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

{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 →