ultimatestudyabroad

[ultimatestudyabroad]

Returning to the U.S. Work Culture

I’m 3.5 months into my new job, so it’s about time I reflect on what it feels like to be back in the American work culture and, moreover, back in the administrative work culture. First, the positive: payday. Every time I open my banking app and see that the paycheck has been deposited, I feel this immense wave of relief that makes me realize how truly tense I have been for the last year and a half. It also feels really good to not have to shell out almost $600/month for health insurance! And the peace of mind that comes with stability cannot be overrated. I feel for all my adjuncting friends who don’t know what next semester’s workload will look like.

On the flip side, yup, this is just like I remember it. Nothing about the America work culture has changed since it drove me to move to the other side of the planet five years ago (I didn’t think that it had, but still, it’s a bit of a shock to be back in it.) In fact, it’s even worse now, because of covid. Before I moved to Australia, I observed that everyone was pretty miserable/stressed out/burned out, but most people didn’t acknowledge it because either they didn’t realize how miserable/stressed out/burned out they were since that state of being is the status quo – it’s just the way life is – or because they were desperately trying not to acknowledge how miserable/stressed out/burned out they were since there wasn’t much they could do about because this is just the way life is. Now, however, due to covid, everyone is fried to a crisp and they know it. The ridiculous amounts of work you were expected to do before have only been multiplied and moved on Zoom.

In I come, not burned out from work, but still reeling personally from a highly traumatic period of transition. And as I’ve discussed in this blog, I’ve been very concerned about losing “Aussie Mel” now that I’m back in the U.S. Re-entering the America work culture will be the ultimate test. So far, it is not going well. It’s hard to describe to my Aussie friends just what it’s like. The easy example is to point out just how little vacation time we Americans take/actually have. But, it’s so much more than that. It’s the day-to-day grind. It’s the fact that every single person is expected to complete way more work than one person can be expected to do. For example, while I was very excited by the job description for my new position from the first time I saw, once I started, I learned that the “and” in my title – Assistant Dean for Advising and Experiential Learning – is actually indicating two jobs. There was a person who did advising before. I get to do his job and this extra piece of “experiential learning.” Typical American workplace move. Kinda like that time I was promoted, but expected to keep doing all of my old job, plus the new duties of the higher level.

The way this unrealistic workload expectation plays out on a daily basis is chronic stress. I felt this before I moved to Australia, which was a huge part of why I wanted to leave. In my former role, I’d usually have the first hour of the day to answer email and prepare for my students before the student appointments began. I would work as fast as I could while watching the hour tick away. A voice in my head would say “Move faster, Mel, you’re running out of time. No, you don’t have time to look that up before the meeting. Shit, you’re out of time. When are you going to be able to get this done?” My chest would tighten and I would feel like I was constantly failing. When you feel like that, you don’t have the capacity to be patient with your co-workers, who are all also feeling the same way. When everyone is so overworked, they unintentionally make your job harder by, for example, not reading the email carefully which then creates three more follow up emails to clear up the confusion. Or, they only answer one of the two questions you asked in the first email. Or, they don’t take the time to look something up or find an old email in their inbox and instead just ask you again. All of this slows me down and I can’t slow down, because I have too much to do!!!! This new job is no different. That’s not a slam on the new job; it’s just the way life is here in America. I have a never-ending deluge of email that I can not get ahead of. It is what it is. I block off time to work on other projects for an hour or so and then I return to my inbox to realize that, if I had been doing email that entire hour, I may have kept up with the inflow, but maybe not. One thing I am very grateful for at my new institution is that I get very few emails on the weekends. That’s nice. I’m desperately trying to develop a healthy work pattern. One very helpful thing I did was silence the tone that sounds every time a new email comes in. But, the struggle is real and it’s largely out of my control. The voice in my head is back: “Move faster, Mel. When are you going to be able to get this done?” American Mel is back and I’m not happy about it.

I’m a bit surprised by how much I miss the academic life. I knew when I was in it that I loved it. My PhD supervisor used to check in on my mental health (because she was an amazing supervisor) and I’d say, “You don’t have to worry about my mental health. I’m great! I’m not at work!” I was working very hard, of course, but it was completely self-directed and about 90% was tasks I enjoyed (the exceptions would be marking/grading essays and taking notes on the stuff I had read). When I wasn’t teaching, I got almost no email! I also did a lot of my reading on the beach or outside in a hammock, which doesn’t hurt 😊 One of my new colleagues articulated the difference between academic and administrative work very well. She said that, though academics are obviously working very hard and also feel overworked, a significant chunk of the work they are doing is their work, their research, their classes. On contrast, as an administrator, your day-to-day tasks are determined for you. You might be able to carve out a little time to work on a project, but that project is something that relates to making the bulk of your job better, say by improving a process or redoing a website. There’s almost no time to pursue intellectual interests or anything that requires deep thinking. That framing really crystallized the difference for me.

Still, I’m surprised by how much I miss academic life, especially given that I knew all along I would be going back into administrative work, because, as we all know, there are no jobs in academia. I’m trying to stay connected to that world; finishing up my book manuscript definitely helped there! And, I was recently lucky to be able to participate in a weekly seminar focused on the works of Sara Ahmed hosted through Flinders University (the time difference just randomly worked). It was so energizing to read difficult works and then discuss them with brilliant people from around the world. When it ended, I found myself sitting down and going back through all of my notes on the books and the seminars, as if I were studying for an exam or something! That’s when I realized how much I was truly craving the academic work again. I’m continuing to work on my research as I can and I’m very much looking forward to next academic year when I’ll have the opportunity to teach (though I’m not sure how I’ll manage to fit that in). I’ve achieved my big hope of getting a position that allows room to combine my administrative and academic identities. It’ll be interesting to see how/if I’m able to strike a balance.

[ultimatestudyabroad]

My Year-and-a-Half of Hell, By the Numbers

1 year, 9 months & 3 weeks after I submitted my first administrative job application (& 2 years, 4 months after my first academic job app), my job search finally ended! Mid-January, I’ll become the Assistant Dean of Advising for Experiential Learning at Quinnipiac University’s College of Arts and Sciences in Hamden, Connecticut!

Now that my nightmare is over, I feel this blog is the appropriate place to quantify just how much this last year-and-a-half has sucked …

Homelessness

# friends/family crashed with: 6 Typical stay at any one place: 3-4 months Note: every time we move, Hibby stops eating …

Where has all my stuff been? Suitcases in the trunk of my car, boxes needing climate control at 2 different friends’ houses, everything else in the not-climate controlled storage unit ($164/month!) & then a third friend’s garage

Money

Average monthly budget (2020): $1250 % of monthly budget spent on health insurance: 46%

Where did this money come from? During my PhD, I had saved up enough to get me through 2019, to get me through a job search of reasonable length. 

How I survived 2020: 2 temp jobs (including in my old job – in my old office! – at Duke), working for the census (which sucked!), tax returns from Australia & U.S., cashing out my meagre Australian super (retirement), that $1200 coronavirus check

Public assistance qualified for: $0 (thanks, North Carolina, for not expanding Medicaid!)

Jobs

Academic Jobs # academic jobs applied for (tenure-track, postdoc, teaching 1st year writing): 18 # interviews: 2 (neither in my discipline) These were pipe dreams; I’m not shocked by my lack of success here.

Administrative jobs Years experience in higher ed administration: 10+ (I am, in fact, shocked by my lack of success here!) # admin jobs applied for: 99 # requiring or preferring a PhD (meaning I wasn’t over-educated): 32 # interviews offered: 31 # jobs I was encouraged to apply for by someone involved in the search & then wasn’t even given an interview: 3

Outside of higher ed altogether # applications (done in moments of deep frustration & hopelessness): 6

Academic & administrative jobs combined # different institutions applied to: 65 # countries: 4 # states: 22

Of the 33 jobs I was offered interviews for… # times a finalist: 6 # rounds of interviews done: 40 # institutions I interviewed with that NEVER contacted me again: 4 Let’s name names, shall we! Lehigh, Purdue, UNCG, Colby Bonus: Rutgers didn’t contact me again until NINE MONTHS after the interview!

Now let’s break down two institutions that wronged me particularly grievously...

Heinous offender #1: Princeton University # jobs applied for: 9 # jobs interviewed for: 4 # rounds of interviews: 11 # trips to campus (before covid, obviously): 3 # times a finalist: 3 # times they checked my references: 2 (6 weeks apart!) # job offers: 0

Heinous offender #2: Duke University # jobs applied for: 13 # of those where I knew someone involved in the search: all but 2 # jobs interviewed for: only 3 # times a finalist: 1 # job offers: 0 # people they hired for the job I was a finalist for: 6

Being told I was not one of the top six applicants for a job that was very similar to the last job I had done at Duke was a particularly painful punch in the gut, believe me!

 Mental Health

Weight gained: ~20 lbs # friends who suggested I see a counselor or get anti-depressants: 3  (I didn’t, though, bc I couldn’t afford it) # times I hyperventilated: 1 # full-on meltdowns: lost count

Whew! It feels good to get all that off my chest! Thanks for reading.

