Experience Report Christian Leßmann
Prof. Dr. Christian Leßmann holds the Chair of Economics, esp. International Economics
I became a father in the fourth year of my doctorate. Looking back, it's just great that as a scientist you can divide your time so freely. If something happened at daycare or your daughter was sick, you can take good care of her and simply work from home. For me, with West German roots, it's just unbelievably great how childcare is organized in Dresden.
We had a daycare place for our daughter after 15 months - a little later than we wanted, but the desired daycare center was nearby. My wife was at home for the first 10 months and I was officially at home for 4 months plus flexible working until the daycare place was free. We had a great and really family-friendly atmosphere at the chair at that time, so flexibility wasn't a problem at all at the beginning. In the end, I was mostly the man for emergencies, because I could simply work more independently than my wife as a pharmacist. I know this from some of my father colleagues at the university. The working hours of my wife and I were also so different that I usually took our daughter to daycare a little later in the morning, but my wife was able to pick her up again in the early afternoon. Especially in the beginning, we tried not to leave the little one at the daycare center for more than 6 hours, since that is also exhausting for a toddler. Over time, that became less of a problem. At some point we also had a grandma on site, so we had a litte bit more freedom. It would have worked that way - but for us it was a nice luxury.
In my experience, the reconciling of family and career at the university is great. However, I don't want to hide some limitations that also have an impact on my career. Some time after my PhD, I had an offer from Oxford for a postdoc position. That would have been a great opportunity, but after much deliberation I decided against it. Later, I moved to Erlangen and from there to Braunschweig, while my daughter and wife stayed in Dresden. I believe that these were very important steps professionally, but they were also very exhausting due to commuting. But somehow you manage it.