Flashback: How does a foreigner like you score a job in Fiji?

(Hypatia’s note: Flashback denotes something we’d have blogged about prior to this date, had we had the presence of mind to have a blog up when the event in question happened. Think of these items as retroactive blog posts.)

So when we tell friends that we don’t see often or who are behind in checking Facebook that we’ve moving to Fiji for 3 years, the two main questions we get are in two categories:

1) “what will happen to your stuff/your cats/your car/your house/” or some variant on the difficulty of moving/dispersing possessions and pets.

2) “Why are they paying for you to move there to take this job? Isn’t there someone local they could have hired instead?”

Since question 1 is easily answered (It will be moved there, or it won’t. If it won’t, we will sell it or find a new home for it), let’s look at question 2, since it’s more complex and possibly relevant to your interests if you’d ever want to follow our path.

The short answer is they hired me because there’s no one local that has the qualifications to do the job. For most of the faculty jobs at a university, you need a PhD or a terminal Masters (MBA, MFA, MLIS, etc). In the US or Canada, multiple universities offer a PhD in most mainstream disciplines, and theoretically, once you get the degree, you traipse off to another school to be a professor. If you should have a PhD in a field so esoteric (or oversupplied) that no other college needs professors in that discipline, you’re in trouble. (For the record, my unemployment woes of the last few years have been related to the “oversupply of talented people with my same qualifications that live in a 10 mile radius” than to being versed in an esoteric field of inquiry.)

Conversely, if you live in a nation small enough to have only a few colleges, those colleges might not have PhD or terminal Masters programs in half the undergraduate disciplines they offer. Even if the college did have PhD programs and they would hire back their own doctoral graduates (most American universities will not do this), they won’t generate enough faculty members to sustain the department. So unless college A graduates enough English Lit professors to satisfy the hiring/curriculum needs of College B, College B must look elsewhere to fill professional faculty vacancies. And even if you can get enough English professors, you have undergrad majors in engineering, the sciences, art, agriculture, etc, that need professors with an advanced degree, and there’s no way College A has graduate  programs in all of them.  And that’s where I (and other international hires) come in.

There is one other solution: if citizens of the nation housing College B go abroad (to Australia, the US, India, or wherever) to get the needed qualification (terminal Masters, PhD) to work at College B, they’d get hired instead of resorting to recruiting a foreigner like me. This works fine in places like China or India that export a huge amount of grad students who return home after completing their studies, but might not be practical for a nation with fewer than 900,000 people. Even if you could convince a few potential grad students to study abroad, would enough of them come back (rather than deciding they’d rather live in a country with both an Apple store AND an Ikea) at the exact time you were hiring? And that’s also where I (and other international hires) come in.

So the place I’ll be working recruits abroad quite a bit, because there simply aren’t enough Fijians with advanced degrees to fill the bill. When I interviewed (via Skype, so don’t apply in the hopes of getting a free vacation out of the interview), I asked if the majority of their international faculty in my field came from Australia and NZ. They said that they’d had Americans and Europeans as or more often than the folks right next door (for whom I’d think the move/expat thing would be less difficult since they’re a 3 hour flight from home), which surprised me. I assumed there weren’t THAT many Americans willing to uproot and move across the globe, but apparently we may be as willing to do so as an Australian.

So I’m interviewing versus OTHER potential expats, not other citizens. Assuming our academic qualifications are similar, it probably boils down to finding the candidate willing to come who best seems like they won’t freak out when they discover the tropical beach paradise they imagined is actually a busy city with litter and crazy humidity. In this case, a candidate with 5 years experience that’s lived abroad and has been to your country is a better risk than the candidate with 15 years experience who’s never lived outside of New England whose kids are not going to enjoy being uprooted 2 months into sophomore year. Not saying this was my competition: I have no idea who else interviewed for the position. But I do know that I had 15 years experience, had lived abroad for a summer in college, had a spouse that could move, no kids, and (I think this was the thing) when I visited Fiji, we also went to the non-tourist cities of Nadi and Lautoka so we could see Fiji beyond the resorts. (and yes, this was something I mentioned in my cover letter that also was discussed in the interview). The US equivalent of this would be like visiting Stockton while in San Francisco, or maybe Schenectady after NYC; there’s no real reason for a tourist to go there, but they are sizable enough cities you’ll get an idea of what daily life in that region is actually like if you go and hang out there for a day and chat with people that aren’t employed by a resort.

I often wonder if I’m “culturally” a better fit for this position than I am academically. I have enough related experience to do the job I was hired for, though doubtless there are people out there with more tailored qualifications. But they’re probably not the types that think hanging out in a dive bar in a run-down ex-colonial sugar town is an appropriate honeymoon activity, so that’s why they hired me instead of them.