[ultimatestudyabroad]

Homelessness

One of the hardest parts of this extremely prolonged transition period from PhD student to gainful employment is being homeless. I don’t want to be too melodramatic about it – I’m not sleeping rough. I’m not living out of my car. Thanks to an incredibly generous string of friends and family willing to take us in, I’ve always had a roof over my head. I’m in no danger of going hungry. And yet, I have no place to call my own. My worldly possessions are scattered in several locations (suitcases in the trunk of my car, a few boxes at one friend’s house, the remaining furniture in another friend’s garage). Whenever I interact with the bank, pharmacy, etc., I have to remember which friend’s address I may have put as my own. And I’m constantly feeling guilty for imposing on people for so long. When I arrived at the first friend’s house, I remember saying, “Well, hopefully, I get this job I’m interviewing for and we only need to be here like six weeks or so” – ha!

I know there are a lot of people out there who live alone and are really struggling with the coronavirus lockdowns. And maybe in different circumstances that would be me, too, but in general, I really like living alone. I’ve been living alone since 2005. I like having my own space, maintaining my own schedule, and leaving the bathroom door open so Hibby doesn’t sit outside and whine the whole time I’m in there! I like my privacy, something, I’ve learned, that is essential when you need to cry. And I’ve needed to cry a lot lately! Out of disappointment, hopelessness, anxiety … I never want the people around me to know that I’m crying; it’s something I need to do on my own. When you’re living in someone else’s house, though … you have to find a spot where you won’t be walked in on, you have to keep the volume down, and you have to hope no one calls you to dinner before the redness and puffiness in your eyes and face go down.

When I have an interview for a job somewhere, I’ve taken to online shopping for a house/apartment in that area. At first, I just go to Craigslist to get a sense of how much rent is in the area, to know how much the job would need to pay in order to survive. It goes on way longer than that, though. I get lost in thinking “oh, I like this kitchen!”, “this one doesn’t have a yard for Hibby,” etc., etc. It’s fun in the moment to envision myself in a new place, a little bit of faith in the future. But I think I should probably stop doing that, because when I inevitably don’t get the job, it’s just a big letdown…

In conclusion, not only do I desperately need a job so I can have a paycheck, a future, and a day-to-day purpose, but I’m also dying to have a job so that I can have a home again. My own space. So Hibby can have all her toys in a toybox. So I can be reunited with my possessions that have been in storage for almost five years (what the hell is even in all those boxes??) So I can cook whatever food I want, watch whatever I want on TV, load the dishwasher however I want, and maybe even turn off the AC and open all the windows! I want to be able to put my groceries in the trunk of my car, which I can’t do now, because it’s full of suitcases. I want to hang all my clothes in a closet, knowing that they’ll be staying there and not getting packed up in six weeks when we move on to the next foster home. I want to change my address on all of my accounts. These are small silly things, I know, but still I miss them.

[ultimatestudyabroad]

This Sucks

Note – I wrote this in November and December, when I was at a particularly low point in my job searching despair (there have been several, including now). I didn’t publish it at the time because I felt it wouldn’t be good to have this in the public domain while I was still looking for a job, but since coronavirus has paused all job searches and it seems I will never again have gainful employment, I figure, what the hell? Maybe it will be cathartic to get my frustration out into the universe.

My happiness from a year ago feels like a dream. Facebook reminds me that a year ago I was on a mini-holiday in Port Douglas with friends, marking essays for the class I was teaching in between snorkeling sessions and gin and tonics. My day-to-day life was luxuriously full of reading and writing; my weekends full of concerts and shows, trips to the beach, and dinners with friends. And though my financial subsistence was meagre, I had regular income and I had established a budget that allowed me to live without worrying about money all that often. And above all, I felt like the best, happiest version of myself. This was a life I had intentionally built for myself through meticulous planning and more than a bit of luck. It was everything I had ever hoped it would be.

That luck has run out. From the beginning, I knew that my life in Australia was but temporary and, if you read this blog regularly, you know that I was very concerned with whether, upon return to the U.S., I’d be able to build a better life there than I had had before Australia. Certainly not as happy as I was in Sydney, but hopefully happier than before I left. Instead, I have no life. Four-and-a-half months since I’ve returned to the U.S. (now 11 months) and a full nine months since my first administrative job application was submitted (now 15), I still have no job and no immediate job prospects. Applications are out, sure, but the hiring process in higher ed usually takes months (and now it is non-existent because of coronavirus). The money I so carefully saved throughout my time in Sydney for this period of transition is gone. I’m still relying on the kindness of friends and family to house me and Hibby. I have no job, I have no steady income, I have no home, I have no future, and I have absolutely no idea when (or if) it will ever end.

Now, before people start thinking to themselves, “the academic job market is brutal” or “it took me years to get an academic job,” I want to be clear that I am not searching for an academic job. I made an attempt at the academic job market in the (northern hemisphere) fall of 2018, applying for about 15 postdocs, short-term though multi-year teaching gigs, and tenure-track positions. My expectations were low, so I was not really surprised when absolutely nothing came of these.

So, when February 2019 rolled around and the thesis due date drew near, I turned my attention to what had been my realistic plan all along: re-enter my former career in higher ed administration. Given my decade-plus experience in the field and wealth of contacts, I didn’t think this would be too terribly difficult. I knew that job searches in higher ed take forever and I had saved accordingly. I also knew that mid-level jobs (in between entry-level and assistant vice provost level) are harder to come by, but I was/am willing to be flexible geographically. (For crying out loud, I applied to two jobs at the University of Wisconsin! I would freeze my ass off there!) But, I never in my wildest dreams imagined it would possibly take this long.

It’s not that I’m directionless, a young professional trying to find her niche; I know exactly what my field is. It’s not that I’m being too choosy; I’ve applied for 60 admin jobs. It’s not that I’m choosing inappropriate jobs for my experience; I’ve had phone interviews for over a third of the jobs I’ve applied for. I’ve been a finalist for two jobs (neither one of which I got, obviously). My application materials are good. I’ve been to this rodeo a number of times before; I know how to do this. Still nothing…

I have friends who try to offer explanations and, while I know and appreciate that they’re trying to be supportive, their explanations don’t help because they, much like the process itself, are nonsensical and contradictory. I’ve been told, “it’s all in who you know.” Well, again, I fucking know everyone at Duke and, after nine applications there, I’ve only had two phone interviews! I’ve been told, “you have to leave Duke and come back to work your way up.” Silly me, I thought moving to the other side of the planet for 3.5 years was leaving Duke. I’ve been told that my PhD is holding me back, never mind the fact that many of the jobs I’ve applied for are PhD-preferred or -required. And never mind the fact that a big part of the reason I decided to do the PhD in the first place (even though I had my eyes wide open about the state of the academic job market) was because I was told again and again that I would need a PhD to advance much past my former position. In fact, my former position was PhD-preferred. I was the only one on the team without a PhD and I had to endure all sorts of snide comments about “non-intellectuals” (to be clear, not from my colleagues but from higher administrators and faculty). Since I wanted to do the PhD anyway, just for myself, I decided to go for it. Not having the PhD held me back, but apparently having it also holds me back?

Well, you see, one helpful explanation goes, I chose to do an academic PhD, in a discipline as opposed to an EdD or PhD in higher ed. What the fuck? First, I sat on several hiring committees in my last job in which people with higher ed degrees were sneered at. Secondly, I chose a discipline because that’s the subject that interested me enough to devote three years of my life to it. I love working with undergraduates, but I don’t want to study the little bastards! Oh, but don’t you see, since you have an academic PhD, hiring managers will assume you’re not serious about the role and will leave as soon as you get an academic job. FFFUUUUUUCCKKK MMMMEEEEE! That’s not going to happen! There aren’t any academic jobs!

As much as I want to dismiss this no-win point of view on the PhD, I know that, at least at times, it’s completely true. People in administration seem completely oblivious to the casualization crisis in academia. This blows my mind, since we all work in the same damn industry. Even so, I’m prepared for the “why did you do a PhD” question and have my polished (and completely honest!) answer prepared. And that was the verbal answer I gave to one particularly annoying iteration of that question, but my mental response was quite a bit different. The question was posed along the lines of, “I see you just got a PhD. I want to make sure you understand that this is not a teaching job.” The polished answer came out of my mouth while the snarky, bitchy, fed-up Mel voice in the back of my mind responded, “Yes, I know that. Because 1. I can fucking read. 2. I wrote a whole cover letter which demonstrated I knew exactly what the job is. And 3. There are no teaching jobs!”

