Wife of a Ph.D. student

I love that Bryce loves academics.  He has this admirable attitude that we can never learn enough.  And he loves to learn.  When we was living in Venezuela, he read actual Physics and various other science text books.  For. Fun.  Pleasurable reading?  Maybe not for you and me.  This is one of the many reasons I think he would be so great in academia.  The environment of higher learning and teaching seems perfect for him.  At the same time, being a wife of a Ph.D. student leaves me wondering all the time.  At one point he was saying, "Med school would be so fun" while at other points he says "I hope I get to be a professor someday", and still other times, "I think the business world and industry would be challenging and interesting."  All of these sound pretty great to me (except maybe med school...another 1000 years of schooling for my already over worked husband? hmm...).  In all reality though, I think he will do great wherever he ends up.  I just pray that God leads us to where it is that we need to be and that Bryce would feel challenged and interested in the next job that he chooses.

This July will mark 3 years since we moved to Blacksburg for Bryce to get his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering at Virignia Tech in the SBES program.  It looks like he will be trying to finish either this coming Winter or next Spring.  I am not exactly sure what will come next, but probably a postdoctorate program.  We have started looking into some universities and postdoc positions that he may be interested.  My impression of a postdoc program is a research position that will keep most (job) doors open to him for the next big step.  A postdoc program can last anywhere from 1-5 years usually.  Most professors do postdocs after Ph.D. but before finding a professorship.  In his field of engineering, it's super competitive to be a university research professor.  Sometimes I envy the other fields where jobs are more easy to come by.  Even as a professor, he would have to choose whether he wants to work at a big research university where most of his work would be research with class teaching more as a side, or work at a smaller university doing much less (if any) research with mostly class teaching.

So, unless something changes, we are in the search for postdoc programs and thinking more about our next step as a family (of 3!).