Women students expect to balance career and family.

Diaper changes, sick kids, presentations, deadlines. Despite several decades of media attention to the challenges of having a career and a family, most of today's students have no clue about the balancing act involved for working women.

After the first shift at the office, working women may come home to a second shift involving kids, housework and meals with little help from their partners. Throwing coursework into the mix--like training for a new job or getting another degree--means women add a third shift.

While helping women students choose a career, campus career counselors need to steer the conversation toward the reality of that career when it's combined with a family life. At the NASPA/ACPA conference held in Orlando in April, Dr. Marybeth Walpole, in the educational leadership department and Kim Joyce, in the service learning department, both at Rowan University in New Jersey, encouraged colleagues to present the full picture of the working woman to the students they counsel.

A dose of reality

Because this generation of women students believes they can have it all, many choose nontraditional careers, assuming they can do anything they want and the workplace will support them.

While there's been progress in developing family friendly workplace policies, at home we're still the lead worker. No wonder we're overstressed, overwhelmed and exhausted. In addition to the gender gap over whose turn it is to do the dishes, there are measured differences by race and social class. But there's little research on how the future familial responsibilities of young women shape their career choices.

Walpole and Joyce conducted 69 interviews with female seniors on four campuses, including 25 African Americans. Students were asked to envision what their lives would be like five, 10 and 15 years into the future. Walpole and Joyce used the feminist identity model to analyze their results.