I feel frustrated even when talking to people who support me. The frustration brought on by hiring managers is exponentially worse. If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve seen a number of frustrated tweets about the lack of follow up after interviews. Of that one-third of the jobs I’ve applied for in which I’ve had phone interviews, only THREE hiring managers have done me the courtesy of emailing me to let me know I was not advancing to an in-person interview. One school didn’t send me my generic rejection email until eight months after my phone interview. Two places I had phone interviews (both in 2019) still haven’t contacted me at all. Now, reader, don’t give me any bullshit about the number of applications received for the average job or how busy everyone is. I’m not complaining about the mass rejection email from HR I get for jobs I don’t get an interview for. I’m talking about a hiring committee doing 6-7 phone interviews and inviting three of those people to campus for an in-person interview while never bothering to send 3-4 emails to the other interviewees! It does not take much time to send 3-4 identical emails that say, “Thank you for speaking with us last week about the position. Unfortunately, you were not selected for an in-person interview, but we wish you the best of luck in your search.” See? I just did it! That took like 30 seconds! By November, I was over this shit. Two weeks after a phone interview, I sent a polite email asking for a status update. Which was completely ignored! On what planet is that acceptable?

Here’s another little lesson in human decency for hiring managers: don’t call people’s references unless you plan to offer them the job. Because when someone’s references are contacted, they assume they’re about to get a job offer. Those two jobs I was a finalist for? They were at the same school and they contacted my references twice. Same people, 1.5 months apart! If you feel so compelled to call references on multiple people, be transparent. Send an email to the candidates saying , “FYI - we’re checking references on both of our finalists.” (And btw, where are you getting all this time to make all these phone calls, anyway? I thought you didn’t have time to send 3-4 emails to the rejected phone interview candidates!)

Piled on top of my frustration, despair, rapidly eroding self-esteem, and bank account anxiety is guilt. Guilt over being annoyed with my friends who are incapable of cheering me up in the face of a hopeless situation. Guilt over assuring undergrads in my temp advising job that they will be able to find jobs after they graduate (I know it’s my job to calm them down, but seriously, how hypocritical can I possibly be?!). Guilt over that panel on non-academic jobs I organized at the 2018 AHA. The one where I told everyone that administration jobs are rewarding and realistic. Ha! If I, with all my experience, can’t find a job, can a newly minted PhD in his/her mid-late 20s who went straight from undergrad to grad school really expect to find one? Without being dismissed as only wanting an academic job? I apologize to all the folks at that panel. Your post-grad rep (unwittingly) lied to you!

I am obviously in a very dark place right now. That’s not to say I regret doing my PhD. Not at all. Not for a moment. This was the best three years of my life. I’m proud of the research I did. I am an infinitely better person than I was four years ago. But someone just needs to give me a fucking job.

[ultimatestudyabroad]

Health Insurance: Adding Insult to Injury

Not only have I been unemployed and homeless since I arrived back in America, but I’ve also not had any health insurance. So, on top of worrying about how long I can make my money stretch and stressing about whether anyone will ever hire me, I’ve had this nagging voice in the back of my head: You’d better not get sick, Mel. You’d better not need a prescription filled, Mel. Don’t go ice skating with your friend, Mel. If you break your ankle, you don’t have health insurance.

I feel the need to pause here and clarify for my Australian friends: no health insurance = no health cover of any kind. This isn’t a “I don’t have private insurance, but Medicare still covers me” situation. (Note: universal health care in Australia is called “Medicare” whereas “Medicare” in the U.S. is primarily for the elderly – this can admittedly get confusing). In the United States, if you don’t have a job, you don’t have health insurance (unless you buy it yourself, but we’ll get to that). There is no automatic social safety net.

When I was younger, I would simply take the risk of not having insurance in between jobs. In retrospect, I was lucky nothing serious happened. But now, I’m older, wiser, and only two years away from the age my mom was when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, so no insurance is no longer a risk I’m willing to take. Before I left Australia, I tried to figure out how to get some insurance until I get a job. I didn’t have much luck. Because here’s another oddity in America: you can only buy/make changes to your health insurance at certain times of year, the “open enrollment period.” There are exceptions to that, of course, for major “life events” like getting married, etc. and it turns out that returning from living abroad is one of them. However, outside the open enrollment period, options are scarce. They are also tied to the state you live in and I wasn’t sure where I was going to live! The only plans I could find were so expensive and so crappy that I decided against buying “real” insurance and instead obtained emergency cover through a travel insurance plan for expats returning from abroad. I figured I just needed something to cover me in case I was in a car accident or I needed an emergency appendectomy or something like that. I figured I’d only need it a few months and then I’d have a job (hahahahaha, joke was on me). I bought the plan and extended it once. Then open enrollment hit and I still didn’t have a job, so I knew I needed to bite the bullet and get some health insurance.

Some of my friends in Australia assumed that Obamacare gave all Americans health insurance and I had to explain to them that it merely required us all to have insurance; it didn’t give us anything. It did add some regulations to make our health insurance plans suck less and it created the marketplace, a website where individuals could go purchase their own health insurance if they didn’t have any through work. And this is where I went to buy my insurance plan, an eye-opening experience. I entered in some demographic information and where I lived so that the system could identify plans I was eligible for. I got to a screen that asked for my anticipated 2020 income. I entered “$0.” I mean, the whole reason I have to go through this is that I’m unemployed! In return, I got the message that, based on my answer, I do not qualify for subsidies to help cover the cost of my insurance. What?! How can someone with no income not qualify for the assistance the law provides for the insurance the law requires people to have? Oh well. I wasn’t terribly surprised by this. I’d already made weak attempts to see if I could qualify for any kind of social welfare program. Unemployment? Nope. Medicaid? Nope. For food stamps, I was at least asked to provide some additional information, but after that, I never got any kind of response…

Anyway, I cursed the heavens and clicked through to see my plan options. Words cannot express how shit these plans were. As I report on this, bear in mind that I am a healthy, non-smoker with no pre-existing conditions. Plans that were affordable – around $250-300 a month – had deductibles upwards of $8,000! Meaning, I would need to utilize $8,000 worth of medical services before my insurance would kick in. Now, I neither intend to need $8,000 worth of medical services nor do I have $8,000 to spend on medical services. Some of the more affordable plans also had no cap to the out-of-pocket expense. For example, if once I had met my $8,000 deductible, I ended up in the emergency room, I’d still be responsible for, say 50%, of the total cost. For other kinds of treatment, insurance might pay 80% and I’d be responsible for 20% (again, this is all after I’ve met my deductible). Two things make these kind of plans a very bad idea. First, as I mentioned, I have a family history of breast cancer. My boobies are most likely going to turn on me one day. I don’t just need insurance; I need cancer-quality insurance. This fact was vividly driven home to me in the month before I went on the marketplace, when two people I care about were diagnosed with breast cancer. Crappy insurance is not an option for me.

Secondly, health care in America is expensive. How expensive, you ask? Check out this thread of responses from when Bernie asked the same question. From personal experience, I’ll give one example. Before I moved  to Australia, I’d been having annual breast MRIs as part of my preventative care.  My GP in Australia wanted me to continue that type of screening, but warned me that my overseas student health cover (basically, the equivalent of Medicare) didn’t cover MRIs. I immediately refused the test and we got in a bit of a spat over why I was refusing her recommendation. I told her I could not possibly afford an MRI out of pocket. We went back and forth a few times before she finally looked up the price: $500. FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS FOR AN MRI! The total cost of this test in the U.S. is $3,000-4,000. I told her that. She almost fell out of her chair. This kind of experience happened to me several times in Australia. I’d be having a disagreement with someone on health care and there’d be this sense that neither one of us really knew why we were so opposed to each other and the reason turned out to be that we were operating from two completely different frames of reference. To close the story, I had my MRI (and my OSHC surprisingly ended up covering it! This – paying less than what you think you’re going to have to pay -- is something that never happens in America!)

But back to the Marketplace. I ended up choosing a plan that had an out-of-pocket maximum. I’m not interested in going bankrupt because of medical bills. I also chose a plan with $0 deductible because the difference in cost between low-deductible and no-deductible plans was fairly negligible. So, my plan isn’t that bad (or, I should say, it doesn’t seem to be. We’ll find out when I actually try to use it). What’s this costing me, you might be wondering? $580 a month! Please recall that my income is currently $0. I do not have $580 a month, which is only $139 less than what my mortgage was before I sold my house! Americans reading this are most likely thinking, “yeah, that sounds about right” whereas my Australian friends are probably a little shell-shocked.

To give my American friends some context … When I moved to Australia, in order to get my student visa, I had to pay for 46 months (the duration of my visa) worth of health cover up front. At the cost of my new American health insurance plan, that would have amounted to almost $27,000. Instead, I paid $1,893.12! That’s just over $40 a month. And for that, I got amazing health care. I went to my GP all the time because it was so easy and it was free. The only time I ever had to pay was $35 for a blood test that wasn’t fully covered (and I got part of that back from my insurance within a WEEK of submitting a claim!) My OSHC didn’t cover prescriptions or routine dental, but both of those things were cheaper fully out of pocket than they are in America with insurance. I once had to take an American study abroad student (who had no Australian health insurance) to the equivalent of urgent care for strep throat. He waited less than five minutes without an appointment (can’t remember the last time I waited less than 20 minutes in the U.S. even with an appointment). He paid $50 for the visit and $10 for his antibiotic with – I repeat – no insurance.

