You and your spouse or partner have completed years of coursework, research, writing and teaching on the way toward your doctorates. Now comes the hard part: finding jobs or internships that will meet your career goals without wrecking your relationship.
The challenges facing dual-career couples, particularly those aiming for academic positions, are great. While belt-tightening at universities is making extra money for spousal appointments hard to find, dual careers have become both a personal goal and an economic necessity for many couples, particularly in high-cost regions such as New York, Boston or the San Francisco Bay Area.
But there is hope. With hard work, good luck, clear goals, patience and a willingness to compromise, success is possible, say psychologists who have made their own dual-career relationships work. And although the academic job market remains intensely competitive, institutions of higher education are increasingly recognizing that providing support for employees in dual-career relationships-who now comprise about 80 percent of the faculty at American universities-can help them meet their own recruitment goals.
Take the example of Margo Monteith, PhD, and Donald Lynam, PhD. Like many dual-career couples, the two spent several years apart before they found jobs in the same location. When Monteith graduated with a PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1991, several years before Lynam was scheduled to finish his PhD there, she took a job at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. Until Lynam graduated, they spent time together only over weekends and during the summers. In 1994, Lynam found an internship in Louisville, Ky., while Monteith found an assistant professorship at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. An assistant professorship in clinical psychology opened up in Monteith's department the next year, for which Lynam successfully competed, and they were both granted tenure several years later.
"It's not easy for dual-career couples, and I think we were really, really fortunate in how it worked out," says Monteith. "For many
couples, they have to compromise, and we don't feel that we did.