I’m 28, English, and currently live in SE England. My partner of 5 years lives in London, and we see each other 2-3 weekends a month. I have a relatively-well-paid IT-based job, at an excellent organisation to work for, which is as recession-proof as it gets. I like this job, and have been there about 3 years. My partner has suggested that she move to live with me and commute into London (not ideal) for her freelance work; this will be pretty awkward for her, but possible.
There is an academic position open in Vienna. Their research specialism exactly matches the subject of my PhD (indeed my external examiner was from there). I have been invited to apply for it, and have been told I will have a strong chance of being offered the post. Money-wise, it’s less than I get now, but it’s still quite a bit more than the equivalent position at a British university. The big snag is that I will be required to teach undergrads in German. I haven’t used German since I got a B in GCSE (that’s at age 16 for non-UK dopers). They’ve said they may be willing to give me time to acclimatise, but I would definitely be expected to teach within a year, and lecture soon after that. My partner is very keen us moving out there, and is confident of getting more work over there than here.
What should we do?
As it stands the discussion will be hypothetical until such time as I am offered the job; there is always the possibility of someone better-qualified applying, or of the language problem being more than they are willing to tolerate.
At the risk of straining your attention, I’ve tried to boil down some of the key worries into some handy bullet-points:
Reasons to move:
Last chance to do something adventurous before settling down.
I loved researching and writing my PhD.
My research was starting to go to exciting places and a few more years could see some real breakthroughs.
This is a good chance of being a “life’s work”.
I’m still really interested in the field.
I enjoyed teaching in English.
My career here is unlikely to do anything much more interesting than it is now; more responsibility/money etc. but probably no significant shifts.
I will get probably get bored of my current vocation in a few years.
I will always wonder ‘what if?’ if I don’t.
I will probably regret it if I don’t.
My chances of pursuing an academic career in this country in a field I’m even remotely interested in are pretty small.
Reasons to stay:
As far as mid-range developer positions go, it doesn’t get much better than what I have.
I love the city I currently live in.
In all honesty, my research field is a bit of a backwater, is not very populous, and doesn’t have a lot of drive behind it. It will never change the world. It is next to impossible to get post-PhD funding for it in the UK.
There’s a pretty good chance that when the post finishes (6 years) the only job in the field I could get would be to stay out there, and we would probably want to come back in time to breed over here.
If I/we hate it over there and come back quickly, I won’t get nearly as good a job as I have now.
I’ve never lived abroad (lived all over the UK though) and am frankly a bit scared about it.
I suck at languages, and am frankly terrified about it.
The working environment won’t be nearly as good as what I have, and I will get frustrated with a) the academic lack of drive (the only thing I disliked during my PhD), b) the absence of any kind of technical support framework/procedure which I’ve come to take for granted, c) working much more on my own.
I’ve moved house dozens of times and usually take change in my stride, but this prospect scares me in a most unfamiliar way which I’m not, in honesty, coping with very well.
My partner has all but said she will come with me either way (she’s a doper too, be nice!), though it’s fairly clear she favours Vienna, provided it is for the right reasons. There are a load of practical considerations, but as far as I’m concerned we’ll worry about these later. What I (and I emphasise ‘I’ not ‘we’) must decide is whether the Vienna job is the right move, and whether it will make me happier with my working life/career than where I am now. Everything else is secondary (but not unimportant!)
Advice please! Have any of you done anything similar? What is Vienna like for an English-speaking expat? What about learning languages?
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I suck at languages, and am frankly terrified about it.[endquote]
That is a real problem. My advice is don’t minimize it. I too suck at languages and I unfortunately know that they just don’t stick in my head. I can’t imagine me needing to be able to TEACH in another language. I’d be totally fucked.
So get real about your ability to become proficient in German in a year’s time before you make your decision.
I’m an academic in a UK university, in chemistry. It’s an exceptional job to have, if you’re cut out for it, so in general I’d say go for it. You should definitely apply, no question about that.
However, the teaching thing sounds like a massive problem. It’s a long way from GCSE grade B to teaching an undergrad class in the language. Teaching is a paradox in research-intensive universities, in that it manages to be both irrelevant and critically important. You can teach like Jesus Christ and no one will care, you’ll never get promoted on the basis of good teaching, and you can go your whole career dishing out mediocre lectures and it won’t be a particular problem. OTOH, the only reason our position (and the four walls of the university) exists, is to teach undergrads. So if you’re past mediocre and into un-acceptably bad then it can be a real problem for your job. GCSE German sounds like it could be in this latter category. I would still never make the decision on this basis, mind, but it’s worth stating.
