Over the years, I’ve taught and done research in a number of locations outside of the United States, including Pakistan (Islamabad and Lahore), India (Delhi and Mumbai), Egypt (Cairo), France (Paris), and Germany (Bonn). I often get questions from colleagues back in the U.S. about how I found my positions, and then also queries about the logistics of spending a substantial time outside of the United States. While this is obviously a long conversation, and one highly contingent on one’s personal circumstances, I thought I would spend a little bit of time here discussing some of the more general aspects of all this. By way of context, this semester I am Visiting Faculty at the Shaikh Ahmad Hassan School of Law at LUMS (university) in Lahore, Pakistan. If you have any particular questions about spending time at this academic institution, or anything else I discuss in this post, feel free to email me or ask your question in the comments section below.
The first question many people usually ask me about my overseas academic position is “How did you find your position? How can *I* find a similar position?” If you’re a comparativist like myself, it’s not difficult to be networked internationally—indeed, you have to be to do your job. But for others, finding a place outside of the U.S. to spend a semester or year can appear to be a daunting challenge. My first response to this kind of query, then, is usually to recommend doing a Fulbright. Indeed, I first taught at LUMS 13 years ago while I was in Pakistan on a Fulbright and have remained, to this day, a friend and intellectual interlocutor with many people that I met during that time.
There are a lot of good things about the Fulbright program—it tends to favor people with little to no experience in the host country, thus providing a crucial opportunity for international/comparative newbies—and just a couple of bad things, namely: 1) You have to apply very early (make sure get your ducks in row for the summer/August application deadline), and 2) It takes the Fulbright bureaucracy a very long time to decide on recipients (be prepared to be waiting into April or even May for final confirmation of your award).
If a Fulbright sounds a bit logistically too complicated for you, another good way to broaden your overseas network is to participate as a faculty member in any study summer abroad program that your school runs. And while you’re in Europe, or South America, or Asia, make a special effort to find out about regional conferences going on while you are close-by, and make sure to attend a couple. You’ll very likely find new collaborators and colleagues at these events. American legal academia tends to be insular and provincial, and it will generally be difficult to find foreign opportunities and interlocutors unless you are actually overseas.
Once you’ve gotten your position lined up, then comes 1001 logistical issues. In what follows, I’ll try to list the issues that are the most pressing (or have been for me, at least). Here goes:
1) Immigration. What kind of permission do you need to live in your host country? Do you need a visa to enter? Do you need a long-stay visa? Do you need to make an in-person trip to the closest embassy or consulate to arrange for all this? In my own experience, for one French sojourn, I had to travel to Chicago from Saint Louis to deposit my passport in person with—and also give my fingerprints to—the French consulate there. I then got my passport mailed back to me within the week; in it was a special visa authorizing both my entry and permission to apply for a residency permit once in Paris—another story in itself. For Germany (also part of the Schengen visa area), the process was much easier, with no pre-departure trip to a consulate necessary. At the time I was there, Egypt gave visas upon arrival at the airport; these could be indefinitely extended one way or another. Pakistani visas used to be easy to get; now they are difficult; hopefully they will be easy to get again some day soon. Non-tourist visas for India are similarly unpredictable. In any event, figure out your immigration situation ASAP—the process of applying for/receiving a visa could take months. The rules governing your situation may also be entirely unclear, so try to get in contact with other foreign nationals working at your academic institution to see how they went about getting their visa. The earlier you start on this, the better; if you start too late, you may not be able to take up your position overseas.
2) Housing overseas. Does your host institution provide you with (furnished) housing? What is it like? Will you be isolated? Are there other options? How far are they from campus? How do you go about find housing generally? I’ve never had difficulty finding adequate housing during my trips overseas, but if you have to go about finding it yourself, this will probably take a month and maybe two. In both France and Germany, I lived in furnished apartments that I found via online services. Paris apartments were pretty easy to find—with numerous websites dedicated to renting furnished, medium/long-stay apartments; these websites were also in English!—but in Germany, the situation was significantly more difficult because the city I was staying in was not a major European commercial or tourist hub and my German (at the time) was nearly non-existent. In both Cairo and Lahore, I have been provided with very nice, apartment-style university housing. All of this becomes a bit more trickier if you have children you are bringing along, or if you or someone else staying with you has a mobility impairment (navigating a narrow staircase up several flights of steps in Europe is something to consider in either one of these situations).
