Juggling marriage and study is ‘worth all the pain’
By Katherine Wu and David Tam Yat Pang
Burning the midnight oil is not new for students studying for examinations or for parents of a newborn, but what if you had to do both?
For Pierre Lau, a first year accountancy student at City University, it once pushed him to the edge.
“There was one night when my baby cried very hard and I had no idea how to calm him down, but that was also the night before examinations. At that moment, I felt like I could not handle both my study and family,” Lau said. “After getting my baby to sleep, I cried alone in a room.”
Overstressed by both academic work and family responsibilities, this one moment of frailty never happened again.
He can now strike a balance between the two, but clearly, it has not been without challenges, and Lau believes that overall the struggles have been worth it.
According to the Census and Statistics Department, 660 out of 97,224 full-time undergraduate students in Hong Kong, aged from 20 to 24, tied the knot in 2012. Data for the last census in 2006 was not available.
Although Lau is in a minority, he does not regret one moment because being married has helped him be more motivated.
“I am determined to get a good GPA in university in order to get a place in internship programs,” Lau said. “I need to seize every single opportunity.”
Lau, who has been married for three years, said the most difficult part of being a father of two children was the time management.
“Though there are quite a number of group projects at university, it is not hard to arrange time with classmates,” Lau said.
“We will usually have a meeting right after school, so I can spend the night with my family. My classmates are very caring, indeed.”
Apart from group projects, Lau still has to deal with papers and reading. He said his only study time was at late at night since he had to look after two children. His family is his top priority.
The hardest period was when he and his wife were associate students, when he had to spend all his spare time after school as a private tutor to earn a living from Monday to Saturday. The situation improved when his wife became a makeup artist, providing the family with a stable income.
While Lau became a first-time father in 2010, a year one student at Lingnan University, who does not want to be identified, gave birth to a baby boy last December. She also married her boyfriend in the same year.
“I had not thought much about when I would get married. But when I got pregnant, then I decided it was time to do it,” she said.
Recovering from childbirth usually requires a month of rest, but as a new semester started in January, she went back to school even though she had not recuperated.
It was tough taking up two roles at the same time – being a mother and a university student.
“After school, I had to take care of my baby until 9 to 10 o’clock at night. Then, I started doing my homework and didn’t finish until 3 to 4 o’clock.
But, then I had to wake up at 8 in the morning,” she said.
With a newborn baby, her habits and lifestyle had also changed.
“You will want to spend more time with family,” she said. This thought became a force within her, driving her to work faster in completing assignments rather than wasting time surfing the Internet. “There is no time to lose,” she said.
“I am tired, but I am happy,” she said twice, expressing how her baby gave her sheer joy.
HK people want to keep it simple
Unlike other countries, most Hong Kong people prefer not to juggle marriage and study at the same time, a Hong Kong Baptist University academic says.
“In fact, Hong Kong people prefer to settle study, career and marriage one by one,” Odalia Wong Ming-hung, an associate professor of sociology at the university, said. “The incidence of married university students is very common in foreign countries.”
About 18 per cent of 20,928 undergraduates said they were married, according to a survey by the National Center for Education Statistics in the US.
Considering how long doctorate and medical students have to study, usually more than three years – a period of their life when marriage is popoular – many countries provide dormitories and even services, Wong said.
American universities, Canada, Korea and Taiwan provide married dormitories for research students, she said.
The universities in USA not only offer health services at clinics and medical coverage to married couples, but also provide nurseries, managed by early childhood education students.
“It is very good that university students can enjoy these campus facilities,” said Wong.
None of the universities in Hong Kong provide special dormitories, childcare services or financial aid to married undergraduate students, as confirmed by their student affairs or public relations offices. But University of Hong Kong provides 10 out of 600 postgraduate dormitories for married students.
