Moving On

Last year I reviewed ~40 papers, published a book, got involved in shipping an IBM product, did a SIGMOD tutorial, mentored two interns and a post-doc, interviewed at 8 places, applied for a Schengen visa 3 times, I dreamed about potentially moving to 6 different cities … I know I should consider it a pretty good year. Going through it, though, was quite messy.

It is no secret that I am not a big fan of Bay Area. It is a great place for many people. It makes me want to sing Martha Wainwright’s Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole. I liked working at IBM Research Almaden, but I never felt like I could live in Bay Area long term. I constantly thought of possibilities outside Bay Area, entertained some options in the US, mostly failed. Until early 2017, though, I didn’t really take serious action to go on another interview cycle.

This interview process felt very different than the one I did toward the end of my PhD. The following was what I tweeted after my interview cycle back in spring 2014.

a month of interviews, finally done. feels like a post-rock-music-festival; physically wasted and super tired but it was extremely fun.

I remember feeling like a champ after those interviews despite the fact that some of those interviews were failures as well. In contrast, last year, after some of my interviews, I felt like maybe I should quit computer science altogether, and do something else with my life. 

The biggest difference was that when you are interviewing as a last-year PhD student, it is something that everyone expects you to do. It is public knowledge that you are interviewing. Your PhD advisor and academic siblings support the time you spend for your interviews. When you interview as an adult, most of the time, you have to do this in secret, and you have to still keep doing your current job. At the end of the week, it feels like you have 1.5 jobs.

The other difference was inertia. As we get older, we accumulate more of it. I understood the meaning of Massive Attack’s Inertia Creeps last year as well. In Switzerland, I was living like I would leave the place from almost day one. Here, I kind of knew I didn’t want to live in Bay Area in the long term. However, I still wanted to give it a chance and feel less detached compared to my time in Switzerland. I spent some effort to make San Jose feel like home. In addition, I do have some really close friends and colleagues in Bay Area (some of whom I know from Switzerland) who are family to me at this point. As a result, it was harder to break some daily routine to allocate serious time and energy to prepare for and go through the interviews.

The final difference was most of the interviews I did were pure industry interviews this time rather than academic and research lab interviews. I didn’t want to restrict my options since there aren’t tons of options if you want to do something related to core database systems in English in Europe outside UK. :) I am not as good at pure industry interviews mainly due to the coding interviews. I should have prepared better for them. However, I remember at several of those interviews I was asked what my favorite part of my job at IBM was. In each of them I think I gave an answer similar to “dealing with the interns”. Maybe academia is just a better fit for me anyways.

I would like to thank all the folks who has shown me constant support this year despite me sometimes acting like the character described in Green Day’s Basket Case. Especially, Fellow Musketeers, Twin Sister, Academic Sister, Partner in Crime, Greek Bro, Queen Bear, and Illegitimate Daughter.

I also would like to thank my ex-managers at IBM, Guy Lohman and Fatma Özcan, for prioritizing the happiness and growth of the people manage. I let both of them know my feelings toward Bay Area. They both did their best to guide me while trying to find a solution that would be good both location- and career-wise.

If you had told me in January 2017 that I would be preparing a year later to move to Copenhagen as a prof, I would have thought you were joking. I initially didn’t think about moving back to Europe. After all, it is easier to be an immigrant for me (someone who carries a Turkish passport) in the US than in EU (even under Trump’s rule :)). So spending some effort to figure out where I can relocate within the US made sense. I wasn’t initially looking for academic positions either since my previous attempts were neither successful nor encouraging. After I expanded my search to Europe, I also was initially just looking at Central Europe since it is more familiar territory to me. Today, I am extremely happy with this much unexpected end result. 

I am well-aware that it is going to be difficult initially. I am changing both countries and the type of job I am doing. I don’t have any best friends in Denmark yet. In addition, I do know that I have my fair share of integration problems. I didn’t ever ski in Switzerland, I never bought/leased a car in Bay Area, I don’t like hiking still … I am amazed how some people adapt to the habits of the local people easily. I am quite stubborn. I don’t like changing my habits much based on where I live or other people. I rather search for things and people that allow me to be my existing self. I had the same issue back in Turkey as well, so this isn’t related to being a foreigner. I wonder how this would play out in Denmark. We will see.

This reminds me the following from Stephen King’s Doctor Sleep.

“There came a time when you realized that moving on was pointless. That you took yourself with you wherever you went.”

Moving on gives you another chance to retry with whatever you learned from the previous move, though.