Working Scientist podcast: Global career moves, and how to survive them

Julie Gould:

Hello, I’m Julie Gould and this is Working Scientist, a Nature Careers podcast. This is the second part of our series on careers in physics, where we’re focusing on transitions.

In this episode, I’m exploring geographical transitions and I’m particularly focusing on the story of an astrophysicist whose academic career so far has straddled the UK, US, Canada and Japan twice. So, how do the countries’ research cultures and institutions compare and how do you prepare for an international career move, particularly to countries where you don’t speak the language and turn that to your advantage. So, Elizabeth Tasker is our story for today. She’s an astrophysicist and science communicator at the Japan Exploration Agency (JAXA) at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Sciences. Her interest in star formation in galaxy discs started during her PhD, which was both at the University of Oxford in the UK and the University of Columbia in the US, and then followed her through two postdocs – one at the University of Florida and a second at the Origins Institute based at McMaster University in Canada. After the two postdocs, she decided to take the opportunity to work in Japan. Now, it wasn’t a decision based on a whim – she’d actually previously spent four months on a fellowship out there and had fallen in love with the country. So, I wanted to know, are the working environments very different when comparing the different physics departments that she worked in? Let’s start with Florida.

Elizabeth Tasker:

Obviously, in Oxford and indeed Columbia, alligators are not much of a problem, whereas in Florida, any drainage ditch was a concern – it could honestly contain a man-eating reptile, so that was a whole new ballpark to contend with.

Julie Gould:

Did you have any encounters with a man-eating reptile whilst you were there?

Elizabeth Tasker:

They were on campus. They really are incredibly common. It’s not that Florida just has alligators, I mean Florida has alligators everywhere.

Julie Gould:

But what about when you compare these to Japan? Elizabeth moved to Tokyo in June 2009 for a short-term four-month fellowship.

Elizabeth Tasker:

The US, The UK and Canada, they’re not the same country and they definitely have differences, but we share a history and we’re cut from the same cloth. So, there’s obviously a common language that is widely spoken and it’s generally a different sort of handful of words as opposed to any major difference between languages. Whereas Japan, obviously, the language is very different, the culture was very different, and I actually felt that I’d travelled somewhere and really was seeing something different and I love that. I loved going to the temples and shrines, and these were sort of side by side with incredibly modern architecture like soaring skyscrapers and huge TV screens and really the two extremes of very traditional and very modern.

Julie Gould:

And what about the working environment? Did you notice any particular differences that you found either challenging or interesting?

Elizabeth Tasker:

On the whole, universities operate pretty similarly, I’ve found, across the world. They have the same range of graduate students and postdocs and faculty, and people meet together and give talks and we’re all publishing in the same journals because astrophysics is a sufficiently small field that you do need to all publish in the same journals and share your work. So, despite the level of English being sometimes a little mixed, everyone was still writing in English because they had to publish in English for their work to be seen worldwide.

Julie Gould:

She enjoyed her time so much that she wanted to come back.

Elizabeth Tasker:

And I said to the person who was helping supervising me, can I do this, and he said you can. He said the problem is that most foreigners in academia in Japan are postdocs. Because we typically teach in Japanese, we don’t hire many faculty members and at this stage I was about to enter my second full postdoc and ideally would be applying for faculty jobs after this. So, I was left with a choice. I thought do I do a third postdoc by choice as opposed to by necessity and try and go back to Japan, or do I decide that going back to Japan permanently is not really an option and look for a career in North America or Europe. But just as I was coming up to that decision, I was entering near the end of my second year at McMaster University where the job market was starting to loom on the horizon, I actually was contacted by Hokkaido University, which is a university on the northern island of Hokkaido in Japan in a city called Sapporo – most people know it for the beer – and they emailed me and said, ‘Actually, we are looking to hire a native English speaker. We’re starting to introduce more English courses in science and we want someone to teach in that language. Would you be interested? We’ve asked around and your name has come up as someone who might be prepared to drop everything and move to the other side of the world.’ And I said, ‘Yes, you’ve come to the right place. I would definitely be prepared to do that.’ So, I applied for that position and I got it. So, actually, that summer in 2011, I moved to Hokkaido and began an assistant professorship at Hokkaido University there.

Julie Gould:

This transition came with many challenges – one of which was obviously the language barrier.

Elizabeth Tasker:

It was one of those things, I was at Hokkaido for five years, and things got a lot better over that five-year period. By which, I don’t mean that I wasn’t welcome or that I didn’t enjoy myself but in terms of the support that was easily available, that increased a lot over the five years. I was not the only foreign faculty by a long way, but I was part of the first generation really to come to Japan as foreign faculty and therefore it was generally up to the people in your group to support you which was obviously, ultimately successful but certainly had its problems. Our head of group was a very kind person. He was very supportive of me but he was not fluent in English and so we had some problems like when I taught my class, no one gave me a syllabus, which I personally thought was important, and I said, ‘Don’t you mind what I teach the students?’ I got a kind of vague, ‘Oh, it’s first year physics.’ I’m like, but could we be more explicit about what you want me to cover and then I would ask, ‘Okay, so what is the level of the students? What have they covered before? What have they covered since?’ and no one was really up to explaining that to me. So, in the end there was only one way to find out – and I apologised deeply to my first class and that was on my first or second lecture – I put up maths questions and I waited for them all to fail because I needed to know at what point I needed to start teaching the mathematics and at what point they already had it down. And I explained this to them and they took it in very good humour, but no one was able to sit down to me and say, ‘Look, by this stage, we expect students to have covered the following things. This is what we expect in a first-year physics course.’ It was very much oh, here’s a class, you work it out.