I listen to the Medicare for All debates in the Democratic primary and my first reaction is to be completely flummoxed that anyone (other than a health insurance executive) could be against it. But upon further reflection, I think that Americans are just so used to being screwed by their health insurance that they find it hard to conceive of an existence in which they are not. We are so conditioned by the structures that run our lives that a functioning system seems fanciful. Once I got to Australia, it took me some time to believe. During pretty much every encounter with the Australian health care system, I was confused/surprised/skeptical that it really was that easy/quick/cheap. Now that I’m back, I’m equal parts a) dreading the reverse culture shock that will occur when I need to go to a doctor and b) pissed off that the “richest country on earth” extracts so much profit from the health of its citizens. So to my fellow Americans I say: support universal, single-payer health care! Trust me, you’ll love it.

[ultimatestudyabroad]

Transitions

So, it’s over. This wonderful life experiment of leaving everything behind, moving to another country, and starting a new life has hit its (visa) expiration date. I knew from the beginning that this day would come, aside from a few fleeting moments when visions of sponsored employment or (chuckle) partner visas entered my mind.

The move back itself went smoother than I had anticipated. I did not spend the whole plane ride crying as I had assumed I would. Instead, I had my complete mental breakdown the day before when Hibby’s departure (the pet exporter picked her up the day before the flight) combined with yet more bad news on the job front reduced me to a blubbering mess. And my ridiculous plan of landing in LA and buying a car the same day actually worked (many shout outs to Jose at the LAX CarMax!) Hibby survived the flight (a big concern of mine), my luggage all made it, and we headed off on our cross country trip. Luckily, I still remembered how to drive, though there were a few moments when my brain struggled to decide which side of the road to turn onto!

During our 2.5-week cross-country trip, I did fine mentally, but Hibby did not. When we moved to Australia, she had some difficulties adjusting, but I had hoped that this time would be easier since she only had one flight (instead of three) and since we were reunited immediately (instead of after her 10 days in quarantine). But once again, she wasn’t eating, even when I bought her her own hashbrown from McDonald’s and even when I made her chicken and rice. And she wasn’t barking. At one of our Air BnBs, there were two dogs on the other side of the fence barking at her and she did not respond. Everyone who has ever met my dog knows this is weird. I took her to my friend’s vet in Kansas to make sure she hadn’t ruptured an ear drum or something on the flight (she hadn’t). The scariest moment was when she had what can only be described as an anxiety attack. I’m not doctor (well, I am, just not that kind of doctor!), but I’m confident in this diagnosis. She was lying on the floor in the living room at Lindsey’s house and, from the kitchen, I could see that she was trembling. I lay on the floor next to her and spooned her until she calmed down. Poor thing!

Once we got back to the East Coast and Hibby was in places she knew with people she knew, she calmed down. She’s pretty much back to her normal self (the geriatric version at least, which is slightly different than what her American friends remember!) But once we got back to the East Coast, that’s when mommy started feeling her adjustment difficulties. This is no longer an unorthodox road trip; this shit is real and permanent.

I’m really enjoying seeing everyone and revisiting the places that used to be a part of my normal routine – the Eno, the Farmer’s Market, the outlet mall… But treading water in Durham is challenging for a number of reasons. First, I am so over this job search. I recently received an email telling me to renew my Interfolio account (used for academic jobs), which means I’ve been applying for jobs for a FULL YEAR! Now, I knew that all those academic job applications would most likely amount to nothing (yup, I was right on that one), but they’re still a ton of work and all those rejections do weigh you down. And looking for a job when you don’t have one is a whole different level of stress than looking for a job when you do have one, but it’s just a job you’re sick of and want to leave.

Secondly, I have no home and don’t know when I’ll have one again. I’m couch surfing across America living out of my car (many thanks to all of the friends and family who have hosted us). How long are you in Durham, Mel? Dunno. In which state are you going to register the car? Dunno. What’s your address? Don’t really have one. I’m in this liminal space (now that I have a PhD, I’m legally required to use words like “liminal” and “interrogate”) with zero clue what comes next. Which is hard because I’m a planner … The move to Australia presented one logistical challenge after another (as I described in one of my first blog posts), but in many ways, this is even harder, because there’s no goal I’m chasing, there’s nothing to plan for. I left behind a life I love and a community I miss dearly (especially my two Labrador buddies!) for … what, exactly? Somebody just give me a damn job already so I can at least begin the process of building my new life!

As I put these thoughts on paper, I can’t help but think about all those poor people in the concentration camps at the border and on Nauru and Manus. My migration experience has been an incredibly privileged one and still it has been stressful. I’m feeling a certain level of despair about my future and it’s only been a month since I’ve been back in the U.S. I can’t imagine the utter hopelessness of being stuck on Nauru for five or six years. One thing I do know is that people do not decide to leave their entire lives behind on a whim. They are chasing something better with no guarantee they’ll get it.  Personal experience, a PhD thesis on migration, and basic empathy tell me that. All of this is to say that I am aware that I have it pretty damn good and I am aware that I sound self-absorbed, but I can’t help it. I want to go home ☹

[ultimatestudyabroad]

Thesis Aftermath

Thesis submission day was three years in the making, an endpoint you think of regularly for 1,095 days and yet, when the day came, I was a little surprised by how I felt, which I document here to inform others who are about to submit.

I’ll preface all this by saying that submission was not at all stressful for me. I acknowledge and am incredibly grateful for this. I didn’t have to pull any all-nighters; I was never worried about making the deadline. I even turned it in a day early. (There was a frustrating day of final formatting in there when Word and Endnote combined to exhaust my considerable vocabulary of swear words, but I had been expecting that…) Given my peaceable state of mind at the end, I wasn’t expecting how I reacted when I finally hit “submit”.

At Macquarie, we now don’t hand in a physical copy; we just upload the pdf. When I logged into the submission system, I got really nervous. I had butterflies in my stomach and my heart started pounding like it does before I give a presentation. I checked and double-checked all the drop-down menus and made sure I had uploaded the correct file. And then … nothing. I was alone in my apartment and Hibby was dead asleep on her back on the couch with all four paws up in the air. A little anti-climactic!

No matter! I cracked open my bottle of champagne and my thesis cake (chocolate!) that I had waiting in the fridge and sat down to watch Duke versus UNC. But then Zion’s shoe exploded 13 seconds in and the rest of the game sucked ☹ The rest of the day was pretty much normal. I slept off the 3/4s of a bottle of champagne I had drunk mid-afternoon during a lovely nap (Hibby joined me) and treated myself to dinner at our local Italian restaurant.

The next day was when I noticed that I felt off. I was meeting my supervisor for lunch, so I went to the movies in the morning, because it was Friday, I didn’t have no thesis, and I didn’t have shit to do! But when the trailer for the new Dumbo movie came on, I started crying. And while it is very sad that [spoiler alert!] they took Dumbo’s mommy away, this was very odd behavior for me! When the movie itself came on, things didn’t get much better. I watched Storm Boy, an Australian movie about a boy and his pet pelican. I bawled the whole way through! I didn’t know what was wrong with me! At the end of the movie, though, I felt so much better. Storm Boy allowed me to let out a massive wave of emotion that I didn’t realize I was holding in.

That night I had a bad dream. I was proofreading my thesis at the same time I was screaming at myself, “No, Mel. You’ve already turned it in! It’s too late. Stop the insanity!” In the first week, I slept a lot so, luckily, that only happened once. I was exhausted. I took naps every day, I had trouble making small talk (even with people I like!), and I struggled to get myself to leave the house even though I had fun things planned. Six weeks later (including a month traveling abroad), I’m still struggling with motivation. I feel properly bored – a nice, unusual feeling! My brain is slowly starting to turn back on, though; it’s starting to ponder history things again – projects for the future, books to read, etc.

To sum all this up, here are my pieces of advice for anyone about to submit based on my experience:

DO have a bottle of champagne in the fridge ready for when you hit submit!

DON’T commit yourself to whole bunch stuff the week after. Give yourself time to bum around the house in your PJs and nap all afternoon.

DO treat yourself to a spa day. That was indulgent and delicious and wonderful. I was watching GroupOn for months looking for a good deal (and then my wonderful friend bought it for me as a congratulations gift!)

DO go on holiday right after. Finances are tight, so that may not be possible for everyone (I was fortunate to be able to save up money from my casual job for this purpose), but a trip gives your brain a break and is a good disruption to a routine that won’t exist anymore. It wasn’t until I got back from my trip that I suddenly realized I had nothing to do and found myself wandering aimlessly around my apartment.

