Moving in academia

Today we have Ankita Sinha, a Marie Curie postdoc in EEB working with Gavin Thomas studying riverine bird colouration, talking about her experiences (good and bad) moving around in academia.

Ankita is originally from India, where she did her undergrad and masters in zoology, before moving to the north of the country, near the foothills of the Himalayas, to undertake a PhD focusing on riverine birds. She had already moved around a lot within India for education, and this PhD was a sandwich programme which included a year in Cardiff, UK, studying dippers. Following this, Ankita worked at the University of Minnesota and the University of Georgia in the US, before returning to the UK to take up a postdoc position at the University of Sheffield.

Ankita reflected on the differences between education structures in India and in Western countries. In India, the general consensus is that the higher education system works better in Western countries, which Ankita broadly agrees with. In her experience:

• Western academic environments are much more open to collaboration, sharing data, and the admin burden is lighter
• If you’re a masters student in India, you have to approach the professor you want to work with – BUT professors really have their favourites from day one, and you don’t really have a lot of choice about the project you want to do
• This is partly due to lack of funds, but generally professors in India are not very open to sharing their ideas with other labs
• Ankita feels she’d have more chance of being treated equally in a Western country, maybe partly because the class sizes are so large in India
• Courses are much cheaper in India, but to an extent, you get what you pay for – large classes, and professors are totally overloaded with admin. It’s only getting worse with the current political administration – funds are decreasing, number of students are increasing, which means the load on the teaching staff is increasing
• In general, the admin process in UK universities has been very smooth and fast, with admin teams very helpful and cooperative

In general, in Ankita’s experience, in Western countries you have more autonomy if you’re lower down the ladder – you don’t have to answer for every little thing you do.

We also discussed how academic institutions in the US are a different environment to those in the UK. Some reflections were that:

• Americans do a lot of meetings – while working in the US, Ankita’s partner had 4 hours of zoom calls a day, just doing meetings. It’s more or less mandatory to meet your supervisor every week, in contrast with, say, Cardiff, where communication was mostly by email
• She found the culture of helping each other was different – in the US, you can’t really write to people saying you’re stuck and asking for help, it’s all done within the lab meetings
• The amount of hierarchy in the administrative part of it, versus sharing ideas with colleagues, and just saying hi and catching up with people, is very different in the three countries – Ankita thinks it’s very good in the UK and would like to continue working like this
• Americans don’t have the same pub culture as we do in the UK, so in some ways it’s more difficult to socialise
• Most people would eat their lunch at their desk in the US. In comparison, in India you can take a break whenever you want (although they have biometric checking-in systems)

We then moved on to a broader discussion about difficulties that might arise when moving between countries. These included:

Life admin stuff:

• Things like finding a house can be very difficult unless you have someone already in the country to help you – one strategy could be to move in somewhere temporary initially and try to find a permanent place once you’re in the country/city
• You have to be careful about a lot of stuff that you might not initially think of, for example, driving – is your licence valid in the new country? Are the rules of the road different? Could it affect your visa if you accidentally commit driving offences?
• Visas in general are extremely troublesome, and particularly if you’re moving from a country that is perceived to be ‘poorer’ than a Western country
• Because of all these thing, something to bear in mind is that you really can’t be productive from day one when you move to a new country – you’re most likely going to have several months of admin frustration

Language barriers:

• Lots of places work in English, but if you don’t speak the local language it can be quite ostracising, as it makes it that much more difficult to socialise with locals
• Even when working in English, it can sometimes be disadvantaging not to speak the local language – even if you speak the work language, you’re inevitably going to miss out on some stuff
• This can be a problem even when working in your native language - the language of academia really is English, so non-native English speakers are at a disadvantage, particularly e.g. at conferences. It can be very nerve wracking to get up and give a presentation in a non-native language!
• This is something that native English speakers should bear in mind. May want to consider that constantly speaking a foreign language can be tiring, plus even a very high-level speaker will have problems with colloquial words or cultural references, for example

Socialising and personal life:

• If you’re moving about, you have to be prepared to make the effort to meet people and make friends etc., as it can be hard and sometimes lonely.
• Even just the constant packing and moving can be difficult and make you feel quite low, exacerbated by being apart from partner/friends/family etc
• You can’t even think about whether you want to start a family or not, because the existence is so unstable and you might not even be in the same country as your partner (and again, visas are very difficult!)

We concluded that despite these downsides, moving about can really be worth it as it can open your eyes to new ways of thinking, working, and asking research questions. It can make you a better scientist and also enrich you personally, although it can be very difficult at times. We agreed that in a future session, we’d like to start putting together a compendium of resources that could be useful for incoming academics, PIs who have incoming academics, and potentially for current Sheffield researchers looking to move abroad. It seems like lots of PIs have their own resources already, and the postdoc society tried to put something similar together at some point, but it would be useful to have this all compiled in one living document that we could workshop in a macrofun session and keep updated with new resources.