Global Connections #2 : Being a parent and an educator at the same time: Is it possible? – Dr. Gudrun Nyunt

Global Connections #2 : Being a parent and an educator at the same time: Is it possible? – Dr. Gudrun Nyunt 

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Podcast Transcript: Global Connections #2 : Being a parent and an educator at the same time: Is it possible? – Dr. Gudrun Nyunt 

Xiaoyun Sim  0:00

Welcome Gudrun! We are so excited to have you today to chat about juggling both roles of being a parent and an educator. Before we dive right into our topic, do you want to introduce yourself and talk a little about your involvement with our commission and ACPA?

Gudrun Nyunt  0:15

Yes, of course. So, my name is Gudrun Nyunt. I am a clinical assistant professor, and the HESA program coordinator at Northern Illinois University. And I’ve been involved with ACPA since 2006, when I was a graduate student. And actually, I should introduce my co-host, but she’ll probably make some comments throughout this. Um, her name is Lily Nyunt. And she’s 17 months old now. And so, if you hear any background noises, that’s what’s happening around here. But yeah, so I’ve been involved with ACPA since 2006. And I’ve really found my niche in different Commission’s. I first got involved with the Commissioner of Housing and Residential Life, right out of grad school and served on their directorate board for three years. I then switched over to the commission for student involvement and first served as a volunteer and then later on the directorate board as well. And then was actually taking a break from commission work, when one of my colleagues and friends at the University of Maryland where I was pursuing my PhD, asked me if I would be interested in getting involved with the commission for global dimensions. And so, one of my interest areas has always been study abroad and working with international students. And so, it felt like that commission was just a perfect fit for what I’m interested in. And so, I agreed to serve on the commission, I served as the awards coordinator for one year, and then moved up to being the chair elect and chair of the Commission. And so, I just ended that tenure at ACPA 2020.

Xiaoyun Sim  1:51

I remembered ACPA 2020 when I first met you, in Nashville, and I was like, Oh my gosh, she’s also from a different country working with student affairs and then moved on within her PhD program. So that was how I met Gudrun. And Hi, Lily, and I just want to jump in with asking my co-host of the day Bianca, how did she meet Gudrun?

Bianca Chau  2:18

Hi. Um, I met Gudrun the semester, I was going to graduate, I think it was like on a Facebook post or something like that. And then we reconnected again in the summer. Because, you know, as international students were not allowed to work until our start date on our Employment Authorization Document. And so, I was looking for ways to spend my time wisely and Gudrun was like, Hey, you know, there’s this commission, and we’ve got this open position with the blog post. And, you know, it’s kind of new. And there’s, there’s a lot you can do with this, and you can network with other people. And so that’s how I got into it. And three years passed by, and here we are. So, time really flies. And I unfortunately, couldn’t get to meet Gudrun and you, Xiao Yun last year at the convention, because actually, state funding from California doesn’t allow us to go to Tennessee. So, I couldn’t go over there. But I do hope that we can all meet each other again in person sometime soon. Okay, and so I am going to transition over to really just diving into the topic of what it’s like to be an educator and parent at the same time, especially during this unprecedented time of COVID-19. And Gudrun if possible, could you please share with us how your involvement changed and evolved before raising a child and now having a child? For example, like what are some of the things that you notice that were different?

