Is moving overseas a requirement for success in academia?

‘If you want to be successful in academia, you need to be willing to move to wherever the jobs are. It’s a sacrifice you have to make’

I’ve lost count of the number of advice columns, job application advice talks and conversations with mentors which begin with some variation on this theme. The academic job market is saturated with a large quantity of extremely talented individuals vying for a small number of job opportunities. For almost all young academics, staying in one location, or even in one country, is not only seen to be impossible, but actively discouraged. The universal advice given to everyone is move overseas.

Does moving countries for a job opportunity automatically make an individual more worthy of the job in question, irrespective of ability or experience? Should we be discouraging individuals from attempting to build a solid foundation for their personal lives on which their career can be build in favour of uprooting one’s entire existence?

I have emigrated twice. But what did emigrating teach me? I was exposed to new cultures and experiences I would not otherwise have experienced. It made me more tolerant, more understanding of difference and much more appreciative of the power of diversity. For me, most importantly, emigrating (once in particular for a ‘better’ opportunity as a PhD student) taught me that self-development and growth as a scientist does not necessarily come from moving to a new location.

However, it is rarely acknowledged that for many of us, emigration is a deeply traumatic experience. Disenfranchised grief is rarely discussed, but an extremely common result of emigration and not an experience I would wish on anybody. Is it right to force ’self-development’ through trauma?

When we give advice to young academics, we have to also acknowledge that the ability to emigrate and move freely is a significant privilege. The personal circumstances of individuals who are part of minority groups will often make emigration inaccessible. Can an individual with a disability or chronic health condition get the appropriate medical care and insurance when far from home? What about the financial burden of emigration? What about those academics who have families, who would be required to uproot children in order to continue their careers? Not all countries are accepting and welcoming of transgender individuals or those in same-sex relationships, and to emigrate would put individuals in danger or at risk of persecution. Not to mention the fact that many immigrants in various countries may be subject to racial abuse and at worse, violence.

The advice that ‘it is best to move overseas for your career’ comes from a place of privilege, and this option is not available to everyone. The narrative that the best academics have spent time overseas is disadvantaging underrepresented minorities for whom freedom of movement isn’t an option. I think dismantling this narrative is one way to achieving greater equity and representation in the academic community.

I think we need to change the narrative that one has to emigrate to be successful. Personally, I believe that a willingness to learn new things, explore new challenges, and build an exciting research program doesn’t necessarily result from moving far from one’s home. All of these things come from within the individual, and from the relationship between the individual and their mentor. They are independent of location. What’s more, it is entirely possible for an individual to become ‘entrenched’ in a way of thinking being despite moving halfway across the world. Equivalently, it’s entirely possible for someone with a solid foundation in a familiar location to take on new challenges and actively seek out new experiences and career development.

The idea that young academics have to uproot their entire lives, place important personal relationships under strain, and in some cases subject themselves and their families to the trauma of relocation in order to be ’successful’ or demonstrate ‘devotion’ or ‘commitment’ to their careers is wrong. Sometimes, we need to define ’success’ as recognising ones own priorities. If that priority is not uprooting one’s entire life, abandoning a developed support network and choosing to pursue a job opportunity close to ‘home’, then we need to understand that and work to accomodate it.

Let’s end the narrative of requiring the abandoning of one’s home for academic ’success’. Sometimes, a solid, unshakable foundation is the best place for someone to learn, grow and flourish in their career.

Postscript: I was fortunate enough to find a job in the same country as I completed my PhD, and I was also fortunate enough to emigrate between my undergraduate degree and my PhD.

However, I was also ready to walk away from my academic career if I could not find an academic job here in Australia. This made finding an academic position orders of magnitude harder. This blog is my personal opinion, which is that getting a job in a country where you are already established is harder largely because there is an expectation that academics have to be highly mobile and willing to uproot their families.

I’d like to dismantle this, as I think it comes from the fact that academics were traditionally single men or men whose families had to adhere to the whims of the father figure. Freedom of movement is an accessibility issue that is limiting opportunities for URMs in academia.

I have been waiting to publish this blog since I was asked a pointed question about “what was wrong with all my collaborators in Germany and why wasn’t I moving there?” during an interview for a job I ultimately did not get at my PhD institution. The question seemed to imply there was something wrong with me seeking a job at an institution where I felt at home. I challenged it in the interview with many of the points I stated here. I hope if anyone is asked a similar question, this will give them the confidence to challenge an unnecessary narrative we’ve been buying into for too long.