But after a couple years of fairly mindless dead-end work, she decided she needed a change:

“It was then that I decided to become an electrical engineer, convinced it would be my ticket out of intellectual petrifaction. Choosing electrical engineering wasn’t a well-informed decision; in spite of having an engineer dad, I’d never actually figured out what engineers did. My dad didn’t talk about his job, and my own observation was that mostly what he did was tinker on his Corvettes. … I assumed that if I got an engineering degree, I too would learn the secrets of working on cars. I now know that this particular goal would have been better served by an auto-shop class.”

The goal might not have been expertly considered, but the journey certainly was, and Jennifer’s essay describes her careful route, via community college (where she met her husband), then a junior transfer to UCLA for her degree in electrical engineering, then a spreadsheet-organized plan to be a grad student mom:

“As I’d hoped, being a mother and a graduate student turned out to be a great combination. I had plenty of time with Riley, and enough time away. I did brain things, and I did mom things. If she was sick and I needed to be home with her, no one cared that I didn’t show up for class; I never had to call in sick or apologize for missing a big meeting. I didn’t have to hoard my vacation and sick days like a candy bar on a desert island. I didn’t have to worry whether my co-workers (or my boss) thought I was a flake. Later on, when I tried juggling an engineering career with one, then two, then three kids, I realized just how much harder it was to be a working mom than to be a student mom.”

Today, Jennifer writes, “Your email. . . made me want to tell you how writing my Mama PhD essay has affected me.  As you know I was a fighter plane and sports car groupie long before I became an engineer, and if I’d had a clue what I was doing I should have chosen to become a mechanical engineer rather than an electrical engineer (EE’s don’t take classes in stuff like aerodynamics since we’re too busy studying circuits and semiconductor physics and that sort of thing).

“Writing my essay for Mama PhD reminded me of my original love of overpowered machinery and it made me sad that I never learned about the stuff that interested me — so I recently registered for an online class in airfoil design. I’m happy to report that, unlike when I was in grad school in the mid 90’s, lots of excellent engineering schools have online grad-level courses now. This is great for people who work and also, of course, for moms!

“The only question is whether I can remember the prerequisite material fast enough to keep up. It’s slightly terrifying. Oh, and writing the essay also made me really want to go back to driving a ferocious sports car rather than a minivan.  Still working on that one.

Some time later, Jennifer sent me another update, demonstrating how flexible working student moms need to be: “I switched classes from Airfoil Theory to Dynamics because of a work conflict (well, not only did I switch classes, I switched colleges, since I needed a later start date).  I’m really excited. But I know I will be severely overwhelmed.”

Jennifer is one of several contributors to the book who do not hold PhDs — some of them are still working on the degree; some are deciding whether to finish it; some, like Jennifer, never wanted that particular degree, or needed it to pursue a career in their chosen field. But all their stories shed light on the challenges of combining motherhood and academic work, and we’re happy Jennifer’s story is in the book. And now we’ll look forward to seeing her airplane designs.

My friend and fellow mama-writer, one of the most savvy internet book marketing women I know, Christina Katz, is once again running her Writer Mama Back-to-School Giveaway where she gives away one book or magazine subscription every day in September. On September 25th, I’m delighted that Mama, PhD will be included in a trio of anthologies edited by Literary Mama editors Shari MacDonald Strong and Amy Hudock.

Our books — Mama, PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life; The Maternal Is Political: Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood and Social Change; and Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined–will be up for giveaway on September 25th. To see a complete list of what you can win, visit Christina’s Writer Mama blog. You can enter every day if you want, so bookmark her site and visit again and again. Good luck!

We were surprised by her story, because we didn’t realize that Megan was an academic daughter herself! As she writes in her essay:

“A PhD in accounting, my mother has gone from popular professor at one major business school to highly respected department chair in another, was thoroughly present for me and my brother growing up, and has a happy, thirty-seven-year marriage to my father, who is also an academic. She defies the studies I have cited in my Chronicle of Higher Education columns on the challenges of career/family balance in academia—studies that show women on the tenure track are less likely to have as many children as they want, and to make their marriages work, than tenured men or nontenured women. Several of my academic mentors fit the studies’ disheartening description. But my mom pretty much has it all.”

“My mother never pressured me to have an academic career like hers, and she never pressured me to get married or have babies. In fact, her pressure actually came in the form of subtly urging me not to marry young (even though she did and got “lucky,” as she calls it). The only outright requests she ever made of me were that I not become a cheerleader and I not pursue a career in acting, my adolescent fantasy. The cheerleader request was for obvious reasons from a 1970s feminist mother (and is a request I plan to pass down to my own daughter), and the acting because, living south of Hollywood, we knew many talented but starving actors, and CPA Mom didn’t like the odds. Other than that, she just told me to do what made me happy.”

Megan did enter a PhD program, as she describes in her essay, and then decidesdto leave — a decision that opened a pathway to a new career as an academic adviser and then a freelance writer and editor.

After publishing her essay in Mama, PhD, Megan contributed to the Mama, PhD blog on Inside Higher Ed, writing a weekly advice column, The Career Coach Is In. Today, she writes, “I’ve continued to evolve as a freelancer since Mama, PhD came out. After leaping at the great opportunity to be a personal story editor for Miriam Peskowitz on her chapters of The Daring Book for Girls, I remembered just how much I love editing books (one of my pre-academia jobs). So I jumped a the next opportunity, to edit the 4th edition of the teacher-training bestseller, The First Days of School, by Harry and Rosemary Wong, and then got to work with Miriam again on The Double-Daring Book for Girls. I am finding book editing to fit very well with mothering for me, and I now have three more book editing projects in the works. My writing these days comes when the mood strikes, as did the essay about my first pregnancy that Mothering Magazine published last fall.