Julie Gould:

Did the students speak English at a level well enough for you to teach them?

Elizabeth Tasker:

They did. They didn’t always believe they did. Generally speaking, I found the issue with the students was one of confidence and on the whole, their reading and writing was greatly better than their spoken English, so as a result, I designed my lectures with PowerPoint presentations which many people say they hate – and I confess, as a student I didn’t really like these – but what I found with teaching in Japan is that it was very important to be able to follow the class through reading the slides and not rely on understanding at speed what the lecturer was saying. So, I used a lot of diagrams, a lot of pictures, movies where I could, and I made sure all the key points were on the slides. And it’s not true that nobody failed my course. It is true because I went and talked to students who weren’t doing so well that nobody failed because of the level of English. They failed because they were lazy and not doing the homework.

Julie Gould:

Well, that happens everywhere I think.

Elizabeth Tasker:

Exactly.

Julie Gould:

One of the things that I hear a lot from academics is that having a support network of peers and people in your field is incredibly important. This becomes tricky to form when you move to a new place where you don’t speak the language, where you don’t know the working culture as well. So, how did you put together a network for yourself when you moved to Japan?

Elizabeth Tasker:

Nowadays, the internet makes the world a much smaller place. So, for example, I’m very keen on Twitter. I like it a lot and I used it in lots of different ways. I would say one of its strengths is following up-to-date news, so I see a lot of news stories flash by and if something really big is happening like, for example, when Rosetta dropped its Philae lander on Comet 67P, Twitter was fantastic for up-to-date news from lots of different sources and those sorts of live events are very powerful. But the other way I use Twitter is that it’s a little bit like sitting in the office with people from around the world. The tweets I really appreciate are ones from people, who I may have met in the past or maybe I only know through Twitter, tweeting about a problem they’ve got in their research or just day-to-day problems with applying for grants, and you can also reach out in the same way and say, ‘I’ve got this problem with my code. Anyone have any ideas?’ and the Twitter science community is very good at responding to that and making you feel that your part of a very international community.

Julie Gould:

Well, as well as the language and setting yourself up with things like phones and bank accounts, were there any points where you thought that things were becoming a little bit too challenging and a little bit too difficult for you in Japan?

Elizabeth Tasker:

I could probably say the worst thing to happen to me and that was the closest I came to walking out, and that was actually, I’d received a very big grant from MEXT – our educational government – that was supporting young faculty members. It was an incredible award and I was really proud to have it, but although I completed the application in English, the details of how the award worked and functioned were given to me in Japanese and at the time, that wasn’t being handled by our new office of international support. For whatever reason, the full details of the award were not clearly explained to me in English and the small print that I missed was that as soon as I tenured – that is, I moved from assistant professor to associate professor – the award would end regardless of whether I’d got to the five-year period. So, it was whichever came first – either five years or tenure – and I didn’t realise that. I thought it was for five years and I hired two postdocs with the promise that I had three years funding for them and after they accepted, it turned out I only had eighteen months before my tenure review. I was really, very, very upset by this because I’d signed on to work in Japan knowing there would be some problems, so when random things happen to me like I didn’t really know what the maths level of my class was and things like that, it is kind of what I signed on for so I was like yes, Elizabeth, this is annoying but let’s face it, you asked for it. When it affects other people, especially their careers, it was really hard to cope with. I was very, very, very upset and quite angry, and I felt that people hadn’t really understood why I was so upset, which is maybe not true – it may be that people were very embarrassed and therefore they didn’t really express themselves terribly well. And in the end, it all worked out okay. I explained to the two postdocs who I’d made offers to that this had happened. They were actually very understanding and they both still came and they both went on to positions afterwards, very good positions, so that was very fortunate, but it was the closest I came to saying this is not okay and I’m going to leave.

Julie Gould:

Wow, I can only imagine how frustrating that must have been at the time. So, what happened in the aftermath? Did the students stay on or did the system change to support you in the future?

Elizabeth Tasker:

So, the fallout for that was I contacted the international support office and I basically said to them, ‘This wouldn’t have happened if you’d be handling this grant because you would have checked the details,’ and they said, ‘You’re right, currently grant handling is not in our jurisdiction. It’s not what we’re supposed to be doing but we should be doing it. This is a classic example of why we should be doing it,’ and they liaised on my behalf and I said to them, ‘The only way we can go forward is if you take over my grant management,’ and they arranged that. They really did their best for me and they went to the people who are currently handling the grants and said, ‘We know this was an honest mistake but actually we could have avoided it. Let us take over from now onwards.’ And they did, which is why I had the confidence going forward that this mistake would not be repeated.

