Experience Report Janis Neufeld
Janis Neufeld, Postdoc at the Chair of Business Administration, esp. Industrial Management
During the course of my doctorate and time as a postdoc at the faculty, my wife and I had four children. It could not be confirmed that the proportion of born girls and boys is approximately equal: we had four sons. So our everyday life is full of life and without the support of the grandparents and also the occasional cutting back in my job by me and my wife, it would certainly not be possible to cope. But in my experience, working at the chair in particular offers very good conditions for reconciling work and family life. The very flexible working hours, home office options and parental leave make it much easier to reconcile both. Apart from the fixed times for our own courses, appointments can usually be scheduled so that they fit in with childcare times and you can also react spontaneously, for example, to sick children. Of course, this depends to a large extent on the respective climate at the chair and the attitude of the professor or supervisor. I am very grateful that I was able to experience a lot of understanding and support here and that we are a team with many children.
At the same time, however, there is always the feeling that you are caught between two chairs and should actually do more in each of your roles. The everyday tasks at the chair with teaching, supervision of students, projects and also administrative tasks, the dissertation or research projects, the family at home and also voluntary work - it feels like you should invest more time for everything. And so it happens again and again that I'm actually in a good mood later in the afternoon and could happily continue writing an article, but the time to get home is pressing. This requires the ability to let things be, to switch off, but to work disciplined at other times. In the same way, one sometimes forgoes the chance of a stay abroad or could perhaps have a larger research output as a result. Nevertheless, I would not want to change the living situation. And when your ten-year-old son tells you that he would like to work at the university later on, the reconciling of family and scientific work doesn't seem all that bad...