It’s hard to believe that the thesis is over. It was a huge commitment, a huge amount of work, a huge chunk of my life and now it’s done. I feel at once a great sense of accomplishment and a great sense of loss. The latter even more so since my academic job search came up empty (no surprises there) which means this very well could be the only history project of this scope I ever do. I have best intentions to try to publish another article and get my thesis turned into a book, but once I’m sucked backed into the world of 9-5 work, who knows if I’ll have the energy or time to achieve those goals? No regrets, though. I loved every bit of this PhD. Now, everyone just needs to keep their fingers crossed for those examiners reports!

[ultimatestudyabroad]

New Year’s Resolutions

It’s New Year’s resolution time! Like in 2016, I’m facing another year of massive change. So, the typical resolutions – work out more, lose weight, etc. – are completely unrealistic given the nomadic, unsettled life I’m about to lead for most of the year. But no matter – I’m not very interested in those things anyway! The goal for the year is abundantly clear to me; I don’t even have to stop to think about it. The goal is obvious: hang on the Aussie Mel.

I’ve written a lot in this blog about the personal goals (beyond the PhD) that drove my move to Australia. I was trying to effect a very real personal change that I wasn’t even sure was possible. Turns out it was! Though it can be easy to forget how far you’ve come, I’ve had things lately remind me of the life – more accurately, the mindset or way of being – I left behind. First, I experienced a mini-burnout. While busting my butt to get my revisions done and reach that penultimate draft, I was working seven days a week on mentally taxing work. I felt tired all the time, even when I first woke up. And I started having headaches because I was clenching my teeth at night. This brief spell of burnout was understandable and completely bearable. I was coming up on a major deadline for a massive, three-year project. I should expect to work hard and tire myself out doing so. (And, indeed, a nice 4.5-day weekend after I got the draft to the supervisors fixed everything!) So, I recognized the burnout, but wasn’t too worried about it. I did realize, though, that I used to feel that way all the time in my old life. Then, there was no final deadline that would provide relief. Just a perpetual state of exhaustion and tension.

I also recently read that great article on Buzzfeed, “How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation” by Anne Helen Petersen.* I consider myself too old to be a millennial; nevertheless, Petersen so perfectly captures the diffuse malaise I felt but couldn’t quite describe or explain, a malaise I could also sense in my friends and clearly identify in my students. The aim of the article is simply to acknowledge; Petersen doesn’t think it can be fixed – the structures of society are too against that. But as I read, I realized that I had fixed it; I had cured my burnout. I had to rip myself completely out of my life to do it, but I did it.

Now, I’m facing going back, facing putting myself back in that environment, back to where most people around me will be stuck in the mindset that they should be working all the time. My biggest fear about the coming year is not where I’ll end up, what kind of job I’ll get, or if I’ll run out of money. My biggest fear is slipping back into that place of perpetual burnout, of becoming American Mel again.

Hence the New Year’s resolution: hang on to Aussie Mel. The problem is, I’m not exactly sure how to. The forces Petersen describes and I used to feel are strong and so pervasive so as to be almost impossible to identify. So, how do you attack that when you’re in the middle of it? I half expect to find that I can’t and run off to another country in a few years. In the meantime, though, I have to give it a go.

But how? I’m struggling to come up with specific strategies and I’m open to suggestions if anyone has any! As I see it, there are two parts to this: what I do and what I think. Hopefully, if I manage both of those appropriately, it will carry over into how I feel. The first part is easier to control, obviously. I’ll need to budget carefully to make sure I have enough money for the things I want to do: vacations, shows, mini-trips. Since I’ll no longer have student loans and a house to pay for, this should be do-able. The hardest part will be corralling people into doing things with me. When everyone around you is stuck in the burnout fog, how do you get them to add something else – even something enjoyable – onto their calendars without stressing them out more?

Managing what I think will be much trickier, especially since my brain doesn’t like to shut off. I’ve got some tricks up my sleeve – meditation, mindfulness, gratitude journals, etc. – but will they be enough? I’ve changed my mindset, but my more positive mindset doesn’t get tested here very much. What will I do to interrupt the negative thought loop? What will I do when the noise is keeping me from enjoying something I actually want to do? What will I do when I’m sitting at my desk and I’m feeling my chest tighten because I know there’s no way I can ever finish everything that’s on my plate for the day? All of these things regularly occurred before I moved to Australia. I have to figure out a way to deal with them, but I’m scared I won’t be able to.

The stakes are high for my New Year’s resolution. If I fail, I’ll lose the happiness and contentment I’ve worked so hard to achieve. In addition to those stakes, I face the pressure of not really knowing how to succeed. But, I have no choice. I have to give it my all. Wish me luck!

* This article has gotten a lot of … well … buzz, even in Australia. They were just discussing it on The Drum. The panelists decided it didn’t resonate with them. And I screamed at the TV, “That’s because you’re Australian and she’s American! The two places are different!”

[ultimatestudyabroad]

The Home Stretch

I recently hit the “6 months to go” mark on my PhD, which – I have to admit – felt a little unbelievable. It doesn’t feel like I’ve been here for 2.5 years already! It also felt a little nerve-racking … but not in any way related to the PhD. The thesis itself is in really good shape and it will get done on time, no problems. I’m actually quite eager to finish it. Not because I’m sick of it or anything – far from it. I’m loving the life of a self-directed, full-time student. I’m just eager to see it all come together and bring this massive project to completion.

I’m also looking forward to living like an adult again. Not the working 8-to-5 in an office part of being an adult – hell, no! – but, you know, the having a reasonably-sized paycheck part of being an adult. And having a car. And a stove. And contributing to my retirement fund. And my friends not feeling like they have to say, “Hey, Mel, we want to go to X. Can you afford it?” Not that I’m living in abject poverty here. But still, the life of a grad student is a life on a strict budget.

What’s most nerve-racking about all this is that I don’t know what I’ll be doing or where I’ll be going next. Staying in Australia doesn’t seem to be a realistic option given that I would need a job willing to sponsor a visa and that would need to be lined up before my current visa expires. And as much as I love living in Australia, I just don’t feel in my heart that I’m willing to take on the visa stress in order to be able to stay. If something fell in my lap, I’d pursue it, but, in my mind, I picture myself leaving in the middle of next year.

Though I will of course miss Australia, getting the career I want requires me to leave. As I wrote in an earlier blog, I want to teach at a university and I would prefer the traditional American residential, liberal arts experience to the Australian model. And since so many people from home have asked what my plan is, I’ll tell you. I’m currently applying to academic jobs and fellowships, principally in the U.S. (though I’m open to other countries – provided they’ll let Hibby in, of course!) But these jobs are few and far between and notoriously difficult to get (if you’re outside academia and don’t believe me, here’s a taste of the job crisis), so I’m not holding my breath. If I don’t get any leads by April, I’ll start applying for admin jobs (at universities) primarily in North Carolina … or maybe even in Australia …

On the one hand, this is kind of exciting. Who knows where Hibby and I will be this time next year? On the other hand, everyone who knows me knows I’m a planner and this situation does not satisfy the planning part of my brain. I was planning this move to Australia for more than two years! Not always taking active steps, but doing the mental work of figuring out what to do with all my stuff … could I live on a grad student stipend in Sydney? … would Hibby be allowed on public transport? (No) … would I be able to manage without a car? (Yes) … Now, I’ve got another huge move on the horizon, but I can’t launch into figuring out the details, because I don’t know where I’m going! Admittedly, this move will be easier since 1. there’s no house to deal with, 2. the possessions were thinned out significantly the first time around, and 3. pretty much any other country will be easier than Australia to get Hibby into! On the flip side, I also know that, depending on where I end up, this move could be a lot harder because, the first time around, I benefited from tremendous support networks in both NC and Sydney.

So, I’ve been trying to distract the planning part of my brain by planning my post-PhD submission festivities instead : ) These will definitely involve a day at the spa and probably a Netflix binge in my pajamas. It’s also going to involve a lengthy vacay in Thailand.  

Beyond that, I’m trying to quiet my planning mind. I figured this out once and I will figure it out again. For now, I want to stay focused on enjoying my last few months in Australia.

[ultimatestudyabroad]

The Handmaid’s Tale

Warning: mild spoilers.

So, I’m completely obsessed with this show. In a way I haven’t been this obsessed with a show since The Tudors (naked Henry Cavill? Yes, please! Oh, those were simpler times…)

Last night, after watching season 2 episode 3, I sat stunned on my couch, as I usually do, unable to go to bed. So I did a quick google to see what the world thought of this episode. Had I missed any little details? When will I find out what’s happening with Fred and Serena, dammit?! And I found this article: “The Handmaid's Tale isn't a dystopian prophecy. It's a progressive cry for help.”

Now, I normally try to keep this blog a nice, happy account of fun cross-cultural experiences. Lord knows the internet has enough political ranting. But, this article has stuck with me. I can’t stop thinking about it. So, I need to work it out.

Damon Linker, the author, feels that liberals are getting their panties all in a twist (he uses the phrase “overwrought position,” but I’m paraphrasing), wringing their hands and worrying that The Handmaid’s Tale could come true. Which he says, is silly: “What the creators of the series are attempting to suggest is that the Trump administration could well be the leading edge of a movement that culminates in the complete overthrow of liberal democracy … That is, quite obviously, ludicrous.” Is it?