“On the personal side, I’ve greatly enjoyed the ability to be present at home for my daughter Senna, who was just six months old when I wrote my Mama, PhD essay. She is now three-and-a-half and a thriving, precocious and imaginative child. She also happens to have multiple, life-threatening food allergies, which has had a big impact on our life, and helps me see all the more clearly why being home with her is right for me. I helped launch a small, allergy-safe co-op preschool group starting this fall, and when she hits kindergarten age I will begin homeschooling her, with the great back-up of my husband Alex, who was named 2009 California Teacher of the Year last winter. Senna now also has a younger brother, Kallan Joseph, who was born in January at home in a beautifully smooth water birth. I had similar third-trimester complications with Kallan’s pregnancy, so once again I was thankful to be working on my own time at home, which I found a lot less stressful than trying to commute and unsuccessfully to negotiate a job-share as I was during my first pregnancy.

“In short, I feel as if everything for me is happening as it should, and I’m thankful for the flexibility I have to make choices about my family and work life. I don’t see myself returning to academia any time in the foreseeable future, although I continue to correspond with many academic friends and, even though I am not officially career counseling anymore, I always answer the emails I still get from PhD students struggling with their career decisions. I’ve also helped a lot of friends with their resumes!”

We’re not surprised–and we’re very happy–to hear Megan sounding so peaceful and content with how she has managed life since leaving academia. You can find out more about Megan and her work at her website,

Lisa’s essay appears in the fourth section of the book, Momifesto, in which writers consider changes the academy needs to make to become more family-friendly. Lisa describes her experience facing the academic job market after two years in a visiting professorship and realizing that, in order to have the life she wants–with a family and time for creative nonfiction writing–she needs to leave the “community I had always assumed would be my professional home.” She winds up in an adjunct teaching position, the kind of position that is typically considered the worst kind of temporary work for an academic. As Lisa writes:

“Conventional wisdom has it—and my earlier experience had certainly confirmed—that adjunct faculty serve as second-class citizens on most university campuses. Lower pay, the absence of benefits, the lack of job security, poor course assignments, and overwork are only the most pragmatic problems. Compounding these difficulties, in many institutions, part-timers are largely excluded from the life of the department, from administrative responsibilities (and, therefore, from administrative power), from the intellectual and collegial respect afforded their full-time colleagues, and from the possibilities for career advancement in their own and other institutions.

“But in my new program, I worked with a group of writers, almost all of whom served as adjunct faculty, who seemed genuinely to like one another, and who were happy to be teaching together. Although the practical, financial challenges of adjunct work remained, we also were largely freed from the administrative burdens that took time from the primary pleasures of writing and teaching. As part-timers, we were all equals. As part-timers, it was a given that we had families, occupations—in short, full lives—outside the academy. This fact was respected by all, including the students who had their own demanding lives outside of our program. Contrary to prevailing academic wisdom, here was a program that thrived because of—not in spite of—part-time labor. My colleagues and I talked about pedagogy, supported each others’ book releases, and traded manuscripts. We attended programwide readings and read each semester from our own works in progress. There was a clear, communal sense of purpose and a devotion to the art of teaching that equaled our primary calling to write. It was a rare find and a great freedom to be part of such a community.”

Today, Lisa “is still Adjunct Professor of Writing in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco. She continues to juggle writing, teaching, and parenting with varied degrees of success. On some days, she eagerly anticipates September 2010 when her youngest will enter full day kindergarten. On other days, this fact makes her weep.”

You can find out more about Lisa’s projects–one of which is an anthology, coedited with Caroline, about what we eat and why it matters–over at her website.

My friend and fellow mama-writer, one of the most savvy internet book marketing women I know, Christina Katz, is once again running her Writer Mama Back-to-School Giveaway where she gives away one book or magazine subscription every day in September. On September 25th, I’m delighted that Mama, PhD will be included in a trio of anthologies edited by Literary Mama editors Shari MacDonald Strong and Amy Hudock.

Our books — Mama, PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life; The Maternal Is Political: Women Writers at the Intersection of Motherhood and Social Change; and Literary Mama: Reading for the Maternally Inclined–will be up for giveaway on September 25th. To see a complete list of what you can win, visit Christina’s Writer Mama blog. You can enter every day if you want, so bookmark her site and visit again and again. Good luck!

In 2006, Cassandra Vasquez, a UC Riverside graduate student researcher, was shocked she didn’t qualify for maternity leave and surprised how little information there was on campus for soon-to-be mothers.

When seeking advice, a university official told her to take academic leave — a move that would have cut her off from everything from her student housing to library privileges. Instead, she spent hours researching options.

She worked out a solution, thanks in part to an understanding adviser. It has allowed her to, first, care for her daughter, and second, continue studying wasps as an alternative to pesticides. She expects to graduate in a year.

Hoping future graduate students won’t go through a similar situation, Vasquez and fellow graduate student/mom Genet Tulgetske have organized a panel discussion Wednesday about parenthood and academia.

Click here to read the rest! And contact us at editors AT mamaphd.com if you’d like us to come to your campus!

“[The organizers] wrote letters to Chancellor Timothy White, Dean of Graduate Division Joseph Childers, the Graduate Student Council and the Graduate Council of the Academic Senate in an attempt to shed light on issues that student-parents face.

They have come up with numerous ideas and policies, ranging from a children’s section of the library, to various parental support systems and priority teaching assistant assignments.”

Click here to read the rest, and if you’re nearby, come see us at Riverside on the 20th!