sonia Ong wrote out her life plan in fourth grade. She would attend college, work, get married, and raise a big family. Decades later, motherhood is at the center of her social media presence.

In one short video titled “Different path. Same destination,” Ong lists three goals: get a Ph.D., become a child psychologist, and care for children. Life didn’t turn out quite that way. After earning degrees from Stanford University and Harvard, she is now focused on raising five children.

Comments on videos range from praise to scorn . One viewer writes, “The best career ever is being a parent for your kids! You did well, sister!! Love all your videos and relationship of your kids.” Another writes, “Wasted time in university.”

I found Ong when I was mindlessly scrolling through my TikTok feed. I watched the 44-year old woman drive her kids to school in a suburban Canadian city, look at bright red Spider-Man velcro sneakers for her youngest son who was going into preschool, and throw a Duolingo-themed party for her daughter hitting a 365-day math streak. Ong’s accounts have more than 19 million followers across four social media platforms.

From these vlogs, you would never guess that this social media influencer graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, then earned a master’s degree in counseling at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

As a woman at Harvard, I struggled to put myself in Ong’s shoes. After enduring rigorous classes, collaborating with equally ambitious peers in a high-pressure environment, and receiving countless opportunities from this institution, not using my Harvard degree to pursue a traditional career seems almost taboo.

Even though women outpace men in terms of college completion in the U.S., the expectations and choices for women after higher education remain murky. Some mutter disapproval when a college-educated woman becomes a stay-at-home mom, while others get upset if a woman decides to put her career ahead of having a family. Balancing a demanding career with raising children can seem impossible. My female friends and I often find ourselves thinking about these different paths and asking ourselves, “What does it mean to be a woman with a college degree?”

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In 1975, Harvard and Radcliffe merged their admissions offices and adopted an equal-access policy for women. Two years later, Harvard assumed responsibility for undergraduate women’s education. Yet women continued to face prejudice on campus.

Federal civil servant Allison H. Eydt ’80, a member of Harvard’s first graduating class with women fully integrated, recalls a conversation with her Harvard advisor. After telling him she was considering taking statistics and calculus, he said, “Why are you doing these classes? Aren’t you just here for your MRS?”

Though I don’t hear that expectation expressed as bluntly today, I still see women cautiously considering their career paths based on wanting to raise a family. It’s a trade-off that people start thinking about early on. As someone who wants to pursue medicine, a time-consuming journey, I grapple with the possibility of having children too late in my life and not being present. For many women my age, this is a high-stakes dilemma.

Schanberg tells me that she and women she knew expected to have both families and careers. Comparatively, today, I witness my friends and peers having a more pessimistic view of real-world problems and responsibilities. It feels unrealistic in today’s financial climate to manage a full-time job while providing the best quality lives for your children.

As the daughter of two immigrant parents, not working a traditional job after graduation seems taboo. These choices can feel even more daunting with a Harvard education. So many students feel they need to put their degree to “good use” after they graduate. Not getting a high-paying, prestigious job, then, feels like a waste.

“You feel like others are doing more that you almost push yourself to do more, even if you weren’t interested,” Lia G. Galindo ’27 tells me. “I’ve seen time and time again, people choose something that they don’t really care about, but they think it will look good.”

I ask Galindo, who wants to become a cardiologist, if she has ever considered being a stay-at-home mom.

“Yeah, I have, and I think I don’t want that for myself,” Galindo says. “I think there’s a point in time where I will want that for a period of time. Like when my kids are first starting off, when they’re really young. I would be really sad if I couldn’t be there for every moment of theirs.”

“If a person gets a college degree from Harvard and goes straight into motherhood or chooses to have a family, I tend to wonder, did they choose this? Did they really let themselves fully explore this experience?” Galindo wonders.

One of Ong’s videos touches on this topic. What was she going to use her Harvard degree for? The answer: “Be a stay-at-home mom duh!” In another video, she compares her education with her cardiologist husband’s, both attended undergraduate and graduate school. The video has drawn 1.9 million likes on TikTok. Ong’s content plays on the tension between traditional gender roles and her prestigious degrees.

Yet, it’s more complicated than that. Ong says she spends 15 to 20 hours a week creating social media content and has partnered with brands including Nest Designs and Duolingo. Ong shares that being an influencer is much more lucrative than counseling ever was, earning her a mid-six-figure annual income. Arguably, Ong isn’t just a “stay-at-home” mom. Rather, she is a working mom with a job that affords her more time with her kids.

To Eydt, this kind of financial independence is an important part of female agency.

“What worries me, though, is when women stay home and don’t have their own income,” she says. “The other thing that I think is important about women’s freedom and liberation is that they can walk away from people and relationships that are abusive. And that’s really important when you have children.”

In 2012, the year her second child was born, Ong left her job as a mental health counselor at British Columbia Children’s Hospital in Vancouver.

“I think what I found was that the job of being a trauma counselor was so intense and draining that I had absolutely nothing left in the tank when I got home. Like I was wiped,” Ong says. “It was like 12-hour shifts, and I just had nothing left to give to my kids and my babies at the time.”

Instead of pursuing a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, she decided to be a stay-at-home mom for her two children. Her husband’s job as a cardiologist made the decision much easier: she had the financial backing that many women cannot afford.

Ong posted her first online video in 2020 and later turned content creation into a full-time job. She tells me people frequently ask her whether she still uses her college degrees in her work. Ong says her education helps her write video scripts and lends her credibility with brands.

I ask Ong if she would ever go back to counseling.

She pauses. “I love what I do now for a number of reasons. One is I get to work from home. And I left my job because I wanted to be at home with my kids. They’re still very young, and I want to be present with them. And this job of being a content creator allows me total freedom to work from home.”

When I mention Ong in my conversation with Duke University School of Medicine Professor Laura E. Schanberg ’80, she tells me that she is “not a big social media fan. Period.”

“I think a lot of bad is happening because of social media. But her choice to stay at home, I mean, those are the things that I fight for,” Schanberg says of Ong. “Women should have the opportunity to do whatever they want to do, and if that’s what she wants to do, and goes for it, that’s great.”

Through my conversations with students, alumni, and media influencers like Ong herself, I’ve learned that being an educated woman does not mean forcing yourself into the career box. It means having a choice, whether I choose to work, stay at home, or do both.

I also know that these choices come with real tradeoffs. Focusing on my career might mean I can’t raise a family until much later in my life. Or maybe I’ll have to sacrifice parts of my career to raise a family.

While some women might be lucky enough to do it all, many are not. Young women today, even those graduating from elite institutions like Harvard, may not have the luxury of choosing freely.

— Magazine Writer Christine Yoo can be reached at [email protected]