Tag Archives: From Scotland to Brazil

From Scotland to Brazil: The final broken puzzle piece

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Careers don’t always follow the plans you set, as Gina Maffey is currently experiencing whilst in Brazil.

Contributor Gina Maffey

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Sunset in the Pantanal{credit}Image credit: Gina Maffey{/credit}

I shut the door behind me and walked to the end of the corridor. Unsure what to think of what had just happened, I dropped my bag on the floor and leaned on the windowsill. I felt like I’d just found the final piece of a puzzle under the sofa, except it didn’t quite fit into place.

My meeting had concluded in a positive but unexpected way. After a lengthy discussion with colleagues on a developing project, one of the professors had asked if I had heard any news on the postdoc that I had applied for. I told her that I was not expecting news any time soon because of the strike that university staff were engaged in. The strike had begun the day after I submitted the application, and the campus had been a very quiet and desolate place for the previous month. Continue reading →

From Scotland to Brazil: The postdoc: Are you in or are you out?

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Gina Maffey contemplates her next career move, having applied for positions both inside and outside of academia.

Contributor Gina Maffey

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Morpho butterfly emerges from chrysalis {credit}Image credit: Gina Maffey{/credit}

The bus turns down another road, and once again I stare at the buildings trying to gauge their familiarity. Is this a new route that we’re driving along or is it just that the last journey has already become fogged in my memory? It’s my favourite part of the week this, my three hour jaunt on a Thursday morning to my Portuguese lesson. For half an hour on that journey there is no one translating on my behalf, no one explaining how things work here and I am alone, independent and travelling. It is liberating.

I watch people get on and off the bus. Fascinated by the way things work, and with only a few weeks of Brazilian life behind me, still comparing everything to a European model. As the city shifts from high-rise flats to sprawling suburbia, my present preferred topic of contemplation swings into view: What am I going to work on in Brazil? Continue reading →

From Scotland to Brazil: Queuing up in the urban jungle

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Getting through the mountains of paperwork and bureaucracy when moving countries can be difficult, but don’t forget the reasons why you moved in the first place, says Gina Maffey in the third part of her adventures from Scotland to Brazil.

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{credit}Image credit: Gina Maffey{/credit}

I stared blankly at the wall. The air-conditioning unit was humming away merrily, but it could offer no advice to my conundrum. The man behind the desk repeated the question, asking where I was born. The form in front of him said England, but my passport said that I was British. My mind was hurriedly trying to piece together an answer, stumbling over the unfamiliar language. How on earth do you explain the fact that the United Kingdom is comprised of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and that England is a country within that kingdom… in Portuguese.

Our first week had been punctuated with encounters such as this as my husband and I sought to get all our documents in order. Hours of waiting in queues; passing from one desk to another; seeking approval from banks; the federal police; the tax office. The path to adventure had a seemingly slow and bureaucratic beginning. Continue reading →

From Scotland to Brazil: Playing Tetris

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How do you pack your life in one bag? Gina Maffey continues to look at the challenges and opportunities faced by an academic couple moving abroad.

Contributor Gina Maffey

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Snowdrop {credit}Image credit: Gina Maffey{/credit}

I sat staring at the two cases on the floor. This was like a complicated game of Tetris. Weeks of lists had culminated in scattered piles around the cases – there was a pile of ‘definites’, a pile of ‘maybes’ and a pile of ‘just-in-cases’. I willed the strewn items to slot into place. Packing becomes more difficult when you try to put a sense of normality into your case.

Clutching a cup of tea, my gaze shifted from the chaos on the floor to a flurry of movement outside the window. A long-tailed tit family was fighting off intruders to their bird feeder, scattering seeds over the snowdrops below. The first snowdrops of the year – a promise of spring, a promise of warmer, longer days, a promise of change.

Is change necessarily a good thing though?

It was a question that had been bouncing round my head for the past few weeks. The culmination of a series of ‘what ifs’ that sat in the pit of my stomach, or woke me like an alarm call at three in the morning. At times I couldn’t tell if I was being rational or ridiculous.

It had always been this way. Right through university. That nagging voice at the back of the mind, second-guessing whether you’ve done the right thing for your career – planting a small seed of doubt that was sometimes difficult to ignore. Continue reading →

From Scotland to Brazil: Making the decision (twice)

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This is the first of a series of posts by Gina Maffey on the challenges, opportunities and difficulties faced by an academic couple moving abroad.

Contributor Gina Maffey

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{credit}Image credit: Gina Maffey{/credit}

It had been two months since I’d finished the PhD, and the wind was coming straight off the sea up on to the dunes. My husband and I were sat huddled in the frosty dune grass watching sanderlings scoot along the shoreline below, while we listened to the curlews in the fields behind.

Aberdeenshire had become our home. We loved the landscape, the people, our work and our lifestyle. Yet, once again one of us turned to the other and asked:

“Do you think we should move?”

We’d been discussing it for years; pie in the sky dreaming of where we could go once my PhD was finished. We were at a point where moving would be relatively easy, we had no mortgage, no children and a lot of energy. But, all the while we’d been settling into a comfortable rhythm of normality.

We’d weighed it up. On the one hand we were perfectly happy where we were. We could pursue funding for projects in our area, continue to build on the research we’d started in Aberdeen and nurture the networks that were beginning to grow. Or, we could look for something completely different, geographically speaking, and indulge our pie-in-the-sky dreams. We convinced ourselves that if we didn’t act now it might not happen, and agreed that whoever found something first would take the lead.

Shortly after our discussion on the beach my husband went for coffee with a colleague, who asked:

“Would you be interested in working in Brazil?” Continue reading →