Winter travels part 4: Hawai'i

If you're counting, yes, this is my fifth trip this winter, the third trip that involves crossing the Atlantic. I've seen a lot of films on aeroplanes now. This wasn't a trip I had anticipated making, but I got a call inviting me out to Hawai'i for a job interview! (All travel costs covered, of course.) This wasn't totally out of the blue -- I'd applied for the job, and I'd had a preliminary Skype interview, but there are usually so many applicants that the odds of being invited for an in-person interview are very low. So, it was time to pack my bags!

As you may know, my contract here in Paris ends at the end of August, so I've been looking for new opportunities. As I explained in my post "What is a postdoc?", my goal is to get a permanent position in teaching and research. That'd be a "lecturer" in the UK, an "assistant professor" in the US, and a "maître de conferences" in France. The Hawai'i job is an assistant professor job, so it's a big deal if I can do it right.

It's nearly 7,500 miles from Paris to Hawai'i (that's nearly 12,000km), and that's plotting a straight line. There are no direct flights from Europe, so you have to fly via some major hub in the US (or in Asia, which is slightly longer but doesn't make that much difference). All told, it was about 24 hours from takeoff in Paris to landing in Honolulu. The time difference from Hawai'i to Paris is 11 hours.

The Sans Souci State Recreational Park. Yep, sans souci is French for "no worry".

Given all of that, I decided to arrive in Honolulu on Monday evening, which gave me a couple of days to adjust my internal clock before my visit formally began on Thursday. Academic job interview visits in the US are fairly intense. In this case, it involved meeting one-on-one with each faculty member in the department (for 30 minutes to an hour), presenting a research talk to the whole department (faculty and postgraduate students, plus any other interested parties), teaching a (real!) class as a demonstration of my pedagogical methods, being formally interviewed by the entire faculty of the department, meeting with the dean of the college, meeting (and being interviewed by) the postgraduate students, and then also going to dinners with various faculty members in the evening. It's a real marathon, designed to test your skill and aptitude as a researcher and educator, and also your collegiality and ability to get on well with others. Those extra days were crucial for me in de-fogging my jetlagged brain, and also in allowing me time to explore the island and investigate what it'd be like to live there. This last part was especially important as it's not a temporary position, so any relocation to Hawai'i has the potential to be permanent.

Of course, you don't want to know the details of the interview process -- you want to know what was Hawai'i like?

A view of Honolulu. The hilly crater in the distance is Diamond Head. Buildings on the left are part of the university campus.

Well, it was quite lovely, especially in contrast to Paris in February (rainy, cold, dreary). It was apparently a little colder than usual when I visited, but I didn't notice. Since records began in 1877, Honolulu has never been colder than 11C (52F) or warmer than 35C (95F). It's usually between 23C and 27C year round (73F to 81F), so it's extremely pleasant.

A lovely tree at Kailua beach. Hawai'i has lots of lovely trees.

Some miscellaneous observations:

• Everyone wears flip flops.
• No-one is in a hurry.
• Apparently there are centipedes and flying cockroaches. (I didn't see any myself.) They lurk.
• I had been in Hawai'i for three days before I heard a car sounding its horn. (You might get three minutes in Paris if you're lucky.)
• A quick scan through some radio stations while driving revealed chamber music, reggae, Japanese punk rock, Korean slow jams, and surf rock.
• This will sound strange, but the closest point of reference I have is New Zealand. Hawai'i is like New Zealand, but tropical and American rather than temperate and British.

There are several dramatic cliffs with secluded beaches below.

The island of O'ahu, where Honolulu is located, is about the size of the isle of Skye in Scotland, and is home to about 950,000 people. (Skye has 9,000 people.) This means that it can be pretty crowded, especially in the city; but it also means that you can find most goods and products that you need, like any major city. You will pay a lot of money for them, though. Most cost of living indices put Honolulu at about the same level as San Francisco or London, just behind New York. It's not cheap to live in paradise.

Part of this is because most goods must be shipped in on planes or container ships. At more than 3,000km from the closest continent, Hawai'i is by some measures the most isolated archipelago in the world. Unlike the isle of Skye, there is no convenient bridge connecting you to the mainland.

A panorama of the Mānoa valley, the neighbourhood where the university is located.