Gudrun Nyunt  3:54

Yes, definitely. I think it’s definitely harder to stay involved with professional association when you have a child right. And I think the pandemic in many ways has shaped my parenting journey and a lot of ways. Lily was just six months when the pandemic started, right. And so, most of her time has been spent being home with me while I’m working from home. She was actually, my parents came from Austria to help us with daycare once my maternity leave ended. And so they were here until like they left. The following week was ACPA. So, my husband came with me to ACPA. And then we came home and the world right shut down. So, and Lily was supposed to go to daycare that week. And so we made that decision to pull her out of daycare and so she’s never been to daycare for a day in her life. So I think in some ways, my parenting journey has been interesting and different, right or unique in some ways because of the pandemic. But I think in general, it has definitely been more challenging to, to find times to be involved in ACPA. Um, in some ways it worked out the way that you know, my tenure as chair was ending when I had Lily. And so, I took a step back and intentionally said, I’m going to take a break from ACPA leadership roles. I was asked to run for a couple position the following year. And I said, I just can’t. And it was really hard because I love ACPA. And it means a lot to me. And I do want to get back and serve on leadership roles and give back to the organization. But I just didn’t think that it was a good idea on top of work and parenting, right and dealing with this pandemic. And so, I think, for me, what’s really changed is that instead of kind of being actively involved on a consistent way, I’ve tried to kind of find different, smaller, short term involvements that allow me to still stay engaged, but not necessarily do a right to consistent like, where I have meetings every week, or every month and things going on. And so instead, I’ve tried to, you know, I’ll volunteer to do a webinar here or there, I’ve volunteered to work on a book project with some colleagues from the commission. I, you know, when they asked her program reviewers, I volunteer for that. And so I think in some ways, I stay connected to ACPA, so that in a lot of ways, but I’m not as actively engaged, I’m not serving in a specific leadership role. And it has been as opportunities come up, I think the first question and thought I always have is, how much time will that take? And is that possible? When prior to being a parent, that wasn’t necessarily the first thing I thought about right? The first thing I thought about was, Oh, is this a cool opportunity, right, that I would enjoy doing? And then maybe the second thought was, okay, do I have time for this? But now, this is like the first question I’ll ask. I think in some ways, too, I’m lucky that I have been so involved in ACPA, that I feel really connected to the organization. And I know a lot of people. And so that has allowed me to still stay involved, in many ways, like an idea for a webinar, and I reached out to a different Commission, the commission for professional preparation, right. And she had that idea. And then it ended up we were hosting the webinar, and I helped with it. And some of that’s only possible because I already have those connections, right. And I think it’s a lot harder when you are a parent, and you don’t have those connections yet. I recently saw a Facebook post from a mother who said, you know, I haven’t been involved for 15 years, because I was raising my children. And I want to get involved now, but I don’t know how. And so, I think in some ways, I have that advantage did I know how, and I have the networks, but definitely am lacking on time right now.

Xiaoyun Sim  7:36

But talking a little about, since the pandemic, everything transitioned online and more time to take care of Lily on the side and while watching a webinar. And there is the freedom of option of like, okay, maybe I can switch off my video, or maybe I can just use the chat feature to communicate with other attendees. So how has that been for you? How was your ACPA 2021 experience?

Gudrun Nyunt  8:09

Yeah, that’s a great question. Um, I think in some ways, what I found is really hard is blocking the time off for conference right, because usually, it’s like you’re out of because you have an out of office reply, and people know you’re not there. But when you are technically there, even though none of us are there virtually. But it feels like this year work has just kind of kept going through conferences, and it wasn’t just with ACPA. Same thing happened for me to Fall with that. And so I, I really struggled at kind of blocking these times off and intentionally saying I’m going to attend those sessions. I think in some ways, the virtual way has also helped though, right? Because it allows you to some sessions are available for screening afterwards. Right. And so, I’ve streamed some sessions later on that I missed. I think it definitely right, there was a couple sessions where I was like, let me just turn it on while I’m doing something else in the background, while I’m playing with Lily, but I have it running right so I can kind of hear what’s going on. So, I’ve that’s allowed me to do that a little bit. But I definitely feel like I missed that. Just getting away from work, right? I feel like ACPA always comes at this perfect time and this point of the semester when you are exhausted and drained, and you just need a break. And it’s right around spring break. And so, I’ve often been able to combine it with spring break and say, Okay, I’m going to take some time off and go to ACPA. And then it really becomes this like professional development/vacation, right, where you’re just meeting with friends and having a great time and talking about things and thinking about thing versus this year, I felt like it was these like this piece of sessions that were there in between everything else was happening and because everything else was happening, I didn’t get as much out of those sessions because I couldn’t really focus on them. I think interestingly, I was I’ve been doing a research study on Residence Life staff members experience the pandemic and a lot of my participants have mentioned that they will Like the virtual conferences, and that they found it so helpful because it allows them, you know, to attend more because the cost is lower, and just find the time to do it and not have to worry about travel and all of those things. And so I thought that was really interesting, because I think for me, and some of that goes back to the funding that we have, and who has funding and who doesn’t. But for me that travel was always part of the experience, right. And just part of that getting away from campus that I really needed to 100% engage in a professional opportunity. And so, I think, I think moving forward, I’d love to see us do a mix of both, right, I’d love to see us offer some virtual things, so that people who can travel I can afford it can still participate. But I also think there’s just so much value in that in person experience that I’m really excited to get back to that again soon.

