Translocation event: finding a postdoc abroad 🇺🇸 ✈️ 🇪🇸
A few weeks ago, I successfully defended my PhD at UC Irvine and I am now preparing to make a big move for my next position. I will be relocating from California to Barcelona, Spain to start a new job as a Computational Biology Postdoctoral Researcher in the Single-Cell Genomics Team at the Centro Nacional de Análisis Genómico. This is the first in a series of blog posts describing my experience of finding a postdoc position in abroad. Throughout this blog series I aim to chronologically describe the entire process that I took, from identifying prospective countries, prioritizing labs of interest, interviewing, securing the working visa, moving, and settling into life in a new city. This post is the introduction to this series. I hope that some of this information is useful or at least mildly entertaining, but keep in mind that I intend for this to be about my personal experience rather than to be a step-by-step guide on how to find a postdoc abroad.
Why did I want to move abroad in the first place, especially considering how many good labs and jobs there are in the biotechnology industry in my home state of California? There are potentially too many reasons to list, but ultimately I wanted this move to align with both my personal and professional goals. While I have been fortunate enough to travel a fair amount, I have essentially lived my entire life in Southern California. There is a part of me that has always wanted to experience life in another city. California is generally very spread out, and most people that live here rely on cars to get to work or to do basically anything. I have been very fortunate in my time at UC Irvine to live a 15 minute walk from my lab, so I have essentially lived “car-lite” in California for the past five and a half years, and I really did not want to move somewhere that I had to commute by car on a daily basis. Despite its imperfections, its true that many people who grow up in California do not want to move to another state within the US, and this is certainly true for me.
When deciding on a new city to move to, you have to weigh the pros and cons of different regions against each other and determine your own priorities in where you want to live. It is hard for me personally to rationalize enduring the weather of the northeast US like Boston or NYC, even with the abundant career opportunities and better urbanism compared to Southern California. I will discuss more about my priorities in an upcoming post, but I ultimately selected Barcelona as my top choice because of the weather, culture, beach access, well connected metro system and generally great urbanism, as well as a vibrant and growing research environment in the biological sciences. In the next blog post I will discuss in more detail about what my career goals were after completing my PhD and how I prioritized locations and labs for my postdoc.