Breadcrumbs
- Home
- Research staff
- Research staff blog
- Returning 'home' after a stint of working abroad
Returning 'home' after a stint of working abroad
29 January 2012
By Blanka Sengerová
I have just come across an article on the BBC News website about returning home after working abroad and feeling a stranger/foreigner in your own home country.
Home comforts can be hard to find for the expat
The reporter seems to take the business end approach, suggesting many postings by businessmen abroad and also discussing ex-service personnel. When I read the article, it struck me as probably applying just as much to research staff. Would I find it hard to adjust to life in the Czech Republic now? What would Tennie think of a job in Holland? And does Sandrine think of Turkey as home now or is somewhere else home still, and was it hard for Hannah to adjust to life in England after coming back from France? And all the others of you on here who have spent few or many years working abroad, did you find that the country changed when you returned home and that friends and family felt you'd been gallivanting round the world whilst they paid their taxes nicely?
I guess in my case the length of time spent in the UK is much longer than the average postdoc contract (and I didn't come here for a job in the first place), but even two years can be a long time in a country's development and things can and do change. So is it sometimes just as hard to return home as it was to leave your country in the first place, and does it bring added complications (kids finding it hard to adjust to school with exams to take, missing national insurance - or similar - payments, life in your circle of friends having moved on, etc.)?
Has anyone experienced this sort of return and can they share with us what it's like? How should you prepare for it and are there things to think about *before* you even leave?
Tennie Videler04 February 2012 at 09:50 AM
permalinkreport this comment
thanks, Blanka, I saw this article and was thinking of blogging about it but was too slow off the mark, so turned my attention to the call Emma then blogged about....
I haven't really considered returning to Holland permanently, partly because of fear of it being really odd (but mostly because my family and I are settled and happy here). Some of my Dutch friends have after postdoccing stints in the States or working in China. They have had to adjust to the huge difference in attention from friends when visiting and when back permanently.
Wellcome used to run a scheme where you'd spend two years abroad (usually in the Sates) with a pre-arranged place in a UK lab on return. The return has worked well for people I knwo who went on it, maybe it was all in the planning the return in advance?
It's become a family joke that I get annoyed when things change in Holland in my absence (you turn your back for 20 years and look..): streets that have become one way, my primary school is now a parking lot, my sister has moved from her convenient location near the ferry, it's all so inconsiderate!
Simon Smith04 February 2012 at 08:33 PM
permalinkreport this comment
All this leaves me wanting to say yes, but .. Yes, but aren't we supposed to be the archetypal cosmopolitans, us researchers? I suspect that something that attracted me to research was the desire to travel, and maybe subconsciously even to escape from too settled a life! (even if in my own case the relocations have mostly been within one country).
Having said that I've found that I've developed emotional attachments to all the places I've lived, so that I get Tennie's feeling of 'why can't things stay the same!' when I visit any of them again and notice that something's changed!
Sarah Davies06 February 2012 at 01:36 AM
permalinkreport this comment
Changes within culture and in particular places are one thing, but might there also be changes in research culture? I won't be back in the UK in the foreseeable future - my next stop is going to be Denmark - but when I visited colleagues there over Christmas there was a noticable sense of belt tightening. And I find myself a little out of touch with, for instance, debates around impact and the REF...
Blanka Sengerová08 February 2012 at 05:06 PM
permalinkreport this comment
>>but when I visited colleagues there over Christmas there was a noticable sense of belt tightening
Does that mean you think there isn't the same sense of belt tightening elsewhere in the research world at the moment, particularly in the States and other European countries.
>>And I find myself a little out of touch with, for instance, debates around impact and the REF...
I hate to disappoint you but the REF does not appear to be the "in" topic at our conversations at tea/coffee breaks either. Maybe it gets discussed more at group heads' meetings, but it hasn't yet been made hugely obvious at what is expected of us postdocs/PhD students.