Why I love my job and being a Career-Oriented Military Spouse

I've really hated on parts of the graduate school process, but now that my oral comprehensive exams are becoming a distant memory, I've started to revise my opinion of academia. This isn't to say there aren't real problems within the system that I feel need to be addressed. I guess, I have found that once the major hoops are all jumped through, and it really is just about the research and the communication of results, I really like my job.

I love the hours, most of the time, even when I am exhausted. There are a lot of perks to being an academic, like being able to go in a little later and leave earlier, or work from home, or take a day off when my husband is home for a visit. If I need to run errands during the daytime, I can rearrange my schedule to do my work at night. There are exceptions to this, like timed experiments, where I have to be somewhere at a specific time. The same is true for Teaching or Research Assistanceships, which may or may not provide flexibility on certain days or times.

I love to travel and my job takes me to 1-2 conferences in various places around the world per year, plus occasional research trips to far off places. There are occasional field trips for fun and education.

Mostly I love the opportunity to share my knowledge with others. The geology mentor program we started at BIGU has made great connections between faculty, undergrads and graduate students and really increased the camaraderie in the department. I enjoy mentoring the undergraduate students. I love having the opportunity to extend that to online venues.

Most importantly, I love doing research. I love finding out things that no one else knows. I love sharing that new knowledge with other people. That's the best part of being an academic; I get to learn about new things I am interested in.

This deep sense of satisfaction, and dare I say joy, in my work has been hard fought. It has meant many nights of suffering for what I love, of sticking to the path when the easiest course was to quit.  I wanted to share my success after sorrow with people who may feel like quitting when things get tough, in the hopes that maybe these will be the words that help someone else make it through to the sunshine I am enjoying.

I guess part of me also wanted to state it as a counter-point to some twitter comments that came through my feed earlier this week. One of the people I follow wrote a piece on SpouseBuzz and said she was surprised by all of the positive feedback she got. Her surprise that a piece about being a SAHW got positive feedback, assuming it was genuine, was what shocked me. As an active duty officer's wife, I would have been far more shocked to see a piece on SpouseBuzz about career-oriented spouses that was positive. I have always been heavily criticized for pursuing my own career, especially because it causes Senior Jefe and I to live apart. Even people who are well-meaning question my decision and imply in comments that I am not making my marriage a priority (I often wonder if they ask dual-career military personnel the same question).

I am not critical of her choice, but I did want to point out that much of the freedom she has is freedom I have earned as an academic. She states

"Deployments and TDYs are the norm for us; I don’t have the luxury of getting to see my husband for holidays and celebrations, so weekends and days when he comes home at a reasonable hour are precious moments that we really treasure. I didn’t want to have a job keeping me from seeing him. The thought of having to ask for time off and having an employer decline my request was a terrifying thought; I didn’t want to have to choose between getting fired and seeing my husband. Now, I enjoy having the ability to hop on a plane and go visit him for a weekend when he’s TDY (on our own dime, of course) and being able to spend those few days before and after deployments together."

The assumption in this statement is that working precludes the ability to spend a weekend here and there with one's spouse. Perhaps in her case it would be. It is not always the case. I frequently jaunt across the country. I have even ridden along for many of Senior Jefe's PCS adventures while I am here at BIGU, taking the opportunity to spend time with him whenever I can (even in a hot car for 12 hrs a day). I am sure there are jobs where such luxuries are not the norm, but academia can, once the price has been paid, be a place of significant freedom for military spouses, not just in intellectual thought, but in ability to spend time with one's spouse.

I am working while Senior Jefe is here. I have to. I have 2 abstracts due in the next week. However, I am also spending lots of time with my spouse, at times of my choosing. So for those military spouses who don't think they could handle being home all day, the take home messages for you should be: Don't listen to people who criticize your choices and Yes, Virginia, you can have a career, be a military spouse, and still have flexibility to spend time with your spouse. ArmyWife101 has a great video about working from home as a military spouse, which illustrates that academia is not the only path that can provide a career and flexibility