It’s been an interesting week or so at work. Being a new faculty member can be a bit of a challenge anywhere, I imagine, and getting used to the changes from being either a Post-Doc or even a student can be overwhelming at times. I’m not sure how it is for anyone else who has been in this type of situation, but I feel sometimes I am having difficulty trying to integrate into the department. I feel that became abundantly clear this week.
I can’t really go into any details about what happened or anything, but a massive change is underway in the Geodynamics Research Center on many levels, and it is the kind of change that is unprecedented at Ehime University. Some people are leaving, some others are having their positions changed, and some of those position changes come with physical location changes. 95% of all this is on an administrative level, and deals very little with the research and education roles of the GRC. Still, it’s something that will change how things run around here in many ways.
So imagine my surprise last Friday when I came back from City Hall after doing a load of paperwork for Emi, and I find everyone in the conference room having a meeting. Every faculty member associated with the GRC was there.
Except me.
I had a lot of thoughts going through my head as I saw this, and even more thoughts over the weekend. I know I have felt a bit like an outsider on the faculty here, which is understandable as I am the only foreign faculty member in the GRC. I get most official emails and can’t read them. Because of this, I either don’t know about University meetings, or when I do, I am lost because I don’t speak the language. I’m trying to learn as best I can, but I’ve never been very good with languages, and Japanese has almost nothing in common with English, which makes it even harder.
There is a very cooperative research environment here, with many faculty members having strong collaborations with each other in their research programs. I have had a bit of difficulty getting involved in that. I feel at times that people are more than willing to help me with my research, but when it comes to theirs, I find myself on the outside looking in. I am hoping this is because of the simple fact that I am new and haven’t had time to integrate to a great degree yet, and not part of the outsider feeling that I get at times.
I met with the bossman today, and had a really good, if brief discussion about some of these things. Unfortunately, he was preparing to head to Tokyo, so we had to table the discussion until his return later this week. He told me that it was his decision to leave me out of the meeting due to its sensitive nature, and that he intended to fill me in about the events that led up to the meeting and the results afterward. He gave me a brief overview, and I’ll get more details when we talk again later this week. He did put my mind at ease a bit, and I’m hoping that talking candidly with him about these feelings and such will help me get past all this and become better integrated in the department here.
Any advice or personal experiences that anyone is willing to share would be greatly appreciated.
On a more upbeat note, I will be giving a presentation to the 3rd year undergrads here on the 14th about my research program. All of the GRC faculty will do the same over the next week or so, and on October 22nd, the students will choose the faculty member they want to work with to do their undergraduate thesis research. I met with two students today and gave them an overview of the experiments I do, and the equipment and such that I use in the lab. The meeting went fairly well, but at the end of the discussion, they were more interested in asking me whether or not I really liked Heavy Metal and Karaoke like they had heard.
It seems my reputation precedes me.
One thing I am nervous about is the language barrier. I know that the students I met with today were rather shy about using English, even though they understood probably 90% of what I said. I fear that many of the students will write me off completely because they don’t want to deal with the language issue. One of the other professors here told me that I shouldn’t worry too much about it because I am kind of like a rock star to these kids, and I give them a unique opportunity to work with someone from another country, practice their English skills, and work on research projects that are unique to our group here at the GRC. I am hoping that he’s right.
We’ll see how it all plays out in a couple of weeks, and in the meantime I’m keeping my hopes high, but realistic. So much to do, so little time. No rest for the wicked awesome.
Until next time, peeps.
-Matt