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A Moving Experience for Scientists

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By Mary Beckman

The road to becoming a happy, tenured professor takes the blossoming researcher all over the geographic map -- from early training at graduate school through at least one postdoc to finally landing a tenure-track job. Although tenure might suggest a break from all that moving around, professors find many reasons to pull up stakes for a different campus. Sometimes they move in search of a better position, to follow a spouse, or to move closer to family. Whatever the reason, a professor's move means a labful of people have to figure out whether to tag along, or how to stay behind.

When my own adviser took a professorship at Stanford University and dragged me -- an already bitter grad student who just wanted to finish up quietly and figure out what to do with her life -- kicking and screaming to California, I never thought I'd recover. And look at me now: happily writing for national science publications from an obscure little town in Idaho (that's another story).

The Rumors

Often the first inklings of an impending move come in the form of rumors. I am tempted to add, "unless you're the big cheese," but one professor I talked to said the rumors that she was moving started in her department when she got back from a sabbatical. By the time the rumors had abated, she really had decided to move. When my graduate-school adviser first considered moving to Stanford from the University of Colorado at Boulder, the rumors originated from the laboratory of my adviser's husband -- 30 miles away, in Denver.

Does that mean rumors should be taken seriously? Derek Sieburth, a worm researcher, began a postdoc at the University of California at Berkeley amid talk that his new adviser was thinking of moving to Harvard University. "The rumors were plentiful from the day I interviewed," he says. "They stopped after a year and no one talked about it. Then my adviser sprung it on us a year later." Sieburth says he might have reconsidered accepting the position had the move been solid at the time he interviewed. "I wanted to go to California, experience the Bay Area lifestyle," he says. Instead, he will be experiencing New England.

Should I Stay or Should I Go Now?

When professors move, not everyone in the lab moves with them. In my lab, the number of students, postdocs, and technicians dropped by half when it was moved. Sieburth says only half of his fellow postdocs will be moving from Berkeley to the new lab in Boston.

Susan Dutcher, a geneticist who moved to Washington University in St. Louis from Colorado, considers her case unusual: No one moved with her. At the time, she had only one graduate student who finished up before the move, and her postdocs found positions in other nearby labs. Even her technician found other employment. "They all wanted to stay in Boulder," she says, noting that aside from July and August, St. Louis has really beautiful weather.

Moving west instead of east, Tony Wexler, a professor of mechanical and aeronautical engineering, left his lab at the University of Delaware and brought only one lab member with him to his new digs at the University of California at Davis. One of his three graduate students had a husband in Delaware, while another student needed a specialized apparatus for his research that wasn't making the trip west. Meanwhile, Wexler's two postdocs landed faculty positions at just the right time.

Lab members deciding whether to move face a number of considerations, such as the status of their research projects and the resources, including laboratory space, that would be available to anyone who stays behind. Your decision may depend on whether you are a graduate student, a postdoc, or a technician, or on whether you have family or other obligations in the area.

Make sure you take time to decide. Regardless of the rumors, it will still be a surprise when your professor officially announces the move. Give yourself a few days or even a few weeks to let the surprise wear off. "I made a really foolish mistake," says Sieburth, "of telling my adviser the day after his announcement that we'd go to Boston. I went home and talked to my wife, and the next day I told him. It put a damper on any further negotiations." For example, other postdocs in the lab have arranged to stay behind and use empty lab space in the department. "If I had known that was even an option, I would have at least considered it," Sieburth says. "But I committed before I knew."

Unlike postdocs, graduate students receive more supervision and are more dependent on their advisers, so they have less freedom to make a choice about moving independent of their faculty sponsors. However, universities often allow professors to continue advising graduate students from afar.

Two graduate students who were lab mates of mine stayed behind, since they were close to finishing and ready to write up their dissertations. My adviser flew back for meetings on their dissertations. Two years after leaving for Davis, Wexler still returns to the Delaware campus to meet with his two graduate students there. One had been in his lab for about a year and the other a month when the lab moved out West, but he wanted to continue advising them. "There's a lot of e-mail back and forth, and phone calls, and I go out there every six weeks," he says. "With the electronic world the way it is, the arrangement's entirely workable."

Professors, meanwhile, are faced with more mundane decisions about what equipment and furniture they can take with them. Such decisions depend both on the department and on how the equipment and furniture was paid for in the first place. "I took everything I wanted to," says Dutcher. "The department was very nice about that," she says, noting that at other times, researchers who left the department had had to leave their equipment behind.

Moving Day: Before, During and After

Once a professor decides to take another position, timing the move around big experiments, grants, the school year, or other potentially complicating events might reduce the burden and improve morale. Dutcher recommends moving after grant deadlines if possible, but admits that could be difficult for anyone but single, childless researchers.

Wexler says that for busy scientists -- "and everyone thinks they're busy," he says with a laugh -- complicating circumstances can't be avoided. He suggests professors ask for their first semester off at the new institution to deal with getting the lab's infrastructure set up. During his first term at Davis, he notes, "I spent roughly half my time at Delaware. You can't teach a class while doing that."

On the bright side, packing up a lab and lugging equipment, furniture, and chemical solutions halfway across the country can be a great opportunity to clean house. In my lab, an old couch we had in our waiting area at Boulder made the perfect balcony couch overlooking the Stanford Medical School parking lot. But we left behind a bunch of toxic, old, but-surely-someone-will-use-this-nasty-methylmercury-again chemicals. Moving companies, even ones hired by the universities, won't touch the stuff, and the transport of hazardous materials is regulated.

In addition to moving the lab equipment and supplies, lab members need to pack up their houses and apartments. Depending on the agreement between the professor and her new research institution, lab members might have all their personal possessions moved for them. That said, packing four apartments' worth of furniture into a giant U-Haul truck and caravaning down never-ending interstates and through winding mountain roads can be somewhat therapeutic. If professional movers are involved, it will probably take them a week or two to arrive at the new destination, a period of time those planning immediate experiments need to take into account.

The delays don't stop when the truck arrives in town, either. Getting the lab up and running can take several months. Besides unpacking, researchers need to order items and chemicals they left behind. Dutcher made a list of everything she left -- including the things she didn't think she would need again. "There was a period of about three months," she says, "where I'd need a chemical, and think, 'Oh, I have this,' and find I threw it away and hadn't replaced it. It took a good four or five months" to get back in the groove. In that time she also had to meet a grant deadline, take a vacation, and train new personnel.

Both Dutcher and Wexler lamented that in a new place, it's hard to know who to go to for help, and it takes time to get to know your new department. "You get used to working with people, and you know what you can do and what you can hand off to other staff," says Wexler. "You move, and it's a new way of doing business. Every university has its own way of doing things."

And isn't that one of the reasons academic researchers move in the first place?