The AdMoRe project is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network integrated by eight PhD students, three universities and four companies. Therefore, the selection process of the eight PhD candidates was clearly defined beforehand with several conditions to be satisfied. One of those was that the student should not have studied or worked in the country of the first institution, which is the main university or company in each of the eight AdMoRe projects. That basically meant that we, as future PhD students, had to be ready to leave our countries and start a new life somewhere else.
Of course, this is highly dependent on the person, some will be willing to discover new cultures and cities and others will feel like they really need to be close to their old friends and family. However, working abroad will always have positive and negative aspects. Now it is been three years since I moved to the UK and from my experience the experience it is being overall positive.
In my case I have to clearly separate in between my academic and personal lifes. From the academic point of view I think it is imperative to work abroad for several reasons. First it is clear that living in a different country gives you the option to master a language such as English, Spanish or German among others, that will be extremely useful in your future. Moreover, In my case I have been able to meet people with a great knowledge and vast background on my subject of study and this makes the whole experience much more enriching.
On the other hand, the personal life may be the hardest thing in which someone working abroad has to adapt to, at least at the beginning. It may be obvious, but sometimes it is also hard to realise that the life of your friends and family keeps its course without you. However, at the same time there is this feeling that everything keeps being the same back home. For me, a really positive thing that you can only discover by living in a different country a few years is to realise how different a society can be, even when it is near your home country. Differences in culture, cuisine, traditions and even the personality and nature of the people that I have happened to love knowing about.
At the end, nothing is forever and you can always choose that living abroad is not for you. Thus, I would highly recommend working abroad with something that you really feel motivated about. You can really discover things that you would not have thought of and also create a better future for you, wherever this may be!