Linker points out some of the obvious ties to the present the show makes, but then dismisses those connections. Before I address his dismissal, I would like to point out a few more. I would like to kindly remind Mr. Linker that, in a deliberate choice by Margaret Atwood, everything in the book (and I know the show is now moving beyond the book, but stay with me…) has already happened to women somewhere. And as a historian, I would also like to remind him that the past repeats itself. He says liberals are scared the U.S. will become Gilead. Well, let’s think about that. Do liberals really think people will be escaping to Canada? They already are! Do liberals really think the staff of an entire newspaper would be massacred at work? The Secret Service had to escort Katy Tur to her car after a Trump rally! Do liberals really think police will menacingly walk around the streets carrying combat-grade weapons? They already are! And ask any black man in America whether he thinks it’s possible he could get shot arbitrarily (except for Kanye. Don’t ask Kanye…) Do liberals really think people will be convicted of “gender treachery”? The president wants to ban transgender people from the military and the vice president may be able to deny he ever supported conversion therapy, but, let’s face it, he’s no friend of the LGBTQI community. Do liberals really think the universities might be “purged”? I don’t know, ask Berkeley. (Then again, no purging might be necessary there. Just let neoliberalism and casualization continue to run amok and the universities might implode on their own. But that’s a different blog post…)

Maybe these examples don’t quite match the brutality of the world portrayed in Gilead, but it’s a difference of degree, not of kind.

Linker asserts that liberals think in terms of “historical inevitability.” They believe society will continue to progress in the right direction … until it doesn’t and then they despair that anti-progress, too, will continue unabated into dystopia. In a sense, he’s right. History is not a linear story. It’s two steps forward, one step back. One step forward, two steps back. But I disagree with his conclusion that we “have no choice but to learn how to live with one another in the moral muddle of the present.”

Because he’s making the opposite assumption: that progress cannot/will not be undone. In dismissing the connections between the show and reality, he says the U.S. will never become Gilead because we have gay marriage and large portions of the country agree on whether abortion should be legal in at least some circumstances, whether women need to be confined to the home, and whether incels should be condemned as limp-dick trolls. (the phrasing of that last part actually came from Jim Jefferies, not Linker). Yeah, and two years ago I would have said that pretty much everyone agrees that neo-Nazis are bad. And maybe pretty much everyone still does, but our president doesn’t.

This is the point June’s mom was trying to make in episode 3. We have to keep fighting. We can’t bury our head in the sand and assume everything will turn out ok. In terms of political consciousness, I was pre-Gilead June. I grew up in the 90s when everyone was making boat loads of money off this new-fangled thing called the internet and our president played the saxophone on the Arsenio Hall Show. Life was good. I couldn’t stomach the hypocrisy of politicians (still can’t), so I disengaged from politics entirely. I maybe voted in a presidential year, maybe… I turned my nose up at protestors. What was there to protest about? (A lot, it turns out.) Children of the 90s, remember this scene from PCU??

It is possible to recognize that progress is not linear – that steps backward will inevitably happen – and, at the same time, to fight. Fight not to lose the gains that have been made and fight for the next surge forward.

In conclusion, shit is crazy right now. And people who are genuinely concerned about that should not be dismissed as simply paranoid. If the world isn’t the way we want it to be, we shouldn’t sit patiently and wait for the pendulum to swing back; we need to smack that sucker hard in the other direction! So, Mr. Linker, that’s why progressives are crying for help. If June survives, maybe we will, too.

[ultimatestudyabroad]

What I don’t like about Australia

I think this blog has made it obvious that I love living in Australia. But there are some things I’m not in love with or I’m having trouble getting used to, so it’s only fair that I share those, too. I’ll start with the silliest/most frivolous and get more serious.

Food. On my first trip to Australia, the director of UNSW study abroad gave us a mantra to use during our experience: “It’s not wrong; it’s just different.” This is an excellent motto for travelling abroad. I try to live by it and I’ve shared it with my students. The specific example the director gave us to illustrate his point, however, was milkshakes. I hate to break it to you, Australia. Your milkshakes are just wrong. Milkshakes are made with ice cream! Here, a milkshake is just really cold, flavored milk. Like you made your strawberry Quick and put it in the freezer or something. When I complain about the milkshakes, Aussies tell me, “Oh, you need a thick shake.” Well no, thick shakes taste like you took a real milkshake and left it sitting on the counter to melt for a while before you drank it.  Last year, my good friends travelled to the U.S. on their holiday. And since I had been making such a big deal of the milkshakes, they thought they had better try these American milkshakes. The feedback? “Mel, you were right! The milkshakes are so much better!” Vindication! They had a milkshake almost every day they were there. Now, I’m not expecting milkshakes here to hit Cook Out standards – that would be completely unrealistic. But, man, am I missing good milkshakes.

And while we’re on the subject of food, I’m also desperately missing real bacon. The bacon here is Canadian bacon. ☹ I can buy my normal bacon – “streaky bacon” – at the grocery store and make it for myself, but do you know how many times I’ve been out at a restaurant and thought “a BLT with avocado? That sounds lovely!” or “I could really go for a bacon cheeseburger…” only to have my meal come out with a piece of freaking ham on it? So disappointing. There are most definitely Australian foods I will miss after I leave (gozlemes, laksa, and cheap, readily-available haloumi cheese top the list), but right now, I’m hankering for some milkshakes and bacon. And biscuits… And hushpuppies… And pumpkin mash in can (but let’s not go there or that will turn into its own post).

Other little random things I’m missing: Bath tubs. Online shopping with quick delivery times. Logically- and obviously-posted signs featuring the name of the street you’re on. Flies that politely go away when you wave your hand at them (as opposed to angrily dive-bombing your face repeatedly until you scream and run away. I mean seriously, why are the flies so angry?)

Television. My issue here is not so much with the quality of television. Yes, they have their fair share of truly terrible reality TV (and what is WITH their deep love of cooking competition shows??) But, the quality of the documentaries and news coverage on SBS and ABC, especially, is really top notch. When the government proposes a budget, they have a half-hour news special to explain it to the public. That’s crazy talk! Plus, they bring in good stuff from the BBC. No, my issue is with the regularity and predictability of the programming. You never know when shows are actually going to be on. And they’ll bring in a show for a few weeks and then it’ll disappear. They showed the whole last season of The Mindy Project in six weeks. I stumbled upon 2-3 episodes of Blackish, never to see it again. I don’t have a DVR here. How am I supposed to plan my television viewing?? #firstworldproblems.

Another little annoying thing: They use ‘inverted commas’ around quotes instead of quotations marks. This is completely nonsensical as the very function of quotation marks is revealed in the name! Anyway, moving on…

Climate control in buildings. Overall, Sydney has a very mild and pleasant climate. And yet, I freeze to death all winter because they don’t heat their buildings! It’ll be 58 degrees and sunny out (an objectively pleasant winter day), but it’ll be the same temperature inside. I’m grateful to my fellow PhD international student for knitting me some fingerless gloves. And if you think I’m just whining, read this article. Aussies tell me it’s because their electricity is so expensive, to which I have two points to make. First, the fact that electricity is so expensive in an area where there are 340+ sunny days a year and in a country that is 70% desert is an obvious governmental failing. Solar power, anyone? Second, let me introduce you to my friend called insulation (which is also decidedly lacking).

They don’t really do AC either (if they have it, it’ll be in one room), but the summer isn’t as bad (at least in Sydney). Sure, it’ll get up to 100 degrees a few times a summer, but it’s normally only for a day or two and then it cools down. Plus, it cools off at night (thus, answering the first question all my NC-friends ask: “How do they sleep?”) So, I can survive the summer with minimal whining. However, central heating is a beautiful thing.

Politics. There’s much I like about their political system. Tops of the list would be compulsory voting (you can’t selectively disenfranchise certain groups if everyone has to vote), the presence of more than two political parties, and the (comparatively) low amount of corporate money in their elections. But their politicians are dickheads. There’s a decided absence of intelligent, principled debate. Side A disagrees with whatever Side B says and refutes Side B’s stance by saying Side B is only acting out of self-interest. Reverse and repeat. Sound familiar? I keep telling people, this is what the U.S. was like about five years ago. And things in the U.S. went downhill fast. Fix it, Australia, fix it!

Immigration policy. This is my biggest complaint and not just because it affects me personally. My entire thesis examines how poorly working class immigrants were treated in the 1830s. (Did you know that? Have I ever mentioned that on this blog? Yeah, that’s what I’m doing here…) Australia lauds itself as a multicultural nation and yet has a long history of ostracizing immigrants. The major absurdity today is the policy of putting refugees/asylum seekers who attempt to reach the country by boat into off-shore detentions centers. Now, we can have a lengthy debate about the rights of nations to control their borders and whether this policy discourages people from taking such an inordinate risk in the first place. But when you repeatedly oppose New Zealand’s offer to resettle some of your detention center inmates and when your official policy for the Rohingya housed there is to encourage them to return to their home country (!!) … well, that’s morally indefensible. They’re not getting on a ramshackle boat in shark- and croc-infested waters just because they feel like a pleasure cruise. Some of them are escaping fucking genocide.