Xiaoyun Sim 10:56

Yeah, it’s the same over here as well, like I experienced the in person one last year, but this year is virtual, I enjoyed being able to leave where I am right now in Nebraska to go to someplace that I’ve never visited before and treated as like, yes, it’s a professional comfort conference, but also like a traveling on the side as well. And I do think that I now kind of agree with what your participants at the Residence Life have said about like the flexibility because that allows, like our community, which are outside of the US being able to tune in at their different time zones and at their own pace. And that definitely did help a lot as well. But jumping back to where our focus was, again, I know that you mentioned that your parents came from Austria to help take care of Lily, but being international growing up in Austria, then coming to us as an international student. What were some of the differences that you noticed in parenting in Austria versus in the US?

Gudrun Nyunt 11:55

Yeah, that’s a great question. Um, I think sometimes it feels like in the US, there’s more rules, right? Like there’s as an international, former international student, right, and now green card holder. I’ve had to like, look into laws and policies that exist around childcare, which sometimes I feel like in Austria, there’s less of that, right? Like, there’s rules. And for each state of like how old a kid has to be before you can leave them home alone. And I definitely remember when I was a kid, my sister and I were pretty responsible. And so my parents early on, left us alone. And we had the phone, and we knew to call the neighbors if we needed anything, right. And the neighbors knew we were home alone. And so they kind of kept an eye on us, but not really. And that was perfectly normal and okay, right. Or even in elementary school, some days, I would walk to school by myself, because it was nice out and I didn’t want to take the bus. And that was perfectly okay, right versus here. It’s like, your kids will have to take the school bus at the school bus drops him off, right in front of the house right, our school buses would drop us off at a bus stop. And then we can walk from the bus stop home, right. And maybe my first year in school, my mom would pick me up and then soon it was you know, you’re old enough to walk. But and so I think there’s some of those differences. And some of that might be generational as well. Right. But I do think in Austria is a little bit more of that we’re going to trust the parents to do things the way they want to do. I think my experience is also interesting, because my husband is from Myanmar. And so we’re a mix of Burmese parenting and Austrian parenting and then living in the US. And so some of US parenting. And so I think that sometimes has forced us to have more of those conversations around what do we, how do we want to parent and what kind of parents do we want to be, and, and so for example, about food, that’s been a big, big conversation recently, is that Lily’s been always been small, on the pediatrician freaks out about every other visit of how she’s not gaining enough weight. We offer her food, sometimes she eats it, sometimes she just doesn’t want it right. And so my mom was like, Oh, you were small to as a kid, right? This is not a big deal. And so I think I get the Austrian side of like, Oh, this is perfectly fine. And then we get the Burmese side of like, oh, kids have to eat right. And it’s super important. And kids have to learn to eat whatever was put in front of them. And so my husband feels that pressure of like, I need to get my kid to eat. So if my parents come visit, they can see her eating well. And, and we had to, you know, sit down and talk about that. And then we get the perspective of like our pediatrician being super concerned and worried and wanting to do extra tests to like, make sure she’s okay. And so that’s required a lot of kind of talking through things and figuring out like, how do we as a family want to approach it? Right. And I think in some ways, I tried to be a parent that like, obviously takes good care of my kid but also doesn’t overly stress out over things. And I think part of that too, is with pandemic life, there’s just there’s a lot to stress out in general. And it’s been hard and challenging, working from home and raising a kid and so it doesn’t help us if we create more stresses for ourselves. And it doesn’t help Lily if she sees us, right, constantly stressed out and worried. And so, I think that’s part of it is trying to find that, that good path between, you know, making sure everything’s okay, but also not overly stressing out over things. And I think cultural influences have really shaped that in many ways of different cultures kind of looking at that differently.

Bianca Chau 15:33

I think you brought up something super interesting Gudrun about, like, intercultural relationships. And also, you are here in the US, not, not close to many immediate communities of support, maybe if you were back home or somewhere else, maybe it’s, it’s so much easier to get that support. But I think many of us, including myself, as somebody who’s looking to stay here, I’m not sure how long. But if we, if myself, or other people end up staying here, we always wonder, what kind of support can we get if we do establish a life here? And so I wonder, in combination as being an educator, what were some of the myths that you had to debunk? Or what were some of the things that you had to learn in order to really navigate your life here, being an intercultural or racial marriage and also establishing a life not just for yourself, but now the next generation for your kid?

