This is such an interesting thread. I got a PhD myself (in public health & psychology). Initially I went with the intention of becoming a non-academic public health researcher. Starting in my fourth year of graduate school I started to wonder what an academic career might be like, especially because I loved teaching. I did a postdoc and realized six months in, like @Marian’s husband, that academia was not for me. So I took a job as a non-academic researcher at a tech company.
I love my job. It’s pretty flexible, and would be a good job for having children, if I were interested in that kind of thing at the moment. I’m 30, with no immediate or medium-term plans to have children. I like kids but don’t know if I want any of my own. (My husband feels the same.) Most of my coworkers have children. Most of them work around 7-3 or 8-4 and meet their kids off the bus. One has a nanny for her twins, but the rest either have day care or their kids are old enough for public school.
I think for most careers, the dream of “easily” taking a few years off and jumping back in or shifting easily to part-time work is…a dream. Nursing is one career that I think that can happen more easily and flexibly. Beyond that, I think it depends a lot on your workplace. Mine offers five months of paid maternity leave, and when you return you can phase in at part-time. I also don’t know whether it’s my region of the country (Pacific Northwest) or just the people I know, but parental roles seem to be so much more egalitarian here than when and where I grew up. So many more dads are picking kids up, carting them to events, staying home with them when they’re sick, pushing strollers, etc.
Women often put the burden on themselves to think about flexibility around family - spouses, children, aging parents. We start making these choices before we even HAVE these things to worry about. A lot of times, it causes us to opt out of demanding, lucrative, and/or rewarding careers because we’re worried about the time constraints. I remember worrying about it a lot when I was in college and early graduate school; when I was 20-21, I assumed that by the time I was 30 I would already have 2-3 children. And…I don’t, haha.
My mom regretted being a stay at home mom. She loved the time that she spent with us, but she hated the financial dependency on my father and the loss of identity and adult socialization she experienced. She became an LPN and went back to full-time work when I was 16. She was way happier, and I was super-proud of her.
If you are potentially interested in teaching at private schools, look up Carney, Sandoe. They’re a firm that specializes in faculty placement at private and independent schools. Also, several elite private schools have summer programs for college students who aspire to teach. Check out Choate Rosemary Hall, Phillips Academy, Phillips Exeter, and Cushing Academy. Other opportunities to try out summer teaching are Breakthrough Collaborative (very different population - teach at-risk middle school students in urban environments), Duke TIP (teach talented middle and high school students in various subjects; more similar to a upper-class private school demographic) and Johns Hopkins CTY (similar to Duke TIP, but the students have a wider age range).
And after college, there’s the Boston MATCH Corps program. Boston MATCH is a public charter school in Boston that mostly serves low-income kids of color, but is highly-rated and high-achieving. They have a one-year program called MATCH Corps in which they take recent college graduates and use them as tutors for MATCH students. It’s an AmeriCorps program, so it’s basically volunteer - you get a little money to live on - but MATCH corps will either help you get a master’s in education or will help with job or other graduate school placement after your MATCH year.
