My experience as a PhD candidate living abroad

The beginning of the year 2018 was busy for me: I got married, moved abroad, and started my thesis, everything in less than four months. Such an intense change was difficult at the beginning, but, since I was very motivated, my adaptation was more or less quick and smooth.

Living in a new country is already something challenging by itself. There are many aspects of life that we usually take for granted that aren’t so obvious anymore, like what are the laws we should follow, how the health system works, what are the taxes we should pay, etc. I must say that these questions got me a little stressed at the beginning, especially because I didn’t speak French at the time, making it difficult to get accurate information about how the country works.

I lived for nine years in the hot and sunny city of Belo Horizonte, in Brazil. This is where I went to the university, and also where I got my first job. I must say that I liked living there, and the population of over 2 million people didn’t seem a lot to me, I guess I got used to the traffic. Even today I still have an inevitable emotional connection with the city and the people that live there. But Orléans is completely different: it is cold, rainy and it has a population of a little more than 100 thousand people. For me, the way to deal with such a huge change in lifestyle was with a lot of sense of humor, enjoying the experiences, and being open to the new culture that I was about to discover.

From a scientific point of view, it was really important for me to change my perspective. I have the impression that, when we spend a long time working and studying at the same place, we risk becoming blind to other alternative ways of thinking, missing the opportunity to learn something useful just by being in contact with people that do things differently.

My education on Mechanical Engineering in Brazil followed mainly what I guess I can call the “North American school of thought”, which has a more practical way to approach the theories of mechanics, but that requires us to make assumptions that are not always clear (at least for me). At that time I didn’t even know there was another way to solve the problems I was going to face during my career, until I came to France and was exposed to a more mathematical, almost philosophical, way of working, but that, in the end, also leads to very practical results.

I’m really happy to have come to France to work and study, and, three years after I started, I have learned a new language and have been through experiences I’ll never forget. Yesterday I heard from my uncle something my grandmother used to say, and I think it fits perfectly in this context: we need to be like butter in a pan. When things start to get hot, we simply adapt to whatever shape it has and fill all the spaces.