Mayim Bialik might be a neuroscience genius, but even she said raising two boys while in grad school was not easy.
“The Big Bang Theory” alum appeared on the podcast “The Three Questions With Andy Richter” on Tuesday, where she discussed the difficulties of taking on a full course load and writing her thesis while raising her two boys, Miles and Frederick.
“I studied neuroscience as my undergraduate degree. I did a minor in Hebrew and Jewish studies, which kept my GPA up and therefore my morale, because science was still really hard for me. I was a late bloomer,” Bialik told Richter. “So I did my undergrad for five years and then I went on direct to the grad program, the PhD program at UCLA.”
“I got married and I had my first son in grad school and then my second son right after, so it was a big 12 years,” she added.
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While the actress noted that men also need to think about when to have children, she made quite the analogy as to why the situation is different for women.
“It’s a very different set of decisions because you physically at least need to leave to crank that watermelon out of the garden hose,” she joked.
However, Bialik kept up with her demanding school work, even if it meant a little multitasking.
“I basically finished my curriculum, my classwork, and then had a child when I was in data collection,” she explained. “I literally wrote my thesis breastfeeding, laying down and typing with one hand. So (my son’s) a total nerd; it worked, that environment worked.”
The sitcom alum always knew she wanted to stay home with her kids, she added.
“(Staying home) is not a popular choice for women in science, but I knew I would rather raise them than pay someone else to raise them while I was out teaching someone else’s children. That … was the right decision for me, and for my ex, Mike, we were married at the time, and that’s the decision that we made.”
Three years after Miles, who was born in 2005, Bialik got pregnant with Frederick.
“I got pregnant the week I filed my thesis, with my second child, that’s our ‘Mazel Tov’ baby. … He’s also a nerd, so we did pretty good,” Bialik joked.
Bialik shared on the podcast that she will continue to fuel her sons’ “nerdiness” with a new neuroscience curriculum to help teach them and eight of their friends about the subject.
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