Even with the extra time I built in, it was a whirlwind trip. I was able to tour around Honolulu and some nearby places, but there's only so much you can do and see, especially when you're fighting an 11-hour jetlag! The 11 hour time difference also made it difficult to stay in touch with Talia. We'd talk in the mornings and evenings while we were both awake, me sharing stories of banana trees and mangos and her sharing stories of baby poops and interrupted sleeping. Before I knew it I was on a plane back to Europe and home in sunny Paris.

PS, I got the job! I start in August.

Winter travels part 3: Christmas, Scotland (and Texas)

Following on with my recap of our winter travels (see part 1 and part 2), we went to Scotland over Christmas. This trip mostly consisted of Maëlys meeting friends and relatives for the first time.

Great Grandma Turnbull with Maëlys.

Ken, a family friend, with Maëlys.

Me, Maëlys, my cousin Kathryn, and her daughter Jess. Jess is two days younger than Maëlys!

We've been to Scotland many times before, so we didn't do any sightseeing or anything. Strangely, it was unseasonably warm for most of our visit. I think it was about 12C (52F) on Christmas day. It's usually somewhere between 2C and 8C (35F and 46F), and doesn't get into the double figures until March.

Sunrise! At 8:30am. Gotta make the most of those 7 hour days.

It was great getting to see everyone and I was strangely proud when "showing off" Maëlys to people. A little like an enthusiastic schoolchild showing off their class project, "I made this". Except better! She seemed to enjoy the attention too, and wasn't afraid to meet new people as babies sometimes are.

After Hogmanay, I left for Paris, while Talia and Maëlys remained in Scotland. After three days I was leaving for Texas, for another conference (in Austin). We had originally intended to all go to Paris together, but Talia decided to stay in Scotland with my parents rather than be in Paris alone with Maëlys, which was a sensible decision, I think. Of course, my parents were thrilled to get to spend more time with their favourite granddaughter!

I had a couple of days in Paris, which was enough time to unpack and re-pack and to digest Julien Barnes' excellent novel The Sense of an Ending. Then I was off to Austin, Texas for a linguistics conference.

I don't have any pictures for you from Texas, I'm afraid. I was travelling light so I didn't take my camera, and I was in fact travelling so light that I forgot my phone charger, so I don't even have phone camera pictures. In any case, I spent most of the time at the conference hotel, so there isn't much of interest to report. It was in fact unseasonably cold in Austin, also around 12C (52F). I understand that normally it's more like 20C (68F).

It was a good conference, with excellent scientific content and good opportunities for me to meet other academic linguists, new and old. Still, I was very happy to get home, this being the longest I'd ever been away from Maëlys. It was also good to be stationary for a while after all this travelling.

Stay tuned, one more "winter travels" post to go and we'll be all caught up!

Winter travels part 2: Milan

The alps, as seen from my plane.

As Talia alluded to in a previous post, almost immediately after we got back to France from the USA I left France to go to Italy. Specifically to Milan, for an academic conference where I was presenting a paper. The timing was a little unfortunate, as it meant I was abandoning an exhausted Talia with a grumpy jet-lagged baby in the middle of Paris. I was jet lagged too, but I didn't have to deal with a baby...

A tram scoots through one of the medieval city gates. Not pictured: Roman ruins, ornate basilicas, Italians.

Instead, I had to deal with trams, mopeds, and medieval architecture. And excellent coffee.

Traffic.

Speaking of coffee, and food, on my very first morning I went to a local bakery that had been recommended to me for breakfast. I walk in, and the conversation goes something like this:

Baker: [some greeting which is neither buon giorno "good morning" nor salve "hello" (or even ciao, the informal version).]
Me: Buon giorno! Non parlo italiano. ["Good morning! I don't speak Italian."]
Baker: Ah! [stream of Italian, very quick, wherein he explains what each of the baked goods on offer are made of, what they taste like, how they're cooked, etc.]

It's not strictly true that I don't speak any Italian -- I was able to piece together the gist of what he said via my knowledge of French and Spanish -- I was amused by the knowing look he gave me, and by the fact that he very kindly explained everything to me, the confused foreigner, in Italian.

It's not that I expected him to speak English (especially as Italy is one of the most monolingual countries of the EU!), but I thought he would at least slow down, use simple phrases, or something. Maybe point at a bun, say cioccolate, molto bene, 'chocolate, very good', something like that.

