Work and pregnancy - advice needed (esp Academics)

[MaudGonneMad]

Seeing as we are still waiting for Academics' Corner....thought I'd post here and hopefully get some traffic from academics waiting around for term to start

Just got a BFP on a pregnancy test - hurrah - it's the first day of my missed period. Rough calculation indicates that due date is around 12 May.

So my question is: when did you tell your HoD about pregnancy? I know the general standard is 12 weeks, after the first scan etc. I have specialist teaching which runs in both semesters and is examined at the end of the year, as well as a very heavy teaching load in the 2nd semester (which runs from Feb-end May).

I don't, obviously, want to leave my students/department in the lurch, but nor do I know how the pregnancy will go, whether I will need/want to finish early. And of course I don't want to needlessly broadcast pregnancy in case anything goes wrong.

Advice/experience gratefully received! Especially from those eminent MNers who have served as HoDs and possibly managed situations like this before.

Hello Maud, realise I'm picking up on this pretty late but just wanted to throw in my ha'penny.

Congratulations! I am also pregnant; due on 20 May. In a similar position, but a little bit easier because I only have team taught modules in semester 2. However, one of these 'team taught' modules is actually only staffed by two of us so I'm going to be leaving my colleague in a bit of a sticky position: I know I won't be replaced so she'll have to do all the marking herself and they'll have to find someone else in the dept. to moderate.

However, I'm determined not to give myself a hard time about this because we shouldn't be in a position where we feel guilty about taking maternity leave. It's a happy occasion! Ultimately, my colleague will be more happy for me than anything else and the pain of taking on the module alone will be shortlived (of course, ahem, I'm not going to be around for it next year either because I'm taking the full 12 months...but they've got lots of time to plan for that.)

FWIW I'm not telling anyone at work before the 12-week scan because I've had miscarriages in the past and I definitely don't want to share the experience with my HoD. While I know and nobody else does I'm just being careful not to put my name forward for extra things that I'll have to hand over to someone else midway through, and I'm trying to nab extra early lectures on the team taught modules so there's more of a balance as my colleague will have to do the later ones.