Recently, attorney and friend-of-the-Arena Ivana Greco gave some excellent advice on the Hearth Matters podcast to young women considering law school. Her advice was particularly aimed at women who anticipate someday wanting to cut back on wage-work in favor of investing more hours in homemaking.
Go to law school, Ivana said, but plan ahead as you do so. Consider choosing a specialty that is more family-friendly than, for example, being a litigator; be thrifty with your money even while you’re in the dual-income stage, so that you can pay off your loans quickly and build a financial cushion for later on; and consider planning to work for, say, ten years and then thinking about making a shift away from full-time legal work while your children are still young.
Advising a young lawyer to plan ahead and invest in her profession early in life makes excellent sense. Attorneys tend to work long hours and earn high salaries, so investing time and energy in paying off law school loans and building a nest egg in the early years of adulthood, even into the early years of parenting, can facilitate more flexibility as a woman’s family grows so that she then has the option to cut back on this work should she desire to do so during the prime years of family life.
Yet this advice is quite different from the advice I give to young women who have similar long-term desires but are considering going not to law school for a J.D., but to graduate school for a humanities Ph.D. Good advice for budding lawyers focuses on planning ahead, but my advice for graduate students focuses on discerning for the present based partially on the realization that one simply cannot plan ahead in this field.
My usual advice to these young women (and I tell young men much the same thing) goes like this:
- Consider how you might feel if at the end of graduate school, you cannot get a job in your field. Would you still be glad you went?
- Are you interested only in a particular narrow topic (e.g. women’s fashion in New York City in 1842), or are you also interested in a wide field within a discipline (e.g. American history)? If the former, you likely do not have the flexibility needed for doctoral work.
- Do you have full (even if meager) funding for your Ph.D. studies? You will likely not earn enough later as a professor to pay loans back quickly, so do not take loans.
- Is there anything else you are just as interested in as graduate school? Completing a Ph.D. requires passion, sacrifice, and perseverance – if something else would make you just as happy but also give you more security, do that instead!
Lest this sound overly negative, let me add that if a student does have that “spark” that shows a love for the discipline, a curious and agile mind, and a sense of determination, I will enthusiastically recommend that they do go to graduate school. We need such young people as our next generation of scholars and teachers. So there is always piece of advice #5:
- If after thinking through numbers 1-4, you still desperately want to go to graduate school, then: absolutely, positively, and without a doubt, I wholeheartedly encourage you to go!
I myself was a #5. Graduate school, especially the first three years spent in coursework, exams, and dissertation planning, was my idea of heaven. But for it to be so, the spark has to be there in the individual, because it’s the spark that pays the dividends in professional work in the humanities – the spark that makes teaching and mentoring students a joy, writing alone in a carrell a passion, and smelling the must on an ancient letter in an archive a thrill. A teacher and a scholar in the humanities benefits from the personal experience of teaching, researching, and writing, as well as from engaging with colleagues, not from finances. I will never stop feeling, along with John Fea, that every morning spent in an archive is Christmas morning.
For a humanities graduate student, the money will almost certainly not be there in a few years in the way it might be for a lawyer, so while investing early on in working hard may lead to tenure and a life joyfully spent in classrooms and archives (and committee meetings, alas), it will likely not lead to a financial cushion. Whereas a young woman lawyer who anticipates someday becoming a full-time homemaker will do well to work hard now and plan ahead, a young woman graduate student in the humanities will do well to focus on good discernment at the beginning and then, essentially, to plan largely only for the short term, trusting herself to be able to meet challenges and adjust for them as they come. Unlike with law school (perhaps), you really don’t know what’s going to come at the end of your training; you don’t even know with an accuracy of, say, 50%. A lot can happen (or not happen) in the eight years or so that it takes to complete a History Ph.D.
So just take each decision as it comes to you, I tell young women in my field, and ask yourself what God and your inclinations are prompting you to do now rather than thinking you can plan for what might happen later. You may end up in a tenured job that also honors your mothering – I can think of several exemplary women professors who have found this balance – or you may find yourself choosing to become a part-time curator or a freelancer or doing something else entirely, including full-time homemaking (work which is absolutely worthy of your education).
You just can’t know the future – but you can make choices that will serve you well now. You can’t anticipate what the job market will be like eight years hence, you don’t know what your family situation will be, and you’re not likely to make very much money as compared to others with similar levels of education in different fields. But you can discern whether you would like to give yourself over wholeheartedly to the pursuit of wisdom in graduate school if the spark drives you there right now – and in later years, you can let that same wisdom guide you as you make decisions about wage-work and family life.