3) Housing in the homeland. What are you going to do with where you normally live? If you have a mortgage, how do you keep up payments on that while paying rent overseas? If you rent, will you (can you?) sublet? How much will storage/movers cost? I’ve never owned the place where I’ve lived in the United States. So, for me, it has always been more vexing to decide what I am going to do with the place where most of my crap is, than it is to decide where precisely I am going to live overseas. My present venture overseas saw me end my lease and put my stuff into storage in Saint Louis. For the previous significant sojourn abroad (in France), I was able to make a deal with my landlord to pay 30% of my normal rent during the several months I was going to be gone. It was worth it to them not to lose a good tenant, and it was worth it to me not to have to think about moving. In any event, different strokes for different folks, but this is a significant decision for most people I know.
4) Health insurance. Some countries require you to show proof of health insurance in order to get a long-stay visa. Others include you in their national system (and make modest deductions from your paycheck for it) automatically. Some don’t care at all what your coverage is, but you probably will. In short, then, investigate your health insurance options. Some U.S. university plans cover overseas care; for others, however, ‘out of network’ has an unstated (yet enforced) domestic requirement. As well, don’t forget to get full supplies of any prescriptions you need before you leave the country; you don’t want to have to deal with all that in a language and price-structure you are unfamiliar with (unless you go to India where you will be pleasantly surprised by the price of high-quality generics).
5) Shipping books/research materials. There’s no way around this: this is pricy. From the U.S. to Europe, the best option for most people will probably be the U.S. Postal Service. But long (long) gone are the days of the special ‘book rate’ for shipping (as are long gone the days of affordable excess baggage). The best deal then is to send via the normal international USPS rate, which will get your books and materials to your destination via plane relatively quickly (no longer than a week). So, get familiar with usps.com; you will want to fill out all the customs forms online, pay and print your postage electronically, and not have to do this at your local post office (where customer service will be poor and confusing directions will be impatiently shouted at you). Oh, and pack your books and papers in sturdy plastic bags before putting them in sturdy boxes. French customs has torn my boxes open with what appeared to be a sword (and then delivered my boxes to my French address in that fully dilapidated condition); Pakistani customs was more refined and even sealed the boxes back up with wax and rope (yet the boxes arrived from overseas via ship and arrived in a fairly damaged condition); the Germans manually (and carefully) open the boxes in front of you at special customs depots where you have to go and personally collect your international shipping.
And on the other side, the situation varies wildly (e.g. in Delhi, I ship my books using a local bookstore who specializes in these kinds of shipments), but make sure to look for a book rate and understand the rules (e.g. weight or packaging limitations) that come with this subsidized shipping rate.
If this all sounds like a lot to deal with, it certainly can be. But it gets easier to anticipate the issues, and manage them adequately, each time you spend a significant amount of time teaching or researching overseas. This is the subject of another post altogether, but one also hopes that the policies and infrastructure of U.S. academia will change over time to make it easier for individual faculty members to manage some of the above issues. In any event, please don’t hesitate to email me individually with questions or to post your queries below. Eid Mubarak from Lahore!
A couple of more thoughts. 1) In most expat heavy locations, there are groups - often oriented around trailing spouses - that provide ready made networks and massive amounts of on the ground information. When we lived in Madrid, it was the International Newcomers Club, which I believe is in many locations; here, it is the Shenzen Women's International Club. If you are headed overseas and need to sort out neighborhoods, schooling, realtors, special dietary issues, health care, etc., these can be fantastic resources. They can also provide on the ground mentoring and fellowship for trailing spouses who are largely outside the work group, which can be nice as some trailing spouses can find the whole process more difficult than does someone who arrives to a full set of welcoming colleagues. 2) In some locations, you might want a virtual private network on your computer. In China it's necessary to access certain sites, but in other countries it helps if you want to access resources where copyright or security concerns limit access from overseas - e.g. Amazon streaming (last I checked Netflix sniffed out the VPN and blocked access from outside the US even with one, but not Amazon) and perhaps your bank or credit card company (again, Citi sniffs out the VPN and blocks all access from southeast Asia even with a VPN but apparently not Chase). 3) A little bit of the local language is better than none - even just being able to tell a cab driver to stop or turn left can make a big difference. If you don't have the language already, getting a start before you come can speed things up if you arrive, but you will need to be sure that you get the pronunciation right from the beginning so you don't spend hours drilling yourself on the wrong way to pronounce things.
Posted by: Ray Campbell | October 06, 2014 at 08:49 AM
Ray: Thanks for your comments. I would particularly endorse learning some of the local language(s) before arriving. Germany was the only country for which I didn't do that and I struggled linguistically for that. English is not as common as purported.
Posted by: Jeff Redding | October 07, 2014 at 08:23 AM