Gudrun Nyunt 16:36

Yeah, I think that’s a great question. I think some of it is parenting is hard. Right, and you hear that, and you know that, but you don’t fully get it until you’re in it. And so I, when I worked at the University of Maryland, when I was pursuing my PhD there, one of the things we did, I worked with faculty learning communities, they really tried to support faculty, right. And one of the things we often got pushback, the learning communities will get towards women. And so the pushback we often got is that a lot of it focuses on parents and mothers, specifically, right and their struggles. And so the single women said, well, we have concerns too. And we face stresses, too. And not that they don’t right. And obviously, there were things that were challenging about my work before this. But I still think right, there are certain things about being a parent that just make kind of this work experience, and work life balance so much harder. And I don’t think you fully get that until you’re in it. Or at least I’ll say I didn’t fully get them until I was in it. I’ll balance it, and the kid will hang out and do something and I’ll do some work, and it’ll be fine. I think I also continuously throughout just try me kept telling myself, it’s going to get better as soon as she gets older. This is just the hard time right now. And then I look back. And I’m like, No, actually, that was the easy time, right? Like in the very beginning. Yeah, I didn’t get a lot of sleep. But she also did. So I had a lot of time to actually do work. Now she’s active and running around 24/7. And if I take my eyes off her right, she’s immediately in some drawer or getting some stuff out moving things around doing something she’s not supposed to, drawing on the wall with her crayons. So now it feels like I can’t get anything done, right, because I’m constantly running after her. And so in some ways, it’s this, like, you keep telling yourself, it’ll get better. And then it doesn’t really, right. And there’s new challenges that kind of come up. And not that, you know, there’s lots of things that I love about being a parent and parenting and having my daughter and it’s definitely changed kind of the focus in our life. So I guess that’s probably one of the things that that is a takeaway, right? Is that it does people always say that it’ll change your life, it’ll change the focus of your life. And I don’t know if I again 100% belief that right before, but it does it, it makes in some ways it makes work seem less important, right? Because you are more thinking about coming Well, if you’re coming home at the end of day, or being done at the end of the day and getting to hang out with your kid. Um, I think you know, I, there’s so many things that I think are challenging about this experience. And then particularly right during a pandemic and with intercultural relationships with parents not being here. Academia is a hard place to work or higher ed in general is a hard place to work in. I think the US in some ways is difficult as a mother is a difficult country to be in as a mother because there is such limited maternity leave or parental leave, right? And those kinds of supports. Daycares are way more expensive here. And so if we go back right to the previous question around what’s different in Austria for example, right, like in Austria, you get a year of maternity leave that’s paid you have the option to take up to three years unpaid. And then still have a job waiting for you when you come back, right? So you have all these options, your husband can take a year of parental leave. So you can literally, you know, for between two to four years, you could go through and always have a parent be at home with your kid, which would make a huge difference, right versus here. And faculty life is even more interesting. So my institution didn’t even have paid maternity leave until the Fall I had Lily. So I was eight months pregnant when we got an email that said, Oh, we now have five weeks of paid maternity leave. And I was like, Okay, what does that mean? How do I do this, right? But at that point in time, we’d already figured out the schedule. And so I’d agreed to teach online for the second half of the semester. Because she was coming right in the middle of the semester. Because I didn’t want to have unpaid maternity leave, right? I couldn’t really afford at that point in time. Because usually you have kids, right when you’re young in your career and so you’re not making that much yet. And I couldn’t afford to just take six weeks off unpaid. And so I was like, well, I’ll just teach online, and we’ll figure out right how to make it work. And so I ended up taking the maternity leave, but still teaching online. And I literally had Lily on Friday, I came out of the hospital on Sunday, and I was grading papers on Monday, which just now looking back, I’m like, this is insane. Like, why did I do this to myself? Why did I let them do this to me? And so I think that’s, that’s one of the things that’s super hard, right? And then there is culturally like, my parents in Austria, like, that doesn’t make sense. How is your institution doing this? Right, and they just don’t, can’t even fathom that there isn’t more support there. And then right my husband gets kind of the Burmese thought of like, well, family should be helping and family should help raise your child, but you don’t live near family. So why don’t you move back to be closer to family? And then it’s like, well, that doesn’t work with our careers, right. In Student Affairs, a lot of times we have to move where the job is. And so, so those are some of those challenges that I’ve definitely encountered. That, yeah, that’s just that make it difficult, right? And where, especially as an international student, when you don’t have that family nearby, that makes it extra difficult.

