have sound great and frankly, put ND to shame. When I came to ND I didn't really see the maternity policies here as a problem, because I assumed the secular schools would be even worse. I just assumed that it was like this everywhere because grad students are fairly low on the academic food chain. Now that I see it isn't, I feel just a little bit angry. I trusted that a Catholic school would recognize the primacy of the family - and clearly, that isn't the case.
On a more personal note, this letter hit a real chord with me because of my husband's continuing unemployment and the financial difficulties resulting from that. He is still unable to find a job in the area because of the dismal economy, and is now starting to look out-of-state. I don't want to quit grad school - I worked really hard to get here and I love what I'm doing - but part of me wonders what the point would be in continuing. If he moves and I stay here to finish school, I'd only be starting all over again, looking for a postdoc in one specific area of the country with my very specific skill set. The never-ending two body problem would just continue to plague me. And I know couples do it, but living apart as a married couple would be very painful to me and, I feel, contradictory to the spirit of Christian married life. I want to start our family soon and continuing on in academic life would just throw up more hurdles in our way. I wonder why I should go on in a profession that is so very unwelcoming of women who actually want to be wives and mothers.
In any case, it makes me very happy to see a fellow grad student standing up for us. It's easy to feel neglected here, with ND being so heavily undergrad-centered. If ND really wants to become prominent in research, they need to be able to attract graduate students with family-friendly policies. Unfortunately Mr. Klee's letter will probably go unnoticed in the brouhaha over an offensive cartoon published in the Observer (which I apparently missed) but I say to him again, bravo, sir!
I don't know Mr. Klee personally, but we are most certainly on the same wavelength. He touches on a lot of the points I made in a previous post about women in academic life - the policy which allows grad student mothers a bare six weeks at home with their newborns and the lack of child care on campus for children younger than two years of age. He also brings out a point I had missed - the cost of grad student insurance for spouses. I had originally planned to put my husband on my insurance when he lost his job, but thanks to COBRA he can keep his US Steel insurance for a fraction of what it would have cost me to buy it from ND. Our stipends are small enough already, and insurance payments are a significant expense.
To my great surprise, Mr. Klee points out the family policies that benefit grad students at schools like Yale, Cornell, and the UC system school. I won't repeat what he wrote in his letter, but the plans they have sound great and frankly, put ND to shame. When I came to ND I didn't really see the maternity policies here as a problem, because I assumed the secular schools would be even worse. I just assumed that it was like this everywhere because grad students are fairly low on the academic food chain. Now that I see it isn't, I feel just a little bit angry. I trusted that a Catholic school would recognize the primacy of the family - and clearly, that isn't the case.
On a more personal note, this letter hit a real chord with me because of my husband's continuing unemployment and the financial difficulties resulting from that. He is still unable to find a job in the area because of the dismal economy, and is now starting to look out-of-state. I don't want to quit grad school - I worked really hard to get here and I love what I'm doing - but part of me wonders what the point would be in continuing. If he moves and I stay here to finish school, I'd only be starting all over again, looking for a postdoc in one specific area of the country with my very specific skill set. The never-ending two body problem would just continue to plague me. And I know couples do it, but living apart as a married couple would be very painful to me and, I feel, contradictory to the spirit of Christian married life. I want to start our family soon and continuing on in academic life would just throw up more hurdles in our way. I wonder why I should go on in a profession that is so very unwelcoming of women who actually want to be wives and mothers.
In any case, it makes me very happy to see a fellow grad student standing up for us. It's easy to feel neglected here, with ND being so heavily undergrad-centered. If ND really wants to become prominent in research, they need to be able to attract graduate students with family-friendly policies. Unfortunately Mr. Klee's letter will probably go unnoticed in the brouhaha over an offensive cartoon published in the Observer (which I apparently missed) but I say to him again, bravo, sir!
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