At 8:30 p.m. on a school night, Dana Wood says good night to her children and tucks them into bed. Then, she says good night to her husband and goes to bed herself. Five and a half hours later at 2 a.m., Wood’s alarm goes off and she rolls out of bed to get an early start to her day. She has four hours before she has to wake her kids up to get them ready for school and make their lunches for them, so she gets to grading and preparing material for her students. All in just a day in the life of a working mom.
Born in Houston, Texas, Wood’s life has mainly been focused on academic achievement and hard work. While she was a young child, her mother was an elementary school teacher, and her father was a welder on the Houston Ship Channel. She said that he would come home from work every day really dirty and grimy. Then one day he did a total switch, leaving his manual labor job to pursue a Ph.D. in political science. Her family moved to College Station, Texas, and her father ended up becoming a professor at Texas A&M University.
“A lot of us don’t want to admit that we do things similar to our parents, our role models,” Wood said, “but it often turns out that way. When I grew up, I ended up getting a Ph.D. studying children, merging my dad’s example of getting a Ph.D. and my mom’s example of her interest in children.”
Being very goal-oriented and having a constant drive to learn and set new goals and accomplish those goals was something that Wood’s father instilled in her. She’s always thinking about the next step in her life and how to get there.
Wood is currently a lecturer in psychology at the University of Florida, but it was a long journey for her to get where she is now. Graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin, Wood decided that she wanted to go to graduate school and focus on human development. So, she started a program at the University of California, Berkley, where she discovered that she actually did not like it. Wood dropped out after one year in the program and spent the next few years figuring out what she wanted to do. When she was 28 years old, she started her Ph.D. program in developmental psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
While studying at UNC-Chapel Hill, Wood spent most of her time doing research, which she loved doing at the time. By the time she finished her Ph.D., she thought that she wanted to have a career in research, so she went on to do postdoctoral research at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Wood’s research was focused on the development of African American adolescents. She said that she was really interested in understanding their experiences and how those experiences were different from other adolescents. She mainly focused on their experiences with their identity and racial discrimination. She was especially interested in their experiences in school, specifically the experiences of African American boys in school because they face the most negative stereotypes about their academic abilities.
It was during her time at UCLA where her interest in making research the focus of her career began to fizzle out. She said that this was for a few reasons, the first being that if she were to pursue a research career, she would have to move to where the research jobs were, and that she was not necessarily willing to move around the country for jobs.
Another reason for Wood’s shift away from researching being the center of her career was the sacrifices that she would have to make. She said that successful researchers devoted their lives to it, and she was not sure that she wanted to do that.
“My research adviser when I was in postdoc was probably in her mid-60s,” Wood said, “and sometimes I would be up in the building studying or doing research very late at night, and she would be there. I was like, ‘Gosh, I don’t know when I’m at 65 that I want to be, on Saturday night, at the research building doing work.’”
The final reason was that if she chose to research, she would constantly be under pressure to get money to fund her projects. If she did not get funded, then she would be out of a job. She said that she did not want to live her life like that. She loved research and wanted to continue doing it, but she didn’t want her career to depend on it. That’s when she decided that she wanted to have a career that was more focused on teaching.
However, doing research is not something that Wood has completely written off yet. She said that if in the future she was able to find a job at a research institute or a consulting position she would be interested in it, but not at a place like UF where she would be expected to teach and do research at the same time. She still does some studies as a collaborator with her friends from graduate school.
After she finished up her postdoctoral research she moved to Milledgeville, Georgia, and got a job at a small, public liberal arts college called Georgia College, which is where spent the first four years of her teaching career. She said that she really enjoyed her time there and that she liked the small classes and really getting to know the students. Then, her husband got a residency in psychiatry at Shands, so they moved to Gainesville where she would end up getting her job at UF. Her appointment here only has to do with teaching, so she is not expected to do any research during her time at UF.
What really changed things for her, though, was having children. Wood is currently the mother of three boys, a 6-year-old, a 4-year-old and a 2-year-old. She said that having kids really showed her that even though there are things she wants to do professionally, she can’t do them at this point in her life because she has to focus on her kids.
“When they tell you, ‘You can do anything you want,’ that’s true, but you can’t do everything you want,” Wood said.
Since her husband’s job is not flexible in terms of hours, Wood is the parent who does all of the drop-offs in the mornings and the pick-ups in the afternoons. She says that she takes care of her kids for five hours after school before her husband gets home, so she can’t work the hours that she did before.
Wood only has four hours during the day that she can completely focus on her work before her kids get home from school. So, to make up for the missed hours, she either goes to her friend’s house during the weekends to get work done (she can’t work at home because she’ll be too distracted by her kids), or she’ll wake up at 2 a.m. to get a head start on the day.
“It’s what you have to do to get things done,” she said.
In this way, Wood is more like her mother, who had a job that allowed her to raise Wood. She’s putting her career on the back burner (for now) in order to be there for her kids. She said that she could find a nanny and just live her life the way she used to before she had kids, but she didn’t want to do that and that she wants to be present in their lives.
She says that finding a work-life balance is tough, but it’s something that’s really important. Even though she doesn’t get a full workday and has to revolve her schedule around her kids, she says that everything is worth it in the end. She loves her job at UF, and she especially loves the time that she gets to spend with her kids.