Bianca Chau 22:20

I wanted to follow up on something that you said, Gudrun, again, you mentioned that being an academia is difficult. And I mean, honestly, let’s have some real talk here. Right? Um, I think a lot of us are currently in student affairs, but many of us are probably pursuing a career in academia. And since you have both sides of the experience, I wonder what it would have been like for you if you were in student affairs. And also, just to really dive a little deep, deeper into how you mentioned work in academia is tough. Like, maybe there are some things that we don’t know about academia, maybe we think, oh, it’s just, you know, grading designing your classes, teaching. That’s about it. But what is it really like to be in academia?

Gudrun Nyunt 23:05

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think, some of it right. A lot of it really depends on the institution and your state. And some of those contexts, right, of where is it harder, I think sometimes if you have an institution that has good parental leave policies, then either way, if you’re in student affairs, or in in faculty right, you have those options to take the time off and to spend time with your family. I think what’s there’s definitely advantages to faculty life. And part of it, I definitely thought about that when I was job searching, knowing that I wanted to have children, right. And we wanted to start a family. And one of the things that’s really great about faculty life is that you have that flexibility, right that you have, I set my own schedule, I have a limited amount of meetings. And when I’m not in a meeting, or I’m not in class, it doesn’t matter when I do my work, right. And so I can do my work at any point in time. But I think sometimes that also then leads to kind of do self-imposed pressures, right? Where I see a lot of my colleagues, who will also mothers will spend the day with the kids and then late at night do work. Like I had, you know, one of my friends told me, she’s like, yeah, it’s just her kids a little bit older. And so they were also right with the pandemic going through homeschooling, she was like, Yeah, I just spent the day with my kids. And then when they go to bed at 8pm, I work from 8pm until like, 2am, and that’s when I do all my work. And then I sleep, and I get up at 6am because that’s when they get up and I was like, wait, that makes no sense. Like, that’s insane. I can’t do that. I am too tired for that. Um, but there are those advantage right that I never had to send Lily to daycare that I can work from home that even if, if we weren’t in pandemic world right now, right? I would probably only be on campus two or three days a week and so at most you would have to go to daycare two or three days a week and so I can definitely spend more time with her. I think what some of the challenges come in is those structural right. The structures of oppression that we all know about, um, that exists in academia, even though in academia, right, we talk about equity and diversity and inclusion and all of these things, but we know we’re still perpetuating some of those systems. And so, for example, as a faculty member, a lot of it goes back to the tenure system. And so, when you’re expected to publish, no matter what happens, you can at some institution, ask for an extension on your tenure clock. So instead of going up for tenure, after six years, you would go up after seven years, if you had a kid, which sounds great, it gives you that extra year, it also means that you’re going to wait for an extra year until you get promoted and get paid more, right. And so in the long run, that impacts how much money you make. Or if you have multiple kids right now, it’ll be eight years. And then again, it will impact, right,when you’re going to get that promotion and get that pay raise. It also isn’t a guarantee you just because the institution says you can extend your tenure clock. We’ve definitely heard of cases where mothers have said, you know, I did that. And then people still questions and said, well, she had a seven years or eight years, so she should have more publications, which is exactly the opposite of what this is supposed to do. But that’s still kind of that sense out there of what people think. And so, I think from that, there’s a lot of pressure of just getting, you know, getting those publications out. And that’s hard. And that takes time. And when you’re a parent, you just don’t really have that time. I think Student Affairs programs in some ways too are unique in that, or in general, some of those, like practical focus graduate programs, because a lot of our courses are in the late afternoons or evenings, which doesn’t work with daycare schedules, right. So, our all of our master’s courses conflict with daycare, like the earliest one is from 3pm to 540pm, but daycare on campus closes at 530pm. So there’s no way I can send her to daycare on campus if I’m teaching one of those courses, right. I’m lucky in my program that we have some Doctorate level classes that are hybrid. And so, they meet on Saturdays, which works because then my husband’s home. And so I can teach on Saturdays, and he takes care of the kid. But still, right. So there’s some of those structural issues around, we teach and we work while we have that flexibility. Sometimes that also means that our courses are scheduled at times that just don’t work with daycare schedules. And then again, right, because in academia, a lot of us, faculty end up having to move to wherever that position is. And so you don’t have family, even for domestic faculty right, you don’t have the family nearby. And that means you don’t have that support of someone to watch your children right to late at night or on weekends when you need to get that work done. So I think those are some, I’d say those are some of the biggest struggles that I faced, right. And I actually recently wrote a paper on international doctoral