In any case, if you must know, I ordered a cappuccino and a chocolate brioche. They were both molto bene, although the brioche was covered in powdered sugar and was quite messy.

It turns out that Italians aren't great at French either:

It should be "crêpes".

Apart from the food and the conferencing, my main activity in Milan was wandering the city and examining the architecture. Lots of churches of various shapes and sizes!

The famous Duomo cathedral.

Another angle on the Duomo.

The tower of the Basilica of Sant'Eustorgio.

All in all, it was a pleasant break from my usual routines. The conference went smoothly and my paper was well-received. I was very happy to get home to Talia and a sleepy baby, though.

What is a postdoc?

Today's post is for everyone wondering "what is Rory actually doing in Paris? What is a 'postdoctoral researcher' really?" Since you asked the question, you get to learn about the wonderful world of academia and higher education.

The answer is, on one level, quite simple, but also quite complex as there are many caveats and exceptions. The simple answer is that a postdoc is a form of temporary employment for people with PhDs, which allows them to gain extra training and experience before (presumably) moving on to a permanent position as a professor.

For the longer answer, we have to consider the traditional career trajectory of someone with a PhD. This trajectory is roughly (a) get a PhD, (b) be hired into a professorship. (By "professorship" I mean being hired as an "assistant professor" in North America, or as a "lecturer" in the UK. The positions are broadly equivalent. (Confusingly, "lecturer" in the North American context has a different meaning.)) However, there are two problems with this traditional trajectory:
1) There are very few professorships, and quite a lot of people with PhDs
2) Some fields of knowledge are so very specialized that even after getting a PhD, your knowledge is not complete or effective enough to do groundbreaking original research.

So, as a partial solution, a "postdoctoral" period of additional training is common. Postdoc positions are very diverse, but traditionally they involve working with a mentor (usually an established, famous researcher) on some new project that is related to but not the same as your previous research. Along the way, you will learn new skills, theories, and frameworks, and acquire valuable experience in writing up research articles and supervising students. Some postdoc positions involve working on a specific, pre-determined project, some are open-ended. Some positions involve a little (or a lot) of teaching, to postgraduates or undergraduates, while some have no teaching. Some involve a lot of committee work, organizing, and managing, while others do not. Some postdocs don't even have an explicit mentor.

In some fields, such as the natural sciences, doing a postdoc is all but mandatory if you want to stay in the academic game. (In natural sciences, there are also a lot of job opportunities for PhDs in private industry, so that's where many people go instead of professorships.) In the humanities, postdocs are somewhat rarer. In the social sciences (like linguistics and cognitive science), they're fairly common. Postdocs also appear to be more common in Europe than in North America, although I think that's more to do with the volatile nature of higher education funding in Europe than an actual cultural preference. Indeed, it's not uncommon for academics in Europe to be sustained purely through research funds acquired from grants, rather than through a direct contract from a university. They're still affiliated with a university, but their salary comes from a research foundation (usually funnelled through the university, who skim money off the top so they can pay their electricity bills). This kind of precarious academic situation is becoming more common, and all it takes for them to face unemployment is a few failed grant applications or research budget cuts. It's scary.

So, postdocs are really diverse. What's mine like? Well, I have a supervisor (or a mentor), and together we are working on a project that is largely of my own devising. I do not have any teaching responsibilities, although I've been informally mentoring some master's and PhD students, and I'm otherwise free to pursue my research in whatever way I like. All in all, it's a great position, and very conducive to learning new skills, getting papers published, and making me more attractive for landing that coveted professorship job.

What do postdoctoral researchers actually do, though? For me, there is a lot of variability in my day-to-day activities. Here's a rough outline of the sorts of things that I do:

