This December I completed my research tenure at Harvard, which also marked the end of five years in the US. I thought I should document this moment, to cherish it and to also look back. But, it is a hard thing to do, summing up five years of life and career in a foreign country, which is not so foreign any more. I came here having completed my Ph.D not wholly knowing what to expect. This naivety both shielded and surprised me in my trials and adventures that followed. This has definitely been the most difficult phase of my life so far, but also the most enriching.
I still remember that first week after I landed in Baltimore. I was so clearly not mentally prepared for the kind of cold weather that would welcome me. I remember how smugly I had decided that I would go around looking for a mobile phone shop in just my winter jacket but without any scarf or winter cap or a good pair of gloves. I had no idea that the cold would just punch me in the face. Obviously it is no surprise that I developed a cold and a cough that same night. It was one of the worst ones which lasted two weeks. But never after that did I go out not fully prepared for the weather and am happy to report that not once did I get a cold in any of the 5 winters since.
That first week is special for other lessons as well. A kind acquaintance from my college days let me stay in her apartment for a week. During this time, I would go to work in the morning, look for apartments to rent in the evening and come back home all exhausted from having to navigate the new country, its public transport system, its banking, employee tax, social security and health insurance systems, the almost non-existent vegetarian burgers at the university canteen and the freezing weather while still recovering from the said cold and sore throat. I remember crying uncontrollably several times and in those vulnerable moments questioning my decision to come all the way to the opposite end of the world, to this lonely cold country and for what! In those moments and many others since my boyfriend has been a source of my strength, who reminded me time and again why it was important that I stick it out.
Having sorted out my living situation and my work routine, the next big hurdle for me was making friends and having a good healthy life during my time off. In a country where I didn't know a soul and where making friends at work was not easy, I think what truly saved me was my decision to live with flatmates. Karla took up one of the rooms in that same house within a week of my moving in. She and I gradually became friends and I am going to be eternally grateful that she came into my life when I desperately needed someone to talk to after a hard day at work. I think you can tell from what I've recounted so far that battling loneliness is going to be a running theme in the life I've spent in the US. But, for now, I was finally getting into a peaceful space and time.
In six months time, my research also started taking shape and I started to gain confidence. Sometimes I suffer from imposter syndrome, especially when I'm new to an environment, like my first couple of months working at Johns Hopkins University. Of course I never show it outwardly, but there are times when a seed of doubt plants itself and I worry if I even belong here. Although I eventually do realize that I needn't have worried at all. After all, the training I received during my Ph.D had truly prepared me for a life in research. I learnt so much in the next two years. I switched fields and moved from polymer physics to systems biology, learnt all about genetic interactions and pathways in yeast as a model organism, ran computer simulations on a super computing cluster, learnt python and got much better at MATLAB. There were bumps along the way but things moved in a positive direction and it was an enriching experience.
On the personal front, I still needed some activity for the weekends. I am someone who needs activity and proper recreation which should involve going out of the house at least during weekends, coz otherwise I start getting depressed. I used to regularly play badminton at IISc and I thought I would go for this here as well. But, it was not easy. First, badminton was played on multi-purpose courts and so it was relegated to only twice a week in the gym. Then when I actually did show up on the designated day, it turned out that people go in with partners, so it's hard to break into and find someone to play with. I still waited for them to finish playing and asked if I could play a game. On my second visit to the badminton court, I befriended a Chinese girl. I needed someone to play with and she needed to improve her game. Since I was a better player than her, it worked out for both of us. Many times she would bring along her friend as well who was a much better player than her and I would get to play a real good game. This arrangement went on for a couple of months, but didn't last as she had to come all the way from the medical campus to get to the gym which was on the campus where I worked. Eventually, I had to find something else to do.
In the meantime, I had also started going to the postdoc association events. I went for many of their events, the most memorable of which was a trip to a ski resort, where I learnt to ski for the very first time. Even though I was mostly on my own apart from the car ride to the mountains, It was one of the best experiences. There is a rush you experience when you go down the slopes that's hard to put into words. Another one was a trip to Washington DC. This is a very nice city with a lot of museums, one of my favorites being the Smithsonian air and space museum. It has many replicas and real parts of old aircrafts, fighter jets, space rockets and many small real life illustrations of the concepts of physics. It was during this trip that I befriended another postdoc, which led to me being introduced to bar trivia nights and beach volleyball. Bar trivia nights had too many American pop culture questions from the 80s and 90s which I was very bad at, and so I dropped out of it after a couple of months. But, beach volleyball, I continued to play with whoever was available and whichever team would take me. I was obviously very bad in the beginning but improved with time. This I continued on and off for the next two summers. A year into my stay, my colleagues and I also gradually became more comfortable with each other, one of whom became my running partner. Karla had moved to another city by this time. And then, I made another friend during one of the in-house research symposiums who became my weekend lunch/dinner companion. These are too many details about individual friendships, but all this is to impress upon the fact that they do not come by easy and most were not of the deep kind. I think it's a combination of many factors that make friendships in your late 20s hard to come by. And, moving to a whole another country and shifting base every 2 years does not help with that. The culture in the US is also a bit alien in the sense that people like to keep to themselves and it takes many months (or a year in my case) of constant interaction to finally develop a friendship to the point where you go out and do things together as a group. That is not to say that I was miserable. I, in fact, had many great experiences, met a lot of people from many different countries, tried a lot of new cuisines and had plenty of good times. But, they were interspersed with many many lonely days and one of my constant struggles was to overcome this by putting myself into new situations where I could meet new people. This was the hard part. But, the good thing is that my time here taught me to live alone, to be truly with myself.
My stint in Baltimore reached its natural end after two and a half years. I had completed my projects, learnt a lot, experienced a whole new life and it was time to move on. I moved to Boston to work as a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University in June 2016. Stay tuned for the complete story coming up in Part II.
--RS
--RS
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