Julie Gould:

What did you do after the students left? So, they stayed for 18 months and you had your tenure review, so what happened there?

Elizabeth Tasker:

Right, so, at that stage I had calmed down a bit because it had been 18 months and everything had been going very smoothly, and I had my tenure review and I passed and I became associate professor at Hokkaido, and shortly after that, I left for JAXA but I didn’t leave for negative reasons. I left for positive ones. I was happy at Hokkaido but I’d started to do more and more science communication writing. So, I had my research and my research programme was good and I really liked my students, they were doing really well, but I love writing. I really feel very passionate about it and I really enjoy doing it, and for me, taking a topic that is very hard or maybe has a rather incomprehensible research paper attached to it and being able to explain it so that you don’t need six science degrees to understand it is immensely satisfying. I really enjoy the work and Hokkaido had supported me in this. I had written for their alumni magazine a few feature pieces and then I said to them, ‘Look I’m enjoying this but it’s only coming out once a year and that’s not enough. Can I set up a blog where we walk round different departments and I do interviews with faculty and they tell me what they’re doing?’ And they were very open to this and they said, ‘Absolutely, you go ahead,’ and it was great because I got to go into different departments. I mean like most universities really across the world, departments operate really as independent islands, so you get a bit trapped in your department and you don’t really get to see what other people are doing. But now I had this bona fide excuse for contacting people and saying, ‘Yes, I know I’m in the physics department and I’m an astrophysicist, but I heard you talk about bears – can you tell me about bears?’ And I would go and interview these people. But as time went on, Hokkaido had plans to expand the courses it was teaching in English and in theory I was very supportive of this idea, but in practice slightly anxious about my teaching load, and I was worried that I would have to teach a lot more and the time I was using for scientific communication would be reduced because it wasn’t an official part of my job. So, I was just starting to look for other places where I might be able to make science communication actually part of my job, and around that time, the Japanese Space Agency advertised for an associate professor position in their departments, and it was a positive discrimination position – they would like either a woman or a foreigner, and I was like well, I tick all those boxes. So, I wrote to them and I said, ‘My research is theoretical modelling. It’s not a terribly good fit for any of the JAXA missions but I’m really interested in science communication. Would you consider my application?’ And they wrote back and said, ‘Yes, we would consider it. Write to us and make your case.’ And they called me down for interview and I talked to them at length about some of the plans for outreach and research, and then in October 2016, I started my job as associate professor at JAXA.

Julie Gould:

And since then have you been able to do the amount of science communication that you are keen on?

Elizabeth Tasker:

Very much so. If you have read anything about our asteroid explorer – Hayabusa 2 – in the news, somewhat perhaps indirectly, you are going through me because I do a lot of the translations for the press releases, the news articles. I am @haya2e_jaxa on Twitter and I’ve also written a lot of articles directly with our mission manager, Yoshikawa-san, on the mission for the media and for Nature Astronomy and various other outlets. It’s been absolutely fantastic to be part of such a team.

Julie Gould:

So, for anyone considering a transition to a vastly different culture with a language difference, here’s Elizabeth’s advice.

Elizabeth Tasker

Roll with the punches a little bit. I mean sometimes, occasionally things happen that are really, very infuriating, like the problems I had with the funding and the postdocs, but there’s going to be a lot of miscommunications. You’re not going to be able to communicate perfectly with everyone unless you are fluent in Japanese already, and then even if you are, sometimes the cultural differences mean there’s still some misunderstandings because you’re just picturing slightly different scenarios. And I think you’ve got to be prepared to shrug your shoulders a bit and just say, you know, this is what I signed up for and okay, my students don’t have textbooks and I was assuming they would, but we will manage until they arrive, and just explain and people will understand and try and not panic, I think.

Julie Gould:

Thank you, Elizabeth Tasker. Now, in our next episode as part of this careers in physics series, we’re exploring another type of transition, from physics to data science. It’s a topic I’ve been keen to explore, given that physicists are often coveted by industry for their skills in data science. But now there are so many more people graduating from data science-based undergraduate degrees, so is there still a place for physicists in this industry? I speak to Kim Nilsson and Deepak Mahtani from Pivigo about their science to data science training course, and to Lewis Armitage, who’s made the move from theoretical particle physicist at CERN to data analyst in industry. Here’s a sneak preview.

Lewis Armitage:

If you’ve shown that you’ve actually been able to take data and produce results from your data and then interpret that data – and the key thing is to interpret – then that would really be the thing that puts you above because physicists have really good critical thinking skills. But then being able to justify that for a data science position, it really depends on the position and it depends if the data science position is actually a half analyst position. If that’s the case then the critical thinking will come in immensely.

Julie Gould:

Now, don’t forget you can always find out more about what Nature’s Careers team is up to on Facebook and on Twitter, and there’s of course the website – www.nature.com/careers.