With all that said, I still love Australia. And none of this is to imply that I am blind to the many faults of the U.S. One place isn’t wrong and the other right; they’re just different. Australia is an awfully nice place to live and it will always hold a special place in my heart. But, I could so go for an orange push-up shake from Cook Out right now…

[ultimatestudyabroad]

Comparing American and Australian Higher Ed

Forgive me as I have been fairly slack on this blog as of late. My excuse is that I was teaching last semester and preparations for class plus grading took up a lot of time on the weekends. (As for the two months since the semester ended … well, my excuse for that is that I was writing a chapter of the thesis and my brain hurt too much to write anything else!)

So teaching may have taken time away from the blog, but it did provide some good fodder for the blog. I was teaching 20th century World History,  which involved a lot of U.S. content. It was fascinating to learn my own history from a different perspective (especially the Vietnam War), to see how my Australian students viewed that history, and to watch my American exchange students experience all the benefits of studying abroad.

But beyond my specific classroom, I’ve been reflecting on the similarities and differences between the American and Australian systems of higher ed, at least as compared to the version of American higher ed I’ve spent the most time in: traditional, residential, academically competitive colleges. (I should also note that I’m talking about the undergrad experience here. The postgrad set up is way better in Australia, I’d say. Maybe that will be a future post!) There are definite similarities, most strikingly the prevalence of mental health struggles and the anxiety over career prospects (the latter of which leads, in turn, to similar challenges facing the humanities). And, of course, the joys of working with predominantly 18 to 22 year olds (though there was much more age diversity among my Australian students than my Duke students) with all their enthusiasm, plain-spokenness and delightful naivete.

In some ways, the Australian system has some obvious benefits. First, admissions. For the typical, straight-out-of-high-school student, admissions is based largely on test scores. Each university has a minimum score for each of its majors. Now, I used to teach standardized test prep in the U.S. and am well aware that the only thing the SAT positively correlates to is socio-economic status, so my gut reaction to this was “ugh, that’s not good.” But, the HSC exams in New South Wales (the state where Sydney is located) are actually content-based, so they’re more like a final exam than multiple-choice hell. And, while you can feel the stress in the streets during HSC exams (or maybe I just notice it, because I spend time at the libraries where the high school students are studying!), the noticeable outcome of this system, from the top-tier, ultra-competitive frame of reference, is more relaxed teenagers. I’ve been doing admissions interviews for Duke and the kids I talk to here, have balance. They’re on the soccer team and have a part-time job in a café, but the rest of the time, they hang out with their friends! They do not have a list of activities longer than my resume for none of which can they tell you why they do it or what they get out of it. They haven’t been groomed since kindergarten for that all-important moment when they apply to every single Ivy League school. It’s so refreshing.

Next benefit: cost. Australians will complain about the increase in cost over the last few decades, which cannot be denied, but still, when they give me dollar amounts, I can’t help but snort and say “oh, you’re so cute. You think that’s expensive?? Let me tell you how much Duke costs…” (At Macquarie, course fees for domestic students run from US$5000-8500 per year depending on major, so it’s much more like an in-state tuition situation.) I have a friend who scheduled all her classes during her undergrad into 2 or 2.5 days so she could work the rest of the week, earning money to pay for living costs and course fees (oh, and by the way, the minimum wage is about 70% more than in the U.S. so this is actually possible), a practice which seems pretty common. And don’t even get me started on their income-based loan repayment system which is so beautiful it made me want to cry when I first heard about it. You don’t have to start paying off your loans until you hit a minimum salary level … and I’m pretty sure I had already paid off $30,000 in principal before I ever saw my salary hit the old minimum. (Naturally, the ridiculous conservative government here just made changes to that program – stay tuned for a future blog post on how much I hate Australian politics).

But for all these real benefits, there are drawbacks, too. First, I miss the liberal arts curriculum. Students here apply directly to their majors and, with most degrees at three years in length, have only limited opportunity/mandate to take courses outside their fields. As someone with almost twenty departments listed on her undergraduate transcript, I obviously value and enjoy exploration. And, I don’t think it’s fair to ask a high schooler who has never taken a university course to make a commitment to major...

Second, campus culture. Part of the way they limit their debt is by living at home. Which is great, except when you’re only on campus two days a week for two slammed-packed days of classes, it doesn’t leave much time for becoming involved in a campus organization or even forming friendships with your classmates. Accordingly, campus feels a little different. It’s hard to put your finger on, but it’s there. And for many students, their “friend group” remains their high school friends.

This difference has long-term effects in terms of loyalty felt to one’s university. It’s taken me a while to learn I shouldn’t ask people here “where did you go to school?” because it’s not a common question and doesn’t quite mean the same thing. The most noticeable difference between the two countries from an Australian’s perspective is how much we “wear” our schools in the U.S., which has been pointed out to me several times. Silly, perhaps, but somehow wonderful. I’ve had multiple people with Duke connections approach me in public places here just because I had some kind of Duke gear on me.

None of this is to say that one system’s right and one’s wrong; the study abroad motto is “It’s not wrong; it’s different.” And though the U.S. has got to get the spiraling costs of higher ed under control and though on my most negative days at work I felt like I was at a luxury sleep-away camp for privileged kids, I will say that I have a whole new appreciation for the best parts of the system: the camaraderie and life-long loyalty forged by the residential experience and the intellectual well-roundedness fostered by the liberal arts curriculum. So, as much as I love living in Australia, when I think about my preferred future career teaching undergrads (which I recognize is incredibly unlikely to happen given the current state of the job market), I’d rather be in the U.S. Looks like I might be coming home …

[ultimatestudyabroad]

You can’t just think your way into a new way of living. You have to live your way into a new way of thinking.

Michael Wesch, Life 101

[ultimatestudyabroad]

Halfway Point

I’ve officially hit the halfway point of my PhD. Is the PhD itself halfway done? Well… it’s only 25% written, but the primary research is about 75% done, so I think that evens out!

But anyone who has read this blog knows that moving to Australia was not just about the PhD for me. This was a full on self-improvement project.  So am I halfway through that?

Not too long after I got here, I saw a great Atlantic article by Timothy D. Walker called “The Bad American Habits I Kicked in Finland.” Which inspired me to make a list of “Bad Melanie Habits I Want to Kick in Australia.” So, let’s check in on my progress…

1.       Stressing myself out – I wrote a blog post on this topic early on and I’m pleased to say, I’ve made great progress here. I’m still oddly motivated by to-do lists, but I have learned how to keep  them a manageable length. And if my task list for the day doesn’t get done, I just let it go. Really!

2.       Replaying toxic encounters in my mind – While I still believe that venting helps you let things go, I had gotten to the point that conversations with friends were primarily bitch sessions about things at work. Walks with Hibby were a time for me to relive testy conversations or imagine future ones. They replayed in my dreams … you get the drift. Once I got here, I gave myself a mandate: if I started going back through a negative encounter, I had to stop myself and start mentally planning for the next trip I wanted to take. It’s working so far, though I will admit I have fewer negative encounters here to test me (I’m sure being unemployed has something to do with that! Work is so stressful…)

3.       Copping a ‘tude at people after the slightest rudeness – I feel like my default mode is friendliness, but if someone gives me the slightest bit of attitude, a switch flips and I become super bitch. Furthermore, that interaction will become a toxic encounter (see #2 above). I used to wish I had Maxine Gray’s ability to totally rip into rude people (where my Judging Amy fans at??), but now I’m working really hard to imagine that a rude person has just had a rough day, smile and move on.

4.       Saying “I should do that” and then not. (Or, more likely in Mel’s Type A world, turning down last-minute invitations to funtivities because I had a personal to-do list already in mind). Now, I’m a homebody and downtime at home is important to me, but I work from home so I really have no excuse for saying no to a glass of wine with a friend. And when I most likely have a limited time to live in such an amazing place, I need to get off my butt and do stuff! The limited-time-in-Sydney is a strong motivating factor. The trick will be to keep this up where ever I end up next…

5.       Avoiding interaction with strangers – You know how we are, we avoid eye contact. We see someone drop something and don’t help. But, I want to help that mother get her stroller on the bus. I want to tell the girl in line next to me that I like her dress. I want to strike up conversations with strangers. In short, I want to become my grandmother.

All in all, Australian Mel is making steady progress toward these goals, but the work continues! My hope is that these habits become so ingrained, they just become part of American Mel. So, I’m practicing. Because, as I heard on this really great podcast which so far only has one episode, “You can’t just think your way into a new way of living. You have to live your way into a new way of thinking.”