• Attending discussion groups. Someone may seek expert feedback on a research proposal or a draft presentation for a conference.
• Meetings. Yes, you can't escape meetings, even in higher education. Meetings with collaborators to discuss our projects (and assign tasks and keep people on schedule); meetings with students to review their progress; meetings with the whole lab to discuss administration; meetings with visiting scholars to talk about their latest project; and more.
• Reading articles. Staying up-to-date on the current state of the field is very important - new findings are always being published, and new methodologies and techniques developed. I spend a lot of time simply prioritizing what I need to read closely, what I can simply skim, and what I can ignore. There's a lot of good science out there!
• Designing and planning experiments. This can be a long process and is often one of the most varied aspects of my job. It can involve making recordings, combing through dictionaries for words with just the right combinations of sounds, creating huge spreadsheets to make sure your designs are "balanced", tweaking hardware to ensure that stimulus presentation is correct and that responses are accurately recorded, learning new programming techniques for presenting stimuli, and more.
• Analyzing data from experiments. This part can also take a while, depending on how much (or little!) work I did in the planning stage. This usually involves a lot of statistics and a little programming. For many experiments, acoustic analysis is also necessary (and invariably tedious).
• Preparing presentations to give at professional conferences. Sending work-in-progress for consideration for presentation at conferences is all part of the job. The feedback you get at conferences can really improve the work that you do, and the personal connections you make with people can be really important too. Before the conference, of course, many hours are spent perfecting the presentation - you only have your audience for a brief time, so you have to be sure that you convey your message well.
• Writing (and re-writing) articles for publication in scientific journals. This is a big part of the job. Academics are judged to a large extent on the quality (and quantity) of their publications. Finished articles are sent to a journal, who sends them out to reviewers (other academics) who write critical reviews of the article, saying whether it's good enough to be published. Usually, it isn't, and they demand particular changes - incorporate a particular theory into the discussion, run another experiment, change the statistical analysis. Sometimes they simply reject the article as inferior. It can be a slow, gruelling, and soul-crushing process. Still, getting published and contributing to humanity's understanding of the world is pretty great.

I won't do all of those things in a single day, but they're all things I do. There's usually a fair degree of overlap - while I am planning my next experiment, I'll also be analyzing the data from the previous experiment, and writing up the results from the experiment before that. My job is self-directed and generally very flexible, which is great in some regards. It also means it's easy to procrastinate or skive, so I usually try to impose a fairly rigid structure to my days with clear goals so that I actually get things done.

I definitely enjoy my job, but there are times when I wish the system were simpler, or that the process of proving your worth as a researcher didn't involve so many hoops to jump through. Still, that discussion is probably better saved for another post. Sorry for the lack of pictures today. Next week, we'll be talking about Rouen (in Normandy), so you have that to look forward to!

One month!

Today is a month since we moved to France. We haven't actually spent the whole month in France - we've been to Belgium, and taken a couple of trips to Scotland (and England, technically) - but today is a month since we moved.

So, what has happened in that time? Here's a run-down:

Work

I've started work. Being a postdoc is hard - harder than being a graduate student - and adjusting to a new environment with new colleagues is difficult but rewarding. Foremost among these differences, apart from, y'know, being in France, is that I am now in a cognitive science department, while I got my PhD in a linguistics department. So I've gone from being at the cognitive end of studying language, to being at the linguistic end of studying cognition.

Previously I had colleagues who wondered about why "John ate", "John ate the steak", and "John devoured the steak" are all fine English sentences, but "John devoured" is not acceptable. Now I have colleagues who wonder about how the mammalian auditory system represents acoustic information, or human metacognition under attentional load, that sort of thing. Well, we do more than just wondering, but I'll spare you the discussion of experimental research methodologies in cognitive science.

Apartment

Our apartment is set up and we're living just fine. We might do a little furniture rearranging or adjusting while we settle in, and we could probably do with some particular kitchen items to help us cook specific recipes, but the basics are all there. It's rapidly becoming a home.

 

Necessities of modern life

Bank accounts, library accounts, ATM cards, phone numbers, we have all of these. We've figured out the transport system and can navigate easily. Talia doesn't yet have her carte de sejour (residence permit), but that's a long process. We also don't yet have our cartes vitales (a card which entitles you to healthcare), so I'll probably need to chase up someone in HR at my work. French bureaucracy is somewhat labyrinthine so I'm not entirely looking forward to it.

 

Friends

Friends! Friends are good. We've met up with a few people we knew before we moved, not to mention seeing people on our trips to Belgium and Scotland. We went to a Bahá'í feast the other week and met some local Bahá'ís, which was really great. We have more friends-of-friends on the horizon who we will be meeting soon, too. I've always found making friends hard, especially when moving to a new place, but the effort has always paid off.

Language

Our language skills have improved a lot since we arrived. Well, Talia's have at least. She's been making her way through all sorts of complicated interactions in French just fine. I've been a little slower, partly because my work is more or less in English, and because I've not been trying as hard. I'd better catch up!