student mothers. So I’ve just read lots of literature right on this whole issue. And one of the things that talked about is just that, that there are some of those issues, right of just like working way more hours than anyone else, if not having that support from family there. And those will eventually right, like they just impact you and they make you more tired. We also know that women and mothers in particularly are often in contingent faculty roles, right? Because it’s harder to move to a tenure track position if you have a family, it’s hard to get those tenure track positions, right? A lot of times, you need to already have publications to be competitive on the job market. And you might not have gotten those in graduate school. And they can take a couple of years, right like you, you will have finished your dissertation, but you won’t have published it. And that can take a couple of years to get that done. And so initially, I was in a visiting assistant professor role, and then did that for two years. And then my institution kept trying to apply for tenure track roles and couldn’t get one. And so they which was nice, right? They created this clinical professor position for me, which meant that I took over some of the program coordination. But that also meant that I was now doing, I was teaching regular classes, I was doing all this coordination. And then I was still trying to do research because eventually I wanted to move into a tenure track role.  And so it was like I was doing a full time job plus research, plus parenting, um, which made this past year like I think extra challenging. I’m fortunate, I’m able to, we finally got a tenure track line in my department. So I’m able to move into a tenure track position for next year. And I think in some ways, I’m like, I, you know, I was talking with my department chair and she was like, Oh, you got a course release your first year so you can focus on research. And I was like, what do you mean? I was like, I’m gonna have all this time. And that’s like, that’s all I have to do. I was like, I was doing all these things plus extra, right? But that’s what we see a lot as when women particularly women of color or faculty of color in general. And then also parents a lot of times gets stuck in kind of these contingent faculty roles that then actually require a lot of extra work, right? One of my friends is in an instructor position, which is even worse, right. And so as a full time instructor, she teaches four classes. And she’s in that position because she’s regionally bound, like her family’s here, her kids are in school, she can’t move right now. And, but she wants to get into a tenure track position, right. And so she feels that pressure of like, I need to do research. But I’m teaching for classes, which pretty much keeps me busy all the time. And I think that’s part of it too, right, what people underestimate, it’s, when you’re teaching classes for the first time, it’s a lot of work and trying to figure it out. And so early on in your career, when everything else is happening, right, when you’re trying to get research done to go for tenure when your kids are little. That’s also when you’re teaching all new classes all the time, right. And so you have to do all the course preparation and grading takes a lot more work than probably most people think, right, particularly in fields that include a lot of writing. And so I spend lots of times just giving feedback on writing to my students. And so those things, right, just take time. So I don’t know if I would say, it’s easier being in student affairs or it’s easier being a faculty, I think both kind of have those challenges, right? I think in the US, we’re just really lacking support for parenting, um, one of my friends, she, she’s from Austria, but now lives in Germany. And she’s in this really cool kind of dual position. It’s, it’s basically her and another mother and they share a job. So they apply for jobs as a team. And then they both work part time, they work a little bit more than part time, right, there’s a little bit of overlap. But basically, it’s allowed them to move up to management positions. And, and take on leadership roles, but only work part time, right versus in the US, it feels like, if you want to advance in your career, you have to work full time, like you can’t just work 2/3, so you can’t just work part time. Or if you do that, it’s really going to hurt your ability to move up to higher level positions. And so, I think that’s a challenge in both right in student affairs and in academia as a faculty member, because there’s just, you can’t be a part time tenure track faculty. And if you’re going to be a part time faculty, you’re going to be in some adjunct role where you are completely underpaid, right and undervalued. And so, so I think that’s really challenging, but at the same time, you can’t be a part time Vice President of Student Affairs either. So I think that exists in both ways, right? Like you, if you want to move up, there’s this expectation. And I think both faculty and student affairs are known for fields where we expect people to work extra hours, right? Oh, I worked on the weekend, I worked. And that’s just normal, right? And I work 60 hours a week, or whatever it might be. And it’s the same as faculty, right? Faculty will say, Oh, yeah, you know, I worked on a weekend. And then yeah, maybe I took off a couple of hours during the week, right, but I’m still working way more than other people do. Um, and so I think the hard part in academia and student affairs is that culture of always working more and always doing more. And not really having that work life balance, and not necessarily right to having the systems that allow you to say, okay, it’s five o’clock, I’m done. I’m going to go spend time with my family. Right? Because if that if you didn’t get that publication in or if you didn’t grade that paper, you’re gonna have to keep working.

