Tag: life

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The Language Barrier

Some background information first: I am a foreigner in Finland.

It happens so, from time to time, that when people from my home country are considering a PhD abroad, particularly in Finland, and they somehow know me (directly or through mutual friends), we get into conversations about the pros and cons, the good and bad stuff, the easy and tough parts.

One of the FAQs include the language question.

In my two years here, I have not yet come up with a good short answer. Is there a language barrier in Finland? No, but yes there is. Or more like, yes, but apparently not.

I find this to be one of the weird things about my whole experience, and I never imagined that the “language barrier” would play out quite like this.

Back when I was on the other side, and I was gathering information on different aspects of adjustment, and asking people and disentangling information from the internet webs, I was told that English is fine! Almost everybody speaks English and there are no problems. They are, of course, right.

Ask me and I will tell you that of course you can survive and move about fine with just knowing English. Heck, I have myself done it for almost two years now. But I will also tell you that despite this, there is, in fact, a language barrier in Finland. And because of this, the existing language barrier is never acknowledged. I will also tell you to not take this too seriously and this is probably kind of fine-print information (not to mention, everyone has different experiences and what might feel like an ocean to me could be just a drop in the bucket for other people).

Now, I have come to realize that my methods of adjustments rely heavily on the language. In a new place, it helps to know your boundaries and how much you can dive in appropriately. And, being potentially awkward questions to ask directly, how does one get this kind of information otherwise? By observing one’s environment and noticing the interactions between already-established people in the “culture” (read: by overhearing conversations).

That ways you know if you should just keep it work-related, or if you could joke around a little bit and share light-hearted, other-workly information. And as you put together your own big picture, you see where you can and cannot fit in, in what aspects will you be limited yourself, and if you can establish a state of equilibrium with your environment.

In case there’s a “language barrier”, you are cut-off from this very important source of information. And in case of Finland, where, as the internet says, people don’t talk, or don’t like to talk, or whatever it is actually that they have with the act of talking, this effect is magnified.

So when they are talking among themselves, what is it really that they are talking about? Just work, probably? Or that’s how you start off, more or less.

Now, in my two years of observing and speculating and trying to put together the pieces of my yet-incomplete puzzle, I have reached the conclusion that the Finns do talk, at least, but they are probably not always talking about work. Though still not sure how much. Also not sure if they have a gossip culture and office politics. Also not sure how much is appropriate and how much isn’t. To some extent, I can tell which people in my environment are more friendly and which are not as friendly with each other, but I cannot say how much friendly those people are with each other.

So, yes, there’s a language barrier in Finland that nobody is ready to acknowledge because, of course, everybody speaks English, and what needs to be communicated is being communicated. Survival prospects of internationals are actually pretty nice, even if they are not up for learning the language.

Another way that this language barrier is amplified is when you are sitting in a group and the already-established people just kind of forget you are there and start conversing in their local language. The feelings of exclusion can be tremendous and these can be the main moments where you truly experience a “culture shock”. Still, I assume this is relative to what culture you are coming from and what your host culture is. I expect that in more social and inclusive host cultures, this might not hit a new person so hard (if they feel included in other aspects in their environment).

(Older posts on culture shock: here and here).

There’s only one way I have found around this, so far: Learning the language, irrespective of if you are good with communicating in English only, and even if you are not planning to speak in your new language. Having now taken two Swedish courses, I can tell at least when they are talking in Swedish vs. Finnish. Also, recently I realized that while I can still not understand what the already-established people say while talking among themselves, I can finally get the gist of what is being talked about.

Most importantly, if you are in a gathering and they forget you and start talking among themselves, it at least becomes interesting to try and understand what they are talking about, or you can just imagine it as your usual Swedish listening practice.

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How To Science

So today, I came across this very inspirational post and decided to hold onto it. It was a good reminder that discovering you are wrong is still science (if attempted scientifically).

(Source).

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Discoveries in the Lab

So it happened some days ago, during an unusually in-depth cleaning session of the lab, that we came across super-strong magnets. Such a great discovery should not be in vain.  So since then, we have been trying to come up with some uses for these.

I mean, they can be very useful to pull magnetic stirrers out of a solution if you don’t want to throw away the solution or contaminate it by putting something else in it. But THEN, the magnets might be so strong that if you would use a pair of “metal” forceps to grab the magnetic stirrer sitting on the lip of the bottle, the super-strong magnets might deflect the FORCEPS themselves and you may not be able to grab the magnet AT ALL (yes, I tried – in a casual evasion-of-common-sense moment).

But of course, that could not be the only possible use. What if, instead of pulling the stirrers out of solutions, you wanted to keep the stirrers INSIDE? Like when you are washing magnetic stirrers in a bottle and you come to the part when you have to drain the liquid (soap solution, ethanol, etc.). There’s always a risk of dropping the stirrer with it, which means you have to wash it all over again (depending on where you actually drop it).