[ultimatestudyabroad]

Home Sweet Home

For all my concerns about going home that I discussed in my last post, I have to admit, I had a really great trip. I got to do almost everything I wanted to do, eat almost everything I wanted to eat and see almost everybody I wanted to see - most importantly, Bailey, my mom’s dog who has just turned 15 and whom I’ll probably not get to see again : ( But beyond who I saw and what I did and what I ate, it felt right to be home. Aside from walking on the left and therefore running into people at the airport, I didn’t experience any reverse culture shock. (Luckily, I reacclimated to being on the right before I had to drive!) Other than the host of new buildings that have magically appeared at Duke, it didn’t feel like I had been gone that long. In fact, just being out and about in Durham, I ran into four different people I know. I miss that. I love Sydney, but there’s something to be said about living in a smaller community, one where you’ve lived long enough that chances are you’ll encounter someone you know anytime you leave the house.

I was pleasantly surprised by my interactions with people I didn’t know. When I moved to Australia, I noticed a distinct difference (I felt) in the way people treated strangers. More friendly, more helpful, more coming from a fundamental assumption of generosity than suspicion. One quick example: I was in line to enter a show at the Opera House and a woman wandered up straight to the usher, bypassing the line, clearly not seeing the line and not sure where she should be going. As the usher took her ticket, she realized that she had cut the line and exclaimed “Oh, I’m sorry; I cut the queue!” The usher jokingly threatened to kick her out and a person in line said “You’re alright.” I commented to Sarah that the woman would have gotten a much less warm response in the U.S. (and I stand behind that opinion!) But, on my trip home, I had several very pleasant exchanges with strangers – from a snarky conversation about the news with the woman sitting next to me at the airport to a comical exchange with the salesperson at the airport kiosk who helped me figure out which adapter would fit my Australian phone charger.

I noticed a distinct difference in these interactions to what I remember from before I left and that got me thinking – the country certainly hasn’t changed, I don’t think. If anything, I’d assume it had gotten worse (see below). So, the difference must lie with me. I must have been projecting quite an aura of closed-off bitchiness before! I never thought “American Melanie” was unfriendly, but maybe that’s how I came across to others. Luckily, on this trip, “Australian Melanie” stayed with me; she didn’t go into hiding. That has been perhaps my biggest (personal) fear about going home at the end of the PhD. But the new me seems to be pretty well anchored already and I have almost two more years to make her even more so.

With all that said, I am aware of how incongruous my experience of the openness and warmth of strangers is with the fact that several hate crimes took place in America in the two-and-a-half weeks I was home. So, while I’m feeling more confident about the permanence of the personal transformation I had hoped would happen by moving to Australia, I’m still not sure how I feel about going back to the U.S. with the state it is in today. Most Americans wouldn’t consider leaving the country a viable option, but I’ve done it and consider it a real option for myself, even if Australia forces me to try out a third country. (Why does Canada have to be so cold??) We’ll see how I feel after the 2018 midterm elections happen and the gerrymandering in NC is corrected…

[ultimatestudyabroad]

Going Home

I’m about to go home for the first time since I moved to Australia. I’m both excited and nervous. I’m excited to see everyone, of course. And I’m excited to see just how many Durham restaurants I can eat at in 4 days (I’m going to be so fat by the end of this trip!)

But, I have no idea how being back is going to feel and that makes me nervous. By “feel,” I mean two different things. The first “feeling” is very much personal. I don’t want to feel the way I use feel pretty much all the time. Grouchy … stressed … discontented. I didn’t just move to Australia for the PhD; I moved for personal reasons, too. To find the better, happier version of myself. And I feel like I’ve made very solid progress on this front. It’s easier for me now to maintain a positive mindset. I’ve noticed changes – physiological changes – in the way I deal with stressful situations. Will I be able to maintain that in my old environment? Or will “American Melanie” (as my friends here have dubbed her) come back out? Now, you might be thinking, “It’s only two weeks – are you really afraid you won’t be able to stay happy for two weeks?” But, I’ve already noticed some negative habits of mind creeping back it. I’ve found myself falling back into that old habit of rehashing difficult conversations – both real and imagined – in my mind. Usually out loud while walking Hibby around the neighborhood! Isn’t that odd? I haven’t even left yet, but just thinking about my old environment is bringing back old habits.

The other “feeling” I’m anxious about is the bigger, more important one: I have not yet stepped foot in Trump’s America. I’ve had many people tell me that that makes me incredibly lucky. I’ve heard from American and Australians recently returned from America alike that the mood is very tense. If I was already stressed to the point of unhappiness before I left for Sydney, I’m quite scared to see how I might feel now. Can I imagine myself going back there? This is a particularly monumental question given that it looks like I won’t be able to stay in Australia due to the changes in 457 visas. Best-case scenario is that “Australian Mel” can go back “home” and the best parts of me will live happily with the best parts of North Carolina. This trip is going to give me some hint as to how likely that might be. I’m somewhat terrified of what I’ll find out.

Forgive me, readers, for I have subjected you to one of my habits of mind I’ve made less progress on: turning off my need to incessantly plan the future! Deep down, I know that I can’t divine what I’m going to feel until I go and feel it. I also know that where I end up next will most likely be out of my hands; it’ll be where I get a job. Still tough to stop thinking about it, though. In the meantime, I need to go home, enjoy the company of the Americans who mean the most to me and eat as much delicious, fattening American food as I can in two weeks. Biscuits… Duck Donuts… hush puppies… Cook Out milkshakes… Joe & Mima’s manicotti… Texas Gold margaritas from El Corral… yummmmmm…

[ultimatestudyabroad]

World Happiness Report

I’ve been spending some time reading and thinking about the recently-released World Happiness Report. If you’re not familiar with it, the report ranks 155 nations according to happiness levels. This intrigues me for several reasons. First, I’m curious about the methods sociologists and public policy folks use to measure such an amorphous concept* and second, I love the premise behind the whole enterprise: “Increasingly, happiness is considered to be the proper measure of social progress and the goal of public policy.” Indeed, T.J. asserted in the Declaration of Independence that the “pursuit of happiness” was our unalienable right, one of the rights governments were created to protect.

So how are we doing? Well, the news for the U.S. is not good. We’ve fallen from third in a precursor report from 2007 to 19th. We rank 103rd on the “change in happiness” list. The 2017 report found it necessary to devote an entire chapter to why American happiness is falling. That chapter opens with the “central paradox” of the modern American economy: “income per person has increased roughly three times since 1960, but measured happiness has not risen” (179). It says we always focus on raising economic growth to restore the American dream, but that is the wrong approach. Instead, we should focus on our “multi-faceted social crisis—rising inequality, corruption, isolation, and distrust.” (the entire chapter is definitely worth a read). 

In reading this, I was both saddened and oddly relieved. When I moved to Australia (which is tied for 9th, by the way), it wasn’t just about the PhD. It was about escaping this deep-seated unhappiness I felt, an unhappiness which didn’t make sense on paper. I believed in the mission of my job; I loved living in Durham; I wasn’t poor. But, I was just so stressed.  And everyone around me was stressed. And no one ever took vacations and it was hard to get people to do things because they were so exhausted from work. I thought the best thing for me to do was to quit that environment cold turkey. So, I moved to the land of “no worries, mate” and I’m working on becoming a better, happier version of myself. This report validates what I was feeling. It wasn’t just me. I was just willing to go to extremes to escape it. 

One thing the report drives home is that happiness is both personal and social. And this is what scares me about what comes next at the end of my PhD. Because part of me wants to go home. But another part of me worries that going back into a measurably unhappy society will erase the gains I’ve made in terms of personal happiness. It really is so much easier to be happier when, on the whole, the people around you are happier.  

Time for me to go into my historian zone: What this report really shows us is that happiness – like all social constructs – has a history; it experiences change over time. We’ve got data for five years now and, hopefully, the report will keep going and we’ll get more. I wish we had such data for the early nineteenth century. Historians debate whether the proletariat were better off due to industrialization, but they almost always focus on the question of standard of living. Meanwhile, it certainly seems to me in everything I read that, regardless of increased consumerism, they were much less happy. Sometimes, if they could, they even emigrated in the pursuit of “a better life” (Oh, shit, I might be stumbling upon my next book here! Stay focused, Mel B - must finish PhD first…)

Anyway, if happiness levels change over time, they can also be changed over time. It’s not easy, but we can assert some agency over our society. When I decided to leave the U.S., one of the things that bothered me was a sense of complacency in society. People weren’t all that happy, but either didn’t realize it or just defaulted to “this is the way the world is.” It may be naïve of me, but I’m clinging to the hope that we’ve hit rock bottom and that will motivate people to make changes. We can ask ourselves what will truly make us happier instead of defaulting to “more stuff, bigger house, nicer car.” We can do random acts of kindness for our fellow wo/man. We can be more involved in our communities. So what do you say, my fellow Americans, are you ready to be happier??

* you can dig into the specifics in the report, but they base it on measures of income, health and life expectancy, having someone to count on in times of trouble, generosity, freedom and trust (based largely on the absence of corruption in business and government.) Sound like good indicators to me.