A few other negative points:
Can you get funding for it in Austria? I wouldn’t recommend going into something that lacks a funding profile, no way. It’s a bit difficult for me to comment, as my field is one of the most labour intensive areas there is, and without funding you just cannot do any research whatsoever. So maybe in a less labour intensive area it’s not so bad, but an academic’s life without research funding is a miserable one IME. Do you think you will be able to raise the resources you need to do your research?
Is it a tenured position? Say you turn out to be a huge success, are you still out the door in six years?
This doesn’t sound too promising, either. Are you in a better place now to answer research questions, but just don’t have the opportunity? b) is pretty much a fact of life for the academic environment, infrastructure and technical support is substandard relative to industry, but a) should be completely opposite to how you have stated it. You’ll never see more drive and work ethic anywhere than a research-intensive university lab.
Thanks for some helpful points. In response to some of your questions:
The institute in question is well funded and well organised, and specialises only in research which is close to my interests. There are a few such groups in most ‘major’ western nations. Those in the UK (such as where I got my PhD) find it very hard to get funding for specific research. The group I left is has nobody between two professors either side of retirement, and a bunch of PhD students with ‘departmental pool’ funding. This is a shame, because the field is interesting and has direct practical applications (and, incidentally, is very media-friendly).
No, but six years is double what I could hope for over here for a first postdoc. It is a tenure-track position, so if it went well and I wanted to stay I would have a good chance of tenure after the six years. I get the impression that what they perceive as a postdoc is somewhere between what we call a postdoc and a junior lectureship (the pay reflects this as well).
Maybe my perception of this is tainted by the group I’ve left, but drive is not a word that belongs anywhere near it. This was one of the reasons I went into industry in the first place. My experience in industry is the polar opposite, and frankly I prefer a more regimented approach. The group in Vienna seem to be better at this, and they have certainly achieved a fair bit in the past 10 years, but it will be difficult for me to shed this perception without working there.
We’re skirting around an issue here, which is ‘is this field worth working in?’. Small though it is, I find it fascinating and can easily think of six years’ of worthwhile research to do. Does a smaller field make it easier to make a big contribution? Work in the field (including my own) does get published in, among others, a prestigious international journal on a much broader (and better-funded…) field, so it’s not as if it doesn’t have intrinsic academic value. That said, there is something of a perception that it is “not proper physics”, at least in this country. My specific work is strongly geared towards useful practical output, but a lot of other work going on is very much research for its own sake (nothing wrong with this in principle).
Incidentally I have already applied for the position, and await a possible invitation to interview. Not a great deal is going to change between now and a possible job offer, though!
I had a job situation where I could do something that would definitely be better for the next 6 years but was arguably not better over a longer time horizon. I decided that planning for the long term is super and all, but 6 years is a pretty long time, and I would just be kidding myself if I thought I could predict what life would be like in 6 years with an extremely high degree of accuracy.
So, my humble opinion is to discount the consequences after 6 years (unless it truly is as easy as knowing you absolutely would be much worse off overall) and make your decision by weighing the factors related to the next 6 years.
It sounds like the short-term obstacle is the language issue.
I know there are intensive language-training courses available, and you do have some German background so a lot of that would be refresher / improved fluency. I’d bet that, between the two of those, and also being immersed in German once you move there, your language skills will pick up fairly fast.
Judging by my own college experiences with non-English-speaking instructors (rather, non-native speakers), you’d do fine.
Really, it all sounds like a very exciting opportunity and I think you’d regret not at least trying for it.
Thanks to everyone for your helpful replies. After long discussion with SO on this, we are strongly leaning towards staying in the UK. There are several reasons, but the main one is that, at this stage, I should be much more excited about it than I am. Something this important, and this risky, should at least have the virtue of being An Amazing Opportunity. SO made a similar life-altering decision a couple of years ago, and there was never any doubt that it was what she wanted with all her heart. True, I’m a little less, er, excitable than she is, but the principle is the same!
I furthermore have serious concerns about the research. I’m motivated by a pretty narrow goal, and am interested in anything peripherally related to it, but not much else. If I’m honest with myself, I don’t believe that goal is realistically attainable, even if the science works out (complicated…). I’m coming to think that I want to work in my idealised vision of the field, rather than in what it will actually be like, and that in 5 years I will either have achieved the goal or proved it impossible, and will have run out of interest in the field.
I have been shortlisted for the post, and invited for an interview at short notice at my own expense (several hundred pounds). I need to tell them pretty soon, but my mind isn’t completely made up yet.