Xiaoyun Sim  33:37

Yeah, I think Gudrun you shared a lot of good points. And like the challenges and the struggles that being a parent will face by also maintaining being an educator or being a faculty or staff member in student affairs. And I do think that like, with different countries, different higher education system, it’s different and being in United States for this instance, how can we challenge upper administrators or just everyone to reimagine and rethink how higher education should be to better support people of color, women of color, no matter if they are in faculty roles, staff roles, or just students because we do have more and more non-traditional students coming in pursuing a degree. So how can we better support everyone. And I know that our time is almost done, but I do have one question, what is one piece of advice that you would like to share to our audiences that might be new parents currently juggling between parenthood and professional life?

Gudrun Nyunt 34:37

I think part of it is don’t be too hard on yourself. Uhm, and so right I think we are sometimes our worst enemy that we think we have to do more and we have to be better and we have to be perfect in everything. I think I had to give up on that very quickly uhm, in all avenues, right, of my life. So if feedback doesn’t get to students within my usual like one week turnaround, I’ll send an email saying I’m really sorry but it’s going to take me an extra two days, right, or if Lily makes a mess in the room and draws on the walls, well we’re going to paint it later, it will be fine. So, I think that will be one thing. I think the other thing is making sure that you create that support network for yourself. And I think some of that can come through professional association like ACPA, there is a student affairs mothers Facebook group that is super active, and it’s a really great kind of space where people support each other. Uhm, so I think, right, finding those networks where you don’t have to be doing things all the time, but you know you have people you can go to who supports you, who can answer questions, who you can sometimes just vent to, right, so that you have those support systems, and you don’t feel as alone as you’re trying to make it through and balance everything.

Bianca Chau 35:53

Well, thank you so much. I’m sorry. This is this is actually our very first official episode together. So, everybody, please bear with us. But I’d like to thank Gudrun for joining us today. And okay,

Xiaoyun Sim 36:10

Me, okay. Trying to navigate technology and a Google Doc on the side for audiences who can’t see our Zoom room now. But to end our podcast is being a parent and an educator at the same time possible?

Gudrun Nyunt 36:24

I definitely think it’s possible. I would say it’s not easy. But I know there’s lots of people who are making it work. And I think that’s part of it is just trying to make it work. Um, and in some ways, I think one of the things I’ve learned is to take it one day at a time. And so I might not know, my mom will ask me questions of like, what will you do about daycare, and, you know, in next spring, and I’m like, okay, mom, we’re in Spring right now. I’m gonna make it through the semester. I have a plan for fall, and then we’ll see and we’ll figure it out. And so I think it’s definitely possible. I think part of it is you have to give yourself some grace. And you have to, you know, readjust your priorities and expectations of yourself, and give yourself some grace if things aren’t always perfect, but once you do that, I think it’s definitely possible and I also think it’s definitely worth it. To choose right between parenthood and being an educator. And if that’s a career you love, and you want to have children, then I think you just you need to find a way to make it work, and you will.

Xiao Yun Sim & Bianca Chau

And once again, I would like to thank Gudrun and Bianca for being my co-host for the day. And like Gudrun said take one thing one day at a time and giving yourself grace. Thank you.

Thank you. Bye, everyone.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Show Notes:

S.A.M.S Student Affairs MomS Facebook Group

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1729332837298569

Transcribed by https://otter.ai