Te Ao Nui

The non-graduate-student members of the department are gradually starting to drift back in from their winter holidays (the university shuts down for a month, but most grad students take about a week off, if that) to a slightly-more-snowy-but-not-really Massachusetts.

We have also been upgraded to Really Expletive Cold (a.k.a Too Cold To Go Outside Unless You Have No Other Options.)

Our lab has expanded precipitously in the last six months; over the summer, when one of my labmates was away for six weeks, it was possible for me to go days at a time without actually talking to anyone else in the department, despite being in the lab during regular working hours every weekday, because I was the only person in the lab. Since then we’ve picked up an exchange student, a new (to our lab) PhD student, a postdoctoral researcher, last year’s two undergrads returned for the fall semester, and a new undergrad is going on trial this spring. (Working with me. You may all sympathise. With him.) It’s put something of a premium on desk space, but is otherwise working excellently.

What is remarkable, though, is that even with this expansion, and although I am living in the United States it is also quite possible for me to spend a day at work without talking to an American. (See, sure; have a conversation with, no, if the extent of seeing is “passing in the corridor”.) The undergraduate population of UMass is overwhelmingly domestic, but the graduate student population – especially in our department – is highly international.

This isn’t that surprising, because science is, inherently, an international field. Your research may be most similar to someone at an institution on another continent. Your research may be done somewhere far-flung from your institution, for that matter; I remember that one of the biology lecturers at Canterbury studied African forests, and our lab’s main field site is off the West Coast of the US, thousands of kilometres away. It’s certainly common to go a respectable distance when you’re studying, or teaching. I got grilled by my Honours supervisor about why I wanted to stay at Canterbury for another year instead of going somewhere else. When I finish my PhD and move to postdoctoral positions, they will almost certainly be outside New Zealand.

The flags of all the countries from which people have come to our lab (except for NZ, Sweden, and South Korea, because we're lazy and haven't put them up yet.)

Between seven people currently working in our lab, we cover five continents. Our department covers them all, except Antarctica. (And Australia, technically, since the sole Australian postdoc returned home, but I’m going to call it “Oceania” and say I cover it.)  The vast majority of the faculty and a solid majority of the students are American, but it’s pretty mixed.

The positive in this is that there is always someone up for a round of What Were They Thinking (most common theme: healthcare, followed by visas). It also means that I’m not just being exposed to American culture, but a whole number of them; I’ve learned about what sort of sweets Swedes make for Christmas (tasty ones), how often it snows in South Korea (about as much as NZ), and how expensive magazines are in Swaziland (very). And it makes for some seriously impressive spreads when we hold potluck lunches or dinners, across the department or within the lab.

It also lends itself to a curious sort of banding together; we may have backgrounds less similar to one another than we are individually to Americans, but we share the experience of being Not From Around Here (actually, on that score, the Americans in my lab are in a strict sense Not From Around Here, but that’s not quite the same thing.) And if you want to look at it another way, it takes a certain level of socio-economic privilege to be able to come to America for a PhD or Master’s degree; we also all share the experience of being, relatively, in the top something-very-small-percent of the world’s population. Wherever we’re from.

Ultimately, I think, this is a good thing for America, in terms of the cultural dominance it achieves by being a centre of scientific research and training; we may be coming together from a whole range of countries and occasionally bonding over not being Americans, but we’re interacting through American culture – and, obviously, with American students as well as fellow international students. There are no more than two or three students in our department from any one country; day-to-day, we can’t retreat to our own cultures even if we want to.

I like this part of scientific culture, of being a student of science. Even if I wasn’t part of the Fulbright program – which obviously encourages and entails a lot of cross-cultural interaction – the international nature of science would still be part of my life. To go on to graduate study in the sciences, you have to have at least some innate curiosity about the world. When you’re headfirst in research, it can be easy to let that shrink to whatever small part of it you’re studying. (Because we rarely have time to read even the work that’s relevant to our studies, let alone other areas.) Working with people who differ from you in fundamental cultural ways keeps you paying attention to the greater world. And I like that, a lot.