Mark and I brought lasagna (two of them actually) yesterday to a friend’s house — she’s got a sprained ankle, and her husband’s on a weeklong business trip. We sat around the dinner table musing about the men’s travel schedules, how it can be hard taking care of two or three children when Daddy’s out of town, but still — how fortunate we are, even with the occasional trip out of town. The jobs are interesting and not very stressful. They pay well. They are in a city we’re all happy to inhabit. Both men can choose to leave for home on almost any weekday if something comes up at home. And day after day they can leave it all behind at five o’clock.
It didn’t have to be that way, even given the specific that they’re chemical engineers — Mark with a B. S., our friend’s husband with a Ph. D., and a third friend’s husband (also a ChE) with his master’s degree. Pay’s generally pretty good (not always extravagant relative to the local cost-of-living —ask anyone in the Bay Area), but there’s no shortage of aggravating, dead-end, time-sucking ChE jobs. Plenty others require enormous amounts of travel: consulting’s the classic example, but Mark pointed out that many Minneapolis-based engineers at his company have to travel upwards of 100 days/year to one outlying plant or another. And plant-engineering jobs are often found in small towns in the middle of nowhere, where The Plant is the only significant industry.
This is something I didn’t realize fully until I was a junior or senior in engineering school. Most of the engineers I know agree that the universities should have done a better job getting across the point that, while there are many "good engineering jobs" (in the sense that they pay well and can be relatively secure), finding one that is lifestyle-compatible can be a real challenge.
The notion of consider the kind of daily life you would like to lead is absent from professional career planning as any of us experienced it. Not in college, not in high school, not back in grade school when we were drawing pictures of What We Will Be When We Grow Up. Sure, there’s advice to consider the kind of work you want to do. But the notion of choosing a career path that is well-matched to the kind of life you want to lead outside work is completely foreign. Yes, we should have considered that. Yes, it’s ultimately our own responsibility. But schools at all levels bear some responsibility, too.
What’s missing from the "You can be whatever you dream of being!" message (besides a heavy dose of skill-and-ability-based reality) is the fact of life that whenever you make a choice, doors don’t just open — they close, too. It’s not that you can’t ever go back if you make a misstep, but certain steps make backtracking tough, or expensive, or not worth it, or unethical.
Things turned out differently for me than I thought possible. I’m married, home with two children and one on the way, homeschooling, with no plans to return to the workforce within x years. I like where I am, but I might also have liked to — hell, I might have had to — work part-time or from home. Putting it bluntly: If I’d foreseen wanting to raise children, I’d have structured my education differently. Even engineering grad school had options, options I didn’t take, that in hindsight would have served our family better.
We owe it to our sons and daughters to put all academic work and career planning firmly in the context of their vocation — to married, consecrated, or priestly life. Most will marry. This means more than reminding a daughter of the duties of home, even though it’s likely that as mother she’ll be the one whose "market activities" are sharply curtailed during the childrearing years. It also means reminding a son to plan, financially and socially, for a long period of bringing in most of the family’s support. Sure, there are creative ways that the market work/family support can be split up differently among family members. Encouraging that kind of creativity — while stressing that meeting children’s needs is the first priority that all work must serve — multiplies opportunities for everyone, new ways to serve families.
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