Opinion

For the past two seasons I have been obsessed with the Discovery Channel's "Deadliest Catch" and anxiously anticipated its return...

This story is both shocking, and not. At one level, it's absurd. The Board of Trustees at the College of...

Thanksgiving week offers a welcome break from the treadmill of the semester, which always seems to speed up just before...

Ellen J. Goldberger writes that it's time to move past the customer service image for higher education. She proposes a new way to talk about what happens in academe.

I am a senior at the undergraduate level, and would very much like to be a professor someday. The difficulties...

An occasional correspondent writes: Let's say you get a piece of paper with a report, pie chart, etc.on it that...

I am a senior at the undergraduate level, and would very much like to be a professor someday. The difficulties involved in trying to balance motherhood with graduate studies or accomplishing tenure as a professor seem excessive. I was wondering about the feasibility of the idea of taking a few years off to raise children after completing a PhD but before applying for a professorship. Did you review any information in your research concerning that situation? Do you think it would be advantageous for me to be able to devote myself completely to school until I get the PhD, then devote myself completely to children until they are old enough to be in school, and then be able to enter a professorship without having to take maternity leave or be physically exhausted from childbirth? I am not sure if taking a few years off would be damaging to my chances of being accepted as a professor. I would hope that they would consider me in a positive light, as I would no longer have to take maternity leave, but I am afraid they would view my years of childrearing as inactive and wasteful at a time when I could have been publishing papers and conducting research. Even so, family would be an extremely important part of my life. I do very much want to have children, and am trying to figure out the best way to balance being a good mother, a good student, having time with my children when they are very young (I would like to avoid child care if possible), being able to devote time and energy to my career to have a good chance at tenure, but still having children young enough so that I won't risk infertility. I would be very interested in the stories of people who chose to take time off after achieving a PhD to raise children but before becoming professors -- whether this is a positive or negative choice upon their careers. Thank you very much, This is certainly going to fall under "pointless advice" because inevitably the best laid plans of mice and ambitious young women gang aft agley. I speak from experience: many were my plans, as an ambitious young woman, about how I was going to combine marriage and a PhD and children and so on. Some of the planning was helpful and some of it turned out well, but a lot of things--including me!--didn't quite turn out According to Plan.

As a campus sustainability wonk, much of my work has to do with carbon dioxide equivalent. How much did Greenback...