So then, if you would use a super-strong magnet (or maybe even just a magnet), you can keep the magnet inside while completely inverting your bottle to drain the solvent. Can be pretty useful sometimes. And now you have a use for super-strong magnets lying around (or rather, sticking around) in your lab.

And as I am now discovering, they are also quite good for designing little games. Like taking smaller magnets and dropping them close enough to the bigger magnets and see how they deflect the dropping magnets. If you control the distance precisely, you can make them hit a particular point on a metal pole.

And there, now you have a game of magnet darts (and another use for super-strong magnets lying around in your lab).

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Mistakes That Follow You Around

Sometimes, things go wrong in your life that, no matter how much you try, you just cannot hide them.

Especially if you work with smelly chemicals in your lab.

You spill one of those and your biggest wish would be to bury the evidence of your clumsiness. It’s all well. You clean up, no big damages. No one saw you. It should be fine. Only if it was this simple.

The smell of the chemical will not let it be so. It haunts you and follows you around everywhere you go.

And people start asking questions. Questions that should not have been raised in the first place, that are best left unanswered.

And then, you have to admit that yes, it is you. This is something that you have done. And it is definitely you who smells like that chemical.

But in this adversity lies a masked opportunity. An opportunity to develop your own line of perfumes that smell like chemicals in your lab. Then you can wear them all the time and get the people in your lab accustomed to those smells.

So that next time, they won’t even know (plus you generate revenue. Win-win.)

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The Finnish Happiness

When you are a foreigner exploring a new culture, there is no shortage of stuff to wonder about. Something will keep coming your way throughout your stay.

And so it has been many times when I (and my fellow foreigners) have wondered about Finland being the happiest country in the world, time and again.

This journey of discovery is to each their own. You can search it on the internet and easily find articles analyzing what the reasons are for it. But when you are living in Finland, that is just not enough, is it? You will notice your surroundings, think about this, discuss it with others, and try to find out why in the world is it so (because those articles on the internet, what do they know about it).

And in my personal journey-of-discovery, I think I may have come upon at least one profound, contributing factor.

Finland is basically a happy country. By default. In other parts of the world, people become happy if something happens, but in Finland, you can be happy if something doesn’t happen. Like slipping and falling on ice. This has to be one of the biggest factors. Like you went to work, walked the full some-150-meters distance of it, didn’t slip and fall down, and now you can be happy about it. In fact, now you can be happy about it everyday (seeing as the ice doesn’t seem to be going anywhere any time soon).

Tasks as mundane as getting groceries suddenly become feats of accomplishment (because, you guessed it, you didn’t slip and fall during the entire time you were out). And of course, this also gives rise to a sense of camaraderie with your fellow pedestrians, especially if you see someone slip a little and stumble. Then you can root for them to please-not-fall (and be happy for them when they have regained their balance).

Looking at it statistically, it is far more likely that you will have more days when you wouldn’t slip and fall compared to the few days when you, inevitably, will do. So more happy days. At least in this time of the year.

And if you can be happy in this slushy, icy time of the year, that should probably count.

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Culture Shock (Again)

Wait, haven’t I written about this before?

Seems like I have… But l appear to have the phrase stuck in my head.

Never mind, I’m a changed person now, so anything I write today (on the same topic) cannot be the same as what I might have written four (and something) moons ago.

So I shall write on this again.

And today, now eight (and something) moons into my PhD, I expect myself to have grown somewhat in my scientific capabilities. So we shall talk about culture shock the scientific way, the “graph” way (excuse my English, but I am a foreigner, so I can apparently do whatever I feel like without feeling as bad about it).

And well, the graph-way is the right way, or it becomes so once you start falling in love with this kind of data representation, which is inevitable if you science (again, I am a foreigner, and “science” feels more like a verb to me these days).

But anyway, back to the graph:

(Source).

Of course this is a very generalized curve, and just one “dip” in the experience is untrue for quite some people – this graph should be a lot more “noisy” if you’d plot a real one. Although this would differ from person to person, and how different of a culture you are moving into.

Also, the graph doesn’t really show your “mastery” level at your home country (or town).  But from the text available on the internet, it is apparent that you almost never reach the same level of mastery in your new culture that you had in your old culture (which makes sense if you think about it).

This always makes me wonder… Does this mean that, even after you have adjusted and adapted, you are technically still in a state of culture shock, and will probably remain there throughout your stay?

That I find scary. And a little unrealistic to mention if a discussion about culture shock comes up in, say, two years from today. What do I do then? Do I say I am still in culture shock, if this particular question comes up? (Although I would estimate that to be a highly unlikely scenario, but everything has a first time, doesn’t it?)

But having grown comfortable with the idea of culture shock, and the (somewhat embarrassing) fact that I am still in there somewhere (although now probably in an overall better part of the curve), and being there for perhaps as long as I am in Finland, I have also realized the good this will do to my self-esteem…

So if I am not as good as I am hoping to become… heck, I am just in the wrong country!

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Other Stuff

A while back, I came across this post about how science can make you feel stupid.

I shared it, thinking I understood perfectly what it meant and felt like. I actually didn’t then, because now I know what it means and feels like. (And yet, I am not exactly sure how it feels like. Stupid can take so many forms).

When I started off my PhD, I was like any normal person, motivated about starting a new “project” that they are excited about. It’s just like new year, and we all know how that goes:

1) You start off with a long list of resolutions;

2) You start following through on almost all of them immediately;

3) You feel so good that you are following through, and how this year did not turn out like last year (and we all know how that went);

4) You start realizing how by starting everything, you broke all rules of developing new habits, and how this is not sustainable at all (did you really even want all of this?);

5) You start going back to your normal routine, and your resolutions start feeling less important to you now;

6) New year, and you have almost forgotten (almost) how last year went and are ready for a new cycle of highly-motivated-to-back-to-“normal”.

But of course, everybody knows these stages, everyone has new-year moments. And when I started my PhD, I knew I’d face some kind of a slump some of the times. People-on-the-internet told me that the PhD dip is inevitable, and it is not a question of if you will come across it but when you will actually experience it (although they also told me that this phase comes sometime around the second year and I am still in my first, so am I just going through a trailer for the actual movie that will be officially opening in months to come?).

The thing is, despite knowing this, I didn’t really plan for this time (that is another kind of stupid right there). Because, like any normal person motivated about starting a new “project” that they are excited about, I wanted to be laser-focused on my PhD and on things that would take it forward.

So if I needed a break from lab work, I could read or catch up on literature, and if I needed a break from reading, I could take some online course. I did like doing other stuff, but all of that could wait until I had my PhD a little more on routine (a thing, that I am finding out only now, was not as easy as I supposed it was, but that could be for another time).

And this is the importance of comparatively-dumber-sounding other stuff.

Because when you are doing something as crazy as a PhD, where you can go months running around in circles finding your way back to square-one’s, feeling-stupid does become inevitable. And when you see it’s been a while since you last made progress, or learnt something new, or developed a new skill, or added something to you, yourself, as a person, that can be eexxttrreemmeellyy demotivating.

But other stuff can help you here.

Because if you have a little something going on the side, like learning a new skill that may not be completely related to your PhD, it is some progress that you can, at least, show to yourself: So, yes, I still haven’t been able to decide if zinc chloride is better or if I should go for zinc acetate for my solutions, but I have completed six-hundred-and-eighty-five blog posts! That should be a milestone!

So that’s why I have started to think about starting other stuff this new semester. Like taking a language course (I have always wanted to learn another language and now might be a perfect opportunity), or starting to draw (I have some half-developed scripts for a comic on how my PhD stuff is going), or taking up other random workshops and activities where I can just change my environment and see what else is up in the world.

And there is another reason why the other stuff can be so complementary to your PhD: so now when you are moving about progress-less, you can blame it on the other stuff, and how, because of other stuff, you probably have not been able to focus on your PhD.

But the other stuff was your stupid idea, wasn’t it?

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Breakdowns

Recently, the hotplate I had been using was glitching a lot (it was fine when I was not using it this much). And then I saw this in my social media newsfeed and this seemed to hit right on point:

Currently, I think we have both started to understand each other more, so we have been getting along better. Now, I have nothing but honest praise for the hot plate.

Dear hotplate, you are the best! 🙂

(I took the image from this link but could not find whose brilliant theory this actually is).

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Bad Day for Science?

It hadn’t been past 12 yesterday when I had officially declared it a bad day for science.

The hot plate I was supposed to be using extensively broke down (again!) and I discovered that one of the good things going on seemed so rosy because I had been miscalculating some things (and misleading myself and others about how it was going so good at that end).

Having been through all that by 11, well, what could happen now that would make it a better day?

But in retrospect, I think I may have labelled yesterday a little too soon – because the day itself didn’t turn out that bad after all.

We, scientists, we label. And that’s a good thing. You should label all your solutions and chemicals as soon as possible, even before you put your stuff in a blank bottle, but essentially ahead of forgetting what you put in there (and until you have labelled these, your life hangs in some kind of a science-purgatory where you keep chanting the words in your head until you have penned it down where it belongs).

But today – today when I was again tempted to categorize the day in the bad-days* section, I reminded myself that a scientist should not label her days as hastily as she should label her sample bottles.

 

* A “bad” day for science constitutes all days that are worse than your usual days, when it’s normal that things don’t always work the way you want them to. A “bad” day happens when you discover having an outlier compared to your average kind of day (which can normally be rated quite close to each other on a scale of 1 to 10).